Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (759 page)

The custom of our family in America had been to take all our meals together; but in England the elders take lunch at noon, tea at four or five, and dinner at seven or eight, while the children dine at noon and sup at six. This arrangement was adopted in Rock Park. My father used to leave home for the consulate at nine, and return — unless kept away by an official or social engagement — at five or six. There was appointed for us children a nurse or governess, to oversee and administer our supplies; our father and mother dining, with such guests as might happen to be present, late in the evening. We were sometimes allowed to come in at dessert, to eat a few nuts and raisins and exhibit our infantile good manners. This domestic separation was a matter of much speculation and curiosity to our immature minds; we used to haunt the hall through which the servants carried the dishes, smoking and fragrant, from the kitchen to the dining-room, and once in a while the too-indulgent creatures would allow us to steal something. How ravishingly delicious things thus acquired taste! And we, fancying, of course, that they must be not less delicious for the folks at table, used to marvel how they could ever bear to leave off eating. The dinners were certainly rather elaborate compared with the archaic repasts of Salem or of Concord; but they were as far inferior in grandeur and interminableness to the astonishing banquets at which, in some great houses, our father and mother were present. Consider, for example, this dinner, in no way remarkable among such functions, at the Hollands's, about this time. There were twelve persons at table. The service was of solid silver; two enormous covers were on the table before the soup was served; being removed, they revealed turbot and fried fish. Then followed boiled turkey and roast goose, and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including chicken-pies, ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being placed in their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was a vast round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the sweets were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine, not including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all the way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners six or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually ate and drank them — did not merely glance at them and shake their heads. The ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom they were descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help respecting such prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the poverty-stricken class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a very different thing when I lived there twenty years later, and though port and Madeira were generally on the table, the only man whom I saw habitually drink them was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the reason the British got such a thrashing in South Africa the other day.

After dinner at Rock Park — or, if it were to be a late affair, before — we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined. This was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious, but we had not before been accustomed to express our religious feelings in just that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my father would open the Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a prayer-book containing thirty or forty well-considered addresses to the Almighty, and everybody would kneel down and cover their eyes with their hands. The “Amen” having been reached, and echoed by every one, all would rise to their former positions, and the servants would file out of the room. It must have been somewhat of an effort for my father to go through this ceremony; but I think he did it, not only for the reason above mentioned, but also because he thought it right that his children should have the opportunity of gaining whatever religious sentiment such proceedings might inculcate. But I do not think that he had much faith in the practice as an English institution. Indeed, he has somewhere written that the English “bring themselves no nearer to God when they pray than when they play cards.”

[IMAGE: ROBERT BROWNING]

I understood long afterwards, as I did not at the time, how closely my father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never sent to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were taught our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In addition to the constant walks which I took with my father, he encouraged me to join a cricket club in the Park, and sent me to Huguenin's gymnasium in Liverpool, to the Cornwallis swimming-baths, and to a dancing-academy kept by a highly ornamental Frenchman, and he bought me an enormous steel hoop, and set me racing after it at headlong speed. Nor did he neglect to stimulate us in the imaginative and aesthetic side. From the date of our settlement in England to the end of his life, he read aloud to us in the evenings many of the classics of literature. Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the poems and novels of Scott, Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales, much of Defoe and Swift, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake field, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (he himself was very fond of that poem), and many other things, and I cannot overestimate the good they did me. His talks to me during our walks gave me, under the guise of pleasantry, not so much specific information concerning things (though that was not wanting), but — character; that is, the questions he put to me, the remarks and comments he made, the stories he told, were all calculated to give me a high idea of human duties and aspirations; to encourage generosity, charity, courage, patriotism, and independence. From the reading of The Faerie Queene and of Don Quixote I conceived a vehement infatuation for mediaeval chivalry and knight-errantry; I adopted the motto of the order, “Be faithful, brave, and true in deed and word”; and I indulged in waking dreams of heroic adventures in quest of fair renown, and to succor the oppressed. All this he encouraged and abetted, though always, too, with a sort of twinkle of the eye, lest I should take myself too seriously and wax priggish. He permitted me to have a breastplate and a helmet with a golden dragon crest (made by our nurse out of pasteboard covered with tinsel-paper), and he bought me a real steel sword with a brass hilt wrought in open-work; I used to spend hours polishing it, and picturing to myself the giants and ogres I would slay with it. Finally — with that humorous arching of the eyebrow of his — he bade me kneel down, and with my sword smote me on the shoulder, and dubbed me knight, saying, “Rise up, Sir Julian!” It was worth many set moral homilies to me. He knew the advantage of leading a boy to regard the practice of boyish and manly virtues not as a burden but as a privilege and boon, and of making the boy's own conscience his judge. His handling of the matter was, of course, modified so as to reach the inner springs of my particular nature and temperament, which he thoroughly understood. Withal, he never failed to hold up to ridicule anything showing a tendency to the sentimental; he would test me on this point in various ways, and always betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect the sentimental or mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a manly, robust, and bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I reflect upon what were my proclivities to folly during this impressionable period, I thank my stars for such a father.

