Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  It would seem as if the arrangements and customs of modern society did everything that could be done to render such a previous knowledge impossible. Good sense would say that if men and women are to single each other out, and bind themselves by a solemn oath, forsaking all others to cleave to each other as long as life should last, there ought to be, before taking vows of such gravity, the very best opportunity to become minutely acquainted with each other’s dispositions, and habits, and modes of thought and action. It would seem to be the dictate of reason that a long and intimate friendship ought to be allowed, in which, without any bias or commitment, young people might have full opportunity to study each other’s character and disposition, being under no obligation, expressed or implied, on account of such intimacy to commit themselves to the irrevocable union.

  Such a kind of friendship is the instinctive desire of both the parties that make up society. Both young men and young women, as we observe, would greatly enjoy a more intimate and friendly intercourse, if the very fact of that initiatory acquaintance were not immediately seized upon by busy A, B, and C, and reported as an engagement. The flower that might possibly blossom into the rose of love is withered and blackened by the busy efforts of gossips to pick it open before the time.

  Our young friend, Alice Van Arsdel, was what in modern estimation would be called just the “nicest kind of a girl.” She had a warm heart, a high sense of justice and honor; she was devout in her religious profession, conscientious in the discharge of the duties of family life. Naturally, Alice was of a temperament which might have inclined her to worldly ambition. She had that keen sense of the advantages of wealth and station which even the most sensible person may have, and, had her father’s prosperity continued, might have run the gay career of flirtation and conquest supposed to be proper to a rich young belle.

  The failure of her father not only cut off all these prospects, but roused the deeper and better part of her nature to comfort and support her parents, and to assist in all ways in trimming the family vessel to the new navigation. Her self-esteem took a different form. Had she been enthroned in wealth and station, it would have taken pleasure in reigning; thrown from that position, it became her pride to adapt herself entirely to the proprieties of her different circumstances. Up to that hour she had counted Jim Fellows simply as a tassel on her fan, or any other appendage to her glittering life. When the crash came she expected no more of him than of a last summer’s bird, and it was with somewhat of pleased surprise that, on the first public tidings of the news, she received from Jim an expensive hothouse bouquet of a kind that he had never thought of giving in prosperous days.

  “The extravagant boy!” she said. Yet she said it with tears in her eyes, and she put the bouquet into water, and changed it every day while it lasted. The flowers and the friends of adversity have a value all their own.

  Then Jim came, came daily, with downright unsentimental offers of help, and made so much fun and gayety for them in the days of their breaking up as almost shocked Aunt Maria, who felt that a period of weeping and wailing would have been more appropriate. Jim became recognized in the family as a sort of factotum, always alert and ready to advise or to do, and generally knowing where every body or thing which was wanted in New York was to be found. But, as Alice was by no means the only daughter, as Marie and Angelique were each in their way as lively and desirable young candidates for admiration, it would have appeared that here was the best possible chance for a young man to have a friendship whose buds even the gossips would not pick open to find if there were love inside of them. As a young neophyte of the all-powerful press, Jim had the dispensation of many favors, in the form of tickets to operas, concerts, and other public entertainments, which were means of conferring enjoyment and variety, and dispensed impartially among the sisters. Eva’s house, in all the history of its finding, inception, and construction, had been a ground for many a familiar meeting from whence had grown up a pleasant feeling of comradeship and intimacy.

  The things that specialized this intimacy, as relating to Alice more than to the other sisters, were things as indefinite and indefinable as the shade mark between two tints of the rainbow; and yet there undoubtedly was a peculiar intimacy, and since the misfortunes of the family it had been of a graver kind than before, though neither of them cared to put it into words. Between a young man and a young woman of marriageable age a friendship of this kind, if let alone, generally comes to its bud and blossom in its own season; and there is something unutterably vexatious and revolting to every fibre of a girl’s nature to have any well-meaning interference to force this dénouement.

