Elsie Venner

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> Elsie Venner


There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have
noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water
gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for
years, but never have learned his name. About this person we shall have
accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;--thus, his face, figure,
gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may be
familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of our
consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never found
the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has idealized
itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk
the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff
and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person
dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and then it happens,
perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its
shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all its
real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some accident
reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried so long in
our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as a
fellow-citizen. Now the slack--water gentry are among the persons most
likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and
reality,--for the reason, that, playing no important part in the
community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the
public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we
cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from
them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been "dead-headed"
into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in his
pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for
reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived. I
will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are
three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each
of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar
interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental
character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are
Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have
in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in
perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them
is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place
has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and
down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and
private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of
the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have
grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out their ships all
over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre
or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once
lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of
the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions--like the
Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you
mount the broad staircase)--show that there was not only wealth, but
style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is
not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in
a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of
their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have
even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the
most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they had been
English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or some other
Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for
a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of
ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only
when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built and
organized in the present century.

--It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be an
only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his
meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel in
an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
Elizabeth Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon,
and others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they
stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean
pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight
stove has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose!
So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period,
to do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in
his studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him
the present means of support as a student.

You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a
certificate of his fitness to teach, and why I did not choose to urge him
to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without
ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he
must,--that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise. He was
not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary to allow
half-time to students engaged in school-keeping,--that is, to count a
year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his professional
studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is expected to be
under an instructor before applying for his degree,--he would not
necessarily lose more than a few months of time. He had a small library
of professional books, which he could take with him.

So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying with
him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young gentleman of
excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good education, and
that his services would be of great value in any school, academy, or
other institution, where young persons of-either sex were to be
instructed.

I confess, that expression, "either sex," ran a little thick, as I may
say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair
character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion, I
considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be let
loose in a roomful of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in love
just then--and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as they most
assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him, why, there
was no telling what gratitude and natural sensibility might bring about.

Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never
knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they act
as curses are said to,--come home to roost. Give them often enough,
until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some day or other, you
will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in any climate, or
somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of the youngest children.

I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all
right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach
myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others
into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could
not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated.
Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a young
girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous
experiment. Or, on the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature
should ever be concentrated on them, they would be absorbed into the very
depths of his nature, and then his blood would turn to flame and burn his
life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes that cover a
burning coal.

I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate. An academy for young
gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys' school, that
would be a very good place for him;--some of them are pretty rough, but
there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth strain of blood; he can give
any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out
of time in ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow as that out a
girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the dove-cotes!
I was a fool,--that's all.

I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words until
it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny. I could hardly
sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which might
take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or prospects.
What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial misalliances
where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet flings his
magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some fresh-faced,
half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him than her
father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To think of
the eagle's wings, being clipped so that he shall never lift himself over
the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always must,--because, as
one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves, a woman, and a woman a
man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary. You think yourself
a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least
five-thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you
would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and
nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection. And you, my
dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but
if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of
whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you
would

"First endure, then pity, then embrace,"

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked
out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor
patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better
kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The
great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the
poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody
is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich,
though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common
practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not
get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he
died.

Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep them
clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting
indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and had
once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon
be an opening into the Doctor's Paradise,--the streets with only one side
to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,--set up a nice
little coach, and be driven round like a first-class London doctor,
instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting
anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape Ann fishing-smack. By
the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his
way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the
background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as to
become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not
have him marry until he knew his level,--that is, again, looking at the
matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments
at all into consideration. But remember, that a young man, using large
endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with the
highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging labor.
And to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is something
in itself,--that is, if you like money, and influence, and a seat on the
platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of
places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal better than
any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute
in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand
aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special
vocation.

That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I
have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit
to teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he will run like a moth
into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up
in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him.
Oh, yes! country doctor,--half a dollar a visit,--drive, drive, drive
all day,--get up at night and harness your own horse,--drive again ten
miles in a snow-storm, shake powders out of two phials, (pulv.
glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac. as partes equates,)--drive back again,
if you don't happen to get stuck in a drift, no home, no peace, no
continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social
intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel
like the mummy of an Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture,
and was dug up a hundred years afterwards! Why did n't I warn him about
love and all that nonsense? Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do
with it, yet awhile? Why did n't I hold up to him those awful examples I
could have cited, where poor young fellows who could just keep themselves
afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for
a life-preserver? All this of two words in a certificate!




CHAPTER III.

