Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “After all, poor soul,” said Eva, “it’s her love for us that leads her to vex us in all these ways. She can’t help planning and fussing and lying awake nights for us. She failed in getting a splendid marriage for me, and now she’s like Bruce’s spider, up and at her web again weaving a destiny for you. It’s in her to be active; she has no children; her house don’t half satisfy her as a field of enterprise, and she, of course, is taking care of mamma and our family. If mamma had not been just the gentle, lovely, yielding woman she is, Aunt Maria never would have got such headway in the family and taken such airs about us.”

  “She perfectly tyrannizes over mamma,” said Alice. “She’s always coming up to lecture her for not doing this, that, or the other thing Now all this talk about our going to Mr. St. John’s church; — poor, dear, little mamma is as willing to let us do as we please as the flowers are to blossom, and then Aunt Maria talks as if she were abetting a conspiracy against the Church. I know that we are all living more serious, earnest lives for Mr. St. John’s influence. It may be that he is going too far in certain directions; it may be that in the long run such things tend to dangerous extremes, but I don’t see any real harm in them so far, and I find real good.”

  “Well, you know, dear, that Harry isn’t of our Church —— he is a Congregationalist — but his theory is that Christian people should join with any other Christian people who they see are really working in earnest to do good. This church is near by us, where we can conveniently go, and as I have my house to attend to and am not strong you know, that is quite a consideration. I know Harry don’t agree with Mr. St. John at all about his ideas of the Church, and he thinks he carries some of his ceremonies too far; but, on the whole, he really is doing a great deal of practical good, and Harry is willing to help him. I think it’s just lovely in Harry to do so. It is real liberality.”

  “I wish,” said Alice, “that Mr. St. John were a little freer in his way. There is a sort of solemnity about him that is depressing, and it seems to set Jim off in a spirit of contradiction. He says Mr. St. John stirs up the evil within him, and makes him long to break over bounds and say something wicked, just to shock him.”

  “I’ve had that desire to shock very proper people in the days of my youth,” said Eva. “I don’t know what it comes from.”

  “I think,” said Alice, “that, to be sure, this is an irreverent age, and New York is an irreverent place; but yet I think people may carry the outside air of reverence too far. Don’t you? They impose a sort of constraint on everybody around them that keeps them from knowing the people they associate with. Mr. St. John, for instance, knows nothing about Jim; he never acts himself out before him.”

  “Oh, dear me!” said Eva, “fancy what he would think if he should see Jim in one of his frolics.”

  “And yet, Jim, in his queer way, appreciates Mr. St. John,” said Alice. “He says he’s ‘a brick’ after all, by which he means that he does good, honest work; and Jim has been enough around among the poor of New York, in his quality of newspaper writer, to know when a man does good among them. If Mr. St. John only could learn to be indulgent to other people’s natures he might do a great deal for Jim.”

  “I rather think Jim will be your peculiar parish for some time to come,” said Eva, with a smile, “but Harry and I are projecting schemes to draw Mr. St. John into more general society. That’s one of the things we are going to try to do in our ‘evenings.’ I don’t believe he has ever been into general society at all; he ought to hear the talk of his day — he talks and feels and thinks more in the past than the present; he’s all the while trying to restore an ideal age of reverence and devotion, but he ought to know the real age he lives in. If we could get him to coming to our house every week, and meeting real live men, women, and girls of to-day and entering a little into their life, it would do him good.”

  “I suppose he’d be afraid of any indulgence!”

  “We must not put it to him as an indulgence, but a good hard duty,” said Eva; “we should never catch him with an indulgence.”

  “When are you going to begin?”

  “I’ve been talking with Mary about it, and I rather think I shall take next Thursday for the first. I shall depend on you and the girls to help me keep the thing balanced, and going on just right. Jim must be moderated, and kept from coming out too strong, and everybody must be made to have a good time, so that they’ll want to come again. You see we want to get them to coming every week, so that they will all know one another by and by, and get a sort of home feeling about our rooms; such a thing is possible, I think.”

  The conversation now meandered off into domestic details, not further traceable in this chapter.

