As they were swinging slowly along the engine suddenly fell into a panic, puffing and sending up shrill shrieks of fear in rapid succession. There was a sedate cow on the track. The engine was agitated, it shrieked more shrilly, and began backing in visible terror. Everybody jumped and stood up, and the women clung to the men, all frightened. It was a beautiful exhibition of the sweet dependence of the sex in the hour of danger. The cow was more terrible than a lion on the track. The passengers all trembled like the engine. In fact, the only calm being was the cow, which, after satisfying her curiosity, walked slowly off, wondering what it was all about.
The cog-wheel railway is able to transport a large number of excursionists to the top of the mountain in the course of the morning. The tourists usually arrive there about the time the mist has crept up from the valleys and enveloped everything. Our party had the common experience. The Summit House, the Signal Station, the old Tip-top House, which is lashed down with cables, and rises ten feet higher than the highest crag, were all in the clouds. Nothing was to be seen except the dim outline of these buildings.
“I wonder,” said Mrs. Farquhar, as they stumbled along over the slippery stones, “what people come here for.”
“Just what we came for,” answered Forbes, “to say they have been on top of the mountain.”
They took refuge in the hotel, but that also was invaded by the damp, chill atmosphere, wrapped in and pervaded by the clouds. From the windows nothing more was to be seen than is visible in a Russian steam bath. But the tourists did not mind. They addressed themselves to the business in hand. This was registering their names. A daily newspaper called Among the Clouds is published here, and every person who gets his name on the register in time can see it in print before the train goes. When the train descends, every passenger has one of these two-cent certificates of his exploit. When our party entered, there was a great run on the register, especially by women, who have a repugnance, as is well known, to seeing their names in print. In the room was a hot stove, which was more attractive than the cold clouds, but unable to compete in interest with the register. The artist, who seemed to be in a sardonic mood, and could get no chance to enter his name, watched the scene, while his friends enjoyed the view of the stove. After registering, the visitors all bought note-paper with a chromo heading, “Among the Clouds,” and a natural wild-flower stuck on the corner, and then rushed to the writing-room in order to indite an epistle “from the summit.” This is indispensable.
After that they were ready for the Signal Station. This is a great attraction. The sergeant in charge looked bored to death, and in the mood to predict the worst kind of weather. He is all day beset with a crowd craning their necks to look at him, and bothered with ten thousand questions. He told King that the tourists made his life miserable; they were a great deal worse than the blizzards in the winter. And the government, he said, does not take this into account in his salary.
Occasionally there was an alarm that the mist was getting thin, that the clouds were about to break, and a rush was made out-of-doors, and the tourists dispersed about on the rocks. They were all on the qui vine to see the hotel or the boarding-house they had left in the early morning. Excursionists continually swarmed in by rail or by carriage road. The artist, who had one of his moods for wanting to see nature, said there were too many women; he wanted to know why there were always so many women on excursions. “You can see nothing but excursionists; whichever way you look, you see their backs.” These backs, looming out of the mist, or discovered in a rift, seemed to enrage him.
At length something actually happened. The curtain of cloud slowly lifted, exactly as in a theatre; for a moment there was a magnificent view of peaks, forests, valleys, a burst of sunshine on the lost world, and then the curtain dropped, amid a storm of “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and intense excitement. Three or four times, as if in response to the call of the spectators, this was repeated, the curtain lifting every time on a different scene, and then it was all over, and the heavy mist shut down on the registered and the unregistered alike. But everybody declared that they preferred it this way; it was so much better to have these wonderful glimpses than a full view. They would go down and brag over their good-fortune.
The excursionists by-and-by went away out of the clouds, gliding breathlessly down the rails. When snow covers this track, descent is sometimes made on a toboggan, but it is such a dangerous venture that all except the operatives are now forbidden to try it. The velocity attained of three and a half miles in three minutes may seem nothing to a locomotive engineer who is making up time; it might seem slow to a lover whose sweetheart was at the foot of the slide; to ordinary mortals a mile a minute is quite enough on such an incline.
