Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “‘Well, but kitchen affairs?’

  “‘We can manage them too. You know you can write anywhere and anyhow. Just take your seat at the kitchen table with your writing weapons, and while you superintend Mina fill up the odd snatches of time with the labors of your pen.’

  “I carried my point. In ten minutes she was seated; a table with flour, rolling-pin, ginger, and lard on one side, a dresser with eggs, pork, and beans and various cooking utensils on the other, near her an oven heating, and beside her a dark-skinned nymph, waiting orders.

  “‘Here, Harriet,’ said I, ‘you can write on this atlas in your lap; no matter how the writing looks, I will copy it.’

  “‘Well, well,’ said she, with a resigned sort of amused look. ‘Mina, you may do what I told you, while I write a few minutes, till it is time to mould up the bread. Where is the inkstand?’

  “‘Here it is, close by, on the top of the tea-kettle,’ said I.

  “At this Mina giggled, and we both laughed to see her merriment at our literary proceedings.

  “I began to overhaul the portfolio to find the right sheet.

  “‘Here it is,’ said I. ‘Here is Frederick sitting by Ellen, glancing at her brilliant face, and saying something about “guardian angel,” and all that — you remember?’

  “‘Yes, yes,’ said she, falling into a muse, as she attempted to recover the thread of her story.

  “‘Ma’am, shall I put the pork on the top of the beans?’ asked Mina.

  “‘Come, come,’ said Harriet, laughing. ‘You see how it is. Mina is a new hand and cannot do anything without me to direct her. We must give up the writing for to-day.’

  “‘No, no; let us have another trial. You can dictate as easily as you can write. Come, I can set the baby in this clothes-basket and give him some mischief or other to keep him quiet; you shall dictate and I will write. Now, this is the place where you left off: you were describing the scene between Ellen and her lover; the last sentence was, “Borne down by the tide of agony, she leaned her head on her hands, the tears streamed through her fingers, and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs.” What shall I write next?’

  “‘Mina, pour a little milk into this pearlash,’ said Harriet.

  “‘Come,’ said I. ‘“The tears streamed through her fingers and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs.” What next?’

  “Harriet paused and looked musingly out of the window, as she turned her mind to her story. ‘You may write now,’ said she, and she dictated as follows:

  “‘“Her lover wept with her, nor dared he again to touch the point so sacredly guarded” — Mina, roll that crust a little thinner. “He spoke in soothing tones” — Mina, poke the coals in the oven.’

  “‘Here,’ said I, ‘let me direct Mina about these matters, and write a while yourself.’

  “Harriet took the pen and patiently set herself to the work. For a while my culinary knowledge and skill were proof to all Mina’s investigating inquiries, and they did not fail till I saw two pages completed.

  “‘You have done bravely,’ said I, as I read over the manuscript; ‘now you must direct Mina a while. Meanwhile dictate and I will write.’

  “Never was there a more docile literary lady than my friend. Without a word of objection she followed my request.

  “‘I am ready to write,’ said I. ‘The last sentence was: “What is this life to one who has suffered as I have?” What next?’

  “‘Shall I put in the brown or the white bread first?’ said Mina.

  “‘The brown first,’ said Harriet.

  “‘“What is this life to one who has suffered as I have?”’ said I.

  “Harriet brushed the flour off her apron and sat down for a moment in a muse. Then she dictated as follows: —

  “‘“Under the breaking of my heart I have borne up. I have borne up under all that tries a woman, — but this thought, — oh, Henry!”’

  “‘Ma’am, shall I put ginger into this pumpkin?’ queried Mina.

  “‘No, you may let that alone just now,’ replied Harriet. She then proceeded: —

  “‘“I know my duty to my children. I see the hour must come. You must take them, Henry; they are my last earthly comfort.”’

  “‘Ma’am, what shall I do with these egg-shells and all this truck here?’ interrupted Mina.

  “‘Put them in the pail by you,’ answered Harriet. “‘“They are my last earthly comfort,”’ said I. ‘What next?’

  “She continued to dictate, —

  “‘“You must take them away. It may be — perhaps it must be — that I shall soon follow, but the breaking heart of a wife still pleads, ‘a little longer, a little longer.’”’

  “‘How much longer must the gingerbread stay in?’ inquired Mina.

  “‘Five minutes,’ said Harriet.

  “‘“A little longer, a little longer,”’ I repeated in a dolorous tone, and we burst into a laugh.

  “Thus we went on, cooking, writing, nursing, and laughing, till I finally accomplished my object. The piece was finished, copied, and the next day sent to the editor.”

  The widely scattered members of the Beecher family had a fashion of communicating with each other by means of circular letters. These, begun on great sheets of paper, at either end of the line, were passed along from one to another, each one adding his or her budget of news to the general stock. When the filled sheet reached the last person for whom it was intended, it was finally remailed to its point of departure. Except in the cases of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Perkins, the simple address “Rev. Mr. Beecher” was sufficient to insure its safe delivery in any town to which it was sent.

