Surrounded by just such a community as I have described, my grandmother’s gifts never became rusty for want of exercise. Somebody always needed straightening up and attending to. Somebody was to be exhorted, rebuked, or admonished, with all long-suffering and doctrine; and it was cheering to behold, after years of labors that had appeared to produce no very brilliant results on her disciples, how hale and vigorous her faith yet remained in the power of talking to people. She seemed to consider that evil-doers fell into sins and evils of all sorts merely for want of somebody to talk to them, and would fly at some poor, idle, loafing, shiftless object who staggered past her house from the tavern, with the same earnestness and zeal for the fortieth time as if she had not exhorted him vainly for the thirty-nine before.
In fact, on this very Saturday afternoon, as I was coming down the hill, whence I could see the mill and farm-house, I caught sight of her standing in the door, with cap-border erect, and vigorous gesticulation, upbraiding a poor miserable dog commonly called Uncle Eph, who stood swaying on the bridge, holding himself up by the rails with drunken gravity, only answering her expostulations by shaking his trembling fist at her, irreverently replying in every pause of her expostulation, “You – darned – old sheep you!”
“I do wonder now, mother, that you can’t let Uncle Eph alone,” said my Aunt Lois, who was washing up the kitchen floor behind her. “What earthly good does it do to be talking to him? He always has drank, and always will.”
“I can’t help it,” quoth my grandmother; “it ‘s a shame to him, and his wife lying there down with rheumatism. I don’t see how folks can do so.”
“And I don’t see as it ‘s any of our business,” said Aunt Lois “What is it to us? We are not our brother’s keeper.”
“Well, it was Cain that said that to begin with,” said my grandmother; “and I think it ‘s the spirit of Cain not to care what becomes of our neighbors!”
“I can’t help it if it is. I don’t see the use of fussing and caring about what you can’t help. But there comes Horace Holyoke, to be sure. I suppose, mother, you ‘re sent for; I ‘ve been expecting it all along. – Stand still there!” she called to me as I approached the door, “and don’t come in to track my floor.”
I stood without the door, therefore, and delivered my message; and my grandmother promptly turned into her own bedroom, adjoining the kitchen, to make herself ready to go. I stood without the door, humbly waiting Aunt Lois’s permission to enter the house.
“Well,” said Aunt Lois, “I suppose we ‘ve got to have both boys down here to-night. They ‘ve got to come here, I suppose, and we may as well have ’em first as last. It ‘s just what I told Susy, when she would marry Horace Holyoke. I saw it just as plain as I see it now, that we should have to take care of ‘em. It ‘s aggravating, because Susy neglected her opportunities. She might have been Mrs. Captain Shawmut, and had her carriage and horses, if she ‘d only been a mind to.”
“But,” said my Aunt Keziah, who sat by the chimney, knitting, – “but if she could n’t love Captain Shawmut, and did love Horace Holyoke –”
“Fiddlestick about that. Susy would ‘a’ loved him well enough if she ‘d ‘a’ married him. She ‘d ‘a’ loved anybody that she married well enough, – she ‘s one of the kind; and he ‘s turned out a very rich man, just as I told her. Susy was the only handsome one in our family, and she might have done something with herself if she ‘d had sense.”
“For my part,” said Aunt Keziah, “I can’t blame people for following their hearts. I never saw the money yet that would ‘a’ tempted me to marry the man I did n’t love.”
Poor Aunt Keziah had the reputation of being, on the whole, about the homeliest woman in Oldtown. She was fat and ill-shapen and clumsy, with a pale, greenish tinge to her complexion, watery, whitish-blue eyes, very rough thin hair, and ragged, scrubby eyebrows. Nature had been peculiarly unkind to her; but far within her ill-favored body she had the most exalted and romantic conceptions. She was fond of reading Young’s Night Thoughts, Mrs. Rowe’s Meditations, and Sir Charles Grandison, and always came out strong on the immaterial and sentimental side of every question. She had the most exalted ideas of a lofty, disinterested devotion, which she, poor soul! kept always simmering on a secret altar, ready to bestow on some ideal hero, if ever he should call for it. But, alas! her want of external graces prevented any such application. The princess was enchanted behind a hedge of ragged and unsightly thorns.
She had been my mother’s aid and confidante in her love affair, and was therefore regarded with a suppressed displeasure by Aunt Lois, who rejoined, smartly: “I don’t think, Kezzy, that you are likely to be tempted with offers of any sort; but Susy did have ‘em, – plenty of ‘em, – and took Horace Holyoke when she might ‘a’ done better. Consequence is, we ‘ve got to take her and her children home and take care of ‘em. It ‘s just our luck. Your poor folks are the ones that are sure to have children, – the less they have to give ‘em, the more they have. I think, for my part, that people that can’t provide for children ought not to have ‘em. Susy ‘s no more fit to bring up those boys than a white kitten. There never was a great deal to Susy,” added Aunt Lois, reflectively, as, having finished the ablution of the floor, she took the dish of white sand to sand it.
