Men, Women, and Ghosts Part 11

Night-Watches.

Keturah wishes to state primarily that she is good-natured. She thinks it necessary to make this statement, lest, after having heard her story, you should, however polite you might be about it, in your heart of hearts suspect her capable not only of allowing her angry pa.s.sions to rise, but of permitting them to boil over "in tempestuous fury wild and unrestrained." If it were an orthodox remark, she would also add, from like motives of self-defence, that she is not in the habit of swearing.

Are you accustomed, O tender-hearted reader, to spend your nights, as a habit, with your eyes open or shut? On the answer to this question depends her sole hope of appreciation and sympathy.

She begs you will understand that she does not mean you, the be-ribboned and be-spangled and be-rouged frequenter of ball and _soiree_, with your well-taught, drooping lashes, or wide girl's eyes untamed and wondering, your flushing color, and your pulse up to a hundred. You are very pretty for your pains,--O, to be sure you are very pretty! She has not the heart to scold you, though you are dancing and singing and flirting away your golden nights, your restful, young nights, that never come but once,--though you are dancing and singing and flirting yourselves merrily into your grave. She would like to put in a plea before the eloquence of which Cicero and Demosthenes, Beecher and Sumner, should pale like wax-lights before the sun, for the new fashion said to be obtaining in New York, that the _soiree_ shall give place to the _matinee_, at which the guests shall a.s.semble at four o'clock in the afternoon, and are expected to go home at seven or eight. That would be not only civilized, it would be millennial.

But Keturah is perfectly aware that you will do as you will. If the excitement of the "wee sma' hours ayont the twal" prove preferable to a quiet evening at home, and a good, Christian, healthy sleep after it, why the "sma' hours" it will be. If you will do it, it is "none of her funerals," as the small boy remarked. Only she particularly requests you not to insult her by offering her your sympathy. Wait till you know what forty-eight mortal, wide-awake, staring, whirring, unutterable hours mean.

Listen to her mournful tale; and, while you listen, let your head become fountains of water, and your eyes rivers of tears for her, and for all who are doomed to reside in her immediate vicinity.

"Tired nature's sweet restorer," as the newspapers, in a sudden and severe poetical attack, remarked of Jeff Davis, "refuses to bless"

Keturah, except as her own sweet will inclines her. They have a continuous lover's quarrel, exceedingly bitter while it rages, exceedingly sweet when it is made up. Keturah attends a perfectly grave and unimpeachable lecture,--the Restorer pouts and goes off in a huff for twenty-four hours. Keturah undertakes at seven o'clock a concert,-- announced as Mendelssohn Quintette, proving to be Gilmore's Bra.s.siest,--and nothing hears she of My Lady till two o'clock, A. M.

Keturah spends an hour at a prayer-meeting, on a pine bench that may have heard of cushions, but certainly has never seen one face to face; and comes home at eight o'clock to the pleasing discovery that the fair enslaver has taken some doctrinal offence, and vanished utterly.

Though lost to sight she's still to memory dear, and Keturah penitently betakes herself to the seeking of her in those ingenious ways which she has learned at the school of a melancholy experience. A table and a kerosene lamp are brought into requisition; also a book. If it isn't the Dictionary, it is Cruden's Concordance. If these prove too exciting, it is Edwards on the Will. Light reading is strictly forbidden.

Congressional Reports are sometimes efficacious, as well as Martin F.

Tupper, and somebody's "Sphere of Woman."

There is one single possibility out of ten that this treatment will produce drowsiness. There are nine probabilities to the contrary. The possibility is worth trying for, and trying hard for; but if it results in the sudden flight of President Edwards across the room, a severe banging of the "Sphere of Woman" against the wall, and the total disappearance of Cruden's Concordance beneath the bed, Keturah is not in the least surprised. It is altogether too familiar a result to elicit remark. It simply occasions a fresh growth to a horrible resolution that she has been slowly forming for years.

Some day _she_ will write a book. The publishers shall nap over it, and accept it with pleasure. The drowsy printers shall set up its type with their usual unerring exactness. The proof-readers shall correct it in their dreams. Customers in the bookstores shall nod at the sight of its binding. Its readers shall dose at its Preface. Sleepless old age, sharp and unrelieved pain, youth sorrowful before the time, shall seek it out, shall flock unto the counters of its fortunate publishers (she has three firms in her mind's eye; one in Boston, one in New York, and one in Philadelphia; but who the happy men are to be is not yet definitely decided), who shall waste their inheritance in distributing it throughout the length and breadth of a grateful continent. Physicians from everywhere under the sun, who have proved the fickleness of hyoscyamus, of hops, of Dover's powders, of opium, of morphine, of laudanum, of hidden virtues of herbs of the field, and minerals from the rock, and gases from the air; who know the secrets of all the pitying earth, and, behold, it is vanity of vanities, shall line their hospitals, cram their offices, stuff their bottles, with the new universal panacea and blessing to suffering humanity.

