“That’s a good beginning,” said Mark, after they had left.
“It shows what one woman can do,” said Jane.
“Then how much two people could do,” said Mark, “if they set themselves together! But, Jane, do you know the sight of all such destitution as we have been seeing here stirs up all my theories? I begin to wonder what right we have to any property at all, when these have barely their daily bread. Not that I am largely endowed with worldly goods; but I take my little luxuries, and I am, in my way, working for an independence, for a competency, that I have hoped to reach some time.”
Jane was plunging across the street in front of an omnibus, and her answer was lost.
“Now, I have half a mind,” said Mark, “to start a new order of mendicant friars, throw what little goods I have into the general fund, and set out begging my daily bread.”
“If you came across brother Bardles,” said Jane, for now they had happened to reach a broad sidewalk, and firm footing, where she could talk more freely, “he would give you a ticket to the Provident Association.”
“That’s the trouble nowadays,” said Mark; “one is always coming flat up against an institution. If it were only like the old days, when there was a wide porch to the houses of the great, where the poor could find their rest, and be sure that a loaf of bread would be brought to them”-
“But stop a minute, Mark,” said Jane; “somebody must then be rich enough to build up your castle and its wide porch, and somebody has got to earn and make your bread. Now, I should be a little ashamed to go round and beg for bread I had not earned. But perhaps you mean to preach so grandly that you will be worthy of it.”
“Oh, no!” said Mark, in a discouraged tone. “I am no preacher; but seriously, Jane, is it the highest life among the rich, or among the poor? or, rather, won’t you tell me what do you think living-what do you think life is?”
They had reached a crowded place, where all the horse-cars and all the omnibuses seemed to have met in one grand jumble, with news-boys, apple-women, men selling boot-lacings, men with valises, women with huge travelling-bags, all flung together in a grand pell-mell. It was a muddy day, and sidewalks and street were imbedded in a black paste. Jane had been grasping her dress, and dropping her sunshade every three steps. She succeeded in answering-
“I think it is a little mixed now.”
“I agree with you,” said Mark, laughing: “it is for us two to pick our course through it, together, cleanly, if we can. What do you say to taking this blue-green horse-car?”
Jane gladly flung herself into it; and Mark, seating himself by her side, went on with his speculations. These were somewhat interrupted, for here they had reached the meridian of acquaintances who were to be greeted in the car. Still Mark held manfully to his thread.
When Jane had a little time to consider it all by herself, she began to tremble a little at her responsibilities with Mark. He was depending upon her, she feared, too much.
In the old days she used to think that the kaleidoscope of fate ought to have jostled Mark and Nettie side by side. Nettie was precisely the gay, lively companion that he needed to stir him from his dreams, and keep him active in life. Now the kaleidoscope had turned, and there was a fresh crystallization in their little circle. Was this to be the permanent one? She began to think so. There was one thing she possessed, that she would gladly give Mark; and that was her fortune. Yes, how pleasant it would be to make for him a comfortable home, with its luxurious library, and to have every thing easy and happy for him. She could do it; and in return he was just the person to make home-life charming, always even in temper, with a steady flow of happy thought and originality that made talk with him delightful. She knew that Mark thought so little of her fortune, that the fact that he was poor and she rich would not stand in the way of his marrying her, because it would not occur to him. He would marry her for love, so conscious of her own worth that he would forget in his unworldliness that she had also the commonplace charms of money. This simplicity touched Jane; and she felt that she would like to keep him in this dream all his life. There were so many about her, who looked at her only as an heiress, that it was refreshing to know how utterly Mark was unconscious of it.
She was a little startled one day, when Mark came in suddenly, and begged to speak with her. She drew back from the accustomed throng in the parlors, into a little anteroom that separated them from the billiard-room in the wing. This was so called because there was a billiard-table there, where all the members of the family were fond of playing. But it communicated by some stairs with the lower story, and Sophy was apt to be holding her domestic household councils here with her servants. So it was by no means a secluded room, and the little anteroom that led to it was quite a thoroughfare.
