Miss Ellery was a well-bred young lady, of decorous and proper demeanor, of careful religious education, of no particular strength either of mind or emotion, good-tempered, and with an instinctive approbativeness that made her desirous to please everybody, which created for her the reputation that Miss Brown expressed in calling her “a sweet girl.” She was always most agreeable to those with whom she was thrown, and for the time being appeared to be and was sincerely interested in them; but her mind was like a well-polished looking-glass, retaining not a trace of anything absent or distant.
She was gifted by nature with wonderful beauty, and beauty of that peculiar style that stirs the senses of the poetical and the ideal; her gentle approbativeness and the graceful facility of her manner were such as not at least to destroy the visions which her beauty created. In a quiet way she enjoyed being adored — made love to, but she never overstepped the bounds of strict propriety. She received me with graciousness, and I really think found something in my society which was agreeably stimulating to her. I was somewhat out of the common track of her adorers; my ardor and enthusiasm gave her a new emotion. I wrote poems to her, which she read with a graceful pensiveness and laid away among her trophies in her private writing-desk. I called her my star, my inspiration, my light, and she beamed down on me with a pensive purity. “Yes, she was delighted to have me read Tennyson to her,” and many an hour when I should have been studying, I was lounging in the little front parlor of the Brown house, fancying myself Sir Galahad, and reading with emotion, how his “blade was strong, because his heart was pure;” and Miss Ellery murmured “How lovely!” and I was in paradise.
And then there came wonderful moonlight evenings — evenings when every leaf stirring had a penciled reproduction flickering in light and shade on the turf; and we walked together under arches of elm-trees, and I talked and quoted poetry; and she listened and assented in the sweetest manner possible. All my hopes, my plans, my dreams, my speculations, my philosophies, came out to sun themselves under the magic of those lustrous eyes. Her replies and utterances were greatly in disproportion to mine; but I received them, and made much of them, as of old the priests of Delphi did with those of the inspired maiden. There must he deep meaning in it all, because she was a priestess; and I was not backward to supply it.
I have often endeavored to analyze the sources of the illusion cast over men by such characters as that of Miss Ellery. In their case the instinctive action of approbativeness assumes the semblance of human sympathy, and brings them for the time being into the life-sphere, and under the influence, of any person whom they wish to please, so that they with a temporary sincerity reflect back the ideas and feelings of others. There is just the same illusive sort of charm in this reflection of our own thoughts and emotions from another mind, as there is in the reflection of objects in a placid lake. There is no warmth and no reality to it; and yet, for the time being, it is often the most entrancing thing in the world, and gives back to you the glow of your own heart, the fervor of your imagination, and even every little flower of fancy, and twig of feeling, with a wonderful faithfulness of reproduction. It is not real sympathy, because, like the image in the lake, it is only there when you are present; and when you are away, reflects with equal facility the next comer.
But men always have been, and to the end of time always will be, fascinated by such women, and will suppose this mere reflecting power of a highly polished surface to be the sympathetic response for which the heart longs. So I had no doubt that Miss Ellery was a woman of all sorts of high literary tastes and moral heroisms, for there was nothing so high or so deep in the aspirations of poets or sages in my readings to her that could not be reflected and glorified in those wonderful eyes.
Neither are such women hypocrites, as they are often called. What they give back to you is for the time being a sincere reflection, and if there is no depth to it, if it passes away with the passing hour, it is simply because their natures — smooth, shallow, and cold — have no deeper power of retention. The fault lies in expecting more of a thing than there is in its nature — a fault we shall more or less all go on committing till the great curtain falls.
I wrote all about her to my mother, and received the usual cautionary maternal epistle: reminding me that I was yet far from that goal in life when I was warranted in asking any woman to be my wife, and suggesting that my taste might alter with maturity; warning me against premature commitments — in short, saying all that good, anxious mothers usually say to young juniors in college in similar circumstances.
In reply, I told my mother that I had found a woman worthy the devotion of a life — a woman who would be inspiration and motive and reward. I extolled her purity and saintliness. I told my mother that she was forming and leading me to all that was holy and noble. In short, I meant to win her though the seven labors of Hercules were to be performed seven times over to reach her.
Now the fact is, my mother might have saved herself her anxiety. Miss Ellery was perfectly willing to be my guiding star, my inspiration, my light, within reasonable limits, while making a visit in an otherwise rather dull town. She liked to be read to; she liked the consciousness of being incessantly admired, and would have made a very good image for some Church of the Perpetual Adoration; but after all, Miss Ellery was as incapable of forming an ineligible engagement of marriage with a poor college student as the most sensible and collected of Walter Scott’s heroines.
Looking back upon this part of my life, I can pity myself with as quiet and dispassionate a perception as if I were a third person. The illusion, for the time being, was so real, the feelings called up by it so honest and earnest and sacred; and supposing there had been a tangible reality to it — what might not such a woman have made of me, or of any man?
And suppose it pleased God to send forth an army of such women, as I thought her to he, among the lost children of men, women armed not only with the outward and visible sign of beauty, but with that inward and spiritual grace which beauty typifies, one might believe that the golden age would soon be back upon us.