And Keturah _can_ keep a resolution.

Her literary occupation disposed of, in the summary manner referred to, she runs through the roll of her reserve force, and their name is Legion. She composes herself, in an att.i.tude of rest, with a handkerchief tied over her eyes to keep them shut, blows her lamp out instead of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it out, strangles awhile in the gas, and begins to repeat her alphabet, which, owing to like stern necessity, she has fortunately never forgotten. She says it forward; she says it backward; she begins at the middle and goes up; she begins at the middle and goes down; she rattles it through in French, she groans it through in German, she falters it through in Greek. She attempts the numeration-table, flounders somewhere in the quadrillions, and forgets where she left off.

She watches an interminable flock of sheep jump over a wall till her head spins. There always seem to be so many more where the last one came from. She listens to oar-beats, and drum-beats, and heart-beats. She improvises sonatas and gallopades, oratorios and mazourkas. She perpetrates the t.i.tle and first line of an epic poem, goes through the alphabet for a rhyme, and none appearing, she repeats the first line by way of encouragement. But all in vain.

With a silence that speaks unspeakable things, she rises solemnly, and seeks the pantry in darkness that may be felt. At the bottom of the stairs she steps with her whole weight flat upon something that squirms, and is warm, and turns over, and utters a cry that makes night hideous.

O, nothing but the cat, that is all! The pantry proves to be well stocked with bread, but not another mortal thing. Now, if there is anything Keturah _particularly_ dislikes, it is dry bread. Accordingly, with a remark which is intended for Love's ear alone, she gropes her way to the cellar door, which is unexpectedly open, pitches head-first into the cavity, and makes the descent of half the stairs in an easy and graceful manner, chiefly with her elbows. She reaches the ground after an interval, steps splash into a pool of water, knocks over a mop, and embraces a tall cider barrel with her groping arms. After a little wandering about among ash-bins and apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps and cobwebs, she discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the _ignis fatuus_ of her search. Something extremely cold crossing her shoeless feet at this crisis suggests pleasant fancies of a rat. Keturah is ashamed to confess that she has never in all the days of the years of her pilgrimage set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon her imagination, her conception of that animal is a cross between an alligator and a jaguar. She stands her ground manfully, however, and is happy to state that she did _not_ faint.

In the agitation consequent upon this incident she b.u.t.ters her bread with the lard, and takes an enormous bite on the way up stairs. She seeks no more refreshment that night.

One resort alone is left. With a despairing sigh she turns the great faucet of the bath-tub and holds her head under it till she is upon the verge of a watery grave. This experiment is her forlorn hope. Perhaps about three or four o'clock she falls into a series of jerky naps, and dreams that she is editor of a popular Hebrew magazine, wandering frantically through a warehouse full of aspirant MSS. (chiefly from the junior cla.s.ses of theological seminaries) of which she cannot translate a letter.

Of the tenth of Keturah's unearthly experiences,--of the number of times she has been taken for a robber, and chased by the entire roused and bewildered family, with loaded guns; of the pans of milk she has upset, the crockery whose hopes she has untimely shattered, the skulls she has cracked against open doors, the rocking-chairs she has stumbled over and apostrophized in her own meek way; of the neighbors she has frightened out of town by her perambulations; of the alarms of fire she has raised, pacing the wood-shed with a lantern for exercise stormy nights; of all the possible and impossible corners and crevices in which she has sought repose, (she has slept on every sofa in every room in the house, and once she spent a whole night on a closet shelf); of the amiable condition of her mornings, and the terror she is fast becoming to family. Church, and State, the time would fail her to tell. Were she to "let slip the dogs of war," and relate a modic.u.m of the agonies she undergoes,--how the stamping of a neighbor's horse on a barn floor will drive every solitary wink of sleep from her eyes and slumber from her eyelids; the nibbling of a mouse in some un-get-at-able place in the wall prove torture; the rattling of a pane of gla.s.s, ticking of a clock, or pattering of rain-drops, as effective as a cannon; a guest in the "spare room" with a musical "love of a baby," something far different from a blessing, and a tolerably windy night, one lengthened vigil long drawn out,--the liberal public would cry, "Forbear!" It becomes really an interesting science to learn how slight a thing will utterly deprive an unfortunate creature of the great necessity of life; but this article not being a scientific treatise, that must be left to the sympathizing imagination.

