Without undue personal vanity, a man will surely know when there is a special congeniality of nature between himself and a certain woman, and he is hound in conscience and honor to look ahead in all his intimacies and see what must be the inevitable result of them according to the laws of the human mind. Because I had neglected this caution, because I had yielded myself blindly to the delicious enchantment of a new enthusiasm, I had now come to a place where I knew neither how to advance nor recede.
I could not drop this intimacy, so dangerous to my peace and honor, without risk of offending; to explain was, in fact, to solicit. I might confess all, cast myself at her feet —— but supposing she should incline to mercy — and with a woman’s uncalculating disinterestedness accept my love in place of wealth and station, what should I then do?
Had I been possessed of a fortune even half equal to Mr. Sydney’s; had I, in fact, any settled and assured position to offer, I would have avowed my love boldly and suffered her to decide. But I had no advantage to stand on. I was poor, and had nothing to give but myself; and what man is vain enough to think that he is in himself enough to make up for all that may be wanting in externals? Besides this, Eva was the daughter of a rich family, and an offer of marriage from me must have appeared to all the world the interested proposal of a fortune-hunter. Of what avail would it be under such circumstances to plead that I loved her for herself alone? I could fancy the shout of incredulous laughter with which the suggestion would be received in the gay world.
“So very thoughtful of the fair!
It showed a true fraternal care.
Five thousand guineas in her purse —
The fellow might have fancied worse.”
Now, if there was anything that my pride revolted from as an impossibility, it was coming as a poor suitor to a great rich family. Were I even sure that Eva loved me, how could I do that? Would not all the world say that to make use of my access in the family to draw her down from a splendid position in life to poverty and obscurity was on my part a dishonorable act? Could I trust myself enough to feel that it was justice to her?
The struggle that a young man has to engage in to secure a self-supporting position is of a kind to make him keenly alive to material values. Dr. Franklin said, “If you would learn the value of money, try to borrow some.” I would say rather, Try to earn some, and to live only on what you earn. My own hard experience on this subject led me to reflect very seriously on the responsibility which a man incurs in inducing a woman of refinement and culture to look to him as her provider.
In our advanced state of society there are a thousand absolute wants directly created by culture and refinement; and whatever may be said about the primary importance of personal affection and sympathy as the foundation of a happy marriage, it is undoubtedly true that a certain amount of pecuniary ease and security is necessary as a background on which to develop agreeable qualities. A man and woman much driven, careworn, and overtaxed often have little that is agreeable to show to each other. I queried with myself then, whether, as Eva’s true friend, I should not wish that she might marry a respectable man, devoted to her, who could keep her in all that elegance and luxury she was so fitted to adorn and enjoy; and whether, if I could do it, I ought to try to put myself in his place in her mind.
A man who detects himself in an unfortunate passion has always the refuge of his life object. To the true man, the thing that he hopes to do always offers some compensation for the thing he ceases to enjoy. It was fortunate, therefore, for me, that just in this crisis of my life my friendship with Bolton opened before me the prospect of a permanent establishment in connection with the literary press of the times.
CHAPTER XXVIII. A NEW OPENING
“HENDERSON,” said Bolton to me, one day, “how long are you engaged on the ‘Democracy’?”
“Only for this year,” said I.
“Because,” said he, “I have something to propose to you which I hope may prove a better thing. Hestermann & Co sent for me yesterday in secret session. The head manager of their whole set of magazines and papers has resigned, and is going to travel in Europe, and they want me to take the place.”
“Good! I am heartily glad of it,” said I. “I always felt that you were not in the position that you ought to have. You will accept, of course.”
“Whether I accept or not depends on you,” he replied. “I cannot understand,” said I.
“In short, then,” said he, “the responsibility is a heavy one, and I cannot undertake it without a partner whom I can trust as myself — I mean,” he added, “whom I can trust more than myself.”
“You are a thousand times too good,” said I. “I should like nothing better than such a partnership, but I feel oppressed by your good opinion. Are you sure that I am the one for you?”
