Elsie Venner

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


There were fragmentary delicacies enough left, of one kind and another,
at any rate, to make all the Colonel's family uncomfortable for the next
week. It bid fair to take as long to get rid of the remains of the great
party as it had taken to make ready for it.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had been dreaming, as young men dream, of
gliding shapes with bright eyes and burning cheeks, strangely blended
with red planets and hissing meteors, and, shining over all, the white,
un-wandering star of the North, girt with its tethered constellations.

After breakfast he walked into the parlor, where he found Miss Darley.
She was alone, and, holding a school-book in her hand, was at work with
one of the morning's lessons. She hardly noticed him as he entered,
being very busy with her book,--and he paused a moment before speaking,
and looked at her with a kind of reverence. It would not have been
strictly true to call her beautiful. For years,--since her earliest
womanhood,--those slender hands had taken the bread which repaid the toil
of heart and brain from the coarse palms which offered it in the world's
rude market. It was not for herself alone that she had bartered away the
life of her youth, that she had breathed the hot air of schoolrooms, that
she had forced her intelligence to posture before her will, as the
exigencies of her place required,--waking to mental labor,--sleeping to
dream of problems,--rolling up the stone of education for an endless
twelvemonth's term, to find it at the bottom of the hill again when
another year called her to its renewed duties, schooling her temper in
unending inward and outward conflicts, until neither dulness nor
obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could reach her serene
self-possession. Not for herself alone. Poorly as her prodigal labors
were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they cost, her value was
too well established to leave her without what, under other
circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient compensation. But
there were others who looked to her in their need, and so the modest
fountain which might have been filled to its brim was continually drained
through silent-flowing, hidden sluices.

Out of such a life, inherited from a race which had lived in conditions
not unlike her own, beauty, in the common sense of the term, could hardly
find leisure to develop and shape itself. For it must be remembered,
that symmetry and elegance of features and figure, like perfectly formed
crystals in the mineral world, are reached only by insuring a certain
necessary repose to individuals and to generations. Human beauty is an
agricultural product in the country, growing up in men and women as in
corn and cattle, where the soil is good. It is a luxury almost
monopolized by the rich in cities, bred under glass like their forced
pine-apples and peaches. Both in city and country, the evolution of the
physical harmonies which make music to our eyes requires a combination of
favorable circumstances, of which alternations of unburdened tranquillity
with intervals of varied excitement of mind and body are among the most
important. Where sufficient excitement is wanting, as often happens in
the country, the features, however rich in red and white, get heavy, and
the movements sluggish; where excitement is furnished in excess, as is
frequently the case in cities, the contours and colors are impoverished,
and the nerves begin to make their existence known to the consciousness,
as the face very soon informs us.

Helen Darley could not, in the nature of things, have possessed the kind
of beauty which pleases the common taste. Her eye was calm, sad-looking,
her features very still, except when her pleasant smile changed them for
a moment, all her outlines were delicate, her voice was very gentle, but
somewhat subdued by years of thoughtful labor, and on her smooth forehead
one little hinted line whispered already that Care was beginning to mark
the trace which Time sooner or later would make a furrow. She could not
be a beauty; if she had been, it would have been much harder for many
persons to be interested in her. For, although in the abstract we all
love beauty, and although, if we were sent naked souls into some
ultramundane warehouse of soulless bodies and told to select one to our
liking, we should each choose a handsome one, and never think of the
consequences,--it is quite certain that beauty carries an atmosphere of
repulsion as well as of attraction with it, alike in both sexes. We may
be well assured that there are many persons who no more think of
specializing their love of the other sex upon one endowed with signal
beauty, than they think of wanting great diamonds or thousand-dollar
horses. No man or woman can appropriate beauty without paying for
it,--in endowments, in fortune, in position, in self-surrender, or other
valuable stock; and there are a great many who are too poor, too
ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay any of these prices for
it. So the unbeautiful get many more lovers than the beauties; only, as
there are more of them, their lovers are spread thinner and do not make
so much show.

The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender
admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social
combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale
lambent nimbus round her head.

"I did not see you at the great party last evening," he said, presently.

