The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those years, and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had already begun to read. The publication of this work had made him famous, though he had written two or three volumes before that, and was at this very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow was never a hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One day, however, Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing to turn on Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates, and that the latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular influence over other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of them to run away from the school and lead a life of freedom and adventure on the roads and lanes of England. To this part of Mr. Martineau's tale I lent an eager and sympathetic ear; but the narrator was lowered in my estimation by the confession that he himself had not been a member of Borrow's party. He went on to say that the fugitives had been pursued and captured and brought back to bondage; and upon Borrow's admitting that he had been the instigator of the adventure, he was sentenced to be flogged, and that it was on the back of this very Martineau that he had been “horsed” to undergo the punishment! Imagine the great, wild, mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic and precise cleric that was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts could bring most men.
One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch — though I cannot fix the exact date — was to an old English country-seat, built in the time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting lost, and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and passages through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that when one of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would come out. Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great, black lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end of a corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in addition to its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and there were bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we proposed to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been closed one hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened since then, and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some reason, had become very objectionable or dangerous to other persons concerned. The windows of the room, they added, had been walled up at the same time; so there this unhappy creature slowly starved to death in pitch darkness. There, doubtless, within a few feet of where we stood, lay her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she wore in life. Sometimes, too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound, like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like frivolous chatter beside it.
About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the Continent, and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in Southport which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to meet with the crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding spirits, and he told my father an anecdote of our friend Grace Greenwood, which is recorded in one of the private note-books. “Grace, Bennoch says,” he writes, “was invited to a private reading of Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she thought it behooved her to manifest her good taste and depth of feeling by going into hysterics and finally fainting away upon the floor. Hereupon Charles Kemble looked up from his book and addressed himself to her sternly and severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you disturb the company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'“
This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be imparted to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and, after a few flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch says he had this story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes it; and I think it not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a morbid exaggeration of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed into this awful fix. I wonder how she survived it!
At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved, gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little models of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a sail-boat for myself. My father seems to have thought that some practical acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me no harm — by adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture — so he arranged with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for instruction. Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in the mysteries of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel, and finally presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches long and nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my labors, but conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them himself; the model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a bluff-bowed, broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French fishing-boats which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and Havre. The outside form being done, I entered upon the delightful and exciting work of hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding, more than once, piercing through from the hold into the outer world. But the little ship became more buoyant every day, and finally stood ready for her deck. This I prepared by planing down a bit of plank to the proper thickness — or thinness — and carefully fitted it into its place, with companionways fore and aft, covered with hatches made to slide in grooves. Next, with chisel, spoke-shave, and sand-paper, I prepared the mast and fitted a top-mast to it, and secured it in its place with shrouds and stays of fine, waxed fishing-line. The boom and gaff were then put in place, and Fanny Wrigley (who had aforetime made my pasteboard armor and helmet) now made me a main-sail, top-sail, and jib out of the most delicate linen, beautifully hemmed, and a tiny American flag to hoist to the peak. It only remained to paint her; I was provided with three delectable cans of oil-paint, and I gave her a bright-green under-body, a black upper-body, and white port-holes with a narrow red line running underneath them. Thus decorated, and with her sails set, she was a splendid object, and the boys with bought models were depressed with envy, especially when I called their attention to the stars and stripes. This boat-building mania of mine had originated while we were at Mrs. Blodgett's, where the captain of one of the clippers gave me a beautiful model of his own ship, fully rigged, and perfect in every detail; only it would not sail, being solid. Concerning his clipper, by-the-way, I once overheard a bit of dialogue in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room between my captain and another. “Do you mean to say,” demanded the latter, “that you passed the Lightning?” To which my captain replied, in measured and impressive tones, “I-passed-the-Lightning!” The Lightning, it may be remarked, was at that time considered the queen of the Atlantic passage; she had made the trip between Boston and Liverpool i
n ten days. But my captain had once shown her his heels, nevertheless. I wanted to christen my sloop The Sea Eagle, but my father laughed so much at this name that I gave it up; he suggested The Chub, The Mud-Pout, and other ignoble titles, which I indignantly rejected, and what her name finally was I have forgotten. She afforded me immense happiness.