There was abundant quiet and seclusion in Rock Park, and had my father been able to do any writing, he could hardly have found a retreat more suitable. The tradesmen called early at the houses in the Park, their wagon-wheels making no sound upon the unpaved street, and the two policemen, who lived in the stone lodges, kept the place free from beggars and peddlers. These policemen, pacing slowly along in their uniforms, rigid and dignified, had quite an imposing aspect, and it was some time before we children discovered that they were only men, after all. Each had a wife and children, who filled to overflowing the tiny habitations; when their blue coats and steel-framed hats were off, they were quite humble persons; one of them eked out his official salary by mending shoes. After following with awe the progress along the sidewalk of the officer of public order, stalking with solemn and measured gait, and touching his hat, with a hand encased in a snow-white cotton glove, to such of the denizens of the Park as he might encounter, it was quite like a fairy-tale transformation to see him squatting in soiled shirt-sleeves on his cobbler's bench, drawing waxed thread through holes in a boot-sole. I once saw one of them, of a Sunday afternoon, standing at ease in the doorway of his lodge, clad in an old sack-coat which I recognized as having been my father's. I am constitutionally reverent of law and order; but the revelation of the domestic lives of these policemen gave me an insight, which I have never since lost, into the profound truth that the man and the officer are twain.

There were perhaps twenty families living in the Park, of whom we became acquainted with two only; the people who lived next door to us (whose name I have forgotten), and Mr. and Mrs. Squarey, who dwelt higher up the street. The people next door had two boys of about my own age, with whom I played cricket, and it was from the back windows of their house that I saw for the first time an exhibition of fireworks in their garden; I remember that when, just before the show began, they put out the lamp in the room, I asked to have it relighted, in order that I might see the as yet unexperienced wonder. There are folks who go hunting for the sun with a lantern.

Mr. Squarey was tall and stiff of figure, with a singularly square countenance, with a short whisker on each side of it; but spiritually he was most affable and obliging; so was his wife; but as she was short and globular, my father was wont to refer to her, in the privacy of domestic intercourse, as Mrs. Roundey. They were profuse in invitations to go with us to places — to Chester, to the Welsh show-places, and so forth; and although I think my father and mother would rather have gone alone, they felt constrained to accept these suggestions. It was in their company, at all events, that I first saw Chester “Rows”; and also, from some coign of vantage on those delightful old walls, an English horse-race, with jockeys in silk caps and jackets tinted like the rainbow. Mr. Squarey's demeanor towards my sisters and myself was like that of the benevolent tutor in Sandford and Merton, with which excellent work we were very conversant at that time; as, likewise, with Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, and with still another engaging volume called, I think, the Budget of something; at any rate, it had two or three little boys and girls in it, who were anxious to acquire useful and curious information on many subjects, which was afforded them in generous measure by their highly cultivated elders. Such flower-garlanded instruction was the best specifically juvenile literature which those primitive ages afforded. “Pray, mamma, why does the sun rise in the east instead of in the west?” “Pray, papa, why was King Alfred called 'The Good'?” Mrs. Markham's History of England was constructed upon the same artless principle. What a distance we have travelled since then!