  One of these great, closely-written sheets, bearing in faded ink the names of all the Beechers, lies outspread before us as we write. It is postmarked Hartford, Conn., Batavia, N. Y., Chillicothe, Ohio, Zanesville, Ohio, Walnut Hills, Ohio, Indianapolis, Ind., Jacksonville, Ill., and New Orleans, La. In it Mrs. Stowe occupies her allotted space with —

  WALNUT HILLS, 27,1839.

  DEAR FRIENDS, — I am going to Hartford myself, and therefore shall not write, but hurry along the preparations for my forward journey. Belle, father says you may go to the White Mountains with Mr. Stowe and me this summer. George, we may look in on you coming back. Good-by. Affectionately to all, H. E. STOWE.

  CHAPTER V.

  POVERTY AND SICKNESS, 1840-1850.

  FAMINE IN CINCINNATI. — SUMMER AT THE EAST. — PLANS FOR LITERARY WORK. — EXPERIENCE ON A RAILROAD. — DEATH OF HER BROTHER GEORGE. — SICKNESS AND DESPAIR. — A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF HEALTH. — GOES TO BRATTLEBORO’ WATERCURE. — TROUBLES AT LANE SEMINARY. — CHOLERA IN CINCINNATI. — DEATH OF YOUNGEST CHILD. — DETERMINED TO LEAVE THE WEST.

  On January 7, 1839, Professor Stowe wrote to his mother in Natick, Mass.: “You left here, I believe, in the right time, for as there has been no navigation on the Ohio River for a year, we are almost in a state of famine as to many of the necessities of life. For example, salt (coarse) has sold in Cincinnati this winter for three dollars a bushel; rice eighteen cents a pound; coffee fifty cents a pound; white sugar the same; brown sugar twenty cents; molasses a dollar a gallon; potatoes a dollar a bushel. We do without such things mostly; as there is yet plenty of bread and bacon (flour six and seven dollars a barrel, and good pork from six to eight cents a pound) we get along very comfortably.

  “Our new house is pretty much as it was, but they say it will be finished in July. I expect to visit you next summer, as I shall deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Dartmouth College; but whether wife and children come with me or not is not yet decided.”

  Mrs. Stowe came on to the East with her husband and children during the following summer, and before her return made a trip through the White Mountains.

  In May, 1840, her second son was born and named Frederick William, after the sturdy Prussian king, for whom her husband cherished an unbounded admiration.

  Mrs. Stowe has said somewhere: “So we go, dear re
ader, so long as we have a body and a soul. For worlds must mingle, — the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out like the grotesque carvings on a gothic shrine; only did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial, since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred.” So in writing a biography it is impossible for us to tell what did and what did not powerfully influence the character. It is safer simply to tell the unvarnished truth. The lily builds up its texture of delicate beauty from mould and decay. So how do we know from what humble material a soul grows in strength and beauty!

  In December, 1840, writing to Miss May, Mrs. Stowe says: —

  “For a year I have held the pen only to write an occasional business letter such as could not be neglected. This was primarily owing to a severe neuralgic complaint that settled in my eyes, and for two months not only made it impossible for me to use them in writing, but to fix them with attention on anything. I could not even bear the least light of day in my room. Then my dear little Frederick was born, and for two months more I was confined to my bed. Besides all this, we have had an unusual amount of sickness in our family. . . .

  “For all that my history of the past year records so many troubles, I cannot on the whole regard it as a very troublous one. I have had so many counterbalancing mercies that I must regard myself as a person greatly blessed. It is true that about six months out of the twelve I have been laid up with sickness, but then I have had every comfort and the kindest of nurses in my faithful Anna. My children have thriven, and on the whole ‘come to more,’ as the Yankees say, than the care of them. Thus you see my troubles have been but enough to keep me from loving earth too well.”

  In the spring of 1842 Mrs. Stowe again visited Hartford, taking her six-year-old daughter Hatty with her. In writing from there to her husband she confides some of her literary plans and aspirations to him, and he answers: —

  “My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Make all your calculations accordingly. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind. Drop the E. out of your name. It only incumbers it and interferes with the flow and euphony. Write yourself fully and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, and full of meaning. Then my word for it, your husband will lift up his head in the gate, and your children will rise up and call you blessed.

  “Our humble dwelling has to-day received a distinguished honor of which I must give you an account. It was a visit from his excellency the Baron de Roenne, ambassador of his majesty the King of Prussia to the United States. He was pleased to assure me of the great satisfaction my report on Prussian schools had afforded the king and members of his court, with much more to the same effect. Of course having a real live lord to exhibit, I was anxious for some one to exhibit him to; but neither Aunt Esther nor Anna dared venture near the study, though they both contrived to get a peep at his lordship from the little chamber window as he was leaving.

  “And now, my dear wife, I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is I cannot live without you, and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many things and so little of so many other things?”

