Part 32

You are right, said I,--there's nothing in the world like rhymes to cool off a man's passion. You look at a blacksmith working on a bit of iron or steel. Bright enough it looked while it was on the hearth, in the midst of the sea-coal, the great bellows blowing away, and the rod or the horse-shoe as red or as white as the burning coals. How it fizzes as it goes into the trough of water, and how suddenly all the glow is gone! It looks black and cold enough now. Just so with your passionate incandescence. It is all well while it burns and scintillates in your emotional centres, without articulate and connected expression; but the minute you plunge it into the rhyme-trough it cools down, and becomes as dead and dull as the cold horse-shoe. It is true that if you lay it cold on the anvil and hammer away on it for a while it warms up somewhat. Just so with the rhyming fellow,--he pounds away on his verses and they warm up a little. But don't let him think that this afterglow of composition is the same thing as the original passion. That found expression in a few oh, oh's, eheu's, helas, helas's, and when the passion had burned itself out you got the rhymed verses, which, as I have said, are its ashes.

I thanked Number Seven for his poetical illustration of my thesis. There is great good to be got out of a squinting brain, if one only knows how to profit by it. We see only one side of the moon, you know, but a fellow with a squinting brain seems now and then to get a peep at the other side. I speak metaphorically. He takes new and startling views of things we have always looked at in one particular aspect. There is a rule invariably to be observed with one of this class of intelligences: Never contradict a man with a squinting brain. I say a man, because I do not think that squinting brains are nearly so common in women as they are in men. The “eccentrics” are, I think, for the most part of the male sex.

That leads me to say that persons with a strong instinctive tendency to contradiction are apt to become unprofitable companions. Our thoughts are plants that never flourish in inhospitable soils or chilling atmospheres. They are all started under glass, so to speak; that is, sheltered and fostered in our own warm and sunny consciousness. They must expect some rough treatment when we lift the sash from the frame and let the outside elements in upon them. They can bear the rain and the breezes, and be all the better for them; but perpetual contradiction is a pelting hailstorm, which spoils their growth and tends to kill them out altogether.

Now stop and consider a moment. Are not almost all brains a little wanting in bilateral symmetry? Do you not find in persons whom you love, whom you esteem, and even admire, some marks of obliquity in mental vision? Are there not some subjects in looking at which it seems to you impossible that they should ever see straight? Are there not moods in which it seems to you that they are disposed to see all things out of plumb and in false relations with each other? If you answer these questions in the affirmative, then you will be glad of a hint as to the method of dealing with your friends who have a touch of cerebral strabismus, or are liable to occasional paroxysms of perversity. Let them have their head. Get them talking on subjects that interest them. As a rule, nothing is more likely to serve this purpose than letting them talk about themselves; if authors, about their writings; if artists, about their pictures or statues; and generally on whatever they have most pride in and think most of their own relations with.

Perhaps you will not at first sight agree with me in thinking that slight mental obliquity is as common as I suppose. An analogy may have some influence on your belief in this matter. Will you take the trouble to ask your tailor how many persons have their two shoulders of the same height? I think he will tell you that the majority of his customers show a distinct difference of height on the two sides. Will you ask a portrait-painter how many of those who sit to hint have both sides of their faces exactly alike? I believe he will tell you that one side is always a little better than the other. What will your hatter say about the two sides of the head? Do you see equally well with both eyes, and hear equally well with both ears? Few persons past middle age will pretend that they do. Why should the two halves of a brain not show a natural difference, leading to confusion of thought, and very possibly to that instinct of contradiction of which I was speaking? A great deal of time is lost in profitless conversation, and a good deal of ill temper frequently caused, by not considering these organic and practically insuperable conditions. In dealing with them, acquiescence is the best of palliations and silence the sovereign specific.

I have been the reporter, as you have seen, of my own conversation and that of the other Teacups. I have told some of the circumstances of their personal history, and interested, as I hope, here and there a reader in the fate of different members of our company. Here are our pretty Delilah and our Doctor provided for. We may take it for granted that it will not be very long that the young couple will have to wait; for, as I have told you all, the Doctor is certainly getting into business, and bids fair to have a thriving practice before he saddles his nose with an eyeglass and begins to think of a pair of spectacles. So that part of our little domestic drama is over, and we can only wish the pair that is to be all manner of blessings consistent with a reasonable amount of health in the community on whose ailings must depend their prosperity.