But it was a good and happy life in Rock Park, and I think our father and mother enjoyed it almost as much as we children did. They were meeting people many of whom were delightful — I shall try to paint the portraits of some of them in the next chapter — and they were seeing towns and castles and places of historic and picturesque interest; and my father was earning more money than ever before, though less than a quarter as much as he would have earned had not Congress, soon after his accession to office, cut down the emoluments. This was England; the Old Home, and the Old World, for the understanding of which they had prepared themselves all their lives previous. My father once said, “If England were all the world, it would still have been worth while for the Creator to have made it.” The children were radiantly content with their lot; and it is on record that the little boy once remarked, “I don't remember when I came down from heaven; but I'm glad I happened to tumble into so good a family.” The same individual, rolling on the floor in excess of mirth over some childish comicality, panted out, “Oh, mamma, my ball of jolly is so big I can't breathe!” The ball of jolly became a household word for years thereafter. It was well nourished in those days.

VIII

Cataclysmic adventures — On the trail of dazzling fortunes — “Lovely, but reprehensible Madham” — The throne saves the artist — English robin redbreast — A sad and weary old man — “Most indelicate woman I've ever known” — Perfectly chaste — Something human stirred dimly — ”She loves me; she loves me!” — The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown — Portentous and thundering title — Honest English simplicity — ”The spirit lacking” — Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin — A famous and charming woman of genius — Deep and wide well of human sympathy — The whooping-cough.

In the spring of 1854 we were visited by John O'Sullivan, his wife and mother, and a young relative of theirs, Miss Ella Rogers. O'Sullivan had been appointed Minister to the Court of Portugal, and was on his way thither. He was a Democrat of old standing; had edited the Democratic Review in 1837, and had made my father's acquaintance at that time through soliciting contributions from him; later they became close friends, and when my sister Una was born, he sent her a silver cup, and was ever after called “Uncle John” in the family, and, also, occasionally, “the Count” — a title which, I believe, had some warrant in his ancestry. For, although an American, Uncle John was born at sea off the coast of Spain, of an Irish father and a mother of aristocratic connections or extraction (I am a little uncertain, I find, on this point); I think her parents were Italian. Uncle John had all the charming qualities of the nations mentioned, and none of their objectionable ones; though this is not to say that he was devoid of tender faults, which were, if anything, more lovable than his virtues. Beneath a tranquil, comely, and gentle exterior burned all the fire and romance of the Celt; his faith and enthusiasm in “projects” knew no bounds; he might be deceived and bankrupted a hundred times, and would toe the mark the next time with undiminished confidence. He was continually, and in the quietest way, having the most astonishing and cataclysmic adventures; he would be blown up, as it were, by a dynamite explosion, and presently would return from the sky undisturbed, with only a slight additional sparkle in his soft eyes, and with the lock of hair that fell gracefully over his forehead only a trifle disordered. The most courteous and affectionate of men, with the most yielding and self-effacing manners, he had the spirit of a paladin, and was afraid of nothing. He would empty his pockets — or if, as too often happened, they were already empty, he would pledge his credit to help a friend out of a hole; and, on the other hand, he was always hot upon the trail of a dazzling fortune, which, like Emerson's Forerunners, never was overtaken. It would not long have availed him, had it been otherwise, for never was there a Monte Cristo who lavished wealth as O'Sullivan habitually did in anticipation, and would undoubtedly have done in fact had the opportunity been afforded him. He was gifted with a low, melodious, exquisitely modulated voice, and a most engaging and winning manner, and when he set out to picture the simple and easy methods whereby he proposed to make millions, it was next to impossible to resist him. He was like a beautiful, innocent, brilliant child, grown up, endowed with an enchanter's wand, which was forever promising all the kingdoms of the earth to him, but never (as our modern phrase is) delivered the goods. He regarded my father as a king of men, and he had, times without number, been on the very edge of making him, as well as himself, a multifold millionaire. However, President Pierce did what he could for him by giving him the Portuguese mission (after first offering it to my father), and O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became interested — abstractly — in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father finally, in 1858 or 1859, advanced him ten thousand dollars to finance the scheme. I saw the dear old gentleman, a generation later, in New York; he had the same clear, untroubled, tranquil face as of old; his hair, though gray, was as thick and graceful as ever; his manner was as sweet and attractive; but though, in addition to his other accomplishments, he had become an advanced spiritualist, he had not yet coined into bullion his golden imagination. He had forgotten the Spanish copper-mines, and I took care not to remind him of them. Peace to his generous, ardent, and loving soul!