  CHAPTER XIII

  OUR “EVENING” PROJECTED

  “WELL, Harry,” said Eva, when they were seated at dinner, “Alice was up at lunch with me this morning, in such a state! It seems, after all, Aunt Maria could not contain her zeal for management, and has been having an admonitory talk with Jim Fellows about his intimacy with Alice.”

  “Now, I declare, that goes beyond me,” said Harry, laying down his knife and fork. “That woman’s impertinence is really stupendous. It amounts to the sublime.”

  “Doesn’t it? Alice was in such a state about it; but we talked the matter down into calmness. Still, Harry, I’m pretty certain that Alice is more seriously interested in Jim than she knows of. Of course she thinks it’s all friendship, but she is so sensitive about him, and if you make even the shadow of a criticism she flames up and defends him. You ought to see.”

  “Grave symptoms,” said Harry.

  “But as she says she is not thinking nor wanting to think of marriage” —

  “Any more than a certain other young lady was, with whom I cultivated a friendship some time ago,” said Harry, laughing.

  “Just so,” said Eva; “I plume myself on my forbearance in listening gravely to Alice and not putting in any remarks; but I remembered old times and had my suspicions. We thought it was friendship, didn’t we, Harry? And I used to be downright angry if anybody suggested anything else. Now, I think Allie’s friendship for Jim is getting to be of the same kind. Oh, she knows him so well! and she understands him so perfectly! and she has so much influence over him! and they have such perfect comprehension of each other! and as to his faults, oh, she understands all about them! But, mind you, nobody must criticise him but herself — that’s quite evident. I did make a blundering remark or so; but I found it wasn’t at all the thing, and I had to beat a rapid retreat, I assure you.”

  “Well, poor girl! I hope you managed to console her.”

  “Oh, I was sympathetic and indignant, and after she had poured out her griefs she felt better; and then I put in a soothing word for Aunt Maria, poor woman, who is only monomaniac on managing our affairs.”

  “Yes,” said Harry, “forgiveness of enemies used to be the ultima Thule of virtue; but I rather think it will have to be forgiveness of friends. I call the man a perfect. Christian that can always forgive his friends.”

  “The fact is, Aunt Maria ought to have had a great family of her own — twelve or thirteen, to say the least. If Providence had vouchsafed her eight or nine ramping, roaring boys, and a sprinkling of girls, she would have been a splendid woman and we should have had better times.”

  “She puts me in mind of the story of the persistent broomstick that would fetch water,” said Harry; “we are likely to be drowned out by her.”

  “Well, we can accept her for a whetstone to sharpen up our Christian graces on,” said Eva. “So, let her go. I was talking over our projected evening with Alice, and we spent some time discussing that.”

  “When are you going to begin?” said Harry. “‘Well begun is half done,’ you know.”

  Said Eva, “I’ve been thinking over what day is best, and talking about it with Mary. Now, we can’t have it Monday, there’s the washing, you know; and Tuesday and Wednesday come baking and ironing.”

  “Well, th
en, what happens Thursday?”

  “Well, then, it’s precisely Thursday that Mary and I agreed on. We both made up our minds that it was the right day. One wouldn’t want it on Friday, you know, and Saturday is too late; besides, Mr. St. John never goes out Saturday evenings.”

  “But what’s the objection to Friday?”

  “Oh, the unlucky day. Mary wouldn’t hear of beginning anything on Friday, you know. Then, besides, Mr. St. John, I suspect, fasts every Friday. He never told me so, of course, but they say he does; at all events, I’m sure he wouldn’t come of a Friday evening, and I want to be sure and have him, of all people. Now, you see, I’ve planned it all beautifully. I’m going to have a nice, pretty little tea-table in one corner, with a vase of flowers on it, and I shall sit and make tea. That breaks the stiffness, you know. People talk first about the tea and the china, and whether they take cream and sugar, and so on, and the gentlemen help the ladies. Then Mary will make those delicate little biscuits of hers and her charming sponge-cake. It’s going to be perfectly quiet, you see — from half past seven till eleven — early hours and simple fare, ‘feast of reason and flow of soul.’”

