THE OLD MAID OF THE PERIOD
SHE don't shuffle round in "skimpt" raiment, and awkward shoes, and cotton gloves, with horn side-combs fastening six hairs to her temples; nor has she a sharp nose, and angular jaw, and hollow cheeks, and only two front teeth. She don't read "Law's Serious Call," or keep a cat, or a snuff-box, or go to bed at dark, save on vestry-meeting nights, nor scowl at little children, or gather catnip, or apply a broomstick to astonished dogs.
Not a bit of it. The modern "old maid" is round and jolly, and has her full complement of hair and teeth, and two dimples in her cheek, and has a laugh as musical as a bobolink's song. She wears pretty, nicely fitting dresses too, and cunning little ornaments around her plump throat, and becoming bits of color in her hair, and at her breast, in the shape of little knots and bows; and her waist is shapely, and her hands have sparkling rings, and no knuckles; and her foot is cunning, and is prisoned in a bewildering boot; and she goes to concerts and parties and suppers and lectures and matinees, and she don't go alone either; and she lives in a nice house, earned by herself, and gives jolly little teas in it. She don't care whether she is married or not, nor need she. She can afford to wait, as men often do, till they have "seen life," and when their bones are full of aches, and their blood tamed down to water, and they have done going out, and want somebody to swear at and to nurse them – then marry!
Ah! the modern old maid has her eye-teeth cut. She takes care of herself, instead of her sister's nine children, through mumps, and measles, and croup, and chicken-pox, and lung fever and leprosy, and what not.
She don't work that way for no wages and bare toleration, day and night. No, sir! If she has no money, she teaches, or she lectures, or she writes books or poems, or she is a book-keeper, or she sets types, or she does anything but hang on to the skirts of somebody's else husband, and she feels well and independent in consequence, and holds up her head with the best, and asks no favors, and "Woman's Rights" has done it!
That awful bugbear, "Woman's Rights"! which small-souled men, and, I am sorry to say, narrow women too, burlesque and ridicule, and wont believe in, till the Juggernaut of Progress knocks them down and rides over them, because they will neither climb up on it, nor get out of the way.
The fact is, the Modern Old Maid is as good as the Modern Young Maid, and a great deal better, to those who have outgrown bread and butter. She has sense as well as freshness, and conversation and repartee as well as dimples and curves.
She carries a dainty parasol, and a natty little umbrella, and wears killing bonnets, and has live poets and sages and philosophers in her train, and knows how to use her eyes, and don't care if she never sees a cat, and couldn't tell a snuff-box from a patent reaper, and has a bank-book and dividends: yes, sir! and her name is Phœbe or Alice; and Woman's Rights has done it.
A newspaper lately announced that the fashion of blue coats and brass buttons for gentlemen had received its death-blow. Now, listen, ye men who are constantly preaching to us women, about our "slavery to fashion." It was done by Prince Arthur, who didn't wear it at a recent great public ball. Deadly stab! We hope the gentlemen who did appear in that costume will not commit suicide. But if we might give them a little bit of advice, it would be, that they should keep on wearing blue coats and brass buttons, just because "the Prince" didn't. Show yourself superior to fashion, gentlemen, as you so often advise ladies to do. Try the boot on that foot. Don't throw aside a good coat for the puerile reason that it is out of fashion! Oh, no!
THE NURSE OF THE PERIOD
ALL honor to Mr. Bergh for his remedial measures to prevent cruelty to animals. Cats, they say, have nine lives; so, with this in their favor, will the gentleman above mentioned let them wriggle a while, and devote that portion of his time to an animal which has only one life. I refer to the New York child – the rich New York child. If he will take a walk through any of our city parks with his eyes open, he cannot fail to see suffering enough among this class to enlist his warmest sympathies. I often stroll through the parks to hear the birds sing, and to see the children. One day last week I saw a bright little boy of four years amusing himself by picking up little twigs that had fallen from the trees, while his nurse was engaged in interminable gossip with one of her class. Turning her head suddenly, she perceived him engaged in this harmless and natural amusement. Snatching them from his hand, she took each little twig separately and struck him with each across his happy little face; then, throwing them away out of his reach, left him standing there, sobbing, with nothing to do, while she continued her chapter of gossip. Walking on a little farther, I saw a little girl who had strayed across the path to look at a "dolly" which another child was drawing in a little wagon. It was a wonderful "dolly;" with flaxen curls, and pink boots, and a muslin dress; and its eyes were closed in slumber, after the fashion of the doll of the period, while in a recumbent position. Oh! the sweet little face, as it peered into the tiny wagon, and the precocious mother look of adoration at the "dolly"! Instantly came darting after her the Gorgon nurse, and with a smart slap upon her head and a shake of her little shoulders, till her bright hair flew quite over the frightened little face, she tore her violently away, and seating herself upon a bench, where she had been talking with a coarse-looking man, set the sobbing child so hard upon her knee that I could distinctly hear it catch its breath. I mention here only these two instances of brutal treatment, which I could multiply by dozens. Why do not mothers take pains to follow their nurses occasionally, to see if all is right with their children when out of doors? And why could not Mr. Bergh order some backs placed to the torturing benches in our parks where the little children sit? The Central Park benches are a good model in this regard, as many a weary pedestrian can testify. And while he is up there looking at them with a view to this, if he will just pass under the damp bridges, and rout out those self-same nurses, who sit there talking with their beaux, instead of taking their little charges out into the sunshine, and among the flowers, as they were told to do, this also would be a humanitarian act.
