Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Well, then, set it down in your book that other people are like you; and that the art of entertaining is the art of really caring for people. If you have a warm heart, congenial tastes, and a real interest in your stranger, don’t fear to invite him, though you have no best dinner set, and your existing plates are sadly chipped at the edges, and even though there be a handle broken off from the side of your vegetable dish. Set it down in your belief that you can give something better than a dinner, however good, — you can give a part of yourself. You can give love, good will, and sympathy, of which there has, perhaps, been quite as much over cracked plates and restricted table furniture as over Sèvres china and silver.

  It soon appeared that Mr. Selby, like other sensible Englishmen, had a genuine interest in getting below the surface life of our American world, and coming to the real “hard-pan” on which our social fabric is founded. He was full of intelligent curiosity as to the particulars of American journalism, its management, its possibilities, its remunerations compared with those of England; and here was where Bolton’s experience and Jim Fellows’s many-sided practical observations came out strongly.

  Alice was delighted with the evident impression that Jim made on a man whose good opinion appeared to be worth having; for that young lady, insensibly perhaps to herself, held a sort of right of property in Jim, such as the princesses of the Middle Ages had in the knights that wore their colors; and Jim, undoubtedly, was inspired by the idea that bright eyes looked on to do his devoir manfully in the conversation. So they went over all the chances and prospects of income and living for literary men and journalists in the two countries; the facilities for marriage, and the establishment of families, including salaries, rents, prices of goods, etc. In the course of the conversation Mr. Selby made many frank statements of his own personal experience and observation, which were responded to with equal frankness on the part of Harry and Eva and others, till it finally seemed as if the whole company were as likely to become au courant of each other’s affairs as a party of brothers and sisters. Eva, sitting at the head, like a skillful steerswoman, turned the helm of conversation adroitly, now this way and now that, to draw out the forces of all her guests, and bring each into play. She introduced the humanitarian questions of the day; and the subject branched at once upon what was doing by the Christian world: the High Church, the ritualists, the broad Church, and the dissenters all rose upon the carpet, and St. John was wide awake and earnest in his inquiries. In fact, an eager talking spirit descended upon them, and it was getting dark when Eva made the move to go to the parlor, where a bright fire and coffee awaited them.

  “I always hate to drop very dark shades over my windows in the evening,” said Eva, as she went in and began letting down the lace curtains; “I like to have the firelight of a pleasant room stream out into the dark, and look cheerful and hospitable outside; for that reason I don’t like inside shutters. Do you know, Mr. Selby, how your English arrangements used to impress me? They were all meant to be very delightful to those inside, but freezingly repulsive to those without. Your beautiful grounds that one longs to look at are guarded by high stone walls with broken bottles on the top, to keep one from even hoping to get over. Now, I think beautiful grounds are a public charity, and a public education; and a man shouldn’t build a high wall round them, so that even the sight of his trees, and the odor of his flowers, should be denied to his poor neighbors.”

  “It all comes of our national love of privacy,” said Mr. Selby; “it isn’t stinginess, I beg you to believe, Mrs. Henderson, but shyness, — you find our hearts all right when you get in.”

  “That we do; but, I beg pardon, Mr. Selby, oughtn’t shyness to be put down in the list of besetting sins, and fought against? Isn’t it the enemy of brotherly kindness and charity?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Henderson, you practice so delightfully, one cannot find fault with your preaching,” said Mr. Selby; “but, after all, is it a sin to want to keep one’s private life to himself, and unexposed to the comments of vulgar, uncongenial natures? It seems to me, if you will pardon the suggestion, that there is too little of this sense of privacy in America. Your public men, for instance, are required to live in glass cases, so that they may be constantly inspected behind and before. Your press interviewers beset them on every hand, take down their chance observations, record everything they say and do, and how they look and feel at every moment of their lives. I confess that I would rather be comfortably burned at the stake at once than be one of your public men in America; and all this comes of your not being shy and reserved. It’s a state of things impossible in the kind of country that has high walls with glass bottles around its private grounds.”