Our party, who would have been much surprised if any one had called them an excursion, went away on foot down the carriage road to the Glen House. A descent of a few rods took them into the world of light and sun, and they were soon beyond the little piles of stones which mark the spots where tourists have sunk down bewildered in the mist and died of exhaustion and cold. These little mounds help to give Mount Washington its savage and implacable character. It is not subdued by all the roads and rails and scientific forces. For days it may lie basking and smiling in the sun, but at any hour it is liable to become inhospitable and pitiless, and for a good part of the year the summit is the area of elemental passion.
How delightful it was to saunter down the winding road into a region of peace and calm; to see from the safe highway the great giants in all their majesty; to come to vegetation, to the company of familiar trees, and the haunts of men! As they reached the Glen House all the line of rugged mountain-peaks was violet in the reflected rays. There were people on the porch who were looking at this spectacle. Among them the eager eyes of King recognized Irene.
“Yes, there she is,” cried Mrs. Farquhar; “and there—oh, what a treacherous North——is Mr. Meigs also.”
It was true. There was Mr. Meigs, apparently domiciled with the Benson family. There might have been a scene, but fortunately the porch was full of loungers looking at the sunset, and other pedestrians in couples and groups were returning from afternoon strolls. It might be the crisis of two lives, but to the spectator nothing more was seen than the everyday meeting of friends and acquaintances. A couple say good-night at the door of a drawing-room. Nothing has happened—nothing except a look, nothing except the want of pressure of the hand. The man lounges off to the smoking-room, cool and indifferent; the woman, in her chamber, falls into a passion of tears, and at the end of a wakeful night comes into a new world, hard and cold and uninteresting. Or the reverse happens. It is the girl who tosses the thing off with a smile, perhaps with a sigh, as the incident of a season, while the man, wounded and bitter, loses a degree of respect for woman, and pitches his life henceforth on a lower plane.
In the space of ten steps King passed through an age of emotions, but the strongest one steadied him. There was a general movement, exclamations, greetings, introductions. King was detained a moment by Mr. and Mrs. Benson; he even shook hands with Mr. Meigs, who had the tact to turn immediately from the group and talk with somebody else; while Mrs. Farquhar and Miss Lamont and Mrs. Cortlandt precipitated themselves upon Irene in a little tempest of cries and caresses and delightful feminine fluttering. Truth to say, Irene was so overcome by these greetings that she had not the strength to take a step forward when King at length approached her. She stood with one hand grasping the back of the chair. She knew that that moment would decide her life. Nothing is more admirable in woman, nothing so shows her strength, as her ability to face in public such a moment. It was the critical moment for King—how critical the instant was, luckily, he did not then know. If there had been in his eyes any doubt, any wavering, any timidity, his cause would have been lost. But there was not. There was infinite love and tenderness, but there was also resolution, confidence, possession, mastery. There was that that would neither be denied nor turned aside, nor accept any subterfuge. If King had ridden up on a fiery steed, felled Meigs with his “mailed hand,” and borne away the fainting girl on his saddle pommel, there could have been no more doubt of his resolute intention. In that look all the mists of doubt that her judgment had raised in Irene's mind to obscure love vanished. Her heart within her gave a great leap of exultation that her lover was a man strong enough to compel, strong enough to defend. At that instant she knew that she could trust him against the world. In that moment, while he still held her hand, she experienced the greatest joy that woman ever knows—the bliss of absolute surrender.
“I have come,” he said, “in answer to your letter. And this is my answer.”
She had it in his presence, and read it in his eyes. With the delicious sense thrilling her that she was no longer her own master there came a new timidity. She had imagined that if ever she should meet Mr. King again, she should defend her course, and perhaps appear in his eyes in a very heroic attitude. Now she only said, falteringly, and looking down, “I—I hoped you would come.”