MR. BERNARD TRIES HIS HAND.

Whether the Student advertised for a school, or whether he fell in with
the advertisement of a school-committee, is not certain. At any rate, it
was not long before he found himself the head of a large district, or, as
it was called by the inhabitants, "deestric" school, in the flourishing
inland village of Pequawkett, or, as it is commonly spelt, Pigwacket
Centre. The natives of this place would be surprised, if they should
hear that any of the readers of a work published in Boston were
unacquainted with so remarkable a locality. As, however, some copies of
it may be read at a distance from this distinguished metropolis, it may
be well to give a few particulars respecting the place, taken from the
Universal Gazetteer.

"PIGWACKET, sometimes spelt Pequawkett. A post-village and township in
_________ Co., State of _________,situated in a fine agricultural region,
2 thriving villages, Pigwacket Centre and Smithville, 3 churches, several
school houses, and many handsome private residences. Mink River runs
through the town, navigable for small boats after heavy rains. Muddy
Pond at N. E. section, well stocked with horn pouts, eels, and shiners.
Products, beef, pork, butter, cheese. Manufactures, shoe-pegs,
clothes-pins, and tin-ware. Pop. 1373."

The reader may think there is nothing very remarkable implied in this
description. If, however he had read the town-history, by the Rev. Jabez
Grubb, he would have learned, that, like the celebrated Little
Pedlington, it was distinguished by many very remarkable advantages.
Thus:

"The situation of Pigwacket is eminently beautiful, looking down the
lovely valley of Mink River, a tributary of the Musquash. The air is
salubrious, and many of the inhabitants have attained great age, several
having passed the allotted period of 'three-score years and ten' before
succumbing to any of the various 'ills that flesh is heir to.' Widow
Comfort Leevins died in 1836 AEt. LXXXVII. years. Venus, an African,
died in 1841, supposed to be C. years old. The people are distinguished
for intelligence, as has been frequently remarked by eminent
lyceum-lecturers, who have invariably spoken in the highest terms of a
Pigwacket audience. There is a public library, containing nearly a
hundred volumes, free to all subscribers. The preached word is well
attended, there is a flourishing temperance society, and the schools are
excellent. It is a residence admirably adapted to refined families who
relish the beauties of Nature and the charms of society. The Honorable
John Smith, formerly a member of the State Senate, was a native of this
town."

That is the way they all talk. After all, it is probably pretty much
like other inland New England towns in point of "salubrity,"--that is,
gives people their choice of dysentery or fever every autumn, with a
season-ticket for consumption, good all the year round. And so of the
other pretences. "Pigwacket audience," forsooth! Was there ever an
audience anywhere, though there wasn't a pair of eyes in it brighter than
pickled oysters, that did n't think it was "distinguished for
intelligence"?--"The preached word"! That means the Rev. Jabez Grubb's
sermons. "Temperance society"! "Excellent schools"! Ah, that is just
what we were talking about.

The truth was, that District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, had had a good deal
of trouble of late with its schoolmasters. The committee had done their
best, but there were a number of well-grown and pretty rough young
fellows who had got the upper-hand of the masters, and meant to keep it.
Two dynasties had fallen before the uprising of this fierce democracy.
This was a thing that used to be not very uncommon; but in so
"intelligent" a community as that of Pigwacket Centre, in an era of
public libraries and lyceum-lectures, it was portentous and alarming.

The rebellion began under the ferule of Master Weeks, a slender youth
from a country college, underfed, thin-blooded, sloping-shouldered,
knock-kneed, straight-haired, weak-bearded, pale-eyed, wide-pupilled,
half-colored; a common type enough in in-door races, not rich enough to
pick and choose in their alliances. Nature kills off a good many of this
sort in the first teething-time, a few in later childhood, a good many
again in early adolescence; but every now and then one runs the gauntlet
of her various diseases, or rather forms of one disease, and grows up, as
Master Weeks had done.

It was a very foolish thing for him to try to inflict personal punishment
on such a lusty young fellow as Abner Briggs, Junior, one of the "hardest
customers" in the way of a rough-and-tumble fight that there were
anywhere round. No doubt he had been insolent, but it would have been
better to overlook it. It pains me to report the events which took place
when the master made his rash attempt to maintain his authority. Abner
Briggs, Junior, was a great, hulking fellow, who had been bred to
butchering, but urged by his parents to attend school, in order to learn
the elegant accomplishments of reading and writing, in which he was sadly
deficient. He was in the habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in
school-hours, of throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural
and easy process, of occasional insolence and general negligence. One of
the soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master's
head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it adhered
in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo. The master looked round
and saw the young butcher's arm in an attitude which pointed to it
unequivocally as the source from which the projectile had taken its
flight.