Miss Ellery adroitly avoided all occasions of any critical commitment on my part or on hers. Women soon learn a vast amount of tact and diplomacy on that subject; but she gave me to understand that I was peculiarly congenial to her, and encouraged the outflow of all my romance with the gentlest atmosphere of indulgence. To be sure, I was not the only one whom she thus held with bonds of golden gossamer. She reigned a queen, and had a court at her feet, and the deacon’s square, white, prosaic house bristled with the activity and vivacity of Miss Ellery’s adorers.
Among them Will Marshall was especially distinguished. Will was a senior, immensely rich, good-natured as the longest summer day is long, but so idle and utterly incapable of culture that only the liberality of the extra sum paid to a professor who held him in guardianship secured his stay in college classes. It has been my observation that money will secure a great variety of things in this lower world, and, among others, will carry a very stupid fellow through college.
Will was a sort of favorite with us all. His goodnature was without limit, and he scattered his money with a free hand, and so we generally spoke of him as “Poor Will;” a nice fellow, if he couldn’t write a decent note, and blundered through all his recitations. Will laid himself, so to speak, at Miss Ellery’s feet. He was flush of bouquets and confectionery. He caused the village livery stable to import forthwith a turnout worthy to be a car of Venus herself.
I saw all this, but it never entered my head that Miss Ellery would cast a moment’s thought other than those of the gentlest womanly compassion on poor Will Marshall.
The time of the summer vacation drew nigh, and with the close of the term closed the vision of my idyllic experiences with Miss Ellery. To the last she was so gentle and easy to be entreated. Her lovely eyes cast on me such bright encouraging glances; and she accorded me a farewell moonlight ramble, wherein I walked not on earth, but in the seventh heaven of felicity. Of course ther
e was nothing definite. I told her that I was a poor soldier of fortune, but might I only wear her name in my bosom, it would be a sacred talisman, and give strength to my arm, and she sighed, and looked lovely, and she did not say me nay.
I went home to my mother, and wearied that much-enduring woman, all through the vacation, with the hot and cold fits of my fever. Blessed souls! these mothers, who bear and watch and rear the restless creatures, who by and by come to them with the very heart gone out of them for love of another woman — some idle girl, perhaps, that never knew what it was either to love or care, and that plays with hearts as kittens do with pinballs!
I wrote to Miss Ellery letters long, overflowing, and got back little neatly worded notes on scented paper, speaking in a general way of the charms of friendship. But the first news that met me on my return to college broke my soap-bubble at one touch.
“Hurrah! Hal — who do you guess is engaged?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I couldn’t guess.”
“Why, Miss Ellery — engaged to Bill Marshall.”
Alnaschar, in the Arabian tale, could not have been more astonished when his basket of glassware fell in glittering nothingness. I stood stupid with astonishment.
“She engaged to Will Marshall! — why, boys, he’s a fool!”
“But you see he’s rich. Oh, it’s all arranged; they are to be married next month, and go to Europe for their wedding tour,” said Jim Fellows.
And so my idol fell from its pedestal — and my first dream dissolved.
CHAPTER VI. THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION
Miss ELLERY was sufficiently mistress of herself, and of circumstances, to close our little pastoral in the most graceful and amiable manner possible. I received a beautiful rose-scented note from her, saying that the very kind interest in her happiness which I always had expressed, and the extremely pleasant friendship which had arisen between us, made her desirous of informing me, etc., etc. Thereupon followed the announcement of her engagement, terminating with the assurance that whatever new ties she might form, or scenes she might visit, she should ever cherish a pleasant remembrance of the delightful hours spent beneath the elms of X, and indulge the kindest wishes for my future success and happiness.
I, of course, crushed the rose-scented missive in my hand, in the most approved tragical style, and felt that I had been deceived, betrayed, and undone. I passed forthwith into that cynical state of young manhood, in which one learns for the first time what a mere unimportant drop his own most terribly earnest and excited feelings may be in the tumbling ocean of the existing world. This is a Valley of Humiliation, which lies, in very many cases, just a day’s walk beyond the Palace Beautiful with all its fascinations.
The moral geographer, John Bunyan, to whom we are indebted for much wholesome information, tells us that while it is extremely difficult to descend gracefully into this valley, and pilgrims generally accomplish it at the expense of many a sore trip and stumble, yet when once they are fairly down, it presents many advantages of climate and soil not otherwhere found.
The shivering to pieces of the first ideal, while it breaks ruthlessly and scatters much that is really and honestly good and worthy, breaks up no less a certain stock of unconscious self-conceit, which young people are none the worse for having lessened. The very assumption, so common in the early days of life, that we have feelings of a peculiar sacredness above the comprehension of the common herd, and for which only the selectest sympathy is possible, is one savoring a little too much of the unregenerate natural man, to be safely let alone to grow and thrive.
Natures, in particular, whose ideality is largely in the ascendant, are apt to begin life with the scheme of building a high and thick stone wall of reticence around themselves, and enthroning therein an idol, whose rites and service are to be performed with a contemptuous indifference to all the rest of mankind.
