Carlyle has a dissertation on the “talent for annihilating rubbish.” This was a talent that the respectable Miss Dorcas had none of. Carlyle thinks it a fine thing to have; but we think the lack of it may come from very respectable qualities. In Miss Dorcas it came from a vivid imagination of the possible future uses to which every decayed or broken household article might be put. The pitcher without nose or handle was fine china, and might yet be exactly the thing for something, and so it went carefully on some high perch of preservation, dismembered; the half of a broken pair of snuffers certainly looked too good to throw away — possibly it might be the exact thing needed to perfect some invention. Miss Dorcas vaguely remembered legends of inventors who had laid hold on such chance adaptations at the very critical point of their contrivances, and so the half snuffers waited years for their opportunity. The upper shelves of the closets in the Vanderheyden house were a perfect crowded mustering ground for the incurables and incapables of household belongings. One might fancy them a Hôtel des Invalides of things wounded and fractured in the general battle of life. There were blades of knives without handles, and handles without blades; there were ancient teapots that leaked — but might be mended, and doubtless would be of some good in a future day; there were cracked plates and teacups; there were china dish-covers without dishes to match; a coffee-mill that wouldn’t grind, and shears that wouldn’t cut, and snuffers that wouldn’t snuff — in short, every species of decayed utility.
Miss Dorcas had in the days of her youth been blest with a brother of an active, inventive turn of mind; the secret crypts and recesses of the closets bore marks of his unfinished projections. There were all the wheels and weights and other internal confusions of a clock, which he had pulled to pieces with a view of introducing an improvement into the machinery, which never was introduced; but the wheels and weights were treasured up with pious care, waiting for somebody to put them together again. All this array of litter was fated to come down from its secret recesses, its deep, dark closets, its high shelves and perches, on two solemn days of the year devoted to house-cleaning, when Miss Dorcas, like a good general, looked them over and reviewed them, expatiated on their probable capabilities, and resisted gallantly any suggestions of Black Dinah, the cook and maid of all work, or Mrs. Betsey, that some order ought to be taken to rid the house of them.
“Dear me, Dorcas,” Mrs. Betsey would say, “what is the use of keeping such a clutter and litter of things that nothing can be done with and that never can be used?”
“Betsey Ann Benthusen,” would be the reply, “you always were a careless little thing. You never understood any more about housekeeping than a canary - bird — not a bit.” In Miss Dorcas’s view, Mrs. Betsey, with her snow-white curls and her caps, was still a frivolous young creature, not fit to be trusted with a serious opinion on the nicer points of household management. “Now, who knows, Betsey, but some time we may meet some poor worthy young man who may be struggling along as an inventor and may like to have these wheels and weights! I’m sure brother Dick said they were wonderfully well made.”
“Well, but, Dorcas, all those cracked cups and broken pitchers; I do think they are dreadful!”
“Now, Betsey, hush up! I’ve heard of a kind of new cement that they are manufacturing in London, that makes old china better than new; and when they get it over here I’m going to mend these all up. You wouldn’t have me throw away family china, would you?”
The word “family” china was a settler, for both Mrs. Betsey and Miss Dorcas and old Dinah were united in one fundamental article of faith: that the “family” was a solemn, venerable, and awe-inspiring reality. What, or why, or how it was no mortal could say.
Old Jacob Vanderheyden, the grandfather, had been in his day busy among famous and influential men, and had even been to Europe as a sort of attaché to the first American diplomatic corps. He had been also a thriving merchant, and got to himself houses and lands, and gold and silver. Jacob Vanderheyden, the father, had inherited substance and kept up the good name of the family, and increased and strengthened its connections. But his son and heir, Dick Vanderheyden, Miss Dorcas’s elder brother, had seemed to have no gifts but those of dispersing; and had muddled away the family fortune in all sorts of speculations and adventures as fast as his father and grandfather had made it. The sisters had been left with an income much abridged by the imprudence of the brother and the spendthrift dissipation of Mrs. Betsey’s husband; they were forsaken by the retreating waves of rank and fashion; their house, instead of being a centre of good society, was encompassed by those ordinary buildings devoted to purposes of trade whose presence is deemed incompatible with genteel residence. And yet, through it all, their confidence in the rank and position of their family continued unabated. The old house, with every bit of old queer furniture in it, the old window curtains, the old teacups and saucers, the old bedspreads and towels, all had a sacredness such as pertained to no modern things. Like the daughter of Zion in sacred song, Miss Dorcas “took pleasure in their dust and favored the stones thereof.” The old blue willow-patterned china, with mandarins standing in impossible places, and bridges and pagodas growing up, as the world was made, out of nothing, was to Miss Dorcas consecrated porcelain — even its broken fragments were impregnated with the sacred flavor of ancient gentility.
