Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
We and Our Neighbors: or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street

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 Henry. "'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, then, 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 be 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 cannon balls 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.

There was something that piqued Eva's curiosity about these movements, and just as the door was opening behind her into the Vanderheyden house, the strange woman turned away, and as she turned, the light of the street-lamp flashed strongly on her face. Its expression of haggard pain and misery was something that struck to Eva's heart, though it was but a momentary glimpse, as she turned to go into the house; for, after all, the woman was nothing to her, and the glimpse of her face was purely an accident, such as occurs to one hundreds of times in the streets of a city.

Still, like the sound of a sob or a cry from one unknown, the misery of those dark eyes struck painfully to Eva's heart; as if to her, young, beloved, gay and happy, some of the ever-present but hidden anguish of life – the great invisible mass of sorrow – had made an appeal.

But she went in and shut the door, gave one sigh and dismissed it.

CHAPTER XIV
MR. ST. JOHN IS OUT-ARGUED

A woman has two vernal seasons in her life. One is the fresh, sweet-brier, apple-blossom spring of girlhood – dewy, bird-singing, joyous and transient. The other is the spring of young marriage, before the austere labors and severe strains of real life commence.

It is the spring of wedding presents, of first housekeeping, of incipient, undeveloped matronage. If the young girl is charming, with her dawning airs of womanhood, her inexperienced naïve assumptions, her grave, ignorant wisdom, at which elders smile indulgently – so is the new-made wife with her little matronly graces, her pretty sense of responsibility in her new world of power.

In the first period, the young girl herself is the object of attention and devotion. She is the permitted center of all eyes, the leading star of her own little drama of life. But with marriage the center changes. Self begins to melt away into something higher. The girl recognizes that it is no longer her individuality that is the chief thing, but that she is the priestess and minister of a family state. The home becomes her center, and to her home passes the charm that once was thrown around her person. The pride that she may have had in self becomes a pride in her home. Her home is the new impersonation of herself; it is her throne, her empire. How often do we see the young wife more sensitive to the adornment of her house than the adornment of her person, willing even to retrench and deny in the last, that her home may become more cheerful and attractive! A pretty set of china for her tea-table goes farther with her than a gay robe for herself. She will sacrifice ribbons and laces for means to adorn the sacred recesses which have become to her an expansion of her own being.

The freshness of a new life invests every detail of the freshly arranged ménage. Her china, her bronzes, her pictures, her silver, her table cloths and napkins, her closets and pantries, all speak to her of a new sense of possession – a new and different hold on life. Once she was only a girl, moving among things that belonged to mamma and papa; now she is a matron, surrounded everywhere by things that are her own – a princess in her own little kingdom. Nor is the charm lessened that she no longer uses the possessive singular, but says our. And behind those pronouns, we and our, what pleasant security! What innocent pharisaism of self-complacency, as each congratulates the other on "our" ways, "our" plans, "our" arrangements; each, the while, sure that they two are the fortunate among mankind, and that all who are not blest as they are proper subjects for indulgent pity. "After all, my dear," says he, "what can you expect of poor Snooks? – a bachelor, poor fellow. If he only had a wife like you, now," etc., etc. Or, "I can't really blame Cynthia with that husband of hers, Harry dear. If I were married to such a man, I should act like a little fiend. If she had only such a husband as you, now!" This secret, respectable, mutual admiration society of married life, of how much courage and hope is it the parent! For, do not our failures and mistakes often come from discouragement? Does not every human being need a believing second self, whose support and approbation shall reinforce one's failing courage? The saddest hours of life are when we doubt ourselves. To sensitive, excitable people, who expend nervous energy freely, must come many such low tides. "Am I really a miserable failure – a poor, good-for-nothing, abortive attempt?" In such crises we need another self to restore our equilibrium.