  “He has us there, Eva,” said Harry; “our vulgar, jolly, democratic level of equality over here produces just these insufferable results; there’s no doubt about it.”

  “Well,” said Jim, “I have one word to say about newspaper reporters. Poor boys! everybody is down on them, nobody has a bit of charity for them; and yet, bless you, it isn’t their fault if they’re impertinent and prying. That is what they are engaged for and paid for, and kicked out if they ‘re not up to. Why, look you, here are four or five big dailies running the general gossip-mill for these great United States, and if any one of them gets a bit of news before another, it’s a victory — a ‘beat.’ Well, if the boys are not sharp, if other papers get things that they don’t or can’t, off they must go; and the boys have mothers and sisters to support — and want to get wives some day — and the reporting business is the first round of the ladder; if they get pitched off, it’s all over with them.”

  “Precisely,” said Mr. Selby; “it is, if you will pardon my saying it, it is your great American public that wants these papers and takes them, and takes the most of those that have the most gossip in them, that are to blame. They make the reporters what they are, and keep them what they are, by the demand they keep up for their wares; and so, I say, if Mrs. Henderson will pardon me, that, as yet, I am unable to put down our national shyness in the catalogue of sins to be fought against. I confess I would rather, if I should ever happen to have any literary fame, I would rather shut my shutters, evenings, and have high walls with glass bottles on top around my grounds, and not have every vulgar, impertinent fellow in the community commenting on my private affairs. Now, in England, we have all arrangements to keep our families to ourselves, and to such intimates as we may approve.”

  “Oh yes, I knew it to my cost when I was in England,” said Eva. “You might be in a great hotel with all the historic characters of your day, and see no more of them than if you were in America. They came in close family carriages, they passed to close family rooms, they traveled in railroad compartments specially secured to themselves, and you knew no more about them than if you had stayed at home.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Selby, “you describe what I think are very nice, creditable, comfortable ways of managing.”

  “With not even a newspaper reporter to tell the people what they were talking about, and what gowns their wives and daughters wore,” said Bolton dryly. “I confess, of the two extremes, the English would most accord with my natural man.”

  “So it is with all of us,” said St. John; “the question is, though, whether this strict caste system which links people in certain lines and ruts of social life doesn’t make it impossible to have that knowledge of one another as human beings which Christianity requires. It struck me in England that the High clergy had very little practical comprehension of the feelings of the lower classes, and their wives and daughters less. They were prepared to dispense charity to them from above, but not to study them on the plane of equal intercourse. They never mingle, any more than oil and water; and that, I think, is why so much charity in England is thrown away — the different classes do not understand each other, and never can.”

  “Yes,” said Harry; “with all the disadvantages and disagreeable results of our democratic jumble in society, our common cars where all ride
side by side, our hotel parlors where all sit together, and our tables d’hote where all dine together, we do know each other better, and there is less chance of class misunderstandings and jealousies, than in England.”

  “For my part, I sympathize with Mr. Selby, according to the flesh,” said Mr. St. John. “The sheltered kind of life one leads in English good society is what I prefer; but, if our Christianity is good for anything, we cannot choose what we prefer.”

  “I have often thought,” said Eva, “that the pressure of vulgar notoriety, the rush of the crowd around our Saviour, was evidently the same kind of trial to him that it must be to every refined and sensitive nature; and yet how constant and how close was his affiliation with the lowest and poorest in his day. He lived with them, he gave them just what we shrink from giving — his personal presence — himself.” Eva spoke with a heightened color and with a burst of self-forgetful enthusiasm. There was a little pause afterwards, as if a strain of music had suddenly broken into the conversation, and Mr. Selby, after a moment’s pause, said: —

  “Mrs. Henderson, I give way to that suggestion. Sometimes, for a moment, I get a glimpse that Christianity is something higher and purer than any conventional church shows forth, and I feel that we nominal Christians are not living on that plane, and that if we only could live thus, it would settle the doubts of modern skeptics faster than any Bampton Lectures.”