Miss Dorcas’s own private and personal closets, drawers, and baskets were squirrel’s nests of all sorts of memorials of the past. There were pieces of every gown she had ever worn, of all her sister’s gowns, and of the mortal habiliments of many and many a one beside who had long passed beyond the need of earthly garments. Bits of wedding robes of brides who had long been turned to dust; fragments of tarnished gold lace from old court dresses; faded, crumpled, artificial flowers, once worn on the head of beauty; gauzes and tissues, old and wrinkled, that had once set off the triumphs of the gay — all mingled in her crypts and drawers and trunks, and each had its story. Each, held in her withered hand, brought back to memory the thread of some romance warm with the color and flavor of a life long passed away.
Then there were collections, saving and medicinal; for Miss Dorcas had in great force that divine instinct of womanhood that makes her perceptive of the healing power inherent in all things. Never an orange or an apple was pared on her premises when the peeling was not carefully-garnered — dried on newspaper, and neatly stored away in paper bags for sick-room uses. There were closets smelling of elderblow, catnip, feverfew, and dried rose leaves, which grew in a bit of old garden soil back of the house; a spot sorely retrenched and cut down from the ample proportions it used to have, as little by little had been sold off, but still retaining a few growing things, in which Miss Dorcas delighted. The lilacs that once were bushes there had grown gaunt and high, and looked in at the chamber windows with an antique and grandfatherly air, quite of a piece with everything else about the old Vanderheyden house.
The ancient sisters had few outlets into the society of modern New York. Now and then, a stray visit came from some elderly person who still remembered the Vanderheydens, and perhaps about once a year they went to the expense of a carriage to return the call, and rolled up into the new part of the town like shadows of the past. But generally their path of life led within the narrow limits of the house. Old Dinah, the sole black servant remaining, was the last remnant of a former retinue of negro servants held by old Jacob when New York was a slave State and a tribe of black retainers was one of the ostentations of wealth. All were gone now, and only Dinah remained, devoted to the relics of the old family, clinging with a catlike attachment to the old place.
She was like many of her race, a jolly-hearted, pigheaded, giggling, faithful old creature, who said “Yes’m” to Miss Dorcas and took her own way about most matters; and Miss Dorcas, satisfied that her way was not on the whole a bad one in the ultimate results, winked at her free handling of orders, and consented to accept her, as we do Nature, for what could be got out of her.
“They are going t
o have mince-pie and broiled chicken for dinner over there,” said Mrs. Betsey, when the two ladies were seated at their own dinner-table that day.
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Miss Dorcas. —
“Well, Dinah met their girl in at the provision store and struck up an acquaintance, and went in to help her put up a bedstead, and so she stopped a while in the kitchen. The tall gentleman with black hair is the husband — I thought all the while he was,” said Mrs. Betsey. “The other one is a Mr. Fellows, a great friend of theirs, Mary says” —
“Mary! — who is Mary?” said Miss Dorcas.
“Why, Mary McArthur, their girl — they only keep one, but she has a little daughter about eight years old to help. I wish we had a little girl, or something that one might train for a waiter to answer door-bells and do little things.”
“Our door-bells don’t call for much attention, and a little girl is nothing but a plague,” interposed Miss Dorcas.
“Dinah has quite fallen in love with Mrs. Henderson,” said Mrs. Betsey; “she says that she is the handsomest, pleasantest-spoken lady she’s seen for a great while.”
“We’ll call upon her when they get well settled,” said Miss Dorcas definitively.
Miss Dorcas settled this with the air of a princess. She felt that such a meritorious little person as the one over the way ought to be encouraged by people of good old families.