“I think I am,” said he, “and it is a case where I am the best judge; and it offers to you just what you want — a stable position, independence to express yourself, and a good income. Hestermann & Co are rich, and wise enough to know that liberality is the best policy.”
“But,” said I, “their offers are made to you, and not to me.”
“Well, of course, their acquaintance with me is of old standing; but I have spoken to them of you, and I am to bring you round to talk with them to-morrow; but, after all, the whole power of arranging is left with me. They put a certain sum at my disposal, and I do what I please with it. In short,” he said, smiling, “I hold the living, and you are my curate. Well,” he added, “of course you need time to think matters over; here is paper on which I have made a little memorandum of an arrangement between us; take it and dream on it, and let me know tomorrow what you think of it.”
I went to my room and unfolded the agreement, and found the terms liberal beyond all my expectations. In fact, the income of the principal was awarded to me, and that of the subordinate to Bolton.
I took the paper the next evening to Bolton’s room. “Look here, Bolton,” said I, “these terms are simply absurd.”
“How so?” he said, lifting his eyes tranquilly from his book. “What’s the matter with them?”
“Why, you give me all the income.”
“Wait till you see how I’ll work you,” he said, smiling. “I’ll get it out of you; you see if I don’t.”
“But you leave yourself nothing.”
“I have as much as I would have, and that’s enough. I’m a literary monk, you know, with no family but Puss and Stumpy, poor fellow, and I need the less.”
Stumpy upon this pricked up his ragged ears with an expression of lively satisfaction, sat back on his haunches, and rapped the floor with his forlorn bit of a tail.
“Poor Stumpy,” said Bolton, “you don’t know that you are the homeliest dog in New York, do you? Well, as far as you go, you are perfect goodness, Stumpy, though you are no beauty.”
Upon this high praise Stumpy seemed so elated that he stood on his hind paws and rested his rough fore feet on Bolton’s knee, and looked up with eyes of admiration.
“Man is the dog’s God,” said Bolton. “I can’t conceive how any man can be rude to his dog. A dog,” he added, fondling his ragged cur, “why, he’s nothing but organized love — love on four feet, encased in fur, and looking piteously out at the eyes — love that would die for you, yet cannot speak — that’s the touching part. Stumpy longs to speak; his poor dog’s breast heaves with something he longs to tell me and can’t. Don’t it, Stumpy?” As if he understood his master, Stumpy wheezed a doleful whine, and actual tears stood in his eyes.
“Well,” said Bolton, “Stumpy has beautiful eyes; nobody shall deny that — there, there! poor fellow, maybe on the other shore your rough bark will develop into speech; let’s hope so. I confess I’m of the poor Indian’s mind, and hope to meet my dog in the hereafter. Why should so much love go out in nothing? Yes, Stumpy, we’ll meet in the resurrection, won’t we?” Stumpy barked aloud with the greatest animation.
“Bolton, you ought to be a family man,”
said I. “Why do you take it for granted that you are to be a literary monk, and spend your love on dogs and cats?”
“You may get married, Hal, and I’ll adopt your children,” said Bolton; “that’s one reason why I want to establish you. You see, one ‘s dogs will die, and it breaks one’s heart. If you had a boy, now, I ‘d invest in him.”
“And why can’t you invest in a boy of your own?”
“Oh, I’m a predestined old bachelor.”
“No such thing,” I persisted hardily. “Why do you immure yourself in a den? Why won’t you go out into society? Here, ever since I’ve known you, you have been in this one cave — a New York hermit; yet if you would once begin to go into society, you’d like it.”
“You think I haven’t tried it; you forget that I am some years older than you are,” said Bolton.
“You are a good-looking young fellow yet,” said I, “and ought to make the most of yourself. Why should you turn all the advantages into my hands, and keep so little for yourself?”
“It suits me,” said Bolton; “I am lazy — I mean to get the work out of you.”
“That’s all hum,” said I; “you know well enough that you are not lazy; you take delight in work for work’s sake.”
“One reason I am glad of this position,” he said, “is that it gives me a chance to manage matters a little as I want them. For instance, there’s Jim Fellows — I want to make something more than a mad Bohemian of that boy. Jim is one of the wild growths of our New York life; he is a creature of the impulses and the senses, and will be for good or evil according as others use him.”