Keturah feels compelled, however, to relate the story of two memorable nights, of which the only wonder is that she has lived to tell the tale.

Every incident is stamped indelibly upon her brain. It is wrought in letters of fire. "While memory holds a seat in this distracted globe,"

it shall not, cannot be forgotten.

It was a night in June,--sultry, gasping, fearful. Keturah went to her own room, as is her custom, at the Puritanic hour of nine. Sleep, for a couple of hours, being out of the question, she threw wide her doors and windows, and betook herself to her writing-desk. A story for a magazine, which it was imperative should be finished to-morrow, appealed to her already partially stupefied brain. She forced her unwilling pen into the service, whisked the table round into the draught, and began.

In about five minutes the sibyl caught the inspiration of her G.o.d, and heat and sleeplessness were alike forgotten. This sounds very poetic, but it wasn't at all. Keturah regrets to say that she had on a very unbecoming green wrapper, and several ink-spots on her fingers.

It was a very thrilling and original story, and it came, as all thrilling and original stories must come, to a crisis. Seraphina found Theodore kissing the hand of Celeste in the woods. Keturah became excited.

"'O Theodore!' whispered the unhappy maiden to the moaning trees. 'O Theodore, my--'"

Whir! buzz! swosh! came something through the window into the lamp, and down squirming into the ink-bottle. Keturah jumped. If you have half the horror of those great June beetles that she has, you will know how she jumped. She emptied the entire contents of the ink-bottle out of the window, closed her blinds, and began again.

"'Theodore,' said Seraphina.

"'Seraphina,' said Theodore." Jump the second! There he was,--not Theodore, but the beetle,--whirring round the lamp, and buzzing down into her lap. Hadn't he been burned in the light, drowned in the ink, speared with the pen, and crushed by falling from the window? Yet there he was, or the ghost of him, fluttering his inky wings into her very eyes, and walking leisurely across the smooth, fair page that waited to be inscribed with Seraphina's woe. Nerved by despair, Keturah did a horrible thing. Never before or since has she been known to accomplish it. She put him down on the floor and stepped on him. She repented of the act in dust and ashes. Before she could get across the room to close the window ten more had come to his funeral. To describe the horrors of the ensuing hour she has no words. She put them out of the window,--they came directly back. She drowned them in the wash-bowl,--they fluttered, and sputtered, and buzzed up into the air. She killed them in corners,--they came to life under her very eyes. She caught them in her handkerchief and tied them up tight,--they crawled out before she could get them in. She shut the cover of the wash-stand down on them,--she looked in awhile after and there was not one to be seen. All ten of the great blundering creatures were knocking their brains out against the ceiling. After the endurance of terrors that came very near turning her hair gray, she had pushed the last one out on the balcony, shut the window, and was gasping away in the airless room, her first momentary sense of security, when there struck upon her agonized ear a fiendish buzzing, and three of them came whirling back through a crack about as large as a knitting-needle. No _mortal_ beetle could have come through it. Keturah turned pale and let them alone.

The clock was striking eleven when quiet was at last restored, and the exhausted sufferer began to think of sleep. At this moment she heard a sound before which her heart sank like lead. You must know that Keturah has a very near neighbor, Miss Humdrum by name. Miss Humdrum is a--well, a very excellent and pious old lady, who keeps a one-eyed servant and three cats; and the sound which Keturah heard was Miss Humdrum's cats.

Keturah descended to the wood-shed, armed herself with a huge oaken log, and sallied out into the garden, with a horrible _sang-froid_ that only long familiarity with her errand could have engendered. It was Egyptian darkness; but her practised eye discerned, or thought it discerned, a white cat upon the top of the high wooden fence. Keturah smiled a ghastly smile, and fired. Now she never yet in her life threw anything anywhere, under any circ.u.mstances, that did not go exactly in the opposite direction from what she wanted to have it. This occasion proved no exception. The cat jumped, and sprang over, and disappeared. The stick went exactly into the middle of the fence. Keturah cannot suppose that the last trump will be capable of making a louder noise. She stood transfixed. One cry alone broke the hideous silence.