  In answer to this letter Mrs. Stowe writes from Hartford: —

  “I have seen Johnson of the ‘Evangelist.’ He is very liberally disposed, and I may safely reckon on being paid for all I do there. Who is that Hale, Jr., that sent me the ‘Boston Miscellany,’ and will he keep his word with me? His offers are very liberal, — twenty dollars for three pages, not very close print. Is he to be depended on? If so, it is the best offer I have received yet. I shall get something from the Harpers some time this winter or spring. Robertson, the publisher here, says the book (‘The Mayflower’) will sell, and though the terms they offer me are very low, that I shall make something on it. For a second volume I shall be able to make better terms. On the whole, my dear, if I choose to be a literary lady, I have, I think, as good a chance of making profit by it as any one I know of. But with all this, I have my doubts whether I shall be able to do so.

  “Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable, and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?

  “There is one thing I must suggest. If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room. I have in my own mind pitched on Mrs. Whipple’s room. I can put the stove in it. I have bought a cheap carpet for it, and I have furniture enough at home to furnish it comfortably, and I only beg in addition that you will let me change the glass door from the nursery into that room and keep my plants there, and then I shall be quite happy.

  “All last winter I felt the need of some place where I could go and be quiet and satisfied. I could not there, for there was all the setting of tables, and clearing up of tables, and dressing and washing of children, and everything else going on, and the constant falling of soot and coal dust on everything in the room was a constant annoyance to me, and I never felt comfortable there though I tried hard. Then if I came into the parlor where you were I felt as if I were interrupting you, and you know you sometimes thought so too.

  “Now this winter let the cooking-stove be put into that room, and let the pipe run up through the floor into the room above. We can eat by our cooking-stove, and the children can be washed and dressed and keep their playthings in the room above, and play there when we don’t want them below. You can study by the parlor fire, and I and my plants, etc., will take the other room. I shall keep my work and all my things there and feel settled and quiet. I intend to have a regular part of each day devoted to the children, and then I shall take them in there.”

  In his reply to this letter Professor Stowe says: —

  “The little magazine (‘The Souvenir’) goes ahead finely. Fisher sent down to Fulton the other day and got sixty subscribers. He will make the June number as handsome as possible, as a specimen number for the students, several of whom will take agencies for it during the coming vacation. You have it in your power by means of this little magazine to form the mind of the West for the coming generation. It is just as I told you in my last letter. God has written it in his book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God? You must therefore make all your calculations to spend the rest of your life with your pen.

  “If you only could come home to-day how happy should I be. I am daily finding out more and more (what I knew very well before) that you are the most intelligent and agreeable woman in the whole circle of my acquaintance.”

  That Professor Stowe’s devoted admiration for his wife was reciprocated, and that a most perfect sympathy of feeling existed between the husband and wife, is shown by a line in one of Mrs. Stowe’s letters from Hartford in which she says: “I was telling Belle yesterday that I did not know till I came away how much I was dependent upon you for information. There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than with any one else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you.”

  In this same letter she writes of herself: —

  “One thing more in regard to myself. The absence and wandering of mind and forgetfulness that so often vexes you is a physical infirmity with me. It is the failing of a mind not calculated to endure a great pressure of care, and so much do I feel the pressure I am under, so much is my mind often darkened and troubled by care, that life seriously considered holds out few allurements, — only my children.

  “In returning to my family, from whom I have been so long separated, I am impressed with a new and solemn feeling of responsibility. I
t appears to me that I am not probably destined for long life; at all events, the feeling is strongly impressed upon my mind that a work is put into my hands which I must be earnest to finish shortly. It is nothing great or brilliant in the world’s eye; it lies in one small family circle, of which I am called to be the central point.”

  On her way home from this Eastern visit Mrs. Stowe traveled for the first time by rail, and of this novel experience she writes to Miss Georgiana May: —

  BATAVIA, August 29, 1842.

  “Here I am at Brother William’s, and our passage along this railroad reminds me of the verse of the psalm: —

  ”Tho’ lions roar and tempests blow,

  And rocks and dangers fill the way.”

  Such confusion of tongues, such shouting and swearing, such want of all sort of system and decency in arrangements, I never desire to see again. I was literally almost trodden down and torn to pieces in the Rochester depot when I went to help my poor, near-sighted spouse in sorting out the baggage. You see there was an accident which happened to the cars leaving Rochester that morning, which kept us two hours and a half at the passing place this side of Auburn, waiting for them to come up and go by us. The consequence was that we got into this Rochester depot aforesaid after dark, and the steamboat, the canal- boat, and the Western train of cars had all been kept waiting three hours beyond their usual time, and they all broke loose upon us the moment we put our heads out of the cars, and such a jerking, and elbowing, and scuffling, and swearing, and protesting, and scolding you never heard, while the great locomotive sailed up and down in the midst thereof, spitting fire and smoke like some great fiend monster diverting himself with our commotions. I do think these steam concerns border a little too much on the supernatural to be agreeable, especially when you are shut up in a great dark depot after sundown. Well, after all, we had to ride till twelve o’clock at night to get to Batavia, and I’ve been sick abed, so to speak, ever since.”