It was pretty much filled up, too, by a large Daphne plant in flower, and a marble head of Psyche on a pedestal. Mark and Jane managed to stand there a few minutes.
“Jane, I have come to tell you,” said Mark, “that I have just received an appointment as head librarian to the Johnsonian Library in Chicago, with a real substantial salary; only I must go there directly.”
Sophy rushed through from the billiard-room.
“Where is Ned? Has he got out? I must speak to him.”
“To Chicago!” said Jane, when she had answered Sophy: “how singular! For I was going to tell you of our new plans. Ned’s brother wants him to come out to Chicago, for this next winter, to oversee some business; and Sophy and I, all of us, are to go next fall. At least, it is settled I am to go if I like. Ned was talking it over this morning at breakfast; and I, indeed, thought I would consult you on my going.”
Jane’s long sentence had only been brought out with interruptions. Carl, the oldest boy, had dashed through to the billiard-room to find his mother, and back again, not successful in his search. Retty had appeared looking for Cecil. The nurse came rushing after Retty. Cecil had made his way downstairs, but Retty was not to be allowed to follow him; the nurse brought Retty back triumphantly in her arms, screaming at the top of his lungs. He had to be cosseted by his aunt, and then his mother reappeared on the scene to see what was the matter. Then she wanted to consult Jane about making Mr. Jack Bardles stay to dinner, but she flew off again at a scream from Cecil. Aunt Maria was shouting from the front room, wondering where Jane was.
“Of course, of course,” said Mark, when he had a chance to speak, “you will come to Chicago. Only let me get there first and establish myself, and then may I write and ask you”-
Christine here plunged in.
“O Jane,” Jane! save me from that detestable Mr. Archer. He is coming up the stairs. Do let me have a cosey little chat with you and Mark”-
Mark suppressed some strong language, unusual to him, and left. He came in the evening to say good-by, but had only an opportunity of promising to write to Jane.
The next day was Valentine’s Day, and this little poem came to Jane. It was not in Mark’s writing. But could any one except him have written it?
DAY AND NIGHT.
I.
Though my heart throbs not when I hear her voice,
Nor moves with every rustle of her dress,
Still do I know her wondrous loveliness,
And in her rare, sweet beauty I rejoice.
The symbol of all lovely things to me;
A touch of heaven seems to light her face.
She is a creature of such perfect grace,
And more than that, such perfect purity,
The world seems better for her living in it.
To love her, then, can any of us dare?
Her heart a treasure is,-I would not win it.
It is enough, our breathing the same air.
I know, through her, my life is filled with light.
This is the placid day: oh! must there come a night?
II.
To her alone I can myself disclose;
She always understands and comforts me.
So brave, so fran
k, so generous is she,
So true a friend, that I forget my foes.
So beautiful, with soft yet brilliant eyes,
And tangled dark brown hair, and youth’s rich bloom,
Where’er she moves is warmth and sweet perfume.
And yet, o’er all this good, such ill may rise:
Though by the future only ‘twill be proved,
Too well I know what coming years may bring,
If, ever loving, she should not be loved.
She will reach ruin through that suffering.
But now she is all love and life and light.
It is the joyous day: I will not think of night.
FEB. 14, 1871.
CHAPTER XVII.
VALENTINE’S DAY came in Lent last year, and soon after Easter the Bardles establishment was broken up for the summer wanderings. Jane went for a few weeks to Greyford, but was to spend the summer with her sister Sophy in Newport.
She found that she had just missed seeing Rachel Holley and Horace, in Greyford. Mr. Holley had taken Rachel away with him “out west.”
“Somehow, since his wife is dead,” said Miss Burgess, Jane’s aunt, “Mr. Holley can’t seem to settle down to any thing at home. He has gone out prospecting a little. He did talk about Denver City and St. Paul’s; but I shouldn’t wonder if he settled down before he got there. Mrs. Holley’s relations are all in Chicago, and Mrs. Worboise has moved out there, I suppose you heard.”