That evening there was a little dinner given in a private parlor by Mr. Benson in honor of the engagement of his daughter. It was great larks for the young ladies whom Mrs. Cortlandt was chaperoning, who behaved with an elaboration of restraint and propriety that kept Irene in a flutter of uneasiness. Mr. Benson, in mentioning the reason for the “little spread,” told the story of Abraham Lincoln's sole response to Lord Lyons, the bachelor minister of her majesty, when he came officially to announce the marriage of the Prince of Wales—“Lord Lyons, go thou and do likewise;” and he looked at Forbes when he told it, which made Miss Lamont blush, and appear what the artist had described her to King—the sweetest thing in life. Mrs. Benson beamed with motherly content, and was quite as tearful as ungrammatical, but her mind was practical and forecasting. “There'll have to be,” she confided to Miss Lamont, “more curtains in the parlor, and I don't know but new paper.” Mr. Meigs was not present. Mrs. Farquhar noticed this, and Mrs. Benson remembered that he had said something about going down to North Conway, which gave King an opportunity to say to Mrs. Farquhar that she ought not to despair, for Mr. Meigs evidently moved in a circle, and was certain to cross her path again. “I trust so,” she replied. “I've been his only friend through all this miserable business.” The dinner was not a great success. There was too much self-consciousness all round, and nobody was witty and brilliant.
The next morning King took Irene to the Crystal Cascade. When he used to frequent this pretty spot as a college boy, it had seemed to him the ideal place for a love scene-much better than the steps of a hotel. He said as much when they were seated at the foot of the fall. It is a charming cascade fed by the water that comes down Tuckerman's Ravine. But more beautiful than the fall is the stream itself, foaming down through the bowlders, or lying in deep limpid pools which reflect the sky and the forest. The water is as cold as ice and as clear as cut glass; few mountain streams in the world, probably, are so absolutely without color. “I followed it up once,” King was saying, by way of filling in the pauses with personal revelations, “to the source. The woods on the side are dense and impenetrable, and the only way was to keep in the stream and climb over the bowlders. There are innumerable slides and cascades and pretty falls, and a thousand beauties and surprises. I finally came to a marsh, a thicket of alders, and around this the mountain closed in an amphitheatre of naked perpendicular rock a thousand feet high. I made my way along the stream through the thicket till I came to a great bank and arch of snow—it was the last of July—from under which the stream flowed. Water dripped in many little rivulets down the face of the precipices—after a rain there are said to be a thousand cascades there. I determined to climb to the summit, and go back by the Tip-top House. It does not look so from a little distance, but there is a rough, zigzag sort of path on one side of the amphitheatre, and I found this, and scrambled up. When I reached the top the sun was shining, and although there was nothing around me but piles of granite rocks, without any sign of a path, I knew that I had my bearings so that I could either reach the house or a path leading to it. I stretched myself out to rest a few moments, and suddenly the scene was completely shut in by a fog. [Irene put out her hand and touched King's.] I couldn't tell where the sun was, or in what direction the hut lay, and the danger was that I would wander off on a spur, as the lost usually do. But I knew where the ravine was, for I was still on the edge of it.”
“Why,” asked Irene, trembling at the thought of that danger so long ago—“why didn't you go back down the ravine?”
“Because,” and King took up the willing little hand and pressed it to his lips, and looked steadily in her eyes—“because that is not my way. It was nothing. I made what I thought was a very safe calculation, starting from the ravine as a base, to strike the Crawford bridle-path at least a quarter of a mile west of the house. I hit it—but it shows how little one can tell of his course in a fog—I struck it within a rod of the house! It was lucky for me that I did not go two rods further east.”
Ah me! how real and still present the peril seemed to the girl! “You will solemnly promise me, solemnly, will you not, Stanhope, never to go there again—never—without me?”
The promise was given. “I have a note,” said King, after the promise was recorded and sealed, “to show you. It came this morning. It is from Mrs. Bartlett Glow.”
“Perhaps I'd rather not see it,” said Irene, a little stiffly.
“Oh, there is a message to you. I'll read it.”
It was dated at Newport.
“MY DEAR STANHOPE,—The weather has changed. I hope it is more congenial where you are. It is horrid here. I am in a bad humor, chiefly about the cook. Don't think I'm going to inflict a letter on you. You don't deserve it besides. But I should like to know Miss Benson's address. We shall be at home in October, late, and I want her to come and make me a little visit. If you happen to see her, give her my love, and believe me your affectionate cousin,
PENELOPE.”
The next day they explored the wonders of the Notch, and the next were back in the serene atmosphere of the Profile House. How lovely it all was; how idyllic; what a bloom there was on the hills; how amiable everybody seemed; how easy it was to be kind and considerate! King wished he could meet a beggar at every turn. I know he made a great impression on some elderly maiden ladies at the hotel, who thought him the most gentlemanly and good young man they had ever seen. Ah! if one could always be in love and always young!