Our young friends were just in the second spring of life's new year. They were as fond and proud of their little house as a prince of his palace – possibly a good deal more so. They were proud of each other. Eva felt sure that Harry was destined to the high places of the literary world. She read his editorials with sincere admiration, hid his poems away in her heart, and pasted them carefully in her scrap-book. Fame and success she felt sure ought to come to him, and would. He was "such a faithful, noble-hearted fellow, and worked so steadily." And he, with what pride he spoke the words "my wife"! With what exultation repressed under an air of playful indifference he brought this and that associate in to dine, and enjoyed the admiration of her and her pretty home, and graceful, captivating ways. He liked to see the effect of her gay, sparkling conversation, her easy grace, on these new subjects; for Eva was, in truth, a charming woman. The mixture of innocent shrewdness, of sprightly insight, of bright and airy fancy about her, made her society a thing to be longed after, as people long for a pleasant stimulant. Like all bright, earnest young men, Harry wanted to "lend a hand" to make the world around him brighter and better, and had his ideas of what a charming, attractive home might do as a center to many hearts in promoting mutual brotherhood and good fellowship. He had not a doubt of their little social venture in society, nor that Eva was precisely the person to make of their house a pleasant resort, to be in herself the blending and interpreting medium through whom differing and even discordant natures should be brought to understand the good that was in one another.

As a preparation for the first experiment, Eva had commenced by inviting Mr. St. John to dinner, that she might enlist his approbation of her scheme and have time to set it before him in that charming fireside hour, when spirits, like flowers, open to catch the dews of influence. After dinner Harry had an engagement at the printing-office, and left Eva the field all to herself; and she managed her cards admirably. Mr. St. John had been little accustomed to the society of cultured, attractive women; but he had in his own refined nature every sensibility to respond agreeably to its influences; and already this fireside had come to be a place where he loved to linger. And so, when she had him comfortably niched in his corner, she opened the first parallel of her siege.

"Now, Mr. St. John, you have been preaching to us about self-denial, and putting us all up to deeds of self-sacrifice – I have some self-denying work to propose to you."

Mr. St. John opened his blue eyes wide at this exordium, and looked an interrogation.

"Well, Mr. St. John," pursued Eva, "we are going to have little social reunions at our house every Thursday, from seven till ten, for the purpose of promoting good feeling and fellowship, and we want our rector to be one of us and help us."

"Indeed, Mrs. Henderson, I have not the least social tact. My sphere doesn't lie at all in that direction," said Mr. St. John, nervously. "I have no taste for general society."

"Yes, but I think you told us last Sunday we were not to consult our tastes. You told us that if we felt a strong distaste for any particular course, it might possibly show that just here the true path of Christian heroism lay."

"You turn my words upon me, Mrs. Henderson. I was thinking then of the distaste that people usually feel for visiting the poor and making themselves practically familiar with the unlovely side of life."

"Well, but may it not apply the other way? You are perfectly familiar and at home among the poor, but you have always avoided society among cultured persons of your own class. May not the real self-denial for you lie there? You have a fastidious shrinking from strangers. May it not be your duty to overcome it? There are a great many I know in our circle who might be the better for knowing you. Have you a right to shrink back from them?"

Mr. St. John moved uneasily in his chair.

"Now," pursued Eva, "there's a young Dr. Campbell that I want you to know. To be sure, he isn't a believer in the church – not a believer at all, I fear; but still a charming, benevolent, kindly, open-hearted man, and I want him to know you, and come under good influences."

"I don't believe I'm at all adapted," said Mr. St. John, hesitatingly.

"Well, dear sir, what do you say to us when we say the same about mission work? Don't you tell us that if we honestly try we shall learn to adapt ourselves?"

"That is true," said St. John, frankly.

"Besides," said Eva, "Mr. St. John, Dr. Campbell might do you good. All your friends feel that you are too careless of your health. Indeed, we all feel great concern about it, and you might learn something of Dr. Campbell in this."

Thus Eva pursued her advantage with that fluent ability with which a pretty young woman at her own fireside always gets the best of the argument. Mr. St. John, attacked on the weak side of conscientiousness, was obliged at last to admit that to spend an evening with agreeable, cultivated, well-dressed people might be occasionally as much a shepherd's duty as to sit in the close, ill-smelling rooms of poverty and listen to the croonings and maunderings of the ill-educated, improvident, and foolish, who make so large a proportion of the less fortunate classes of society. It had been suggested to him that a highly-educated, agreeable young doctor, who talked materialism and dissented from the thirty-nine articles, might as properly be borne with as a drinking young mechanic who talked unbelief of a lower and less respectable order.