At Southport we had a queer little governess, Miss Brown, who came to us highly recommended both as to her personal character and for ability to instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English composition, and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the “branches” specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with a strong emphasis on the penultimate syllable; and she spent several days repeating over to herself, with a mystified countenance, the famous words, “The square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs.” What were legs of a triangle, and how, if there were any, could they be square? She never solved this enigma; and although we liked little Miss Brown very much, she speedily lost all shadow of control over us; we treated her as a sort of inferior sister, and would never be serious. “English governess” became for us a synonym for an amiable little nonentity who knew nothing; and I was surprised to learn, later, from the early works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, that they could be beautiful and intelligent. Miss Brown did not outlast our residence in Southport.
From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of 1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and Italy, but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of 1858.
It was in Leamington that we were joined by Ada Shepard. She was a graduate of Antioch, a men-and-women's college in Ohio, renowned in its day, when all manner of improvements in the human race were anticipated from educating the sexes together. Miss Shepard had got a very thorough education there, so that she knew as much as a professor, including — what would be of especial service to us — a knowledge of most of the modern European languages. What seemed, no doubt, of even more importance to her was her betrothal to her classmate, Henry Clay Badger; they were to be married on her return to America. Meanwhile, as a matter of mutual convenience (which rapidly became mutual pleasure), she was to act as governess of us children and accompany our travels. Ada (as my father and mother presently called her) was then about twenty-two years old; she had injured her constitution — never robust — by addiction to learning, and had incidentally imbibed from the atmosphere of Antioch all the women's-rights fads and other advanced opinions of the day. These, however, affected mainly the region of her intellect; in her nature she was a simple, affectionate, straightforward American maiden, with the little weaknesses and foibles appertaining to that estate; and it was curious to observe the frequent conflicts between these spontaneous characteristics and her determination to live up to her acquired views. But she was fresh-hearted and happy then, full of interest in the wonders and beauties of the Old World; she wrote, weekly, long, criss-crossed letters, in a running hand, home to “Clay,” the king of men; and periodically received, with an illuminated countenance, thick letters with an American foreign postage-stamp on them, which she would shut herself into her chamber to devour in secret. She was a little over the medium height, with a blue-eyed face, not beautiful, but gentle and expressive, and wearing her flaxen hair in long curls on each side of her pale cheeks. She entered upon her duties as governess with energy and good-will, and we soon found that an American governess was a very different thing from an English one (barring the Rhoda Broughton sort). Her special aim at present was to bring us forward in the French and Italian languages. We had already, in Manchester, made some acquaintance with the books of the celebrated Ollendorff; and my father, who knew Latin well, had taught me something of Latin grammar, which aided me in my Italian studies. I liked Latin, particularly as he taught it to me, and it probably amused him, though it must also often have tried his patience to teach me. I had a certain aptitude for the spirit of the language, but was much too prone to leap at conclusions in my translations. I did not like to look out words in the lexicon, and the result was sometimes queer. Thus, there was a sentence in some Latin author describing the manner in which the Scythians were wont to perform their journeys; relays of fresh horses would be provided at fixed intervals, and thus they were enabled to traverse immense distances at full speed. The words used were, I think, as follows: “Itaque conficiunt iter continuo cursu.” When I translated these, “So they came to the end of their journey with continual cursing,” I was astonished to see my father burst into inextinguishable laughter, falling back in his chair and throwing up his feet in the ebullience of his mirth. I heard a good deal of that “continual cursing” for some years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay stricter attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done.
However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves, by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in fair condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother, indeed, had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not Italian; my father, though he read these languages easily enough, never attained any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up his consular affairs, about the first week in October, we left Leamington and took the train for a few days in London, stopping at lodgings in Great Russell Street, close to the British Museum.
We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work, and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded), that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth — they had never had children. “Troubles,” commented my father “(as I myself have experienced, and many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune.” He was doubtless thinking of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born.