They went one day by invitation, Irene and Marion and King and the artist—as if it made any difference where they went—to Lonesome Lake, a private pond and fishing-lodge on the mountain-top, under the ledge of Cannon. There, set in a rim of forest and crags, lies a charming little lake—which the mountain holds like a mirror for the sky and the clouds and the sailing hawks—full of speckled trout, which have had to be educated by skillful sportsmen to take the fly. From this lake one sees the whole upper range of Lafayette, gray and purple against the sky. On the bank is a log cabin touched with color, with great chimneys, and as luxuriously comfortable as it is picturesque.
While dinner was preparing, the whole party were on the lake in boats, equipped with fishing apparatus, and if the trout had been in half as willing humor as the fisher, it would have been a bad day for them. But perhaps they apprehended that it was merely a bridal party, and they were leaping all over the lake, flipping their tails in the sun, and scorning all the visible wiles. Fish, they seemed to say, are not so easily caught as men.
There appeared to be a good deal of excitement in the boat that carried the artist and Miss Lamont. It was fly-fishing under extreme difficulties. The artist, who kept his flies a good deal of the time out of the boat, frankly confessed that he would prefer an honest worm and hook, or a net, or even a grappling-iron. Miss Lamont, with a great deal of energy, kept her line whirling about, and at length, on a successful cast, landed the artist's hat among the water-lilies. There was nothing discouraging in this, and they both resumed operations with cheerfulness and enthusiasm. But the result of every other cast was entanglement of each other's lines, and King noticed that they spent most of their time together in the middle of the boat, getting out of snarls. And at last, drifting away down to the outlet, they seemed to have given up fishing for the more interesting occupation.
The clouds drifted on; the fish leaped; the butcher-bird called from the shore; the sun was purpling Lafayette. There were kinks in the leader that would not come out, the lines were inextricably tangled. The cook made the signals for dinner, and sent his voice echoing over the lake time and again before these devoted anglers heard or heeded. At last they turned the prow to the landing, Forbes rowing, and Marion dragging her hand in the water, and looking as if she had never cast a line. King was ready to pull the boat on to the float, and Irene stood by the landing expectant. In the bottom of the boat was one poor little trout, his tail curled up and his spots faded.
“Whose trout is that?” asked Irene.
“It belongs to both of us,” said Forbes, who seemed to have some difficulty in adjusting his oars.
“But who caught it?”
“Both of us,” said Marion, stepping out of the boat; “we really did.” There was a heightened color in her face and a little excitement in her manner as she put her arm round Irene's waist and they walked up to the cabin. “Yes, it is true, but you are not to say anything about it yet, dear, for Mr. Forbes has to make his way, you know.”
When they walked down the mountain the sun was setting. Half-way down, at a sharp turn in the path, the trees are cut away just enough to make a frame, in which Lafayette appears like an idealized picture of a mountain. The sun was still on the heights, which were calm, strong, peaceful. They stood gazing at this heavenly vision till the rose had deepened into violet, and then with slow steps descended through the fragrant woods.
In October no region in the North has a monopoly of beauty, but there is a certain refinement, or it may be a repose, in the Berkshire Hills which is in a manner typical of a distinct phase of American fashion. There is here a note of country life, of retirement, suggestive of the old-fashioned “country-seat.” It is differentiated from the caravansary or the cottage life in the great watering-places. Perhaps it expresses in a sincerer way an innate love of rural existence. Perhaps it is only a whim of fashion. Whatever it may be, there is here a moment of pause, a pensive air of the closing scene. The estates are ample, farms in fact, with a sort of villa and park character, woods, pastures, meadows. When the leaves turn crimson and brown and yellow, and the frequent lakes reflect the tender sky and the glory of the autumn foliage, there is much driving over the hills from country place to country place; there are lawn-tennis parties on the high lawns, whence the players in the pauses of the game can look over vast areas of lovely country; there are open-air fetes, chance meetings at the clubhouse, chats on the highway, walking excursions, leisurely dinners. In this atmosphere one is on the lookout for an engagement, and a wedding here has a certain eclat. When one speaks of Great Barrington or Stockbridge or Lenox in the autumn, a certain idea of social position is conveyed.
