Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  No one of them, perhaps, observed it then; but the rather unusual fact for them, that they were not precisely paired, brought these young people into a relation new to them, and much more fresh and healthy than they had ever been in before since childhood. As they had grown to be men and women, they had always, by some fate outside themselves, been thrown in couples. At the sleigh-ride, for instance, already spoken of, it was to be Mark and Rachel, Jeff and Jane, Horace and Nettie. In New York, it was Rachel and Horace. In Boston, it was Jane and Mark. Always they had been counted off by twos, as the drill sergeants say, whether they would or no. But in these various walks, rides, and sails of Chicago, that arrangement was necessarily broken. For there were only two of the young men,-nobody knew where Jeff Fleming was,-and there were all three of the young women. It might well be that there was some Mr. Denison, or Mr. Marsh, or Mr. Fay beside, of the party,-very likely two or three of the Chicago gentlemen, who had found out that three pretty Yankee girls were seeing sights together. But the old doublet combination was broken up. If they started in one arrangement for a walk, they came back in another. And, without their thinking much of it, each of them was thus making out the real life and character of the others a thousand times better than they ever did before. And no people can find more surprises in each other than those who have seen each other since they were babies.

  Perhaps the only person dissatisfied with these daily arrangements was the excellent Mrs. Worboise boise, the only person who saw from the outside how these foolish little pawns were moving to and fro. Mrs. Worboise would get up nice, bountiful teas for the young people when they came home all alive with the excitement of walk or drive; and she would watch at the door-oh, so earnestly!-for their return. And when her dear Rachel came, a little earlier than the others, with some Mr. Fay, or Mr. Marsh, and not with Horace, Mrs. Worboise did not like it at all. And when, last of all, Horace came in with Jane Burgess, Mrs. Worboise did not like that at all. Mrs. Worboise had been sure that Horace and Rachel were meant for each other, ever since they went to the Cooper Institute together. And why he did not hold by Rachel, she did not see! And why Rachel did not hold to him, she did not see! She had almost a mind to speak to Rachel! She could not bear it!

  No! dear Mrs. Worboise, no! all the half-dozen of us think you had better not speak to Rachel. Speaking to them does no good, we think: we think it does harm. The truth was, that Rachel and Horace had helped each other, had helped each other a great, great deal. He had been kind to her, and she had been kind to him. In the loneliness of New York, this had been to each of them a great comfort. But comfort is not every thing. And it was made perfectly clear to Rachel’s mind in the days when they were in Chicago, that she liked this merry Mr. Marsh, and this thoughtful Mr. Fay, and this kind and attentive Mr. Denison, just as well as she liked Horace. And Rachel was quite too true to make Horace fancy that she liked him any better. What Horace found out, perhaps we shall some day know.

  One Saturday night, as they landed from an excursion on the water, Mr. Forsyth, who handed Jane on shore, and walked up the street with her, asked her where she was to go to church the next day; and, before the party separated, she held a congress on the street-corner that they might arrange to go to church together the next day, on their last Sunday in Chicago. On their other Sundays they had been broken up, by one and another chance, and parted. This time they would go together.

  To this they agreed; and, after a little chaffer, it was determined that Mark and Horace should meet at the Sherman House, escort Rachel and Nettie to Mr. Bardles’s house, where Jane should be in waiting, and they would all go together to Unity Church, on the North Side, to hear Robert Collyer, who had not long returned from England; and this they did accordingly.

  They were not too late, certainly, but not too early; were met by a courteous gentleman at the door of the church, who found they would be glad to sit near each other, and apologized that he must therefore place them near the door. The church was large, without galleries; it was already well filled. The low pews, curving a little back in the middle, were ranged so close to each other as to give a social or congregate aspect to the congregation. And the first feeling with our Connecticut friends was, that they were at home.