Uncle John's wife was a good mate for him, in her own way as brilliant and fascinating as he and with an unalterable belief in her husband's destiny. She was a tall, slender woman, with kindling eyes, a lovely smile, and a wonderful richness and vivacity of conversation; nor have I ever since known so truly witty a woman. But she lacked the delightful mellowness and tenderness for which Uncle John was so remarkable. The mother, Madame O'Sullivan, as she was called, was a type of the finegrained, gently bred aristocrat, every outline softened and made gracious by the long lapse of years through which she had lived. She sat like a picture of reverend but still animated age, with white, delicate lace about her pale cheeks and dark, kindly, weary eyes, and making a frost-work over her silvery hair. As for Miss Ella Rogers, it is with some embarrassment that I refer to her; inasmuch as I fell violently in love with her at first sight, and I have reason to think that she never fully appreciated or adequately responded to my passion, though, at the time, I was nearly one-third of her age — she being five-and-twenty. She was a dark and lively beauty, thoroughly self-possessed, and versed in social accomplishments, and gifted with dramatic talent. She afterwards made a great impression in the court of the Portuguese monarch, and more than once the King himself chose her as his partner in the ball. Reports of these gayeties came to my ears; and I found the other day part of a letter which I addressed to her, remonstrating against these royal flirtations. It is written in pencil, upon the blue office-paper of the consulate, and I can recall distinctly the small, indignant boy and knight-errant, sitting at the desk opposite his hugely diverted father, and beginning his epistle thus: “Lovely, but reprehensible Madham!” I suspect that I consulted my father as to the spelling of the second adjective, for it shows signs of having been overhauled; but after that my feelings became too strong for me, and the remainder of the letter is orthographically so eccentric that it was probably cast aside and a copy made of it. But the rough draught, by some inconceivable chance, was kept, and turns up now, after half a century, with a strange thread of pathos woven by time into the texture of its absurdity. Poor, little, lovely reprehensible Madham! Her after-career was not a happy one.

These agreeable persons filled our stuccoed villa full, and gave poignant addition to the quiet, gray beauty of that English spring. A year or so later, when my mother's health compelled her to escape to a warmer climate from fog-ridden Liverpool, she went with my sisters to Lisbon, where the O'Sullivans were by that time established, and spent several months with them, and saw all the splendors of the naive but brilliant little court of Dom Pedro V. She brought home a portfolio of etchings presented to her, and done by his youthful Majesty; which indicate that his throne, little as he cared for it, preserved him from the mortification of failing as an artist.