“He’s capital company,” said I, “but he doesn’t seem to me to have a serious thought on any subject.”
“And yet,” said Bolton, “such is our day and time, that Jim is more likely than you or I to get along in the world. His cap and bells win favor everywhere, and the laugh he raises gives him the privilege of saying anything he pleases. For my part, I couldn’t live without Jim. I have a weakness for him. Nothing is so precious to me as a laugh, and, wet or dry, I can always get that out of Jim. He’ll work in admirably with us.”
“One thing must be said for Jim,” said I, “with all his keenness he ‘s kind hearted. He never is witty at the expense of real trouble. As he says, he goes for the under dog in the fight always, and his cheery, frisky, hit-or-miss morality does many a kind turn for the unfortunate, while he is always ready to help the poor.”
“Jim is not of the sort that is going to do the world’s thinking for them,” said Bolton; “neither will he ever be one of the noble army of martyrs for principle. He is like a lively, sympathetic horse that will keep the step of the team he is harnessed in, and in the department of lively nonsense he’d do us yeoman service. Nowadays people must have truth whipped up to a white froth or they won’t touch it. Jim is a capital egg-beater.”
“Yes,” said I; “he’s like the horse that had the GO in him; he’ll run any team that he’s harnessed in, and if you hold the reins he won’t run off the course.”
“Then again,” said Bolton, “there’s your cousin; there is the editorship of our weekly journal will be just the place for her. You can write and offer it to her.”
“Pardon me,” said I maliciously, “since you are acquainted with the lady, why not write and offer it yourself? It would be a good chance to renew your acquaintance.” Bolton’s countenance changed, and he remained a moment silent.
“Henderson,” he said, “there are very painful circumstances connected with my acquaintance with your cousin. I never wish to meet her, or renew my acquaintance with her. Some time I will tell you why,” he added.
The next evening I found on my table the following letter from Bolton: —
DEAR HENDERSON, — You need feel no hesitancy about accepting in full every advantage in the position I propose to you, since you may find it weighted with disadvantages and incumbrances you do not dream of. In short, I shall ask of you services for which no money can pay, and till I knew you there was no man in the world of whom I had dared to ask them. I want a friend, courageous, calm, and true, capable of thinking broadly and justly, one superior to ordinary prejudices, who may be to me another, and in some hours a stronger self.
I can fancy your surprise at this language, and yet I have not read you aright if you are not the one of a thousand on whom I may rest this hope.
You often rally me on my lack of enterprise and ambition, on my hermit habits. The truth is, Henderson, I am a strained and unseaworthy craft, for whom the harbor and shore are the safest quarters. I have lost trust in myself, and dare not put out to sea without feeling the strong hand of a friend with me.
I suppose no young fellow ever entered the course of life with more self-confidence. I had splendid health, high spirits, great power of application, and great social powers. I lived freely and carelessly on the abundance of my physical resources. I could ride, and row, and wrestle with the best. I could lead in all social gayeties, yet keep the head of my class, as I did the first two years of my college life. It seems hardly fair to us human beings that we should be so buoyed up with ignorant hope and confidence in the beginning of our life, and that we should be left in our ignorance to make mistakes which no after-years can retrieve. I thought I was perfectly sure of myself; I thought my health and strength were inexhaustible, and that I could carry weights that no man else could. The drain of my wide-awake exhausting life upon my nervous system I made up by the insidious use of stimulants. I was like a man habitually overdrawing his capital, and ignorant to what extent. In my third college year this began to tell perceptibly on my nerves. I was losing selfcontrol, losing my way in life; I was excitable, irritable, impatient of guidance or reproof, and at times horribly depressed. I sought refuge from this depression in social exhilaration, and having lost control of myself became a marked man among the college authorities; in short, I was overtaken in a convivial row, brought under college discipline, and suspended.