Did Their Pilgrimage end on these autumn heights? To one of them, I know, the colored landscape, the dreamy atmosphere, the unique glory that comes in October days, were only ecstatic suggestions of the life that opened before her. Love is victorious over any mood of nature, even when exquisite beauty is used to heighten the pathos of decay. Irene raved about the scenery. There is no place in the world beautiful enough to have justified her enthusiasm, and there is none ugly enough to have killed it.
I do not say that Irene's letters to Mr. King were entirely taken up with descriptions of the beauty of Lenox. That young gentleman had gone on business to Georgia. Mr. and Mrs. Benson were in Cyrusville. Irene was staying with Mrs. Farquhar at the house of a friend. These letters had a great deal of Lovers' Latin in them—enough to have admitted the writer into Yale College if this were a qualification. The letters she received were equally learned, and the fragments Mrs. Farquhar was permitted to hear were so interrupted by these cabalistic expressions that she finally begged to be excused. She said she did not doubt that to be in love was a liberal education, but pedantry was uninteresting. Latin might be convenient at this stage; but later on, for little tiffs and reconciliations, French would be much more useful.
One of these letters southward described a wedding. The principals in it were unknown to King, but in the minute detail of the letter there was a personal flavor which charmed him. He would have been still more charmed could he have seen the girl's radiant face as she dashed it off. Mrs. Farquhar watched her with a pensive interest awhile, went behind her chair, and, leaning over, kissed her forehead, and then with slow step and sad eyes passed out to the piazza, and stood with her face to the valley and the purple hills. But it was a faded landscape she saw.
The title naturally suggested for this story was “A Dead Soul,” but it was discarded because of the similarity to that of the famous novel by Nikolai Gogol—“Dead Souls”—though the motive has nothing in common with that used by the Russian novelist. Gogol exposed an extensive fraud practiced by the sale, in connection with lands, of the names of “serfs” (called souls) not living, or “dead souls.”
This story is an attempt to trace the demoralization in a woman's soul of certain well-known influences in our existing social life. In no other way could certain phases of our society be made to appear so distinctly as when reflected in the once pure mirror of a woman's soul.
The character of Margaret is the portrait of no one woman. But it was suggested by the career of two women (among others less marked) who had begun life with the highest ideals, which had been gradually eaten away and destroyed by “prosperous” marriages and association with unscrupulous methods of acquiring money.
The deterioration was gradual. The women were in all outward conduct unchanged, the conventionalities of life were maintained, the graces were not lost, the observances of the duties of charities and of religion were even emphasized, but worldliness had eaten the heart out of them, and they were “dead souls.” The tragedy of the withered life was a thousand-fold enhanced by the external show of prosperous respectability.
The story was first published (in 1888) in Harper's Monthly. During its progress—and it was printed as soon as each installment was ready (a very poor plan)—I was in receipt of the usual letters of sympathy, or protest, and advice. One sympathetic missive urged the removal of Margaret to a neighboring city, where she could be saved by being brought under special Christian influences. The transfer, even in a serial, was impossible, and she by her own choice lived the life she had entered upon.
And yet, if the reader will pardon the confidence, pity intervened to shorten it. I do not know how it is with other writers, but the persons that come about me in a little drama are as real as those I meet in every-day life, and in this case I found it utterly impossible to go on to what might have been the bitter, logical development of Margaret's career. Perhaps it was as well. Perhaps the writer should have no despotic power over his creations, however slight they are. He may profitably recall the dictum of a recent essayist that “there is no limit to the mercy of God.”
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
Hartford, August 11, 1899.