Now it so happened, by one of those unexpected coincidences that fall out in the eternal order of things, that Eva was reinforced in her course of argument by a silent and subtle influence, of which she was herself scarcely aware. The day seldom passed that one or other of her sisters did not form a part of her family circle, and on this day of all others the fates had willed that Angelique should come up to work on her Christmas presents by Eva's fireside.

Imagine, therefore, as the scene of this conversation, a fire-lighted room, the evening flicker of the blaze falling in flecks and flashes over books and pictures, and Mr. St. John in a dark, sheltered corner, surveying without being surveyed, listening to Eva's animated logic, and yet watching a very pretty tableau in the opposite corner.

There sat Angelique, listening to the conversation, with the fire-light falling in flashes on her golden hair and her lap full of worsteds – rosy, pink, blue, lilac, and yellow. Her little hands were busy in some fleecy wonder, designed to adorn the Christmas-tree for the mission school of his church; and she knit and turned and twisted the rosy mystery with an air of grave interest, the while giving an attentive ear to the conversation.

Mr. St. John was not aware that he was looking at her; in fact, he supposed he was listening to Eva, who was eloquently setting forth to him all the good points in Dr. Campbell's character, and the reasons why it was his duty to seek and cultivate his acquaintance; but while she spoke and while he replied he saw the little hands moving, and a sort of fairy web weaving, and the face changing as, without speaking a word, she followed with bright, innocent sympathy the course of the conversation.

When Eva, with a becoming air of matronly gravity, lectured him for his reckless treatment of his own health, and his want of a proper guide on that subject, Angelique's eyes seemed to say the same; and sometimes, when Eva turned just the faintest light of satire on the ascetic notions to which he was prone, those same eyes sparkled with that frank gaiety that her dimpled face seemed made to express. Now the kitten catches at her thread, and she stops, and bends over and dangles the ball, and laughs softly to herself, and St. John from his dark corner watches the play. There is something of the kitten in her, he thinks. Even her gravest words have suggested the air of a kitten on good behavior, and perhaps she may be a naughty, wicked kitten – who knows? A kitten lying in wait to catch unwary birds and mice! But she looked so artless – so innocent! – her little head bent on one side like a flower, and her eyes sparkling as if she were repressing a laugh! – a nervous idea shot through the conversation to Mr. St. John's heart. What if this girl should laugh at him? St. Jerome himself might have been vulnerable to a poisoned arrow like this. What if he really were getting absurd notions and ways in the owl-like recesses and retirements of his study – growing rusty, unfit for civilized life? Clearly it was his duty to "come forth into the light of things," and before he left that evening he gave his pledge to Eva that he would be one of the patrons of her new social enterprise.

It is to be confessed that as he went home that night he felt that duty had never worn an aspect so agreeable. It was certainly his place as a good fisher of men to study the habits of the cultured, refined, and influential portion of society, as well as of its undeveloped children. Then, he didn't say it to himself, but the scene where these investigations were to be pursued rose before him insensibly as one where Angelique was to be one of the entertainers. It would give him a better opportunity of studying the genus and habits of that variety of the church militant who train in the uniform of fashionable girls, and to decide the yet doubtful question whether they had any genuine capacity for church work. Angelique's evident success with her class was a puzzle to him, and he thought he would like to know her better, and see if real, earnest, serious purposes could exist under that gay exterior.

Somehow, he could not fancy those laughing eyes and that willful, curly, golden hair under the stiff cap of a Sister of Charity; and he even doubted whether a gray cloak would seem as appropriate as the blue robe and ermine cape where the poor little child had rested her scarred cheek. He liked to think of her just as she looked then and there. And why shouldn't he get acquainted with her? If he was ever going to form a sisterhood of good works, certainly it was his duty to understand the sisters. Clearly it was!