It was at this time that I went into your neighborhood to study and teach. I found no difficulty in getting the highest recommendations as to scholarship from some of the college officers who were for giving me a chance to recover myself; and for the rest I was thoroughly sobered and determined on a new course. Here commenced my acquaintance with your cousin, and there followed a few months remembered ever since as the purest happiness of my life. I loved her with all there was in me, — heart, soul, mind, and strength, — with a love which can never die. She also loved me, more perhaps than she dared to say, for she was young, hardly come to full consciousness of herself. She was then scarcely sixteen, ignorant of her own nature, ignorant of life, and almost frightened at the intensity of the feeling which she excited in me, yet she loved me. But before we could arrive at anything like a calm understanding her father came between us. He was a trustee of the Academy, and a dispute arose between him and me in which he treated me with an overbearing haughtiness which aroused the spirit of opposition in me. I was in the right and knew I was, and I defended my course before the other trustees in a manner which won them over to my way of thinking — a victory which he never forgave.
Previously to this encounter I had been in the habit of visiting in his family quite intimately. Caroline and I enjoyed that kind of unwatched freedom which the customs of New England allow to young people. I always attended her home from the singing-school and the weekly lectures, and the evening after my encounter with the trustees I did the same. At the door of his house he met us, and as Caroline passed in he stopped me, and briefly saying that my visits there would no longer be permitted, closed the door in my face. I tried to obtain an interview soon after, when he sternly upbraided me as one that had stolen into the village and won their confidence on false pretenses, adding that if he and the trustees had known the full history of my college life I should never have been permitted to teach in their village or have access to their families. It was in vain to attempt a defense to a man determined to take the very worst vie
w of facts which I did not pretend to deny. I knew that I had been irreproachable as to my record in the school, that I had been faithful in my duties, that the majority of parents and pupils were on my side; but I could not deny the harsh facts which he had been enabled to obtain from some secret enemy, and which he thought justified him in saying that he would rather see his daughter in her grave than to see her my wife. The next day Caroline did not appear in school. Her father, with prompt energy, took her immediately to an academy fifty miles away.
I did not attempt to follow her or write to her; a profound sense of discouragement came over me, and I looked on my acquaintance with her with a sort of remorse. The truth bitterly told by an enemy with a vivid power of statement is a tonic oftentimes too strong for one’s power of endurance. I never reflected so seriously on the responsibility which a man assumes in awakening the slumbering feelings of a woman and fixing them on himself. Under the reproaches of Caroline’s father I could but regard this as a wrong I had done, and which could be expiated only by leaving her to peace in forgetfulness. I resolved that I would never let her hear from me again till I had fully proved myself to be possessed of such powers of self-control as would warrant me in offering to be the guardian of her happiness.
But when I set myself to the work, I found what many another does, that I had reckoned without my host. The man who has begun to live and work by artificial stimulant never knows where he stands, and can never count upon himself with any certainty. He lets into his castle a servant who becomes the most tyrannical of masters. He may resolve to turn him out, but will find himself reduced to the condition in which he can neither do with nor without him. In short, the use of stimulant to the brainpower brings on a disease, in whose paroxysms a man is no more his own master than in the ravings of fever, a disease that few have the knowledge to understand, and for whose manifestations the world has no pity.
I cannot tell you the dire despair that came upon me, when after repeated falls, bringing remorse and self-upbraiding to me, and drawing upon me the severest reproaches of my friends, the idea at last flashed upon me that I had indeed become the victim of a sort of periodical insanity in which the power of the will was overwhelmed by a wild unreasoning impulse. I remember when a boy reading an account of a bridal party sailing gayly on the coast of Norway who were insidiously drawn into the resistless outer whirl of the great Maelstrom. The horror of the situation was the moment when the shipmaster learned that the ship no longer obeyed the rudder; the cruelty of it was the gradual manner in which the resistless doom came upon them. The sun still shone, the sky was still blue. The shore, with its green trees and free birds and blooming flowers, was near and visible as they went round and round in dizzy whirls, past the church with its peaceful spire, past the home cottages, past the dwellings of friends and neighbors, past parents, brothers, and sisters who stood on the shore warning and shrieking and entreating; helpless, hopeless, with bitterness in their souls, with all that made life lovely so near in sight, and yet cut off from it by the swirl of that tremendous fate!
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 333