Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “How hard they all make it to do right!” thought Maggie. But she was too proud to plead or entreat. “They all act as if I had the plague, and should give it to them; and yet I don’t want to be bad. I’d a great deal rather be good if they’d let me, but I don’t see any way. Nobody will have me, or let me stay,” and Maggie felt a sobbing pity for herself. Why should she be treated as if she were the very off scouring of the earth, when the man who had led her into all this sin and sorrow was moving in the best society, caressed, admired, flattered, married to a good, pious, lovely woman, and carrying all the honors of life?

  Why was it such a sin for her, and no sin for him? Why could he repent and be forgiven, and why must she never be forgiven? There wasn’t any justice in it, Maggie hotly said to herself — and there wasn’t; and then, as she walked those cold streets, pictures without words were rising in her mind, of days when everybody flattered and praised her, and he most of all. There is no possession which brings such gratifying homage as personal beauty; for it is homage more exclusively belonging to the individual self than any other. The tribute rendered to wealth, or talent, or genius, is far less personal. A child or woman gifted with beauty has a constant talisman that turns all things to gold — though, alas! the gold too often turns out like fairy gifts; it is gold only in seeming, and becomes dirt and slate-stone on their hands.

  Beauty is a dazzling and dizzying gift. It dazzles first its possessor and inclines him to foolish action; and it dazzles outsiders, and makes them say and do foolish things. From the time that Maggie was a little chit, running in the street, people had stopped her, to admire her hair and eyes, and talk all kinds of nonsense to her, for the purpose of making her sparkle and flush and dimple, just as one plays with a stick in the sparkling of a brook. Her father, an idle, willful, careless creature, made a show plaything of her, and spent his earnings for her gratification and adornment. The mother was only too proud and fond; and it was no wonder that when Maggie grew up to girlhood her head was a giddy one, that she was self-willed, self-confident, obstinate. Maggie loved ease and luxury. Who doesn’t? If she had been born on Fifth Avenue, of one of the magnates of New York, it would have been all right, of course, for her to love ribbons and laces and flowers and fine clothes, to be imperious and self-willed, and to set her pretty foot on the neck of the world. Many a young American princess, gifted with youth and beauty and with an indulgent papa and mamma, is no wiser than Maggie was; but nobody thinks the worse of her. People laugh at her little saucy airs and graces, and predict that she will come all right by and by. But then, for her, beauty means an advantageous marriage, a home of luxury, and a continuance through life of the petting and indulgence which every one loves, whether wisely or not. But Maggie was the daughter of a poor working woman — an Irishwoman at that — and what marriage leading to wealth and luxury was in store for her?

  To tell the truth, at seventeen, when her father died and her mother was left penniless, Maggie was as unfit to encounter the world as you, Miss Mary, or you, Miss Alice, and she was a girl of precisely the same flesh and blood as yourself. Maggie cordially hated everything hard, unpleasant, or disagreeable, just as you do. She was as unused to crosses and self-denials as you are. She longed for fine things and pretty things, for fine sight-seeing and lively times, just as you do, and felt just as you do that it was hard fate to be deprived of them. But, when worse came to worst, she went to work with Mrs. Maria Wouvermans. Maggie was parlor-girl and waitress, and a good one too. She was ingenious, neat-handed, quick and bright; and her beauty drew favorable attention. But Mrs. Wouvermans never commended, but only found fault. If Maggie carefully dusted every one of the five hundred knickknacks of the drawing-room five hundred times, there was nothing said; but if, on the five hundred and first time, a moulding or a crevice was found with dust in it, Mrs. Wouvermans would summon Maggie to her presence with the air of a judge, point out the criminal fact, and inveigh, in terms of general severity, against her carelessness, as if carelessness were the rule rather than the exception.