She looked up and answered, "No. I have not much taste for such large
companies. Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me after it
has been paid for. There is always something to do, some lesson or
exercise,--and it so happened, I was very busy last night with the new
problems in geometry. I hope you had a good time."

"Very. Two or three of our girls were there. Rosa Milburn. What a
beauty she is! I wonder what she feeds on! Wine and musk and chloroform
and coals of fire, I believe; I didn't think there was such color and
flavor in a woman outside the tropics."

Miss Darley smiled rather faintly; the imagery was not just to her taste:
femineity often finds it very hard to accept the fact of muliebrity.

"Was"--?

She stopped short; but her question had asked itself.

"Elsie there? She was, for an hour or so. She looked frightfully
handsome. I meant to have spoken to her, but she slipped away before I
knew it."

"I thought she meant to go to the party," said Miss Darley. "Did she
look at you?"

"She did. Why?"

"And you did not speak to her?"

"No. I should have spoken to her, but she was gone when I looked for
her. A strange creature! Is n't there an odd sort of fascination about
her? You have not explained all the mystery about the girl. What does
she come to this school for? She seems to do pretty much as she likes
about studying."

Miss Darley answered in very low tones. "It was a fancy of hers to come,
and they let her have her way. I don't know what there is about her,
except that she seems to take my life out of me when she looks at me. I
don't like to ask other people about our girls. She says very little to
anybody, and studies, or makes believe to study, almost what she likes.
I don't know what she is," (Miss Darley laid her hand, trembling, on the
young master's sleeve,) "but I can tell when she is in the room without
seeing or hearing her. Oh, Mr. Langdon, I am weak and nervous, and no
doubt foolish,--but--if there were women now, as in the days of our
Saviour, possessed of devils, I should think there was something not
human looking out of Elsie Venner's eyes!"

The poor girl's breast rose and fell tumultuously as she spoke, and her
voice labored, as if some obstruction were rising in her throat.

A scene might possibly have come of it, but the door opened. Mr. Silas
Peckham. Miss Darley got away as soon as she well could.

"Why did not Miss Darley go to the party last evening?" said Mr. Bernard.

"Well, the fact is," answered Mr. Silas Peckham, "Miss Darley, she's
pooty much took up with the school. She's an industris young.
woman,--yis, she is industris,--but perhaps she a'n't quite so spry a
worker as some. Maybe, considerin' she's paid for her time, she is n't
fur out o' the way in occoopyin' herself evenin's,--that--is, if so be
she a'n't smart enough to finish up all her work in the daytime.
Edoocation is the great business of the Institoot. Amoosements are
objec's of a secondary natur', accordin' to my v'oo." [The unspellable
pronunciation of this word is the touchstone of New England Brahminism.]

Mr. Bernard drew a deep breath, his thin nostrils dilating, as if the air
did not rush in fast enough to cool his blood, while Silas Peckham was
speaking. The Head of the Apollinean Institute delivered himself of
these judicious sentiments in that peculiar acid, penetrating tone,
thickened with a nasal twang, which not rarely becomes hereditary after
three or four generations raised upon east winds, salt fish, and large,
white-bellied, pickled cucumbers. He spoke deliberately, as if weighing
his words well, so that, during his few remarks, Mr. Bernard had time for
a mental accompaniment with variations, accented by certain bodily
changes, which escaped Mr. Peckham's observation. First there was a
feeling of disgust and shame at hearing Helen Darley spoken of like a
dumb working animal. That sent the blood up into his cheeks. Then the
slur upon her probable want of force--her incapacity, who made the
character of the school and left this man to pocket its profits--sent a
thrill of the old Wentworth fire through him, so that his muscles
hardened, his hands closed, and he took the measure of Mr. Silas Peckham,
to see if his head would strike the wall in case he went over backwards
all of a sudden. This would not do, of course, and so the thrill passed
off and the muscles softened again. Then came that state of tenderness
in the heart, overlying wrath in the stomach, in which the eyes grow
moist like a woman's, and there is also a great boiling-up of
objectionable terms out of the deep-water vocabulary, so that Prudence
and Propriety and all the other pious P's have to jump upon the lid of
speech to keep them from boiling over into fierce articulation. All this
was internal, chiefly, and of course not recognized by Mr. Silas Peckham.
The idea, that any full-grown, sensible man should have any other notion
than that of getting the most work for the least money out of his
assistants, had never suggested itself to him.