  Alice enjoyed the unspoken devotion of Jim, which she perceived by that acute sort of divination of which women are possessed; she felt quietly sure that she had more influence over him, could do more with him, than any other woman; and this consciousness of power over a man is something most agreeable to girls of Alice’s degree of selfesteem. She assumed to be a sort of mentor; she curbed the wild sallies of his wit, rebuking him if he travestied a hymn, or made a smart, funny application of a text of Scripture. But, as she generally laughed, the culprit was not really overborne by the censure. She had induced him to go with her to Mr. St. John’s church, and even to take a class in the Sunday-school, where he presided with the unction of an apostle over a class of street gamins, who certainly never found a more entertaining teacher.

  Now, although Marie and Angelique were also teachers in the same school, it somehow always happened that Jim and Alice walked to the scene of their duties in company. It was one of those quiet, unobserved arrangements of particles which are the result of laws of chemical affinity. These street tète-à-tètes gave Alice admirable opportunity for those graceful admonitions which are so very effective on young gentlemen when coming from handsome, agreeable monitors. On a certain Sunday morning in our history, as Alice was on her way to the mission school with Jim, she had been enjoining upon him to moderate his extreme liveliness to suit the duties of the place and scene.

  “It’s all very well, Alice,” he said to her, “so long as I don’t have to be too much with that St. John. But I declare that fellow stirs me up awfully; he looks so meek and so fearfully pious that it’s all I can do to keep from ripping out an oath, just to see him jump!”

  “Jim, you bad fellow! How can you talk so?”

  “Well, it’s a serious fact now. Ministers oughtn’t to look so pious! It’s too much a temptation. Why, last Sunday, when he came trailing by so soft and meek and asked me what books we wanted, I perfectly longed to rip out an oath and say, ‘Why in thunder can’t you speak louder!’ It’s a temptation of the devil, I know; but you mustn’t let St. John and me run too much together, or I shall blow out.”

  “Oh, Jim, you mustn’t talk so. Why, you really shock me — you grieve me.”

  “Well, you see, I’ve given up swearing for ever so long, but some kinds of people do tempt me fearfully, and he’s one of ‘em, and then I think that he must think I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But then, you see, a wolf understands those cubs better than a sheep. You ought to hear how I put gospel into them. I make ’em come out on the responses like little Trojans. I’ve promised every boy who is ‘sharp up’ on his Collect next Sunday a new pop-gun.”

  “Oh, Jim, you creature!” said Alice, laughing.

  “By George, Alice, it’s the best way. You don’t know anything about these little heathen. You’ve got to take ’em where they live. They put up with the Collect for the sake of the pop-gun, you see.”

  “But, Jim, I really was in hopes that you would look on this thing seriously,” said Alice, endeavoring to draw on a face of protest.

  “Why, Alice, I am serious; didn’t I go round to the highways and hedges, drumming up those little varmints? Not a soul of them would have put his head inside a Sunday-school room if it hadn’t been for me. I tell you I ought to be encouraged now. I’m not appreciated.”

  “Oh, Jim, you have done beautifully.”

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p; “I should think I had. I keep a long face while they are there, and don’t swear at Mr. St. John, and sing like a church robin. So I think you ought to let me let out a little to you going home. That eases my mind; it’s the confessional — Mr. St. John believes in that. I didn’t swear, mind you. I only felt like it; maybe that’ll wear off, by and by. So don’t give me up, yet.”

  “Oh, I don’t; and I’m perfectly sure, Jim, that you are the very person that can do good to these wild boys. Of course, the free experience of life which young men have enables them to know how to deal with such cases better than we girls can.”

  “Yes, you ought to hear me expound the commandments, and put it into them about stealing and lying. You see, Jim knows a thing or two, and is up to their tricks. They don’t come it round Jim, I tell you. Any boy that don’t toe the crack gets it. I give ’em C sharp with the key up.”

  “Oh, Jim, you certainly are original in your ways! But I dare say you’re right,” said Alice. “You know how to get on with them.”

  “Indeed I do. I tell you I know what’s what for these boys, though I don’t know, and don’t care about, what the old coves did in the first two centuries, and all that. Don’t you think, Alice, St. John is a little prosy on that chapter?”