  Mrs. Wouvermans took special umbrage at Maggie’s dress — her hat, her feathers, her flowers — not because they were ugly, but because they were pretty, a great deal too pretty and dressy for her station. Mrs. Wouvermans’ ideal of a maid was a trim creature, content with two gowns of coarse stuff and a bonnet devoid of adornment; a creature who, having eyes, saw not anything in the way of ornament or luxury; whose whole soul was absorbed in work, for work’s sake; content with mean lodgings, mean furniture, poor food, and scanty clothing; and devoting her whole powers of body and soul to securing to others elegances, comforts, and luxuries to which she never aspired. This self-denied sister of charity, who stood as the ideal servant, Mrs. Wouvermans’ maid did not in the least resemble. Quite another thing was the gay, dressy young lady who, on Sunday mornings, stepped forth from the back gate of her house with so much the air of a Murray Hill demoiselle that people sometimes said to Mrs. Wouvermans, “Who is that pretty young lady that you have staying with you?” — a question that never failed to arouse a smothered sense of indignation in that lady’s mind, and added bitterness to her reproofs and sarcasms when she found a picture-frame undusted, or pounced opportunely on a cobweb in some neglected corner.

  Maggie felt certain that Mrs. Wouvermans was on the watch to find fault with her — that she wanted to condemn her, for she had gone to service with the best of resolutions. Her mother was poor and she meant to help her; she meant to be a good girl, and, in her own mind, she thought she was a very good girl to do so much work, and remember so many different things in so many different places, and forget so few things.

  Maggie praised herself to herself, just as you do, my young lady, when you have an energetic turn in household matters, and arrange, and beautify, and dust, and adorn mamma’s parlors, and then call on mamma and papa and all the family to witness and applaud your notability. At sixteen or seventeen, household virtue is much helped in its development by praise. Praise is sunshine; it warms, it inspires, it promotes growth: blame and rebuke are rain and hail; they beat down and bedraggle, even though they may at times be necessary. There was a time in Maggie’s life when a kind, judicious, thoughtful, Christian woman might have kept her - from falling, might have won her confidence, become her guide and teacher, and piloted her through the dangerous shoals and quicksands which beset a bright, attractive, handsome young girl, left to make her own way alone and unprotected.

  But it was not given to Aunt Maria to see this opportunity; and, under her system of management, it was not long before Maggie’s temper grew fractious, and she used to such purpose the democratic liberty of free speech, which is the birthright of American servants, that Mrs. Wouvermans never forgave her. Maggie told her, in fact, that she was a hard-hearted, mean, selfish woman, who wanted to get all she could out of her servants, and to give the least she could in return; and this came a little too near the truth ever to be forgotten or forgiven. Maggie was summarily warned out of the house, and went home to her mother, who took her part with all her heart and soul, and declared that Maggie shouldn’t live out any longer — she should be nobody’s servant.

  This, to be sure, was silly enough in Mary, since service is the law of society, and we are all more or less servants to somebody; but uneducated people never philosophize or generalize, and so cannot help themselves to wise conclusions. All Mary knew was that Maggie had been scolded and chafed by Mrs. Wouvermans; her handsome darling had been abused, and she should get into some higher place in the world; and so she put her as workwoman into the fashionable store of S. S. & Co.

  There Maggie was seen and coveted by the man who made her his prey. Maggie was seventeen, pretty, silly, hating work and trouble, longing for pleasure, leisure, ease, and luxury; and he promised them all. He told her that she was too pretty to work, that if she would trust herself to him she need have no more care; and Maggie looked forward to a rich marriage and a home of her own. To do her justice, she loved the man that pr
omised this with all the warmth of her Irish heart. To her, he was the splendid prince in the fairy tale, come to take her from poverty and set her among princes; and she felt she could not do too much for him. She would be such a good wife, she would be so devoted, she would improve herself and learn so that she might never discredit him. Alas! in just such an enchanted garden of love, and hope, and joy, how often has the ground caved in and let the victim down into dungeons of despair that never open!

  Maggie thinks all this over as she pursues her cheerless, aimless way through the cold, cutting wind, and looks into face after face that has no pity for her. Scarcely knowing why she did it, she took a car and rode up to the Park, got out, and wandered drearily up and down among the leafless paths from which all trace of summer greenness had passed.