We were talking about the want of diversity in American life, the lack of salient characters. It was not at a club. It was a spontaneous talk of people who happened to be together, and who had fallen into an uncompelled habit of happening to be together. There might have been a club for the study of the Want of Diversity in American Life. The members would have been obliged to set apart a stated time for it, to attend as a duty, and to be in a mood to discuss this topic at a set hour in the future. They would have mortgaged another precious portion of the little time left us for individual life. It is a suggestive thought that at a given hour all over the United States innumerable clubs might be considering the Want of Diversity in American Life. Only in this way, according to our present methods, could one expect to accomplish anything in regard to this foreign-felt want. It seems illogical that we could produce diversity by all doing the same thing at the same time, but we know the value of congregate effort. It seems to superficial observers that all Americans are born busy. It is not so. They are born with a fear of not being busy; and if they are intelligent and in circumstances of leisure, they have such a sense of their responsibility that they hasten to allot all their time into portions, and leave no hour unprovided for. This is conscientiousness in women, and not restlessness. There is a day for music, a day for painting, a day for the display of tea-gowns, a day for Dante, a day for the Greek drama, a day for the Dumb Animals' Aid Society, a day for the Society for the Propagation of Indians, and so on. When the year is over, the amount that has been accomplished by this incessant activity can hardly be estimated. Individually it may not be much. But consider where Chaucer would be but for the work of the Chaucer clubs, and what an effect upon the universal progress of things is produced by the associate concentration upon the poet of so many minds.
A cynic says that clubs and circles are for the accumulation of superficial information and unloading it on others, without much individual absorption in anybody. This, like all cynicism, contains only a half-truth, and simply means that the general diffusion of half-digested information does not raise the general level of intelligence, which can only be raised to any purpose by thorough self-culture, by assimilation, digestion, meditation. The busy bee is a favorite simile with us, and we are apt to overlook the fact that the least important part of his example is buzzing around. If the hive simply got together and buzzed, or even brought unrefined treacle from some cyclopaedia, let us say, of treacle, there would be no honey added to the general store.
It occurred to some one in this talk at last to deny that there was this tiresome monotony in American life. And this put a new face on the discussion. Why should there be, with every race under the heavens represented here, and each one struggling to assert itself, and no homogeneity as yet established even between the people of the oldest States? The theory is that democracy levels, and that the anxious pursuit of a common object, money, tends to uniformity, and that facility of communication spreads all over the land the same fashion in dress; and repeats everywhere the same style of house, and that the public schools give all the children in the United States the same superficial smartness. And there is a more serious notion, that in a society without classes there is a sort of tyranny of public opinion which crushes out the play of individual peculiarities, without which human intercourse is uninteresting. It is true that a democracy is intolerant of variations from the general level, and that a new society allows less latitude in eccentricities to its members than an old society.
But with all these allowances, it is also admitted that the difficulty the American novelist has is in hitting upon what is universally accepted as characteristic of American life, so various are the types in regions widely separated from each other, such different points of view are had even in conventionalities, and conscience operates so variously on moral problems in one community and another. It is as impossible for one section to impose upon another its rules of taste and propriety in conduct—and taste is often as strong to determine conduct as principle—as it is to make its literature acceptable to the other. If in the land of the sun and the jasmine and the alligator and the fig, the literature of New England seems passionless and timid in face of the ruling emotions of life, ought we not to thank Heaven for the diversity of temperament as well as of climate which will in the long-run save us from that sameness into which we are supposed to be drifting?
When I think of this vast country with any attention to local developments I am more impressed with the unlikenesses than with the resemblances. And besides this, if one had the ability to draw to the life a single individual in the most homogeneous community, the product would be sufficiently startling. We cannot flatter ourselves, therefore, that under equal laws and opportunities we have rubbed out the saliencies of human nature. At a distance the mass of the Russian people seem as monotonous as their steppes and their commune villages, but the Russian novelists find characters in this mass perfectly individualized, and, indeed, give us the impression that all Russians are irregular polygons. Perhaps if our novelists looked at individuals as intently, they might give the world the impression that social life here is as unpleasant as it appears in the novels to be in Russia.
This is partly the substance of what was said one winter evening before the wood fire in the library of a house in Brandon, one of the lesser New England cities. Like hundreds of residences of its kind, it stood in the suburbs, amid forest-trees, commanding a view of city spires and towers on the one hand, and on the other of a broken country of clustering trees and cottages, rising towards a range of hills which showed purple and warm against the pale straw-color of the winter sunsets. The charm of the situation was that the house was one of many comfortable dwellings, each isolated, and yet near enough together to form a neighborhood; that is to say, a body of neighbors who respected each other's privacy, and yet flowed together, on occasion, without the least conventionality. And a real neighborhood, as our modern life is arranged, is becoming more and more rare.