“Well, for my part,” said Aunt Kezzy, “I don’t blame Susy a mite. Horace Holyoke was a handsome man, and the Holyokes are a good family. Why, his grandfather was a minister, and Horace certainly was a man of talents. Parson Lothrop said, if he ‘d ‘a’ had early advantages, there were few men would have surpassed him. If he ‘d only been able to go to college.”
“And why was n’t he able to go to college? Because he must needs get married. Now, when people set out to do a thing, I like to see ’em do it. If he ‘d a let Susy alone and gone to college, I dare say he might have been distinguished, and all that. I would n’t have had the least objection. But no, nothing would do but he must get married, and have two boys, and then study himself into his grave, and leave ’em to us to take care of.”
“Well now, Lois,” said my grandmother, coming out with her bonnet on, and her gold-headed cane in her hand, “if I were you, I would n’t talk so. What do you always want to fight Providence for?”
“Providence!” said my Aunt Lois, with a sniff. “I don’t call it providence. I guess, if folks would behave themselves, Providence would let them alone.”
“Why, everything is ordered and foreordained,” said Aunt Keziah.
“Besides that,” said my grandmother, setting down her stick hard on the floor, “there ‘s no use in such talk, Lois. What ‘s done ‘s done; and if the Lord let it be done, we may. We can’t always make people do as we would. There ‘s no use in being dragged through the world like a dog under a cart, hanging back and yelping. What we must do, we may as well do wilIingly, – as well walk as be dragged. Now we ‘ve got Susy and her children to take care of, and let ‘s do it. They ‘ve got to come here, and they shall come, – should come if there were forty-eleven more of ’em than there be, – so now you just shut up.”
“Who said they should n’t come?” said Aunt Lois. “I want to know now if I have n’t moved out of the front room and gone into the little back chamber, and scoured up every inch of that front-room chamber on my hands and knees, and brought down the old trundle-bed out of the garret and cleaned it up, on purpose to be all ready for Susy and those children. If I have n’t worked hard for them, I ‘d like to have any one tell me; and I don’t see, for my part, why I should be scolded.”
“She was n’t scolding you, Lois,” said Aunt Keziah, pacifically.
“She was, too; and I never open my mouth,” said Lois, in an aggrieved tone, “that you all don’t come down on me. I ‘m sure I don’t see the harm of wishing Susy had married a man that could ‘a’ provided for her; but some folks feel so rich, nothing comes amiss with ‘em. I suppose we are able to send both boys to college, and keep ’em like gentlemen, are n’t we?”
I was listening at the door with a troubled spirit. Gathering from the conversation that my father and mother, somehow, had been improperly conducted people, and that I and my brother Bill had no business to have been born, and that our presence on the earth was, somehow or other, of the nature of an impertinence, making everybody a vast deal of trouble. I could not bear to go in; and as I saw my grandmother’s stately steppings in the distance, I ran after her as fast as my little bare feet could patter, and seized fast hold of her gown with the same feeling that makes a chicken run under a hen.
“Why, Horace,” said my grandmother, “why did n’t you stay down at the house?”
“I did n’t want to, grandma; please let me go with you.”
“You must n’t mind Aunt Lois’s talk, – she means well.”
I snuffled and persisted, and so had my own way, for my grandmother was as soft-hearted to children as any of the meekest of the tribe who bear that revered name; and so she did n’t mind it that I slid back into the shadows of my father’s room, under cover of her ample skirts, and sat down disconsolate in a dark corner.
My grandmother brought to the sick-room a heavier responsibility than any mere earthly interest could have laid on her. With all her soul, which was a very large one, she was an earnest Puritan Calvinist. She had been nourished in the sayings and traditions of the Mathers and the Eliots, and all the first generation of the saints who had possessed Massachusetts. To these she had added the earnest study of the writings of Edwards and Bellamy, and others of those brave old thinkers who had broken up the crust of formalism and mechanical piety that was rapidly forming over the New England mind.
My remembrances of her are always as a reader. In her private chamber was always a table covered with books; and though performing personally the greater share of the labors of a large family, she never failed to have her quiet hour every afternoon for reading. History and biography she delighted in, but she followed with a keen relish the mazes of theology.