Early in the winter of the following year (1855), Mr. James Buchanan, appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, found his way to my father's retreat in Rock Park. The English winter was a mild affair compared with our recent experiences of the arctic snows of Lenox; there was no coasting, and not much snow-balling; but we had the pleasure of making friends with the English robin-redbreast, a most lovable little creature, who, every morning, hopped confidingly on our window-sill and took bread-crumbs almost from our hands. The old American diplomatist and President that was to be (though he vehemently disclaimed any such possibility) distracted our attention from robin for a day or two. He had the aspect, perhaps cultivated for political and democratic purposes, of a Pennsylvania farmer; he was, I believe, born on a farm in Franklin County, in that State, at the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century. He was tall and ungainly in figure, though he bore himself with a certain security and dignity; his head was high and thinly covered with gray hair; he carried it oddly, a little on one side; it was said at the time that this was due to his having once attempted suicide by cutting his throat. His visage — heavy, long, and noticeable — had the typical traits of the American politician of that epoch; his eyes were small, shrewd, and twinkling; there was a sort of professional candor in his bearing, but he looked like a sad and weary old man. He talked somewhat volubly to my father, who kept him going by a question now and then, as his way generally was with visitors. There was a flavor of rusticity in his speech; he was not a man of culture or polish, though unquestionably of great experience of the world. He was dressed in a wide-skirted coat of black broadcloth, and wore a white choker put on a little askew. The English, who were prone to be critical of our representatives, made a good deal of fun of Mr. Buchanan, and told anecdotes about him which were probably exaggerated or apocryphal. It was alleged, for example, that, speaking of the indisposition of a female relative of his, he had observed that it was due to the severity of the English climate. “She never enjoyed delicate health at home,” he had declared; “in fact, she was always one of the most indelicate women I've ever known.” And it was asserted that he had been admonished by the Lord High Chamberlain, or by the Gold Stick-in-Waiting, for expectorating upon the floor of her Majesty's palace at a levee. Such ribaldries used to be popular in English mouths concerning American visitors before the war; they were all of similar tenor. Mrs. Abbott Lawrence was described as having bought a handsome shawl at a shop on Lord Street, in Liverpool, and to have walked down that populous thoroughfare with her new purchase on her shoulders, ignorant that it bore the legend, inscribed on a white card, which the salesman had neglected to remove, “Perfectly chaste.” The same lady was reported as saying, in asking an invitation to a ball on behalf of Mrs. Augustus Peabody, of Boston, “I assure you, on our side of the water, Mrs. Peabody is much more accustomed to grant favors than to ask them.” Such anecdotes seem to bear upon them the stamp of the British manufacturer. There would not seem to be much harm in them, yet it is such things that sometimes interfere most acutely with the entente cordials between nations. We had another glimpse of Mr. Buchanan, in London, about a year later, and he then remarked to my mother, indirectly referring to such reports, that the Queen had treated him very kindly. For the present, he faded from the Rock Park horizon, and we returned to the robin; nor have I been able to understand how it happened that he made so distinct an impression upon my memory. But a child's memory is unaccountable, both in what it loses and in what it retains.

One Sunday forenoon, when it was not too cold for the young folks to be swinging on that gate which has been mentioned, and the elders were in-doors, enjoying the holiday in their own way, we descried an old gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt hat was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled; his boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and there was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness in his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with the manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the house, and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat a fashionable tattoo with the knocker.

Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable personage sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but modulated to the inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many small gestures, and grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his ancient teeth; he laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat. There was about him an air of determined cheerfulness and affability, though between the efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old eyes and the lines of his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss my sisters, but they drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry one with its ragged nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled my younger sister to his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and solemnly into him with that persistence which characterizes little girls of four or five who are not quite sure of their ground. Her smooth, pink-and-white cheeks and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly with his seamed yellowness and blinking grin; for a long time he coquetted at her, and played peep-bo, without disturbing her gravity, making humorous side comments to the on-lookers meanwhile. There was a ragged and disorderly mop of gray hair on his head, which showed very dingy beside the clear auburn of the child's. One felt a repulsion from him, and yet, as he chatted and smirked and acted, there was a sort of fascination in him, too. Some original force and fire of nature still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, “There — there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves me — she loves me!” He then permitted her to slip down from his knee and withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk which our entrance had interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom we youngsters knew nothing — though our ignorance only argued ourselves unknown, for he named persons all famous in their day. He had seen George IV., Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of elder brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he had quaffed mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors shoulder to shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his familiar stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his finger-ends; he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if there were any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage we desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the first half of the last century; he was such a character as could flourish only in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in 1785, and was now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started in life poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less useful connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had somehow got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the basis of his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence, his faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of shame, conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody could tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good things of the world. After maintaining his ground during the first twenty or thirty years, it had probably been easier for him to forge along afterwards, for he could impose upon the new generation with his stories of success in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was by nature, the external polish and trick of good form which he had acquired, and, no doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had influenced men to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him extraordinary good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice married, and had many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and liaisons had been innumerable, and they had by no means been confined to the lower ranks of society. That he was a practised liar there can be no doubt, but he had the long memory which the proverb recommends to liars, and he was so circumspect that few of his claims and pretensions lacked solid basis enough to make them pass current in a hurrying and heedless world. Now, however, in his age, he was wellnigh at the end of his tether; what we should call his “pull” was losing its efficiency; he was lapsing to the condition where he would offer to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales or to Baron Rothschild, and then ask him for the loan of five pounds — or half a crown, as the case might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He haunted my father for a year or two more, and then vanished I know not where.