  Suddenly a carriage whirred past her. She looked up. There he sat, driving, and by his side so sweet a lady, and between them a flaxen-haired little beauty, clasping a doll in her chubby arms! The sweet-faced woman looks pitifully at the haggard, weary face, and says something to call the attention of her husband. An angry flush rises to his face. He frowns, and whips up the horse, and is gone. A sort of rage and bitterness possess Maggie’s soul. What is the use of trying to do better? Nobody pities her. Nobody helps her. The world is all against her. Why not go to the bad?

  CHAPTER XXXV

  A SOUL IN PERIL

  IT will be seen by the way in which we left poor Maggie that she stood in just one of those critical steep places of life where a soul is in pain and peril; where the turning of a hair’s breadth may decide between death and life. And it is something, not only to the individual, but to the whole community, what a woman may become in one of these crises of life.

  Maggie had a rich, warm, impulsive nature, full of passion and energy; she had personal beauty and the power that comes from it; she had in her all that might have made the devoted wife and mother, fitted to give strong sons and daughters to our republic, and to bring them up to strengthen our country. But, deceived, betrayed, led astray by the very impulses which should have ended in home and marriage, with even her best friends condemning her, her own heart condemning her, the whole face of the world set against her, her feet stood in slippery places.

  There is another life open to the woman whom the world judges and rejects and condemns; a life short, bad, desperate; a life of revenge, of hate, of deceit; a life in which woman, outraged and betrayed by man, turns bitterly upon him, to become the tempter, the betrayer, the ruiner of man, — to visit misery and woe on the society that condemns her. Many a young man has been led to gambling, and drinking, and destruction; many a wife’s happiness has been destroyed; many a mother has wept on a sleepless pillow over a son worse than dead, — only because some woman, who at a certain time in her life might have been saved to honor and good living, has been left to be a vessel of wrath fitted to destruction. For we have seen in Maggie’s history that there were points all along where the girl might have been turned into another and a better way.

  If Mrs. Maria Wouvermans, instead of railing at her love of feathers and flowers, watching for her halting, and seeking occasion against her, had only had grace to do for her what lies in the power of every Christian mistress; if she had won her confidence, given her motherly care and sympathy, and trained her up under the protection of household influences, it might have been otherwise. Or, supposing that Maggie were too self-willed, too elate with the flatteries that come to young beauty, to be saved from a fall, yet, after that fall, when she rose, ashamed and humbled, there was still a chance of retrieval.

  Perhaps there is never a time when man or woman has a better chance, with suitable help, of building a good character than just after a humiliating fall which has taught the sinner his own weakness, and given him a sad experience of the bitterness of sin. Nobody wants to be sold under sin, and go the whole length in iniquity; and when one has gone just far enough in wrong living to perceive in advance all its pains and penalties, there is often an agonized effort to get back to respectability, like the clutching of the drowning man for the shore. The waters of death are cold and bitter, and nobody wants to be drowned. But it is just at this point that the drowning hand is wrenched off; society fears that the poor wet wretch will upset its respectable boat; it pushes him off, and rows over the last rising bubbles.

  And this is not in the main because men and women are hard-hearted or cruel, but because they are busy, every one of them, with their own works and ways, hurried, driven, with no time, strength, or heart-leisure for more than they are doing. What is one poor soul struggling in the water, swimming upstream, to the great pushing, busy, bustling world?

  Nothing in the review of life appears to us so pitiful as the absolute nothingness of the individual in the great mass of human existence. To each living, breathing, suffering atom, the consciousness of what it desires and suffers is so intense, and to every one else so faint. It is faint even to the nearest and dearest compared to what it is to one’s self. “The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith.”

  Suppose you were suddenly struck down to-day by death in any of its dreadful forms, how much were this to you, how little to the world! how little even to the friendly world, who think well of you and wish you kindly! The paper that tells the tale scarcely drops from their hand; a few shocked moments of pity or lamentation, perhaps, and then returns the discussion of what shall be for dinner, and whether the next dress shall be cut with flounces or folds; the gay waves of life dance and glitter over the last bubble which marks where you sank. So we have seen poor Maggie, with despair and bitterness in her heart, wandering, on a miserable cold day, through the Christmas rejoicings of New York, on the very verge of going back to courses that end in unutterable degradation and misery; and yet, how little it was anybody’s business to seek or to save her.