  “Quite pastoral and Arcadian,” said Harry. “When we get it going it will be the ideal of social life. No fuss, no noise; all the quiet of home life with all the variety of company; people seeing each other till they get really intimate and have a genuine interest in meeting each other; not a mere outside, wild beast show, as it is when people go to parties to gaze at other people and see how they look in war-paint.”

  “I feel a little nervous at first,” said Eva; “getting people together that are so diametrically opposed to each other as Dr. Campbell and Mr. St. John, for instance. I’m afraid Dr. Campbell will come out with some of his terribly free speaking, and then Mr. St. John will be so shocked and distressed.”

  “Then Mr. St. John must get over being shocked and distressed. Mr. St. John needs Dr. Campbell,” said Harry. “He is precisely the man he ought to meet, and Dr. Campbell needs Mr. St. John. The two men are intended to help each other: each has what the other wants, and they ought to be intimate.”

  “But you see, Dr. Campbell is such a dreadful unbeliever!”

  “In a certain way he is no more an unbeliever than Mr. St. John. Dr. Campbell is utterly ignorant of the higher facts of moral consciousness — of prayer and communion with God — and therefore he doesn’t believe in them. St. John is equally ignorant of some of the most important facts of the body he inhabits. He does not believe in them — ignores them.”

  “Oh, but now, Harry, I didn’t think that of you — that you could put the truths of the body on a level with the truths of the soul.”

  “Bless you darling, since the Maker has been pleased to make the soul so dependent on the body, how can I help it? Why, just see here; come to this very problem of saving a soul, which is a minister’s work. I insist there are cases where Dr. Campbell can do more towards it than Mr. St. John. He was quoting to me only yesterday a passage from Dr. Wigan, where he says, ‘I firmly believe I have more than once changed the moral character of a boy by leeches’ applied to the inside of his nose.’”

  “Why, Harry, that sounds almost shocking.”

  “Yet it’s a fact — a physiological fact — that some of the worst vices come through a disordered body, and can be cured only by curing the body. So long as we are in this mortal state, our souls have got to he saved in our bodies and by the laws of our bodies; and a doctor who understands them will do more than a minister who doesn’t. Why, just look at poor Bolton. The trouble that he dreads, the fear that blasts his life, that makes him afraid to marry, is a disease of the body. Fasting, prayer, sacraments, couldn’t keep off an acute attack of dipsomania; but a doctor might.”

  “Oh, Harry, do you think so? Well, I must say I do think Mr. St. John is as ignorant as a child about such matters, if I may judge from the way he goes on about his own health. He ignores his body entirely, and seems determined to work as if he were a spirit and could live on prayer and fasting.”

  “Which, as he isn’t a spirit, won’t do,” said Harry. “It may end in making a spirit of him before the time.”

  “But don’t you think the disinterestedness he shows is perfectly heroic?” said Eva.

  “Oh, certainly!” said Harry. “The fact is, I should despair of St. John if he hadn’t set himself at mission work. He is naturally so ideal, and so fastidious, and so fond of rules, and limits, and order, that if he hadn’t this practical common-sense problem of working among the poor on his hands, I should think he wouldn’t be good for much. But drunken men and sorrowful wives, ragged children, sickness, pain, poverty, teach a man the common sense of religion faster than anything else, and I can see St. John is learning sense for everybody but himself. If he only don’t run his own body down, he’ll make something yet.”

  “I think, Harry,” said Eva, “he is a little doubtful of whether you really go with him or not. I don’t think he knows how much you like him.”