I am not sure that the talkers in this conversation expressed their real, final sentiments, or that they should be held accountable for what they said. Nothing so surely kills the freedom of talk as to have some matter-of-fact person instantly bring you to book for some impulsive remark flashed out on the instant, instead of playing with it and tossing it about in a way that shall expose its absurdity or show its value. Freedom is lost with too much responsibility and seriousness, and the truth is more likely to be struck out in a lively play of assertion and retort than when all the words and sentiments are weighed. A person very likely cannot tell what he does think till his thoughts are exposed to the air, and it is the bright fallacies and impulsive, rash ventures in conversation that are often most fruitful to talker and listeners. The talk is always tame if no one dares anything. I have seen the most promising paradox come to grief by a simple “Do you think so?” Nobody, I sometimes think, should be held accountable for anything said in private conversation, the vivacity of which is in a tentative play about the subject. And this is a sufficient reason why one should repudiate any private conversation reported in the newspapers. It is bad enough to be held fast forever to what one writes and prints, but to shackle a man with all his flashing utterances, which may be put into his mouth by some imp in the air, is intolerable slavery. A man had better be silent if he can only say today what he will stand by tomorrow, or if he may not launch into the general talk the whim and fancy of the moment. Racy, entertaining talk is only exposed thought, and no one would hold a man responsible for the thronging thoughts that contradict and displace each other in his mind. Probably no one ever actually makes up his mind until he either acts or puts out his conclusion beyond his recall. Why should one be debarred the privilege of pitching his crude ideas into a conversation where they may have a chance of being precipitated?
I remember that Morgan said in this talk that there was too much diversity. “Almost every church has trouble with it—the different social conditions.”
An Englishman who was present pricked-up his ears at this, as if he expected to obtain a note on the character of Dissenters. “I thought all the churches here were organized on social affinities?” he inquired.
“Oh, no; it is a good deal a matter of vicinage. When there is a real-estate extension, a necessary part of the plan is to build a church in the centre of it, in order to—”
“I declare, Page,” said Mrs. Morgan, “you'll give Mr. Lyon a totally erroneous notion. Of course there must be a church convenient to the worshipers in every district.”
“That is just what I was saying, my dear: As the settlement is not drawn together on religious grounds, but perhaps by purely worldly motives, the elements that meet in the church are apt to be socially incongruous, such as cannot always be fused even by a church-kitchen and a church-parlor.”
“Then it isn't the peculiarity of the church that has attracted to it worshipers who would naturally come together, but the church is a neighborhood necessity?” still further inquired Mr. Lyon.
“All is,” I ventured to put in, “that churches grow up like schoolhouses, where they are wanted.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Morgan; “I'm talking about the kind of want that creates them. If it's the same that builds a music hall, or a gymnasium, or a railway waiting-room, I've nothing more to say.”
“Is it your American idea, then, that a church ought to be formed only of people socially agreeable together?” asked the Englishman.
“I have no American idea. I am only commenting on facts; but one of them is that it is the most difficult thing in the world to reconcile religious association with the real or artificial claims of social life.”
“I don't think you try much,” said Mrs. Morgan, who carried along her traditional religious observance with grateful admiration of her husband.
Mr. Page Morgan had inherited money, and a certain advantageous position for observing life and criticising it, humorously sometimes, and without any serious intention of disturbing it. He had added to his fair fortune by marrying the daintily reared daughter of a cotton-spinner, and he had enough to do in attending meetings of directors and looking out for his investments to keep him from the operation of the State law regarding vagrants, and give greater social weight to his opinions than if he had been compelled to work for his maintenance. The Page Morgans had been a good deal abroad, and were none the worse Americans for having come in contact with the knowledge that there are other peoples who are reasonably prosperous and happy without any of our advantages.
“It seems to me,” said Mr. Lyon, who was always in the conversational attitude of wanting to know, “that you Americans are disturbed by the notion that religion ought to produce social equality.”