  “So,” said Mrs. Wouvermans in a tone of exultation, when she heard of Maggie’s flight, “I hope, I’m sure, Eva’s had enough of her fine ways of managing! Miss Maggie’s off, just as I knew she’d be. That girl is a baggage! And now, of course, nothing must do but Mary must be off to look for her, and then Eva is left with all her house on her hands. I should think this would show her that my advice wasn’t so altogether to he scorned.”

  Now, it is not to be presumed that Mrs. Wouvermans really was so cruel as to exult in the destruction of Maggie, and the perplexity and distress of her mother, or in Eva’s domestic discomfort; yet there was something very like this in the tone of her remarks.

  Whence is the feeling of satisfaction which we have when things that we always said we knew turn out just as we predicted? Had we really rather our neighbor would be proved a thief and a liar than to be proved in a mistake ourselves? Would we be willing to have somebody topple headlong into destruction for the sake of being able to say, “I told you so”? Mrs. Wouvermans did not ask herself these pointed questions, and so she stirred her faultless coffee without stirring up a doubt of her own Christianity

  —— for, like you and me, Mrs. Wouvermans held herself to be an ordinarily good Christian.

  Gentle, easy Mrs. Van Arsdel heard this news with acquiescence. “Well, girls, so that Maggie’s run off and settled the question; and, on the whole, I’m not sorry, for that ends Eva’s responsibility for her; and, after all, I think your aunt was half right about that matter. One doesn’t want to have too much to do with such people.”

  “But, mamma,” said Alice, “it seems such a dreadful thing that so young a girl, not older than I am, should be utterly lost.”

  “Yes, but you can’t help it, and such things are happening all the time, and it isn’t worth while making ourselves unhappy about it. I’m sure Eva acted like a little saint about it, and the girl can have no one to blame but herself.”

  “I know,” said Alice; “Eva told me about it. It was Aunt Maria, with her usual vigor and activity, who precipitated the catastrophe. Eva had just got the girl into good ways, and all was going smoo
thly, when Aunt Maria came in and broke everything up. I must say, I think Aunt Maria is a nuisance.”

  “Oh, Alice, how can you talk so, when you know that your aunt is thinking of nothing so much as how to serve and advance you girls?”

  “She is thinking of how to carry her own will and pleasure; and we girls are like so many ninepins that she wants to set up or knock down to suit her game. Now, she has gone and invited those Stephenson girls to spend the holidays with her.”

  “Well, you know it’s entirely on your account, Alice, —— you girls. The Stephensons are a very desirable family to cultivate.”

  “Yes; it’s all a sort of artifice, so that they may have to invite us to visit them next summer at Newport. NOW, I never was particularly interested in those girls. They always seemed to me insipid sort of people; and to feel obliged to be very attentive to them and cultivate their intimacy, with any such view, is a sort of maneuvering that is very repulsive to me; it doesn’t seem honest.”

  “But now your aunt has got them, and we must be attentive to them,” pleaded Mrs. Van Arsdel.

  “Oh, of course. What I am complaining of is that my aunt can’t let us alone; that she is always scheming for us, planning ahead for us, getting people that we must be attentive to, and all that; and then, because she’s our aunt and devoted to our interests, our conscience is all the while troubling us because we don’t like her better. The truth is, Aunt Maria is a constant annoyance to me, and I reproach myself for not being grateful to her. Now, Angelique and I are on a committee for buying the presents for the Christmas tree of our mission school, and we shall have to go and get the tree up; and it’s no small work to dress a Christmas tree — in fact, we shall just have our hands full, without the Stephensons. We are going up to Eva’s this very morning, to talk this matter over and make out our lists of things; and, for my part, I find the Stephensons altogether de trop.”