In fact, the rich child of the period is at present an object for his especial consideration. Deserted apparently by its natural protector, the mother, except so far as its dress is concerned, it is peculiarly helpless and friendless, at least when out of doors. I speak advisedly; for not a day passes that my blood does not boil at the cruelty it endures; at the innocent little instincts, for the gratification of which it is immediately slapped, as if they were crimes; just as if we should stone a bird for warbling, or a bee for humming, or a leaf for fluttering in the sweet south wind.
Oh! the harsh Juggernaut wheel which crushes out all this sweetness into the dust!
And what of the temper permanently spoiled and soured by such roughness and injustice? What of the aching little head, which is slapped and shaken? What of the tired little feet, while the nurse and her comrades occupy the seat, and the little ones, forbidden to play, lean wearily against the nurse's knee, and cry for "mamma"? Surely, where is mamma? Good Mr. Bergh, do you be the rich children's "mamma," and let the cat with her "nine lives" look out for herself!
A LOOK BACKWARD
OH! to be a child again. My only treasures, bits of shell and stone and glass. To love nothing but maple sugar. To fear nothing but a big dog. To go to sleep without dreading the morrow. To wake up with a shout. Not to have seen a dead face. Not to dread a living one. To be able to believe. Does life give us anything, in after years, as compensation for the lack of all this; I asked, as I watched the busy little feet about me, never weary of chasing some butterfly of the minute. But then when this thought overshadowed me it was a blue day. Things had somehow got "contrary." My shoe might have pinched, or my belt have been too tight; or I had been up too long without my coffee; or I had forgotten the touch of my first baby's velvet cheek, or my mother's praise of my first pie, or my exultation when I cut and fitted down a carpet all myself, sewing on the thick seams till my fingers were swollen and sore, because help was not to be had. I remember, when it was finished, how intensely I admired myself and that carpet. Then I have strutted round very proudly in dresses of my own fitting, that "were fits." And once I roasted a piece of beef, and seasoned it with saleratus, instead of salt; think of the triumph of that moment! But that was owing to a too-fascinating novel under my cooking-apron, in a day when novels were forbidden fruit. And once, at the romantic age of twelve years, I gave a little blue-eyed boy one of my long, yellow curls, and he threw it in the gutter, and said "he hated girl's hair," but then another boy was standing by at the time, and the world's jeer was too much for him; but I may mention in this connection, that the next handful of "three-cornered nuts" he offered me, when we were alone, followed that curl into the gutter!
I have also dim recollections of "seating" a pair of trousers, to see if I had any undeveloped talent in that line; but I have a lurking suspicion that I must have interfered with their original shape, for though my efforts received due commendation, I am confident those breeches were never worn afterward. But I think my failure came of my always running away, in my girlhood, whenever the family tailoress came to reside with us for a period, to make innumerable vests, jackets, etc., for my little brothers. In revenge she prophesied that, when I was married, I should have always boys, and be very glad of her presence. When she learned years after, that I had three girls, she remarked, in a limp and crestfallen state, that "it beat all I should have my own way in such a matter as that!"
Oh, yes, I suppose there is something to be got out of the world besides dolls and sugar-candy; but whether it is worth while to go through all we do to secure it, remains yet the unsolved problem.
Grown people, doubtless, have their crucifixions. Women, I know, "die daily." But I am certain, from observation and reflection, that some children, and very small ones too, suffer quite as much as it is possible for adults to do. I shall never forget a punishment measured out to me, when a fat little chub at school. I had committed the heinous offence of "whispering to one of the boys." I don't recollect what it was about. I only remember that Georgie smiled kindly at me on that first terrible day when I took my seat on a narrow bench, without any back, to "keep very still;" which was then, and is now, the most fiendish torment that can be devised for me.
Directly my name was called to "stand up in the middle of the floor." His name, "Georgie," was also called. With very red faces, out of which all the smile had gone, we confronted each other. Miss Birch then turned us back to back, and with a string of twine tied our elbows together, saying to me as she did so, "Since you like boys, you shall have enough of 'em." Now Georgie, true to the instincts of his sex, no sooner felt himself "bound" to the little creature, whom he the moment before adored, than he began to pull at the cruel string, till it cut into my fat bare arm, with torturing sharpness; his jacket sleeve protecting him from the pain he inflicted on me. There we stood, "the boys" laughing at Georgie. What little man could stand being "hen-pecked," even at that tender age? For me, I would not have shed a tear, had he cut my arm in two. I let him pull and tweak, and bore it with Spartan endurance till our penance was over, and school was "let out."