Mr. Lyon had the air of conveying the impression that this question was settled in England, and that America was interesting on account of numerous experiments of this sort. This state of mind was not offensive to his interlocutors, because they were accustomed to it in transatlantic visitors. Indeed, there was nothing whatever offensive, and little defensive, in Mr. John Lyon. What we liked in him, I think, was his simple acceptance of a position that required neither explanation nor apology—a social condition that banished a sense of his own personality, and left him perfectly free to be absolutely truthful. Though an eldest son and next in succession to an earldom, he was still young. Fresh from Oxford and South Africa and Australia and British Columbia he had come to study the States with a view of perfecting himself for his duties as a legislator for the world when he should be called to the House of Peers. He did not treat himself like an earl, whatever consciousness he may have had that his prospective rank made it safe for him to flirt with the various forms of equality abroad in this generation.
“I don't know what Christianity is expected to produce,” Mr. Morgan replied, in a meditative way; “but I have an idea that the early Christians in their assemblies all knew each other, having met elsewhere in social intercourse, or, if they were not acquainted, they lost sight of distinctions in one paramount interest. But then I don't suppose they were exactly civilized.”
“Were the Pilgrims and the Puritans?” asked Mrs. Fletcher, who now joined the talk, in which she had been a most animated and stimulating listener, her deep gray eyes dancing with intellectual pleasure.
“I should not like to answer 'no' to a descendant of the Mayflower. Yes, they were highly civilized. And if we had adhered to their methods, we should have avoided a good deal of confusion. The meeting-house, you remember, had a committee for seating people according to their quality. They were very shrewd, but it had not occurred to them to give the best pews to the sitters able to pay the most money for them. They escaped the perplexity of reconciling the mercantile and the religious ideas.”
“At any rate,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “they got all sorts of people inside the same meeting-house.”
“Yes, and made them feel they were all sorts; but in those, days they were not much disturbed by that feeling.”
“Do you mean to say,” asked Mr. Lyon, “that in this country you have churches for the rich and other churches for the poor?”
“Not at all. We have in the cities rich churches and poor churches, with prices of pews according to the means of each sort, and the rich are always glad to have the poor come, and if they do not give them the best seats, they equalize it by taking up a collection for them.”
“Mr. Lyon,” Mrs. Morgan interrupted, “you are getting a travesty of the whole thing. I don't believe there is elsewhere in the world such a spirit of Christian charity as in our churches of all sects.”
“There is no doubt about the charity; but that doesn't seem to make the social machine run any more smoothly in the church associations. I'm not sure but we shall have to go back to the old idea of considering the churches places of worship, and not opportunities for sewing-societies, and the cultivation of social equality.”
“I found the idea in Rome,” said Mr. Lyon, “that the United States is now the most promising field for the spread and permanence of the Roman Catholic faith.”
“How is that?” Mr. Fletcher asked, with a smile of Puritan incredulity.
“A high functionary at the Propaganda gave as a reason that the United States is the most democratic country and the Roman Catholic is the most democratic religion, having this one notion that all men, high or low, are equally sinners and equally in need of one thing only. And I must say that in this country I don't find the question of social equality interfering much with the work in their churches.”
“That is because they are not trying to make this world any better, but only to prepare for another,” said Mrs. Fletcher.
“Now, we think that the nearer we approach the kingdom-of-heaven idea on earth, the better off we shall be hereafter. Is that a modern idea?”
“It is an idea that is giving us a great deal of trouble. We've got into such a sophisticated state that it seems easier to take care of the future than of the present.”
“And it isn't a very bad doctrine that if you take care of the present, the future will take care of itself,” rejoined Mrs. Fletcher.
“Yes, I know,” insisted Mr. Morgan; “it's the modern notion of accumulation and compensation—take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves—the gospel of Benjamin Franklin.”
“Ah,” I said, looking up at the entrance of a newcomer, “you are just in time, Margaret, to give the coup de grace, for it is evident by Mr. Morgan's reference, in his Bunker Hill position, to Franklin, that he is getting out of powder.”
The girl stood a moment, her slight figure framed in the doorway, while the company rose to greet her, with a half-hesitating, half-inquiring look in her bright face which I had seen in it a thousand times.