  “Mr. St. John is such a good man that I receive everything he says on subjects where he knows more than I do,” said Alice virtuously.

  “Oh, pshaw, Alice! if a fellow has to swallow every good man’s hobby-horses, hoofs, tail, and all, why, he’ll have a good deal to digest. I tell you, St. John is too ‘other-worldly,’ as Charles Lamb used to say. He ought to get in love, and get married. I think, now, that if our little Angie would take him in hand she would bring him into mortal spheres, make a nice fellow of him.”

  “Oh, Mr. St. John never will marry,” said Alice solemnly; “he is devoted to the Church. He has published a tract on holy virginity that is beautiful.”

  “Holy grandmother!” said Jim; “that’s all bosh, Ally. Now you are too sensible a girl to talk that way. That’s going to Rome on a high canter.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Alice stoutly. “For my part, I think if a man, for the sake of devoting himself to the Church, gives up family cares, I reverence him. I like to feel that my rector is something sacred to the altar. The very idea of a clergyman in any other than sacred relations is disagreeable to me.”

  “Go it, now, so long as I’m not the clergyman!”

  “You sauce-box!”

  “Well, now, mark my words. St. John is a man, after all, and not a Fra Angelico angel, with a long neck and a lily in his hand, and, I tell you, when Angie sits there at the head of her class, working and fussing over those girls, she looks confoundedly pretty, and if St. John finds it out I shall think the better of him, and I think he will.”

  “Pshaw, Jim, he never looks at her.”

  “Don’t he? He does, though. I’ve seen him go round and round, and look at her as if she was an electrical battery, or something that he was afraid might go off and kill him. But he does look at her. I tell you, Jim knows the signs of the sky.”

  With which edifying preparation of mind, Alice found herself at the door of the Sunday-school room, where the pair were graciously received by Mr. St. John.

  CHAPTER X

  MR. ST. JOHN

  THAT good man, in the calm innocence of his heart, was ignorant of the temptations to which he exposed his tumultuous young disciple. He was serenely gratified with the sight of Jim’s handsome face and alert, active figure, as he was enacting good shepherd over his unruly flock. Had he known the exact nature of the motives which he presented to lead them to walk in the ways of piety, he might have searched a good while in primitive records before finding a churchly precedent.

  Arthur St. John was by nature a poet and idealist. He was as pure as a chrysolite, as refined as a flower; and, being thus, had been, by the irony of fate, born on one of the bleakest hillsides of New Hampshire, where there was a literal famine of any æsthetic food. His childhood had been fed on the dry husks of doctrinal catechism; he had sat wearily on hard high-backed seats and dangled his little legs hopelessly through sermons on the difference between justification and sanctification. His ultra-morbid conscientiousness had been wrought into agonized convulsions by stringent endeavors to carry him through certain prescribed formulae of conviction of sin and conversion; efforts which, grating against natures of a certain delicate fibre, produce wounds and abrasions which no after-life can heal. To such a one the cool shades of the Episcopal Church, with its orderly ways, its poetic liturgy, its artistic ceremonies, were as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. No converts are so disposed to be ultra as converts by reaction; and persons of a poetic and imaginative temperament are peculiarly liable to these extremes.

  Wearied with the intense and noisy clangor of modern thought, it was not strange if he should come to think free inquiry an evil, look longingly back on the ages of simple credulity, and believe that the dark ages of intellect were the bright ones of faith. Without really going over to the Romish Church, he proposed to walk that path, fine as the blade that Mahomet fabled as the Bridge of Paradise, in which he might secure all the powers and influences and advantages of that old system without its defects and corruptions.