"_O_ Lord!" in an unmistakably Irish, half-wakened howl, from the open window of the one-eyed servant's room. "Only that, and nothing more."

Keturah returned to her apartment, a sadder if not a wiser woman. Marius among the ruins of Carthage, Napoleon at St. Helena, M'Clellan in Europe, have henceforth and forever her sympathy.

She thinks it was _precisely_ five minutes after her return, during which the happy stillness that seemed to rest upon nature without and nature within had whispered faint promises of coming rest, that there suddenly broke upon it a hoa.r.s.e, deep, unearthly breathing. So hoa.r.s.e, so deep, so unearthly, and so directly underneath her window, that for about ten seconds Keturah sat paralyzed. There was but one thing it could be. A travelling menagerie in town had lost its Polish wolf that very day. This was the Polish wolf.

The horrible panting, like the panting of a famished creature, came nearer, grew louder, grew hoa.r.s.er. The animal had found a bone in the gra.s.s, and was crunching it in his ghastly way. Then she could hear him sniffing at the door.

And Amram's room was on the lower story! Perhaps wolves climbed in at windows!

The awful thought roused Keturah from the stupor of her terror. She was no coward. She would face the fearful sight. She would call and warn him at any risk. She faltered out upon the balcony. She leaned over the railing. She gazed breathlessly down into the darkness.

A cow.

Another cow.

Three cows.

Keturah sat down on the window-sill in the calm of despair.

It was succeeded by a storm. She concludes that she was about five seconds on the pa.s.sage from her room to the garden. With "hair flotant, and arms disclosed," like the harpies of heraldic device, she rushed up to the invaders--and stopped. Exactly what was to be done? Three great stupid, browsing, contented cows _versus_ one lone, lorn woman. For about one minute Keturah would not have wagered her fortune on the woman. But it is not her custom to "say die," and after some reflection she ventured on a manful command.

"Go away! Go! go!" The stentorian remark caused a result for which she was, to say the least, unprepared. The creatures coolly turned about and walked directly up to her. To be sure. Why not? Is it not a part of our outrageous Yankee nomenclature to teach cows to come to you when you tell them to go away? How Keturah, country born and bred, could have even momentarily forgotten so clear and simple a principle of philology, remains a mystery to this day. A little reflection convinced her of the only logical way of ridding herself of her guests. Accordingly, she walked a little way behind them and tried again.

"Come here, sir! Come, good fellow! Wh-e-e! come here!"

Three great wooden heads lifted themselves slowly, and three pairs of soft, sleepy eyes looked at her, and the beasts returned to their clover and stood stock-still.

What was to be done? You could go behind and push them. Or you could go in front and pull them by the horns.

Neither of these methods exactly striking Keturah's fancy, she took up a little chip and threw at them; also a piece of coal and a handful of pebbles. These gigantic efforts proving to be fruitless, she sat down on the gra.s.s and looked at them. The heartless creatures resisted even that appeal.

At this crisis of her woes one of Keturah's many brilliant thoughts came to her relief. She hastened upon the wings of the wind to her infallible resort, the wood-shed, and filled her arms up to the chin with pine knots. Thus equipped, she started afresh to the conflict. It is recorded that out of twenty of those sticks, thrown with savage and direful intent, only one hit. It is, however, recorded that the enemy dispersed, after being valiantly pursued around the house, out of the front gate (where one stuck, and got through with the greatest difficulty), and for a quarter of a mile down the street. In the course of the rout Keturah tripped on her dress only six times, and fell flat but four. One pleasing little incident gave delightful variety to the scene. A particularly frisky and clover-loving white cow, whose heart yearned after the apples of Sodom, turned about in the road without any warning whatever and showed fight. Keturah adopted a sudden resolution to return home "across lots," and climbed the nearest stone-wall with considerable _empress.e.m.e.nt_. Exactly half-way over she was surprised to find herself gasping among the low-hanging boughs of a b.u.t.ternut-tree, where she hung like Absalom of old, between heaven and earth. She would like to state, in this connection, that she always had too much vanity to wear a waterfall; so she still retains a portion of her original hair.

However, she returned victorious over the silent dew-laden fields and down into the garden paths, where she paced for two hours back and forth among the aromatic perfumes of the great yellow June lilies. There might have been a bit of poetry in it under other circ.u.mstances, but Keturah was not poetically inclined on that occasion. The events of the night had so roused her soul within her, that exercise unto exhaustion was her sole remaining hope of sleep.