A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for the light it casts on the characters of the two friends:
“When I inquired for Bennoch, in the warehouse where two or three clerks seemed to be taking account of stock, a boy asked me to write my name on a slip of paper, and took it into his peculiar office. Then appeared Mr. Riggs, the junior partner, looking haggard and anxious, poor man. He is somewhat low of stature, and slightly deformed, and I fancied that he felt the disgrace and trouble more on that account. But he greeted me in a friendly way, though rather awkwardly, and asked me to sit down a little while in his own apartment, where he left me. I sat a good while, reading an old number of Blackwood's Magazine, a pile of which I found on the desk, together with some well-worn ledgers and papers, that looked as if they had been pulled out of drawers and pigeon-holes and dusty corners, and were not there in the regular course of business. By-and-by Mr. Riggs reappeared, and, telling me that I must lunch with them, conducted me up-stairs, and through entrie
s and passages where I had been more than once before, but could not have found my way again through those extensive premises; and everywhere the packages of silk were piled up and ranged on shelves, in paper boxes, and otherwise — a rich stock, but which had brought ruin with it. At last we came to that pleasant drawing-room, hung with a picture or two, where I remember enjoying the hospitality of the firm, with their clerks all at the table, and thinking that this was a genuine scene of the old life of London City, when the master used to feed his 'prentices at a patriarchal board. After all, the room still looked cheerful enough; and there was a good fire, and the table was laid for four. In two or three minutes Bennoch came in — not with that broad, warm, lustrous presence that used to gladden me in our past encounters — not with all that presence, at least — though still he was not less than a very genial man, partially be-dimmed. He looked paler, it seemed to me, thinner, and rather smaller, but nevertheless he smiled at greeting me, more brightly, I suspect, than I smiled back at him, for in truth I was very sorry. Mr. Twentyman, the middle partner, now came in, and appeared as much or more depressed than his fellows in misfortune, and to bear it with a greater degree of English incommunicativeness and reserve. But he, too, met me hospitably, and I and these three poor ruined men sat down to dinner — a good dinner enough, by-the-bye, and such as ruined men need not be ashamed to eat, since they must needs eat something. It was roast beef, and a boiled apple-pudding, and — which I was glad to see, my heart being heavy — a decanter of sherry and another of port, remnants of a stock which, I suppose, will not be replenished. They ate pretty fairly, but scarcely like Englishmen, and drank a reasonable quantity, but not as if their hearts were in it, or as if the liquor went to their hearts and gladdened them. I gathered from them a strong idea of what commercial failure means to English merchants — utter ruin, present and prospective, and obliterating all the successful past; how little chance they have of ever getting up again; how they feel that they must plod heavily onward under a burden of disgrace — poor men and hopeless men and men forever ashamed. I doubt whether any future prosperity (which is unlikely enough to come to them) could ever compensate them for this misfortune, or make them, to their own consciousness, the men they were. They will be like a woman who has once lost her chastity: no after-life of virtue will take out the stain. It is not so in America, nor ought it to be so here; but they said themselves they would never again have put unreserved confidence in a man who had been bankrupt, and they could not but apply the same severe rule to their own case. I was touched by nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault with anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple dignity, too, in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism. I could really have shed tears for them, to see how like men and Christians they let the tears come to their own eyes. This is the true way to do; a man ought not to be too proud to let his eyes be moistened in the presence of God and of a friend. They talked of some little annoyances, half laughingly. Bennoch has been dunned for his gas-bill at Blackheath (only a pound or two) and has paid it. Mr. Twentyman seems to have received an insulting message from some creditor. Mr. Riggs spoke of wanting a little money to pay for some boots. It was very sad, indeed, to see these men of uncommon energy and ability, all now so helpless, and, from managing great enterprises, involving vast expenditures, reduced almost to reckon the silver in their pockets. Bennoch and I sat by the fireside a little while after his partners had left the room, and then he told me that he blamed himself, as holding the principal position in the firm, for not having exercised a stronger controlling influence over their operations. The two other men had recently gone into speculations, of the extent of which he had not been fully aware, and he found the liabilities of the firm very much greater than he had expected. He said this without bitterness, and said it not to the world, but only to a friend. I am exceedingly sorry for him; it is such a changed life that he must lead hereafter, and with none of the objects before him which he might heretofore have hoped to grasp. No doubt he was ambitious of civic, and even of broader public distinction; and not unreasonably so, having the gift of ready and impressive speech, and a behavior among men that wins them, and a tact in the management of affairs, and many-sided and never-tiring activity. To be a member of Parliament — to be lord mayor — whatever an eminent merchant of the world's metropolis may be — beyond question he had dreamed wide-awake of these things. And now fate itself could hardly accomplish them, if ever so favorably inclined. He has to begin life over again, as he began it twenty-five years ago, only under infinite disadvantages, and with so much of his working-day gone forever.
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 648