  “Well,” said Eva, “it does seem as if that which is best for society on the whole is always gained by a sacrifice of what is agreeable. Think of the picturesque scenery, and peasantry, and churches, and ceremonials in Italy, and what a perfect scattering and shattering of all such illusions would be made by a practical, common-sense system of republican government, that would make the people thrifty, prosperous, and happy! The good is not always the beautiful.”

  “Yes,” said Bolton to Mr. Selby, “and you Liberals in England are assuredly doing your best to bring on the very state of society which produces the faults that annoy you here. The reign of the great average masses never can be so agreeable to taste as that of the cultured few.”

  But we will not longer follow a conversation which was kept up till a late hour around the blazing hearth. The visit was one of those happy ones in which a man enters a house a stranger and leaves it a friend. When all were gone, Harry and Eva sat talking it over by the decaying brands.

  “Harry, you venturesome creature, how dared you send such a company in upon me on washing-day?”

  “Because, my dear, I knew you were the one woman in a thousand that could face an emergency and never lose either temper or presence of mind; and you see I was right.”

  “But it isn’t me that you should praise, Harry; it’s my poor, good Mary. Just think how patiently she turned out of her way and changed all her plans, and worked and contrived for me, when her poor old heart was breaking! I must run up now and say how much I thank her for making everything go off so well.”

  Eva tapped softly at the door of Mary’s room. There was no answer. She opened it softly. Mary was kneeling with clasped hands before her crucifix, and praying softly and earnestly; so intent that she did not hear Eva coming in. Eva waited a moment, and then kneeled down beside her and softly put her arm around her.

  “Oh, dear, Miss Eva!” said Mary, “my heart’s just breaking.”

  “I know it, I know it, my poor Mary.”

  “It’s so cold and dark outdoors, and where is she?” said Mary, with a shudder. “Oh, I wish I’d been kinder to her, and not scolded her.”

  “Oh, dear Mary, don’t reproach yourself; you did it for the best. We will pray for her, and the dear Father will hear us, I know he will. The Good Shepherd will go after her and find her.”

  CHAPTER XXXII

  A MISTRESS WITHOUT A MAID

  [Eva to Harry’s Mother.]

  VALLEY OF HUMILIATION.

  DEAR MOTHER, — I have kept you well informed of all our prosperities in undertaking and doing; how everything we have set our hand to has turned out beautifully; how “our evenings” have been a triumphant success; and how we and our neighbors are all coming into the spirit of love and unity, getting acquainted, mingling and melting into each other’s sympathy and knowledge. I have had the most delightful run of compliments about my house, as so bright, so cheerful, so social and cosy, and about my skill in managing to always have everything so nice, and in entertaining with so little parade and trouble, that I really began to plume myself on something very uncommon in the way of what Aunt Prissy Diamond calls “faculty.” Well, you know, next in course after the Palace Beautiful comes the Valley of Humiliation — whence my letter is dated — where I am at this present writing. Honest old John Bunyan says that, although people do not descend into this place with a very good grace, but with many a sore bruise and tumble, yet the air thereof is mild and refreshing, and many sweet flowers grow here that are not found in more exalted regions.

  I have not found the flowers yet, and feel only the soreness and bruises of the descent. To drop the metaphor: I have been now three days conducting my establishment without Mary, and with no other assistant than her daughter, the little ten-year-old midget I told you about. You remember about poor Maggie, and what we were trying to do for her, and how she fled from our house? Well, Jim Fellows set the detectives upon her track, and the last that was heard of her, she had gone up to Poughkeepsie; and, as Mary has relations somewhere in that neighborhood, she thought, perhaps, if she went immediately, she should find her among them. The dear, faithful soul felt dreadfully about leaving me, knowing that, as to all practical matters, I am a poor “sheep in the wilderness;” and if I had made any opposition, or argued against it, I suppose that I might have kept her from going, but I did not. I did all I could to hurry her off, and talked heroically about how I would try to get along without her, and little Midge swelled with importance, and seemed to long for the opportunity to display her latent powers; and so Mary departed suddenly one morning, and left me in possession of the field.