  The organ was of sweet tone, and was very well played; something almost weird in the voluntary started the tears in Rachel’s eyes. Then the preacher rose in the pulpit. A large, strongly-built man, with full, cheerful face, iron-gray hair, and sympathetic, though piercing eyes, he read the opening hymn, with a home-like earnestness, that, in an instant, made them forget him, while they were lost in the emotion of the lines. This direct simplicity controlled them even more when he read the Scripture. The passage was that in Luke, describing the unfruitful fig-tree, and the allusion to the eighteen men who were killed by the tower in Siloam. The young people felt almost as if the eighteen were their own friends, and wondered why they had never before cared for their destruction. After prayer, the congregation sat silent, while a few plaintive chords from the organ seemed to take up the eager and intensely personal petition tion. It was really a relief that no one said a word, for those overcharged minutes. And when the preacher rose again, with the hymn-book, and read the first verse of the hymn, with intense feeling, no one was surprised that he laid down the book, and sat down, as if he could read no more.

  “I want a principle within,

  Of jealous, godly fear;

  A sensibility to sin;

  A pain to find it near.”

  After the hymn was sung, he gave out his text.

  “Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and slew them: think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?”

  Our young friends had never heard such a sermon. They were magnetized by the speaker’s personal power; they were led along in perfect sympathy by his simplicity; they were moved to intense feeling by his undisguised emotion. In the beginning, this or that quaint illustration or suggestion, thrown in without any reserve in his curious Yorkshire dialect, made them turn to each other sometimes with a sympathetic smile. But, before he was done, sympathy expressed itself rather by pressure of hand with hand, or stillness even more rapt than ever. For he was speaking now of the mutual and common life of men. How impossible for any one of us to live for himself, or to die for himself! We must not say nor think, that those are publicans, and we are purer than they: do they sin, is it not because the atmosphere of their lives has been so tainted? and who is responsible for that atmosphere, if not we, among the rest? He alluded to the horrible frauds detected just then in the New York Ring, but it was without invective; from that allusion he passed on to speak with intense feeling of that average conscience of the nation, in which the conception or execution of such frauds could be possible; and he held man, woman, and child to the duty of purifying that conscience, and quickening the common life. The whole hushed assembly testified by its subdued manner, as the service ended, to the power of this personal appeal.

  As our friends began their walk home, Nettie found herself walking with Mark Hinsdale. “If I lived within twenty miles of that man,” she said, “I would hear no other preacher. I would come here if I came barefoot. O Mark! what lives we lead! How can one fling away life as one does, when, as he says, the thoughtless make others thoughtless and the brave make others brave?”

  It seemed to Mark that he had never seen the real side of Nettie, beneath her merry play, before.

  Jane and Rachel were together, Horace with them. “I was never in a Unitarian church before,” said Rachel. “Are they always so grave and silent as they leave church, and as they go home?”

  “I doubt if they always hear such sermons,” said Horace. “These people seem to me to feel as I do; as if I never knew before my duty to the world, or as if”-and he paused and shuddered-”as if we were all on the edge of a common calamity.”

  CHAPTER XXI.

  AS the five went and came on that October Sunday, how many times they said to ea
ch other, what they had said so many times before: “If only Jeff Fleming were here, it would be perfect!”

  In saying this they were wholly wrong. The truth was, that, if Jeff Fleming had been there, they would, almost of course, have paired off in one of the old and familiar combinations. They would have lost just that vivacity of the new discoveries which they were making all the time; and making precisely because their partnerships changed with every new house into which they entered, and, indeed, with every other change of their little plans.

  Meanwhile, Jeff was coming to them, though they did not know it, a good deal faster than the old poetical expressions for full speed can tell. He was coming a good deal faster than the average wind comes. He was coming as fast as high-pressure steam, thrown first on one end and then on the other of the pistons of a first-class engine from the Boston Locomotive Shop would carry him. Now, if any of the new school of poets wants to write a realistic poem about Jeff Fleming, let him try putting that statement into rhythm, verse, and rhyme.