Jane heard, too, that Dr. Sylva and Nettie joined the Holleys, just for the journey, and nobody knew when Nettie would be back.
How quiet Greyford seemed! Jane looked up and down its broad streets, with their huge elms shading it on either side; and, in the late afternoon, she seemed to see the same cows wandering home that she used to watch when she was a child. They ran wildly into Deacon Spinley’s side yard, just as they used to, and were chased out with the same contumely, as it seemed, by the same boy.
One day, while she was with her aunt, she opened a little cupboard that was set into the side of the old-fashioned chimney of the sitting-room, to put away into it some of the things she was tired of seeing on the mantle-piece. She was surprised to find standing in front of one of the shelves, looking at her, a little bear of carved wood, which she had never seen before. She took it out to look at it, when Miss Burgess exclaimed, “There, Jane, I almost forgot to give it to you. Horace Vanzandt left it for you, to show you he had improved in carving since the old days. He put it up on the mantle-shelf; but seeing it was getting dusty, I set it away in the cupboard, and clean forgot it.”
It was in very old, childish days that the Vanzandts lived next door to the Burgesses. Horace had a special gift at whittling, and used to make dolls’ chairs and tables for Jane, that she kept in her baby-house as long as they would stand. The little Jane valued them, though the legs were rickety; and they were the pride of her establishment.
One day when Horace was about six years old, he was found crying on the door-step. Tears were unusual with this ambitious youth. Jane tried to find out the trouble. He held up a bit of wood in his hand, saying, “I tried to make it a bear, and it will be a pig.”
This was a tragic event in childhood, but had been the source of an infinite number of jokes afterwards; Horace insisting that his bears, in after life, turned out nothing but pigs.
“He wants to show me that he can make a bear,” said Jane, as she took it upstairs with her. This was on one of her last days of packing, and she did the bear up in tissue-paper, and put it in one of the sacredest trays of her trunk. She had a letter from Mark in the afternoon; and when she went back to her room she unpacked all her things, took the bear out, and set it up on the mantlepiece.
“I may as well leave it with the rest of my things,” she said.
The next morning she went away. She looked round her room before she left, with her travelling-bag in her hand. The little bear sat up on his hind legs, and looked at her. She saw the little bear, took it, and plunged it into the top of her bag.
Sophy went upstairs with Jane to her room, after she reached Newport, and was present when Jane opened her bag, to take out some of her things. “What a dear little bear!” exclaimed Sophy, when it appeared. “It is just the thing to set on the top of your little clock. I had a plan for a cuckoo-clock for your room, but Ned thought you would not like the noise. And perhaps it is best not to have two in the house. And he found this pretty little carved thing for the mantle-piece. And just what it needs is this little bear.”
Jane’s summer passed on quietly. Its peace almost terrified her. It made her think of one of those cloudless summer days that are called “weather breeders,” and she had a vague dread of a storm collecting behind the horizon.
She had the most charming letters from Mark, full of tenderness and eloquence and poetry. She liked to read them over and over. After she had been especially moved by one of these letters, she would take away Horace’s little bear from the top of the clock, and set it aside. But Ann, the housemaid, had an unwonted eye for symmetry, and always found it out and put it back again.
“Of course it’s absurd,” said Jane to herself, “to make any thing out of such a little thing. But I wonder if Horace meant any thing more than fun, and to show me that he had improved in carving. Yet it keeps me thinking of him; and I can’t see the right of it, that all Mark’s letters should not keep him in my mind so much as the sight of that little thing makes Horace always present to me!”