Mr. Bernard had gone through this paroxysm, and cooled down, in the
period while Mr. Peckham was uttering these words in his thin, shallow
whine, twanging up into the frontal sinuses. What was the use of losing
his temper and throwing away his place, and so, among the consequences
which would necessarily follow, leaving the poor lady-teacher without a
friend to stand by her ready to lay his hand on the grand-inquisitor
before the windlass of his rack had taken one turn too many?

"No doubt, Mr. Peckham," he said, in a grave, calm voice, "there is a
great deal of work to be done in the school; but perhaps we can
distribute the duties a little more evenly after a time. I shall look
over the girls' themes myself, after this week. Perhaps there will be
some other parts of her labor that I can take on myself. We can arrange
a new programme of studies and recitations."

"We can do that," said Mr. Silas Peckham. "But I don't propose mater'lly
alterin' Miss Darley's dooties. I don't think she works to hurt herself.
Some of the Trustees have proposed interdoosin' new branches of study,
and I expect you will be pooty much occoopied with the dooties that
belong to your place. On the Sahbath you will be able to attend divine
service three times, which is expected of our teachers. I shall continoo
myself to give Sahbath Scriptur' readin's to the young ladies. That is a
solemn dooty I can't make up my mind to commit to other people. My
teachers enjoy the Lord's day as a day of rest. In it they do no manner
of work, except in cases of necessity or mercy, such as fillin' out
diplomas, or when we git crowded jest at the end of a term, or when there
is an extry number of p'oopils, or other Providential call to dispense
with the ordinance."

Mr. Bernard had a fine glow in his cheeks by this time,--doubtless
kindled by the thought of the kind consideration Mr. Peckham showed for
his subordinates in allowing them the between meeting-time on Sundays
except for some special reason. But the morning was wearing away; so he
went to the schoolroom, taking leave very properly of his respected
principal, who soon took his hat and departed.

Mr. Peckham visited certain "stores" or shops, where he made inquiries
after various articles in the provision-line, and effected a purchase or
two. Two or three barrels of potatoes, which had sprouted in a promising
way, he secured at a bargain. A side of feminine beef was also obtained
at a low figure. He was entirely satisfied with a couple of barrels of
flour, which, being invoiced "slightly damaged," were to be had at a
reasonable price.

After this, Silas Peckham felt in good spirits. He had done a pretty
stroke of business. It came into his head whether he might not follow it
up with a still more brilliant speculation. So he turned his steps in
the direction of Colonel Sprowle's.

It was now eleven o'clock, and the battle-field of last evening was as we
left it. Mr. Peckham's visit was unexpected, perhaps not very well
timed, but the Colonel received him civilly.

"Beautifully lighted,--these rooms last night!" said Mr. Peckham.
"Winter-strained?"

The Colonel nodded.

"How much do you pay for your winter-strained?"

The Colonel told him the price.

"Very hahnsome supper,--very hahnsome. Nothin' ever seen like it in
Rockland. Must have been a great heap of things leftover."

The compliment was not ungrateful, and the Colonel acknowledged it by
smiling and saying, "I should think the' was a trifle? Come and look."

When Silas Peckham saw how many delicacies had survived the evening's
conflict, his commercial spirit rose at once to the point of a proposal.

"Colonel Sprowle," said he, "there's 'meat and cakes and pies and pickles
enough on that table to spread a hahnsome colation. If you'd like to
trade reasonable, I think perhaps I should be willin' to take 'em off
your hands. There's been a talk about our havin' a celebration in the
Parnassian Grove, and I think I could work in what your folks don't want
and make myself whole by chargin' a small sum for tickets. Broken meats,
of course, a'n't of the same valoo as fresh provisions; so I think you
might be willin' to trade reasonable."

Mr. Peckham paused and rested on his proposal. It would not, perhaps,
have been very extraordinary, if Colonel Sprowle had entertained the
proposition. There is no telling beforehand how such things will strike
people. It didn't happen to strike the Colonel favorably. He had a
little red-blooded manhood in him.