  After he has done this, he may go on to say, that a little after they left Cass Corners, on that October Sunday afternoon, three or four very wild cows, tormented by five or six wilder German boys, left the pasture where they would fain have been quiet, broke through its fence, and were rushing across the railway, when the express, to which Jeff had intrusted himself, struck full on the whitest of the herd. She disappeared; but the engine was not so fortunate with the other cows, and when it was done with them, it was lying in the prairie, some feet below the level it had been running on, gasping the last inarticulate word which it would speak for many days. Jeff and the other passengers, startled from their naps, sprang up, to discover that they were not hurt, and to call an unexpected town meeting for the advice and assistance of the conductor and engineer. The hours spent in contemplating the wrecks of engine and cows, in repairing damages, and in waiting for another engine, threw them wholly out of time. The road was no longer theirs, to take the expressive phrase of the craft. Their pride was humbled, as is a great cardinal’s after his fall. Only this morning, and every thing got out of their way! Only this evening, and they must shirk off upon sidings, and get out of everybody’s else way; all because four cows did not understand the eternal etiquettes, and know that precedence must be given to an express-train.

  So was it that, as Jeff and his companions at last struck Lake Michigan, and thought now that all was clear for them to approach Chicago, it was already well advanced toward midnight. Some one, who stepped in from a way station, bade Jeff look out and see the prairie fire at the northward.

  Prairie fire, indeed! One passenger after another threw up his window on each side of the car, and looked into the night air; and as they rushed northward, at their old speed again now, and the flames and glowing smoke-clouds grew higher on the horizon, every one knew that this was no fire of hay and straw and stubble, but that the city itself, which was home to most of them and harbor to all of them, was in flames.

  They dashed into the station, wild for news, to find all silent there. The throng which usually welcomes the arrival of an express was elsewhere now; not one hackman to urge his claims, not one teamster to plead for a trunk. Even the few women who found themselves on that Sunday train, saw that their friends had not come to meet them. The porters and switch-tenders on duty could hardly tell them more than what they knew already,-that Chicago was in flames.

  Few indeed had stopped to ask this, only those who were strangers as completely as Jeff Fleming was. The larger part had leaped from the car platforms as soon as the motion was slow enough, and had disappeared at once on their way to warehouse or to home, which they knew must be in danger. Jeff himself, who knew not the name of a street, and indeed had no special place to go to, as soon as he found that he could learn nothing from the porters, rushed, self-directed, toward the line of fire. At first the stillness and solitude were terrible to him. All was light as day, and yet desert as midnight. He could hear his own boot-heel on the sidewalk, and in that square he could see no one. But, in a moment more, when he was in the presence of the fire itself, he saw why there had been solitude before. For now he had come into a jam of people, who did know the city, as he did not, and were on one of the great ganglions of its circulation. Jeff felt a terrible pang cross him, as he saw the struggles and horrors of this crowd. Here was a young man, with a sick child of four or five years old in his arms. Oh, how wretched her pale face was! “Will you make way for me? this child is dying.” And the poor mother was close behind. Jeff felt it like a personal pang cross him. Where were the three Greyford girls in this wild confusion? Were they lost in the crowd, as he was? Was there any one to take care of them? Point by point Jeff crossed that street. Between the back wheels of wagons there is a little space, even in a terrible crowd, of which a resolute pedestrian can avail himself. And Jeff was not a man to shrink. He crossed the avenue,-pressing still towards the fire-ran up a street which was almost desolate again, and this time faced a coffle of horses, wild with fright,-some of them hooded in the jackets of the men who had led them from their stable, others, blindfolded by such rags as could be seized upon,-haltered together, and flanked by as many men and boys as could be brought into the service, driven from the light, down into safer regions, where they could be harnessed in their turn, and put to the work which was so essential. Jeff shrunk into a doorway till this wild cortge passed on, and then started again for the line of fire. He came on it in a moment, sooner than he expected,-came close on a steam fire-engine, whose foreman, hoarse and black, was just giving the orders to limber up, that she might be put in a station to windward. Jeff saw by the unconscious gestures of the men, that the flames, or the burning brands, had leaped over their heads as they worked; he could see that the treacherous eaves of a high warehouse forty rods behind them were in flames. Jeff had found his place now: he bore a hand man-fully with the rest, at the tongue of the engine; neither questioned why, nor made reply, as one order after another was given; only admired the sublime audacity of the foreman, who was doing his personal duty still, and doing it cheerfully, in the face of such tremendous odds. “Easy with her! Away with her! Softly, boys; steady. Here we are!”-as she wheeled round into position,-as, in a miraculously short time, a line of hose was run out,-as a spirited fellow carried it up half the height of the guilty warehouse,-and, amid the cheers of the few workmen, drenched back the spiteful flame, and then turned his fountain on the roof opposite. Short-lived triumph, indeed! They had not been three minutes in position, sending out hose, hither and thither, to points which seemed assailable, when, as Jeff rose from his knees, where, in a deluge of water, he had been coupling two bits of leading-hose together, he saw, what the foreman did not see, so eager was he in his attack,-another Mansard roof, a whole square to windward of them, all bannered and pennoned in flame. Jeff simply pointed it to the foreman, who nodded in reply with a grim, hard smile, called in his hose once more, coiled it roughly as he might; once more gave the order he had given so often,-”Limber up, boys! No good here! Easy with her! Walk her along,”-and directed the new station. It was as if they had been spitting at the flame.