As for Mark, he liked Chicago. It would be hard to find a wide-awake young man, whether he were poet like Mark, inventor like Horace, or a general, driving, enthusiastic putter-of-things-through like Jeff, who did not like Chicago in those days, at least, till he had seen the folly of it. In the first place, Chicago was, as Mark’s old friend, Dr. Sylva, was used to say, a central ganglion of the world’s nervous-system,-the life of the world found its centres there; and then Humfry, on the other side the table, would laugh, and say, “He means it is a relay station on the wires,” which was substantially what the Doctor did mean. Everybody was in a hurry; everybody looked forward, and was so perfectly sure of his future that he discounted it at whatever rate of interest. Mark did not find that a great many people came into the Johnsonian Library; but that was all the better for the librarian. It gave him more time to write for “The Lakeside Monthly,” in which he was an accepted and favorite contributor. As he walked home at night, he would stop and see Mr. Walsh, and look over the last new books, and in his beautiful book-store, that most luxurious of “loafing-places places,” turn over some of the new English newspapers. Then, ignoring the horse-cars, he would cross the bridge westward, often stopping to study character or race, as the fresh-water seamen worked their boats or schooners through the drawbridges or up and down the crowded stream. Mark lived in nice rooms with some old friends who kept house well out on the prairie, as he used to say, on the west side. But he did not dislike his walk, night or morning. In the warmest August evenings he came home well contented with himself, and declaring, that if you did not walk fast, the air was not oppressive. This meant, being interpreted, that as he walked he had been blocking out a new novel, or whipping into shape the refractory rhymes of a new sonnet to Jane. To think that that quiet girl, so well-balanced, so little demonstrative, should have got this empire over our bright, intense poet, who cannot sleep to-night unless to paper he has confided what he thinks and what he knows! Ah, Jane! Jane! as he makes “lowly” do its duty in rhyming with “holy,” and reserves fit place lower down in which the line is to round off into “melancholy,” are you reading his last sonnet? or are you looking at Horace’s bear?
CHAPTER XVIII.
999 WEST 12TH STREET, Aug. 11, 1870.
MY DEAR MARK,-The Greyford people tell me you are in Chicago. And to think that your old dream is fulfilled, and that you are librarian-in-chief! Shall I not make you order full sets of “Annales des Mines,” and “Royal Engineer Transactions,” and every thing else in my line? You
know, old fellow, that I am to spend next winter in Chicago, and, if things turn out well, all my life. It is one of those hits which fellows here call “bonus ictus,” that being supposed to be the Latin for “a good lick.”
Do you know any thing about cut-offs? Very likely you do not; but on the proper management and adjustment of cut-offs depends the very price of the coal that you will burn next winter to warm your Alexandrian library, or whatever its name may be. It is estimated that the truly successful cut-offs now in use diminish the quantity of fuel needed in the steam-engines which employ them by twenty-three, twenty-seven, and in some cases thirty-five, and even thirty-six and two-thirds percent. So you see a cut-off, if it is really good, is a virtual addition of such an amount as those figures represent to the coal-product of the country.
Well, we have stumbled on an old fellow-queer fellow too; regular down-east Yankee-who has a most amazing and ingenious invention for a new cut-off. If you were here I could explain it to you in two minutes; but without a working model you would hardly understand it. I have just sent off to London, where we are to get an English patent, some capital drawings of it by Rachel, which would make you understand it perfectly. No matter. Some friends of mine have an interest in the patent for the whole North-west, with the exception of Davenport, Dubuque, and two or three other cities, which had been sold before. We propose to establish one good shop to begin with, as our head-centre; and the question now is where it shall be put. I have been rather in favor of Chicago myself, it is such an advantage to be at a central point. Wherever it is established, Chicago will be my central point for some months, till we are ready to begin, for I have the oversight of all the sub-contracts we make.
Oddly enough, as very likely you know, our old friend, Mrs. Worboise, at whose adventures you have heard us laugh so much, is established there. Would you mind going round to see her, and finding out surreptitiously whether I can go to her direct when I come? If I write and ask, she will turn out the best inmates she has; Abe Lincoln and his wife and Thad would have to go to make room for me, if she could not provide otherwise. But if you think she has a decent attic, or other landing-place, which I can have without ruining her, just engage it for me, and let me know. They tell me business was never opening so briskly in Chicago. But I believe that is what you Western fellows always say. How soon I shall be saying “we Western fellows!” It will be real good to live in the same “school deestrict” with you again, old fellow. Good-by.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 426