  The situation was the graver that we had a gentleman invited to dinner, and Mary had not time even to stuff the turkey, as she had to hurry off to the cars. “What will you do, Miss Eva?” she said ruefully; and I said cheerily, “Oh, never “fear, Mary; I never found a situation yet that I was not adequate to,” and I saw her out of the door, and then turned to my kitchen and my turkey. My soul was fired with energy. I would prove to Harry what a wonderful and unexplored field of domestic science lay in my little person. Everything should be so perfect that the absence of Mary should not even be suspected!

  So I came airily upon the stage of action, and took an observation of the field. This turkey should be stuffed, of course; turkeys always were stuffed; but what with? How very shadowy and indefinite my knowledge grew, as I contemplated those yawning rifts and caverns which were to be filled up with something savory — I didn’t precisely know what! But the cook-book came to my relief. I read and studied the directions, and proceeded to explore for the articles. “Midge, where does your mother keep the sweet herbs?” Midge was prompt and alert in her researches and brought them to light, and I proceeded gravely to measure and mix, while Midge, delighted at the opportunity of exploring forbidden territory, began a miscellaneous system of rummaging and upsetting in Mary’s orderly closets. “Here’s the mustard, ma’am, and here’s the French mustard, and here’s the vanilla, and the cloves is here, and the nutmeg-grater, ma’am, and the nutmegs is here;” and so on, till I was half crazy.

  “Midge, put all those things back and shut the cupboard door, and stop talking,” said I decisively. And Midge obeyed.

  “Now,” said I, “I wonder where Mary keeps her needles; this must be sewed up.”

  Midge was on hand again, and pulled forth needles, and thread, and twine, and after some pulling and pinching of my fingers, and some unsuccessful struggles with the stiff wings that wouldn’t lie down, and the stiff legs that would kick out, my turkey was fairly bound and captive, and handsomely a
waiting his destiny.

  “Now, Midge,” said I, triumphant, “open the oven door!”

  “Oh! please, ma’am, it’s only ten o’clock. You don’t want to roast him all day.”

  Sure enough; I had not thought of that. Our dinner hour was five o’clock; and, for the first time in my life, the idea of time as connected with a roast turkey rose in my head.

  “Midge, when does your mother put the turkey in?”

  “Oh! not till some time in the afternoon,” said Midge wisely.

  “How long does it take a turkey to roast?” said I.

  “Oh! a good while,” said Midge confidently, “‘cordin’ as how large they is.”

  I turned to my cook-book, and saw that so much time must be given to so many pounds; but I had not the remotest idea how many pounds there were in the turkey. So I set Midge to cleaning the silver, and ran across the way, to get light of Miss Dorcas.

  How thankful I was for the neighborly running-in terms on which I stood with my old ladies; it stood me in good stead in this time of need. I ran in at the back door and found Miss Dorcas in her kitchen, presiding over some special Eleusinean mysteries in the way of preserves. The good soul had on a morning-cap calculated to strike terror into an inexperienced beholder, but her face beamed with benignity, and she entered into the situation at once.

  “Cookery books are not worth a fly in such cases,” she remarked sententiously. “You must use your judgment.”

  “But what if you haven’t got any judgment to use?” said I. “I haven’t a bit.”

  “Well, then, dear child, you must use Dinah’s, as I do. Dinah can tell to a T how long a turkey takes to roast, by looking at it. Here, Dinah, run over, and ‘talk turkey’ to Mrs. Henderson.”

  Dinah went back with me, boiling over with giggle. She laughed so immoderately over my turkey that I began to fear I had made some disgraceful blunder; but I was relieved by a facetious poke in the side which she gave me, declaring: —