Master Weeks turned pale. He must "lick" Abner Briggs, Junior, or
abdicate. So he determined to lick Abner Briggs, Junior.

"Come here, Sir!" he said; "you have insulted me and outraged the decency
of the schoolroom often enough! Hold out your hand!"

The young fellow grinned and held it out. The master struck at it with
his black ruler, with a will in the blow and a snapping of the eyes, as
much as to say that he meant to make him smart this time. The young
fellow pulled his hand back as the ruler came down, and the master hit
himself a vicious blow with it on the right knee. There are things no
man can stand. The master caught the refractory youth by the collar and
began shaking him, or rather shaking himself against him.

"Le' go o' that are coat, naow," said the fellow, "or I 'll make ye! 'T
'll take tew on yet' handle me, I tell ye, 'n' then ye caant dew
it!"--and the young pupil returned the master's attention by catching
hold of his collar.

When it comes to that, the best man, not exactly in the moral sense, but
rather in the material, and more especially the muscular point of view,
is very apt to have the best of it, irrespectively of the merits of the
case. So it happened now. The unfortunate schoolmaster found himself
taking the measure of the sanded floor, amidst the general uproar of the
school. From that moment his ferule was broken, and the school-committee
very soon had a vacancy to fill.

Master Pigeon, the successor of Master Weeks, was of better stature, but
loosely put together, and slender-limbed. A dreadfully nervous kind of
man he was, walked on tiptoe, started at sudden noises, was distressed
when he heard a whisper, had a quick, suspicious look, and was always
saying, "Hush?" and putting his hands to his ears. The boys were not
long in finding out this nervous weakness, of course. In less than a week
a regular system of torments was inaugurated, full of the most diabolical
malice and ingenuity. The exercises of the conspirators varied from day
to day, but consisted mainly of foot-scraping, solos on the slate-pencil,
(making it screech on the slate,) falling of heavy books, attacks of
coughing, banging of desk-lids, boot-creaking, with sounds as of drawing
a cork from time to time, followed by suppressed chuckles.

Master Pigeon grew worse and worse under these inflictions. The rascally
boys always had an excuse for any one trick they were caught at. "Could
n' help coughin', Sir." "Slipped out o' m' han', Sir." "Did n' go to,
Sir." "Did n' dew't o' purpose, Sir." And so on,--always the best of
reasons for the most outrageous of behavior. The master weighed himself
at the grocer's on a platform balance, some ten days after he began
keeping the school. At the end of a week he weighed himself again. He
had lost two pounds. At the end of another week he had lost five. He
made a little calculation, based on these data, from which he learned
that in a certain number of months, going on at this rate, he should come
to weigh precisely nothing at all; and as this was a sum in subtraction
he did not care to work out in practice, Master Pigeon took to himself
wings and left the school-committee in possession of a letter of
resignation and a vacant place to fill once more.

This was the school to which Mr. Bernard Langdon found himself appointed
as master. He accepted the place conditionally, with the understanding
that he should leave it at the end of a month, if he were tired of it.

The advent of Master Langdon to Pigwacket Centre created a much more
lively sensation than had attended that of either of his predecessors.
Looks go a good way all the world over, and though there were several
good-looking people in the place, and Major Bush was what the natives of
the town called a "hahnsome mahn," that is, big, fat, and red, yet the
sight of a really elegant young fellow, with the natural air which grows
up with carefully-bred young persons, was a novelty. The Brahmin blood
which came from his grandfather as well as from his mother, a direct
descendant of the old Flynt family, well known by the famous tutor, Henry
Flynt, (see Cat. Harv. Anno 1693,) had been enlivened and enriched by
that of the Wentworths, which had had a good deal of ripe old Madeira and
other generous elements mingled with it, so that it ran to gout sometimes
in the old folks and to high spirit, warm complexion, and curly hair in
some of the younger ones. The soft curling hair Mr. Bernard had
inherited,--something, perhaps, of the high spirit; but that we shall
have a chance of finding out by and by. But the long sermons and the
frugal board of his Brahmin ancestry, with his own habits of study, had
told upon his color, which was subdued to something more of delicacy than
one would care to see in a young fellow with rough work before him.
This, however, made him look more interesting, or, as the young ladies at
Major Bush's said, "interestin'."