  “Go with him! of course I do. I stand up for St. John and defend him. So long as a man is giving his whole life to hard work among the poor and neglected he may burn forty candles, if he wants to, for all I care. He may turn to any point of the compass he likes, east, west, north, or south, and wear all the colors of the rainbow if it suits him, and I won’t complain. In fact, I like processions, and chantings, and ceremonies, if you don’t get too many of them. I think, generally speaking, there’s too little of that sort of thing in our American life. In the main, St. John preaches good sermons; that is, good, manly, honest talks to people about what they need to know. But then his mind is tending to a monomania of veneration. You see he has a mystical, poetic element in it that may lead him back into the old idolatries of past ages, and lead weak minds there after him; that’s why I want to get him acquainted with such fellows as Campbell. He needs to learn the common sense of life. I think he is capable of it, and one of the first things he has got to learn is not to be shocked at hearing things said from other people’s points of view. If these two men could only like each other, so as to listen tolerantly and dispassionately to what each has to say, they might be everything to each other.”

  “Well, how to get a mordant to unite these two opposing colors?” said Eva.

  “That’s what you women are for — at least such women as you. It’s your mission to interpret differing natures —— to bind, and blend, and unite.”

  “But how shall we get them to like each other?” said Eva. “Both are so very intense and so opposite. I suppose Dr. Campbell would consider most of Mr. St. John’s ideas stuff and nonsense; and I know, as well as I know anything, that if Mr. St. John should hear Dr. Campbell talking as he talks to you, he would shut up like a flower —— he would retire into himself and not come here any more.”

  “Oh, Eva, that’s making the man too ridiculous and unmanly. Good gracious! Can’t a man who thinks he has God’s truth — and such truth! — listen to opposing views without going into fits? It’s like a soldier who cannot face guns and wants to stay inside of a clean, nice fort, making pretty stacks of bayonets and piling cannonballs in lovely little triangles.”

  “Well, Harry, I know Mr. St. John isn’t like that. I don’t think he’s cowardly or unmanly, but he is very reverent, and, Harry, you are very free. You do let Dr. Campbell go on so, over everything. It quite shocks me.”

  “Just because my faith is so strong that I can afford it. I can see when he is mistaken; but he is a genuine, active, benevolent man, following truth when he sees it, and getting a good deal of it, and most important truth, too. We’ve got to get truth as we can in this world, just as miners dig gold out of the mine with all the quartz, and dirt, and dross; but it pays.”

  “Well, now, I shall try my skill, and do my best to dispose these two refractory chemicals to a union,” said Eva. “I’ll tell you how let’s do. I’ll interest Dr. Campbell in Mr. St. John’s health. I’ll ask him to study him and see if he can
’t take care of him. I’m sure he needs taking care of.”

  “And,” said Harry, “why not interest Mr. St. John in Dr. Campbell’s soul? Why shouldn’t he try to convert him from the error of his ways?”

  “That would be capital,” said Eva. “Let each convert the other. If we could put Dr. Campbell and Mr. St.

  ‘ John together, what a splendid man we could make of them!”

  “Try your best, my dear; but meanwhile I have three or four hours’ writing to do this evening.”

  “Well, then, settle yourself down, and I will run over and expound my plans to the good old ladies over the way.

  I am getting up quite an intimacy over there; Miss Dorcas is really vastly entertaining. It’s like living in a past age to hear her talk.”

  “You really have established a fashion of rushing in upon them at all sorts of hours,” said Harry.

  “Yes, but they like it. You have no idea what nice things they say to me. Even old Dinah quivers and giggles with delight the minute she sees me — poor old soul! You see, they ‘re shut up all alone in that musty old house, like enchanted princesses, and gone to sleep there; and I am the predestined fairy to wake them up!”

  Eva said this as she was winding a cloud of fleecy worsted around her head, and Harry was settling himself at his writing-table in a little alcove curtained off from the parlor.

  “Don’t keep the old ladies up too late,” said Harry. “Never you fear,” said Eva. “Perhaps I shall stay to see Jack’s feet washed and blanket spread. Those are solemn and impressive ceremonies that I have heard described, but never witnessed.”

  It was a bright, keen, frosty, starlight evening, and when Eva had rung the door-bell on the opposite side, she turned and looked at the play of shadow and firelight on her own window curtains.

  Suddenly she noticed a dark form of a woman coming from an alley back of the house, and standing irresolute, looking at the windows. Then she drew near the house, and seemed trying to read the name on the door-plate.