All our thoughts are now concentrated on the relation existing between Number Five and the Tutor. That there is some profound instinctive impulse which is drawing them closer together no one who watches them can for a moment doubt. There are two principles of attraction which bring different natures together: that in which the two natures closely resemble each other, and that in which one is complementary of the other. In the first case, they coalesce, as do two drops of water or of mercury, and become intimately blended as soon as they touch; in the other, they rush together as an acid and an alkali unite, predestined from eternity to find all they most needed in each other. What is the condition of things in the growing intimacy of Number Five and the Tutor? He is many years her junior, as we know. Both of them look that fact squarely in the face. The presumption is against the union of two persons under these circumstances. Presumptions are strong obstacles against any result we wish to attain, but half our work in life is to overcome them. A great many results look in the distance like six-foot walls, and when we get nearer prove to be only five-foot hurdles, to be leaped over or knocked down. Twenty years from now she may be a vigorous and active old woman, and he a middle-aged, half-worn-out invalid, like so many overworked scholars. Everything depends on the number of drops of the elixir vitae which Nature mingled in the nourishment she administered to the embryo before it tasted its mother's milk. Think of Cleopatra, the bewitching old mischief-maker; think of Ninon de L'Enclos, whose own son fell desperately in love with her, not knowing the relation in which she stood to him; think of Dr. Johnson's friend, Mrs. Thrale, afterward Mrs. Piozzi, who at the age of eighty was full enough of life to be making love ardently and persistently to Conway, the handsome young actor. I can readily believe that Number Five will outlive the Tutor, even if he is fortunate enough rather in winning his way into the fortress through gates that open to him of their own accord. If he fails in his siege, I do really believe he will die early; not of a broken heart, exactly, but of a heart starved, with the food it was craving close to it, but unattainable. I have, therefore, a deep interest in knowing how Number Five and the Tutor are getting along together. Is there any danger of one or the other growing tired of the intimacy, and becoming willing to get rid of it, like a garment which has shrunk and grown too tight? Is it likely that some other attraction may come into disturb the existing relation? The problem is to my mind not only interesting, but exceptionally curious. You remember the story of Cymon and Iphigenia as Dryden tells it. The poor youth has the capacity of loving, but it lies hidden in his undeveloped nature. All at once he comes upon the sleeping beauty, and is awakened by her charms to a hitherto unfelt consciousness. With the advent of the new passion all his dormant faculties start into life, and the seeming simpleton becomes the bright and intelligent lover. The case of Number Five is as different from that of Cymon as it could well be. All her faculties are wide awake, but one emotional side of her nature has never been called into active exercise. Why has she never been in love with any one of her suitors? Because she liked too many of them. Do you happen to remember a poem printed among these papers, entitled “I Like You and I Love You”?

No one of the poems which have been placed in the urn,--that is, in the silver sugar-bowl,--has had any name attached to it; but you could guess pretty nearly who was the author of some of them, certainly of the one just, referred to. Number Five was attracted to the Tutor from the first time he spoke to her. She dreamed about him that night, and nothing idealizes and renders fascinating one in whom we have already an interest like dreaming of him or of her. Many a calm suitor has been made passionate by a dream; many a passionate lover has been made wild and half beside himself by a dream; and now and then an infatuated but hapless lover, waking from a dream of bliss to a cold reality of wretchedness, has helped himself to eternity before he was summoned to the table.

Since Number Five had dreamed about the Tutor, he had been more in her waking thoughts than she was willing to acknowledge. These thoughts were vague, it is true,--emotions, perhaps, rather than worded trains of ideas; but she was conscious of a pleasing excitement as his name or his image floated across her consciousness; she sometimes sighed as she looked over the last passage they had read from the same book, and sometimes when they were together they were silent too long,--too long! What were they thinking of?

And so it was all as plain sailing for Number Five and the young Tutor as it had been for Delilah and the young Doctor, was it? Do you think so? Then you do not understand Number Five. Many a woman has as many atmospheric rings about her as the planet Saturn. Three are easily to be recognized. First, there is the wide ring of attraction which draws into itself all that once cross its outer border. These revolve about her without ever coming any nearer. Next is the inner ring of attraction. Those who come within its irresistible influence are drawn so close that it seems as if they must become one with her sooner or later. But within this ring is another,--an atmospheric girdle, one of repulsion, which love, no matter how enterprising, no matter how prevailing or how insinuating, has never passed, and, if we judge of what is to be by what has been, never will. Perhaps Nature loved Number Five so well that she grudged her to any mortal man, and gave her this inner girdle of repulsion to guard her from all who would know her too nearly and love her too well. Sometimes two vessels at sea keep each other company for a long distance, it may be daring a whole voyage. Very pleasant it is to each to have a companion to exchange signals with from time to time; to came near enough, when the winds are light, to hold converse in ordinary tones from deck to deck; to know that, in case of need, there's help at hand. It is good for them to be near each other, but not good to be too near. Woe is to them if they touch! The wreck of one or both is likely to be the consequence. And so two well-equipped and heavily freighted natures may be the best of companions to each other, and yet must never attempt to come into closer union. Is this the condition of affairs between Number Five and the Tutor? I hope not, for I want them to be joined together in that dearest of intimacies, which, if founded in true affinity, is the nearest approach to happiness to be looked for in our mortal, experience. We mast wait. The Teacups will meet once more before the circle is broken, and we may, perhaps, find the solution of the question we have raised.