  So he had established his mission in one of the least hopeful neighborhoods of New York. The chapel was a marvel of beauty and taste at small expense, for St. John was in a certain way an ecclesiastical architect and artist. He could illuminate neatly, and had at command a good store of the beautiful forms of the past to choose from. He worked at diaphanous windows which had all the effect of painted glass, and emblazoned texts and legends, and painted in polychrome, till the little chapel dazzled the eyes of street vagabonds, who never before had been made welcome to so pretty a place in their lives. Then, when he impressed it on the minds of these poor people that this lovely, pretty little church was their Father’s house, freely open to them every day, and that prayers and psalms might be heard there morning and evening, and the Holy Communion of Christ’s love every Sunday, it is no marvel if many were drawn in and impressed. Beauty of form and attractiveness of color in the church arrangements of the rich may cease to be means of grace and become wantonness of luxury — but for the very poor they are an education, they are means of quickening the artistic sense, t which is twin brother to the spiritual. The rich do not need these things, and the poor do.

  St. John, like many men of seemingly gentle temperament, had the organizing talents of the schoolmaster. No one could he with him and not feel him; and the intense purpose with which he labored, in season and out of season, carried all before it. He marshaled his forces like an army; his eye was everywhere and on every one. He’ trained his choir of singing boys for processional singing, he instructed his teachers, he superintended and catechised his school. In the life of incessant devotion to the Church which he led, woman had no place except as an obedient instrument. He valued the young and fair who flocked to his standard, simply and only for what they could do in his work, and apparently had no worldly change with which to carry on commerce of society. Yet it was true, as Jim said, that his eye had in some way or other been caught by Angelique; yet, at first, it was in the way of doubt and inquiry rather than approval.

  Angelique was gifted by nature with a certain air of piquant vivacity, which gave to her pretty person the effect of a French picture. In heart and character she was a perfect little self-denying saint infinitely humble in her own opinion, devoted to doing good wherever her hand could find it, and ready at any time to work her pretty fingers to the bone in a good cause. But yet undeniably she had a certain style and air of fashion not a bit like “St. Jerome’s love” or any of the mediæval saints. She could not help it. It was not her fault that everything about her had a sort of facility for sliding into trimly fanciful arrangement — that her little hats would sit so jauntily on her pretty head, that her foot and ankle had such a provoking neatness, and that her dai
ntily gloved hands had a hundred little graceful movements in a moment. Then her hair had numberless mutinous little curly-wurlies, and flew of itself into the golden mists of modern fashion; and her almond-shaped hazel eyes had a trick of glancing like a bird’s, and she looked always as if a smile might break out at any moment, even on solemn occasions; all which were traits to inspire doubt in the mind of an earnest young clergyman, in whose study the pictures of holy women were always lean, long-favored, with eyes rolled up, and looking as if they never had heard of a French hat or a pair of gaiter boots. He watched her the first Sunday that she sat at the head of her class, looking for all the world like a serious-minded canary-bird, and wondered whether so evidently airy and worldly a little creature would adapt herself to the earnest work before her; but she did succeed in holding a set of unpromising street girls in a sort of enchanted state while she chippered to them in various little persuasive intonations, made them say catechism after her, and then told them stories that were not in any prayer-book. After a little observation, he was convinced that she would “do.” But the habit of watchfulness continued!

  On this day, as Jim had suggested the subject, Alice somehow was moved to remark the frequent direction of Mr. St. John’s eyes. On this Sunday Angelique had had the misfortune to don for the first time a blue suit, with a blue velvet hat that gave a brilliant effect to her golden hair. In front of this hat, nodding with every motion of her head, was a blue-and-gold humming-bird. She wore a cape of ermine, and her class seemed quite dazzled by her appearance. Now, Mr. St. John had worked vigorously to get up his little chapel in blue and gold, gorgeous to behold; but a blue-and-gold teacher was something that there was no churchly precedent for — although if we look into the philosophy of the thing there may be the same sort of influence exercised over street barbarians by a prettily dressed teacher as by a prettily dressed church. But as Mr. St. John gazed at Angelique, and wondered whether it was quite the thing for her to look so striking, he saw a little incident that touched his heart. There was a poor, pinched, wan-visaged little girl, the smallest in the class, whose face was deformed by the scar of a fearful burn. She seemed to be in a trembling ecstasy at Angie’s finery, and while she was busy with her lesson stealthily laid her thin little hand upon the ermine cape. Immediately she was sharply reproved by a coarse, strong, older sister, who had her in charge, and her hand rudely twitched back.