"Sell you them things to make a colation out of?" the Colonel replied.
"Walk up to that table, Mr. Peckham, and help yourself! Fill your
pockets; Mr. Peckham! Fetch a basket, and our hired folks shall fill it
full for ye! Send a cart, if y' like, 'n' carry off them leavin's to
make a celebration for your pupils with! Only let me tell ye this:--as
sure 's my name's Hezekiah Spraowle, you 'll be known through the taown
'n' through the caounty, from that day forrard, as the Principal of the
Broken-Victuals Institoot!"

Even provincial human-nature sometimes has a touch of sublimity about it.
Mr. Silas Peckham had gone a little deeper than he meant, and come upon
the "hard pan," as the well-diggers call it, of the Colonel's character,
before he thought of it. A militia-colonel standing on his sentiments is
not to be despised. That was shown pretty well in New England two or
three generations ago. There were a good many plain officers that talked
about their "rigiment" and their "caounty" who knew very well how to say
"Make ready!" "Take aim!" "Fire!"--in the face of a line of grenadiers
with bullets in their guns and bayonets on them. And though a rustic
uniform is not always unexceptionable in its cut and trimmings, yet there
was many an ill-made coat in those old times that was good enough to be
shown to the enemy's front rank too often to be left on the field with a
round hole in its left lapel that matched another going right through the
brave heart of the plain country captain or major or colonel who was
buried in it under the crimson turf.

Mr. Silas Peckham said little or nothing. His sensibilities were not
acute, but he perceived that he had made a miscalculation. He hoped that
there was no offence,--thought it might have been mutooally agreeable,
conclooded he would give up the idee of a colation, and backed himself
out as if unwilling to expose the less guarded aspect of his person to
the risk of accelerating impulses.

The Colonel shut the door,--cast his eye on the toe of his right boot, as
if it had had a strong temptation,--looked at his watch, then round the
room, and, going to a cupboard, swallowed a glass of deep-red brandy and
water to compose his feelings.




CHAPTER IX.

THE DOCTOR ORDERS THE BEST SULKY. (With a Digression on "Hired Help.")

"ABEL! Slip Cassia into the new sulky, and fetch her round."

Abel was Dr. Kittredge's hired man. He was born in New Hampshire, a
queer sort of State, with fat streaks of soil and population where they
breed giants in mind and body, and lean streaks which export imperfectly
nourished young men with promising but neglected appetites, who may be
found in great numbers in all the large towns, or could be until of late
years, when they have been half driven out of their favorite
basement-stories by foreigners, and half coaxed away from them by
California. New Hampshire is in more than one sense the Switzerland of
New England. The "Granite State" being naturally enough deficient in
pudding-stone, its children are apt to wander southward in search of that
deposit,--in the unpetrified condition.

Abel Stebbins was a good specimen of that extraordinary hybrid or mule
between democracy and chrysocracy, a native-born New-England serving-man.
The Old World has nothing at all like him. He is at once an emperor and
a subordinate. In one hand he holds one five-millionth part (be the same
more or less) of the power that sways the destinies of the Great
Republic. His other hand is in your boot, which he is about to polish.
It is impossible to turn a fellow citizen whose vote may make his
master--say, rather, employer--Governor or President, or who may be one
or both himself, into a flunky. That article must be imported ready-made
from other centres of civilization. When a New Englander has lost his
self-respect as a citizen and as a man, he is demoralized, and cannot be
trusted with the money to pay for a dinner.

It may be supposed, therefore, that this fractional emperor, this
continent-shaper, finds his position awkward when he goes into service,
and that his employer is apt to find it still more embarrassing. It is
always under protest that the hired man does his duty. Every act of
service is subject to the drawback, "I am as good as you are." This is
so common, at least, as almost to be the rule, and partly accounts for
the rapid disappearance of the indigenous "domestic" from the basements
above mentioned. Paleontologists will by and by be examining the floors
of our kitchens for tracks of the extinct native species of serving-man.
The female of the same race is fast dying out; indeed, the time is not
far distant when all the varieties of young woman will have vanished from
New England, as the dodo has perished in the Mauritius. The young lady
is all that we shall have left, and the mop and duster of the last Ahnira
or Loizy will be stared at by generations of Bridgets and Noras as that
famous head and foot of the lost bird are stared at in the Ashmolean
Museum.

Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man, took the true American view of his
difficult position. He sold his time to the Doctor, and, having sold it,
he took care to fulfil his half of the bargain. The Doctor, on his part,
treated him, not like a gentleman, because one does not order a gentleman
to bring up his horse or run his errands, but he treated him like a man.
Every order was given in courteous terms. His reasonable privileges were
respected as much as if they had been guaranteed under hand and seal.
The Doctor lent him books from his own library, and gave him all friendly
counsel, as if he were a son or a younger brother.

Abel had Revolutionary blood in his veins, and though he saw fit to "hire
out," he could never stand the word "servant," or consider himself the
inferior one of the two high contracting parties. When he came to live
with the Doctor, he made up his mind he would dismiss the old gentleman,
if he did not behave according to his notions of propriety. But he soon
found that the Doctor was one of the right sort, and so determined to
keep him. The Doctor soon found, on his side, that he had a trustworthy,
intelligent fellow, who would be invaluable to him, if he only let him
have his own way of doing what was to be done.

The Doctor's hired man had not the manners of a French valet. He was
grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely smiled,
but was always at work in the daytime, and always reading in the evening.
He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man could properly do,
would go to the door or "tend table," bought the provisions for the
family,--in short, did almost everything for them but get their clothing.
There was no office in a perfectly appointed household, from that of
steward down to that of stable-boy, which he did not cheerfully assume.
His round of work not consuming all his energies, he must needs cultivate
the Doctor's garden, which he kept in one perpetual bloom, from the
blowing of the first crocus to the fading of the last dahlia.

This garden was Abel's poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos.
Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy
in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and
sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the
sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding
floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man.
It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect. He worshipped God according
to the strict way of his fathers; but a florist's Puritanism is always
colored by the petals of his flowers,--and Nature never shows him a
black corolla.

He may or may not figure again in this narrative; but as there must be
some who confound the New England hired man, native-born, with the
servant of foreign birth, and as there is the difference of two
continents and two civilizations between them, it did not seem fair to
let Abel bring round the Doctor's mare and sulky without touching his
features in half-shadow into our background.

The Doctor's mare, Cassia, was so called by her master from her cinnamon
color, cassia being one of the professional names for that spice or drug.
She was of the shade we call sorrel, or, as an Englishman would perhaps
say, chestnut,--a genuine "Morgan" mare, with a low forehand, as is
common in this breed, but with strong quarters and flat hocks, well
ribbed up, with a good eye and a pair of lively ears,--a first-rate
doctor's beast, would stand until her harness dropped off her back at the
door of a tedious case, and trot over hill and dale thirty miles in three
hours, if there was a child in the next county with a bean in its
windpipe and the Doctor gave her a hint of the fact. Cassia was not
large, but she had a good deal of action, and was the Doctor's
show-horse. There were two other animals in his stable: Quassia or
Quashy, the black horse, and Caustic, the old bay, with whom he jogged
round the village.

"A long ride to-day?" said Abel, as he brought up the equipage.

"Just out of the village,--that 's all.--There 's a kink in her
mane,--pull it out, will you?"

"Goin' to visit some of the great folks," Abel said to himself. "Wonder
who it is."--Then to the Doctor,--"Anybody get sick at Sprowles's? They
say Deacon Soper had a fit, after eatin' some o' their frozen victuals."

The Doctor smiled. He guessed the Deacon would do well enough. He was
only going to ride over to the Dudley mansion-house.




CHAPTER X.

THE DOCTOR CALLS ON ELSIE VENNER.

If that primitive physician, Chiron, M. D., appears as a Centaur, as we
look at him through the lapse of thirty centuries, the modern
country-doctor, if he could be seen about thirty miles off, could not be
distinguished from a wheel-animalcule. He inhabits a wheel-carriage. He
thinks of stationary dwellings as Long Tom Coffin did of land in general;
a house may be well enough for incidental purposes, but for a "stiddy"
residence give him a "kerridge." If he is classified in the Linnaean
scale, he must be set down thus: Genus Homo; Species Rotifer infusorius,
the wheel-animal of infusions.