In the mean time, our young Doctor is playing truant oftener than ever. He has brought Avis,--if we must call her so, and not Delilah,--several times to take tea with us. It means something, in these days, to graduate from one of our first-class academies or collegiate schools. I shall never forget my first visit to one of these institutions. How much its pupils know, I said, which I was never taught, and have never learned! I was fairly frightened to see what a teaching apparatus was provided for them. I should think the first thing to be done with most of the husbands, they are likely to get would be to put them through a course of instruction. The young wives must find their lords wofully ignorant, in a large proportion of cases. When the wife has educated the husband to such a point that she can invite him to work out a problem in the higher mathematics or to perform a difficult chemical analysis with her as his collaborator, as less instructed dames ask their husbands to play a game of checkers or backgammon, they can have delightful and instructive evenings together. I hope our young Doctor will take kindly to his wife's (that is to be) teachings.

When the following verses were taken out of the urn, the Mistress asked me to hand the manuscript to the young Doctor to read. I noticed that he did not keep his eyes very closely fixed on the paper. It seemed as if he could have recited the lines without referring to the manuscript at all.

AT THE TURN OF THE ROAD.

The glory has passed from the goldenrod's plume, The purple-hued asters still linger in bloom; The birch is bright yellow, the sumachs are red, The maples like torches aflame overhead.

But what if the joy of the summer is past, And winter's wild herald is blowing his blast? For me dull November is sweeter than May, For my love is its sunshine,--she meets me to-day!

Will she come? Will the ring-dove return to her nest? Will the needle swing back from the east or the west? At the stroke of the hour she will be at her gate; A friend may prove laggard,--love never comes late.

Do I see her afar in the distance? Not yet. Too early! Too early! She could not forget! When I cross the old bridge where the brook overflowed, She will flash full in sight at the turn of the road.

I pass the low wall where the ivy entwines; I tread the brown pathway that leads through the pines; I haste by the boulder that lies in the field, Where her promise at parting was lovingly sealed.

Will she come by the hillside or round through the wood? Will she wear her brown dress or her mantle and hood? The minute draws near,--but her watch may go wrong; My heart will be asking, What keeps her so long?

Why doubt for a moment? More shame if I do! Why question? Why tremble? Are angels more true? She would come to the lover who calls her his own Though she trod in the track of a whirling cyclone!

--I crossed the old bridge ere the minute had passed. I looked: lo! my Love stood before me at last. Her eyes, how they sparkled, her cheeks, how they glowed, As we met, face to face, at the turn of the road!

XII

There was a great tinkling of teaspoons the other evening, when I took my seat at the table, where all The Teacups were gathered before my entrance. The whole company arose, and the Mistress, speaking for them, expressed the usual sentiment appropriate to such occasions. “Many happy returns” is the customary formula. No matter if the object of this kind wish is a centenarian, it is quite safe to assume that he is ready and very willing to accept as many more years as the disposing powers may see fit to allow him.

The meaning of it all was that this was my birthday. My friends, near and distant, had seen fit to remember it, and to let me know in various pleasant ways that they had not forgotten it. The tables were adorned with flowers. Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects were displayed on a side table. A great green wreath, which must have cost the parent oak a large fraction of its foliage, was an object of special admiration. Baskets of flowers which had half unpeopled greenhouses, large bouquets of roses, fragrant bunches of pinks, and many beautiful blossoms I am not botanist enough to name had been coming in upon me all day long. Many of these offerings were brought by the givers in person; many came with notes as fragrant with good wishes as the flowers they accompanied with their natural perfumes.

How old was I, The Dictator, once known by another equally audacious title,--I, the recipient of all these favors and honors? I had cleared the eight-barred gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer, far fewer, go over, a year before. I was a trespasser on the domain belonging to another generation. The children of my coevals were fast getting gray and bald, and their children beginning to look upon the world as belonging to them, and not to their sires and grandsires. After that leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a kind of impropriety to keep on as if one were still of a reasonable age. Sometimes it seems to me almost of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering about in the preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper guards so jealously. But, on the other hand, I remember that men of science have maintained that the natural life of man is nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. I always think of a familiar experience which I bring from the French cafes, well known to me in my early manhood. One of the illustrated papers of my Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.

A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table. He has just had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit verre. Most of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but there may be here and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic fluids, living among the bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not aware that the words, as commonly used, signify a small glass--a very small glass--of spirit, commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-cafe, or coffee-chaser. This drinking of brandy, “neat,” I may remark by the way, is not quite so bad as it looks. Whiskey or rum taken unmixed from a tumbler is a knock-down blow to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.

Well,--to go back behind our brackets,--the guest is calling to the waiter, “Garcon! et le bain de pieds!” Waiter! and the foot-bath!--The little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy rung over into this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer.

Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit. At seventy years it used to be said that the little glass was full. We should be more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and Tennyson and our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking, writing, speaking, in the green preserve belonging to their children and grandchildren, and Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in the distance. But, returning resolutely to the petit verre, I am willing to concede that all after fourscore is the bain de pieds,--the slopping over, so to speak, of the full measure of life. I remember that one who was very near and dear to me, and who lived to a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the century did not look very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very sweet, natural way for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a burden to her children, themselves getting well into years. It is not hard to understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the case of that beloved nonagenarian. I have known few persons, young or old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose memory comes up before me as I write.