During the days of my father’s health and vigor, he had one of those erratic, combative minds that delight in running logical tilts against received opinions, and was skilled in finding the weak point in all assertions. My grandmother, who believed with heart and soul and life-blood everything that she believed at all, had more than once been worsted by him in arguments where her inconsiderate heat outran her logic. These remembrances had pressed heavily on her soul during the time of his sickness, and she had more than once earnestly sought to bring him to her ways of thinking, – ways which to her view were the only possible or safe ones; but during his illness he had put such conversation from him with the quick, irritable impatience of a sore and wounded spirit.
On some natures theology operates as a subtle poison; and the New England theology in particular, with its intense clearness, its sharp-cut crystalline edges and needles of thought, has had in a peculiar degree the power of lacerating the nerves of the soul, and producing strange states of morbid horror and repulsion. The great unanswerable questions which must perplex every thinking soul that awakes to consciousness in this life are there posed with the severest and most appalling distinctness. These awful questions underlie all religions, – they belong as much to Deism as to the strictest orthodoxy, – in fact, they are a part of human perception and consciousness, since it cannot be denied that Nature in her teaching is a more tremendous and inexorable Calvinist than the Cambridge Platform or any other platform that ever was invented.
But in New England society, where all poetic forms, all the draperies and accessories of religious ritual, have been rigidly and unsparingly retrenched, there was nothing between the soul and these austere and terrible problems; it was constantly and severely brought face to face with their infinite mystery. When my grandmother came into the room, it was with an evident and deep emotion working in her strong but plain features. She came up to the bed and grasped my father’s hand earnestly.
“Well, mother,” he said,” my time is come, and I have sent for you to put Susy and the children into your hands.”
“I ‘ll take ’em and welcome, – you know that,” said my grandmother heartily.
“God bless you, mother, – I do know it,” he said; “but do have a special eye on poor little Horace. He has just my passion for books and study; and if he could be helped to get an education, he might do what I have failed to do. I leave him my books, – you will try and help him, mother?”
“Yes, my son, I will; but O my son, my son!” she added with trembling eagerness, “how is it with you now? Are you prepared for this great change?”
“Mother,” he said in a solemn voice, yet speaking with a great effort, “no sane man ever comes to my age, and to this place where I lie, without thinking a great deal on all these things. I have thought, – God knows how earnestly, – but I cannot talk of it. We see through a glass darkly here. There perhaps we shall see clearly. You must be content to leave me where I leave myself, – in the hands of my Creator. He can do no wrong.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE VILLAGE DO-NOTHING.
“WAL now, Horace, don’t ye cry so. Why, I ‘m railly concerned for ye. Why, don’t you s’pose your daddy’ better off? Why, sartin I do. Don’t cry, there ‘s a good boy now. I ‘ll give ye my jack-knife now.”
This was addressed to me the day after my father’s death while the preparations for the funeral hung like a pall over the house, and the terror of the last cold mystery, the tears of my mother, and a sort of bustling dreariness on the part of my aunts and grandmother, all conspired to bear down on my childish nerves with fearful power. It was a doctrine of those good old times, no less than of many in our present days, that a house invaded by death should be made as forlorn as hands could make it. It should be rendered as cold and stiff, as unnatural, as dead and corpse-like as possible, by closed shutters, looking-glasses pinned up in white sheets, and the locking up and hiding out of sight of any pleasant little familiar object which would be thought out of place in a sepulchre. This work had been driven through with unsparing vigor by Aunt Lois, who looked like one of the Fates as she remorselessly cleared away every little familiar object belonging to my father, and reduced every room to the shrouded stillness of a well-kept tomb.
Of course no one thought of looking after me. It was not the fashion of those days to think of children, if only they would take themselves off out of the way of the movements of the grown people; and so I had run out into the orchard back of the house, and, throwing myself down on my face under an apple tree in the tall clover, I gave myself up to despair, and was sobbing aloud in a nervous paroxysm of agony, when these words were addressed to me. The speaker was a tall, shambling, loose-jointed man, with a long, thin visage, prominent watery blue eyes, very fluttering and seedy habiliments, who occupied the responsible position of first do-nothing-in-ordinary in our village of Oldtown, and as such I must introduce him to my readers’ notice.
Every New England village, if you only think of it, must have its do-nothing as regularly as it has its school-house or meeting house. Nature is always wide awake in the matter of compensation. Work, thrift, and industry are such an incessant steam power in Yankee life, that society would burn itself out with intense friction were there not interposed here and there the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing, – a man who won’t be hurried, and won’t work, and will take his ease in his own way, in spite of the whole protest of his neighborhood to the contrary. And there is on the face of the whole earth no do-nothing whose softness, idleness, general inaptitude to labor, and everlasting, universal shiftlessness can compare with that of this worthy, as found in a brisk Yankee village.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 239