  Jeff was willing to work, but not at such work as this. It was the foreman’s duty, very good for the foreman; but it was not his. And, as Jeff saw the steamer in position once more, he ran up, he know not why, toward the Court-house, which they had seen towering high in the distance. He left the line of fire for the moment, called by voices in the crowd which had gathered in the lighted square, and turned to join them. “Take hold, gentleman; take hold! Do you mean to have these poor fellows roasted alive?” These were the first words that came to Jeff in the midst of the uproar; and, in a moment, he saw the position. There had been a theory that the Court-house was fire-proof. Now, the basement of the Court-house was used as the country jail, and was filled with prisoners. The keepers, doubtful as to their right to release them, had gone to whoever had that right, for some sort of sign-manual. Meanwhile, the cupola of the Court-hous
e was in flames; the heat and horror of the fire made themselves known within stone-walls below. And this army of wretches, whose separate cells had all been unlocked by the retiring wardens, was screaming within for freedom; while the strong outer doors were bolted and locked. They were all shut up together, in one undistinguished crowd. The cry of oath and entreaty could be distinctly heard by the smaller crowd outside. But, in that smaller crowd, some man of sense had understood the exigency, and had voted himself into command. The workmen who were relaying the pavement of the square had left, on Saturday, a convenient timber with which they adjusted its grade. “Take hold, gentlemen; take hold! Do you mean to have them roasted alive?” The sovereigns who were passing understood the exigency, and rushed, at this command, to the rescue. Jeff seized the timber with the rest,-thirty, forty of them had hold of it together. “Back! back! a few steps back! Now! One, two, three!” And they rushed at the gate, to be well-nigh overthrown by the recoil. “Once more, men! back! a little back! Now! Are you ready? One, two, three!” And once more their hands were torn, and they thrown back on each other, as the gate refused to yield. But their cheerful leader, after examining its condition dition, reported favorably of the effect. “Don’t give it up, men. Back again!-little more!-little more! Now! One, two, three!” And with rather more skill, and a swing rather more elastic, they rushed again at the gate, and this time it was certain that something inside had given way. An answering cheer from within. Some swings of the battering-ram, directed with more precision, if with less force, and then, in one instant, the, gate swung away, Jeff knew not where; and one black stream of life poured out from the gateway, into the street, with howls and cheers and glad-some oaths, and scattered to be seen no more. Jeff stood still, almost wondering why no one spoke in articulate words, and, in a moment, found himself alone. He was the only man who had nowhere to go.