Our readers will observe that Miss Dorcas listened without remonstrance and with some appearance of interest to the items about mince-pie and broiled chicken; but high moral propriety, as we all know, is a very cold, windy height, and if a person is planted on it once or twice a day, it is as much as ought to be demanded of human weakness. For the rest of the time one should be allowed, like Miss Dorcas, to repose upon one’s laurels. And, after all, it is interesting, when life is moving in a very stagnant current, even to know what your neighbor has for dinner!
CHAPTER II
HOW WE BEGIN LIFE
[Letter from Eva Henderson to Isabel Convers.]
MY dear Belle, — Well, here we are, Harry and I, all settled down to housekeeping quite like old folks. All is about done but the last things, — those little touches, and improvements, and alterations that go off into airy perspective. I believe it was Carlyle that talked about an “infinite shoe-black” whom all the world could not quite satisfy so but that there would always be a next thing in the distance. Well, perhaps it’s going to be so in housekeeping, and I shall turn out an infinite housekeeper; for I find this little, low-studded, unfashionable home of ours, far off in a tabooed street, has kept all my energies brisk and busy for a month past, and still there are more worlds to conquer. Visions of certain brackets and lambrequins that are to adorn my spare chamber visit my pillow nightly while Harry is placidly sleeping the sleep of the just. I have been unable to attain to them because I have been so busy with my parlor ivies and my Ward’s case of ferns, and some perfectly seraphic hanging baskets, gorgeous with flowering nasturtiums that are now blooming in my windows. There is a dear little Quaker dove of a woman living in the next house to ours who is a perfect witch at gardening, — a good kind of witch, you understand, one who could make a broomstick bud and blossom if she undertook it, — and she has been my teacher and exemplar in these matters. Her parlor is a perfect bower, a drab dove’s nest wreathed round with vines and all a-bloom with geraniums; and mine is coming on to look just like it. So you see all this has kept me ever so busy.
Then there are the family accounts to keep. You may think that isn’t much for our little concern, but you would be amazed to find how much there is in it. You see, I have all my life concerned myself only with figures of speech, and never gave a thought about figures of arithmetic, or troubled my head as to where money came from or went to; and when I married Harry I had a general idea that we were going to live with delightful economy. But it is astonishing how much all our simplicity costs, after all. My account-book is giving me a world of new ideas, and some pretty serious ones, too.
Harry, you see, leaves everything to me. He has to be off to his office by seven o’clock every morning, and I am head marshal of the commissariat department, — committee of one on supplies, and all that, — and it takes up a good deal of my time.
You would laugh, Belle, to see me with my matronly airs and graces going my daily walk to the provision store at the corner, which is kept by a tall, black-browed lugubrious man, with rough hair and a stiff stubby beard, who surveys me with a severe gravity over the counter, as if he wasn’t sure that my designs were quite honest.
“Mr. Quackenboss,” I say, with my sweetest smile, “have you any nice butter?”
He looks out of the window, drums on the counter, and answers “Yes” in a tone of great reserve.
“I should like to look at some,” I say, undiscouraged.
“It’s down cellar,” he replies, gloomily chewing a bit of chip and casting sinister glances at me.
“Well,” I say cheerfully, “shall I go down there and look at it?”
“How much do you want?” he asks suspiciously.
“That depends on how well I like it,” say I.
“I s’pose I could get up a cask,” he says in a ruminating tone; and now he calls his partner, a cheerful, fat, roly-poly little cockney Englishman, who flings his h’s round in the most generous and reckless style. His alert manner seems to say that he would get up forty casks a minute and throw them all at my feet, if it would give me any pleasure.
So the butter-cask is got up and opened, and my severe friend stands looking down on it and me as if he would say, “This also is vanity.”
“I should like to taste it,” I say, “if I had something to try it with.”
He scoops up a portion on his dirty thumb-nail and seems to hold it reflectively, as if a doubt was arising in his mind of the propriety of this mode of offering it to me.
And now my cockney friend interposes with a clean knife. I taste the butter and find it excellent, and give a generous order which delights his honest soul; and as he weighs it out he throws in, gratis, the information that his little woman has tried it, and he was sure I would like it, for she is the tidiest little woman and the best judge of butter; that they came from Yorkshire, where the pastures round were so sweet with a-many violets and cowslips — in fact, my little cockney friend strays off into a kind of pastoral that makes the little grocery store quite poetic.