When this idol is suddenly disenchanted by some stroke of inevitable reality, and we discern that the image which we had supposed to be the shrine of a divinity is only a very earthly doll, stuffed with sawdust, one’s pinnacles and battlements — the whole temple in short, that we have prided ourselves on, comes tumbling down about us like the walls of Jericho, not without a certain sense of the ridiculous. Though, like other afflictions, this is not for the present joyous, still the space thus cleared in our mind may be so cultivated as afterwards to bring forth peaceable fruits of righteousness.
In my case, my idol was utterly defaced and destroyed in my eyes, because I could not conceal from myself that she was making a marriage wholly without the one element that above all others marriage requires. Miss Ellery was perfectly well aware of the mental inferiority of poor Bill Marshall, and had listened unreprovingly to the half-contemptuous pity with which it was customary among us to speak of him. I remembered how patronizingly I had often talked of him to her, “Really not a bad fellow — only a little weak, you see;” and the pretty, graceful drollery in her eyes. I remembered things that these same eyes had looked at me when he blundered and miscalled words in conversation, and a thousand sayings and intimations, each by itself indefinite as the boundary between two tints of the rainbow, by which she showed a superior sense of pleasure in my conversation and society.
And was all this acting and insincerity? I thought not. I was and am fully convinced that had I only been possessed of the wealth of Bill Marshall, Miss Ellery would infinitely have preferred me as a life companion; and it was no very serious amount of youthful vanity to imagine that I should have proved a more entertaining one. I can easily imagine that she made the decision with some gentle regret at first, — regret dried up like morning dew in the full sunlight of wedding diamonds, and capable of being put completely to sleep upon a couch of cashmere shawls.
With what indignant bitterness did I listen to all the details of the impending wedding from fluent Jim Fellows, who, being from Portland and well posted in all the gossip of the circle in which she moved, enlightened our entry with daily and weekly bulletins of the grandeur and splendors that were being, and to be.
“Boys, only think! Her wedding present from him is a set of diamonds valued at twenty-five thousand dollars. Bob Rivers saw them on exhibition at Tiffany’s. Then she has three of the most splendid cashmere shawls that ever were imported into Maine. Captain Sautelle got them from an Indian Prince, and there ‘s no saying what they would have cost at usual rates. I tell you, Bill is going it in style, and they are going to be married with drums and trumpets, cymbals and dances; such a wedding as will make old Portland stare; and then off they are going to travel no end of time in Europe, and see all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.”
Now, I suppose none of us doubted that could Miss Ellery have attained the diamonds and the cashmeres and the fortune, with all its possibilities of luxury and self-indulgence, without the addition of the husband, nothing would have been wanting to complete her good fortune; but it is a condition in the way of a woman’s making a fortune by marriage, as it was with Faust’s compact with an unmentionable party, that it can only be ratified by the sacrifice of herself — herself, and for life! A sacrifice most awful and holy when made in pure love”, and most fearful when made for any other consideration. The fact that Miss Ellery could make it was immediate and complete disenchantment to me.
Mine is not, I suppose, the only case where the ideal which has been formed under the brooding influence of a noble mother is shattered by the hand of woman. Some woman, armed with the sacramental power of beauty, enkindles the highest manliness of the youth, and is, in his eyes, the incarnate form of purity and unworldly virtue, the high prize and incitement to valor, patience, constancy, and courage in the great life-battle.
But she sells herself before his eyes, for diamonds and laces, and trinkets and perfumes; for the liberty of walking on soft carpets and singing in gilded cages; and all the world laughs at his simplicity in supposing that, a fair chance given, any woman
would ever do otherwise. Is not beauty woman’s capital in trade, the price put into her hand to get whatever she needs; and are not the most beautiful, as a matter of course, destined prizes of the richest?
Miss Ellery’s marriage was to me a great awakening, a coming out of a life of pure ideas and sentiment into one of external realities. Hitherto, I had lived only with people all whose measures and valuations had been those relating to the character — the intellect and the heart. Never in my father’s house had I heard the gaining of money spoken of as success in life, except as far as money was needed to advance education, and education was a means for doing good. My father had his zeal, his earnestness, his exaltations, but they all related to things to be done in his life-work: the saving of souls, the conversion of sinners, the gathering of churches, the repression of intemperance and immorality, the advancement of education. My elder brothers had successfully entered the ministry under his influence, and in counsels with them where to settle I had never heard the question of salary or worldly support even discussed. The first, the only question I ever heard considered, was What work was needed to be done, and what fitness for the doing of it; taking for granted the record, that where the Kingdom of God and its righteousness were first sought, all things would be added. Thus all my visions of future life had in them something of the innocent verdancy of the golden age, when noble men strove for the favor of fair women, by pureness, by knowledge, by heroism, — and the bravest won the crown from the hand of the most beautiful.
And suddenly to my awakened eyes the whole rushing cavalcade of fashionable life swept by, bearing my princess, amid waving feathers and flashing jewels and dazzling robes and merry laughs and jests, leaving me by the wayside dazed and covered with dust, to plod on alone. Now first I felt the shame which comes over a young man, that he has not known the world as old worldlings know it.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 309