I call my two grocers familiarly Tragedy and Comedy, and make Harry a good deal of fun by recounting my adventures with them. I have many speculations about Tragedy. He is a married man, as I learn, and I can’t help wondering what Mrs. Quackenboss thinks of him. Does he ever shave — or does she kiss him in the rough — or has she given up kissing him at all? How did he act when he was in love? — if ever he was in love — and what did he say to the lady to induce her to marry him? How did he look when he did it? It really makes me shudder to think of such a mournful ghoul coming back to the domestic circle at night. I should think the little “Quacks” would all run and hide. But a truce to scandalizing my neighbor — he may be better than I am, after all!
I ought to tell you that some of my essays in provisioning my garrison might justly excite his contempt — they have been rather appalling to my good Mary McArthur. You know I had been used to seeing about a ten-pound sirloin of beef on papa’s table, and the first day I went into the shop I assumed an air of easy wisdom as if I had been a housekeeper all my life, and ordered just such a cut as I had seen mamma get, with all sorts of vegetables to match, and walked home with composed dignity. When Mary saw it she threw up her hands and gave an exclamation of horror. “Miss Eva!” she said, “when will we get all this eaten up?” And verily that beef pursued us through the week most like a ghost. We had it hot, and we had it cold; we had it stewed and hashed, and made soup of it; we sliced it and we minced it, and I ate a great deal more than was good for me on purpose to “save it.” Towards the close of the week Harry civil
ly suggested (he never finds fault with anything I do, but he merely suggested) whether it wouldn’t be better to have a little variety in our table arrangements; and then I came out with the whole story, and we had a good laugh together about it. Since, then I have come down to taking lessons of Mary, and I say to her, “How much of this, and that, had I better get?” and between us we make it go quite nicely.
Speaking of neighbors, my dear blessed Aunt Maria, whom I suppose you remember, has almost broken her heart about papa’s failing and my marrying Harry and, finally, our coming to live on an unfashionable street — which in her view is equal to falling out of heaven into some very suspicious region of limbo. She almost quarreled with us both because, having got married contrary to her will, we would also insist on going to housekeeping and having a whole house to ourselves on a back street instead of having one little stuffy room on the back side of a fashionable boarding-house. Well, I made all up with her at last. If you will have your own way, and persist in it, people have to make up with you. You thus get to be like the sun and moon which, though they often behave very inconveniently, you have to make the best of; and so Aunt Maria has concluded to make the best of Harry and me. It came about in this wise: I went and sat with her the last time she had a sick headache, and kissed her, and bathed her head, and told her I wanted to be a good girl and did really love her, though I couldn’t always take her advice now I was a married woman; and so we made it up.
But the trouble is that now she wants to show me how to run this poor little unfashionable boat so as to make a good show with the rest of them, and I don’t want to learn. It’s easier to keep out of the regatta. My card receiver is full of most desirable names of people who have come in their fashionable carriages and coupes, and they have “oh’d” and “ah’d” in my little parlors, and declared they were “quite sweet,” and “so odd,” and “so different, you know;” but, for all that, I don’t think I shall try to keep up all this gay circle of acquaintances. Carriage hire costs money; and when paid for by the hour, one asks whether the acquaintances are worth it.. But there are some real noble-hearted people that I mean to keep. The Van Astrachans, for instance. Mrs. Van Astrachan is a solid lump of goodness and motherliness, and that sweet Mrs. Harry Endicott is most lovable. You remember Harry Endicott, I suppose, and what a trump card he was thought to be among the girls, one time when you were visiting us, and afterwards all that scandal about him and that pretty little Mrs. John Seymour? She is dead now, I hear, and he has married this pretty Rose Ferguson, a friend of hers; and since his wife has taken him in hand he has turned out to be a noble fellow. They live up on Madison Avenue quite handsomely. They are among the “real folks” Mrs. Whitney tells about, and I think I must keep them. The Elmores I don’t care much for. They are a frivolous, fast set, and what’s the use? Sophie and her husband, my old friend Wat Sydney, I keep mainly because she won’t give me up. She is one of the clinging sort, and is devoted to me. They have a perfect palace up by the Park — it is quite a show-house, and is, I understand, to be furnished by Harter. So, you see, it’s like a friendship between princess and peasant.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 374