"Did you care?" asked the girls of me, going home. "No," answered I, huskily, with my chin in the air, twitching nervously at my white pinafore. I said nothing about it when I got home, but went up garret to cry it out. That Georgie should have hurt me on purpose, when I was in disgrace! That he should not have walked home with me from school, as before; or that he – a boy– should be "afraid," though a thousand of "the boys" looked on, to speak to a girl – to speak to me! His reign was over from that moment, spite of his curly black hair and glittering white teeth. I staid up garret till I had it all out among the rafters, and then washed my face and went down to my dinner.
The next morning I took my satchel and went to school. When I got as far as the corner of the street, Georgie was there waiting for me. I didn't see him. I looked straight at the lamp-post. He said softly, "Sarah!" I didn't hear. I planted my little boots firmly on the sidewalk and trotted on. He had not been my friend in my trouble. Failing in that, he had failed in everything. This was my first life-battle. I have had others since, with greater capacity for suffering; but I thought then, nothing could be worse than little Georgie's defection.
One day I was walking, with my two little girls beside me, and met "Georgie," to whom I had never spoken since our childish falling out. He was a physician then, in good practice, and as handsome as a man, as he had been as a child.
We each laughed, and passed on. For one, I was glad that I was not "tied" to him, save only for those few moments.
I may add, however, by way of postscript, that if Miss Birch imagined that she then and there cured me of "whispering to the boys," it was a fallacy.
Have you a habit of "putting off till a better time" – through an indolence inexplicable even to yourself – little matters that may seem trifling, but which you should really consider as tests of character? To such we say, fight this inclination with a persistent strength which will take no denial, if you ever wish to be or to accomplish anything in this world; for rest assured, it is the little fox at the foot of the vine, which will nibble away till every bud and blossom of the future shall be covered with mildew and blight.
VARIETIES OF HUMAN NATURE
SHOW me an "easy person," and I will show you a selfish one. Good-natured he may be; why not? since the disastrous consequences of his "easiness" are generally shouldered by other people. He always "guesses it is all right," though he knows it is all wrong. None so blind as they who don't wish to see. To right an abuse, is to tread on somebody's corns, and then that Somebody might turn and tread on his. For instance, some boys in the street are pelting a poor, drunken woman. "Well – boys will do such things." He takes a journey with his family and stops at a hotel in the dog-days, and the hotel clerk assigns him a room which is right over a fiery kitchen. He "guesses" there was no other to give; if so, why didn't the clerk say so? That might possibly do if the clerk didn't always give him the room over the hotel kitchen. He gets up from his seat in the car to step out upon the platform; a very odorous individual takes his seat, much to the disgust of his family. When asked to eject him, he replies, that he is not sure that the law in such cases is in his own favor; so he takes another seat, and leaves to them the new and uncongenial neighbor. The grocer sends him bad butter, instead of the good for which he bargained; but he thinks it was the grocer's boy who did it, and that he didn't do it purposely, and that he wont do it again. The milkman overcharges in his bill: well, very likely grass was scarce, or there was some good reason for it; beside, he can give his family a dollar or two less, the next time money is wanted, – and it is always wanted, – and that will make it all square; thus proving the adage, "that nobody can be generous without doing an injustice to somebody." Mr. Easy orders a coat; and when it comes home the sleeves are too short; but he don't like to send it back. He guesses the cutter understood the order to be just so; besides it is paid for and settled. Mr. Easy always pays for things before they come home; – he thinks it looks like distrust of your fellow-creatures if you don't; – and so he has perpetual short sleeves in his coats, and perpetually his trousers come home too long in the leg; and his wife has to keep on fibbing, and tell him they are just right, and it is the latest fashion; for fear he will ask her, as she goes by the tailor's store, just to step in and mention it, because she is so good at such things, you know, and don't mind speaking up; which accomplishment, desirable as it is, he prefers her to exercise outside the house; in-doors it must be kept in pickle.
The cook sends up the meat underdone. Mr. Easy remarks, apologetically, that it was a larger piece than usual; as if just there, the cook's judgment, if she had any, was not expected to come in, by putting it on to roast a little earlier, else what is the use of a cook?
Now, Mr. Easy's wife believes in eternal justice – obedience or the guillotine. She thinks that the person who, through indolence, offers a premium for carelessness or incompetency, commits a crime against society. She believes that he has no right to shirk a disagreeable duty because it is disagreeable; or because he is lazy, or because it is pleasant to be popular, and to appear amiable to the outside world. She believes that executive people are the hinges upon which alone the world turns – creaking awfully sometimes, it is true, but, thank God! turning! not rusting. She believes in using the dictionary, and plenty of it, when people need waking up to their duty; and, this accomplished, she believes in laying it on the shelf till again called for. A wrong un-righted pains Mrs. Easy; rouses her fiery indignation. Mr. Easy is never quite sure it is wrong; and, till he is, it is not necessary, in his opinion, to clear the deck for action.
Now, I have no doubt that both styles of persons have their mission in the world, else they wouldn't be here: I have known wasps and snails each to have their admirers. Some day I'll write a book of fables for you, to which Æsop's shall be no circumstance.
I wonder is a man justified, to his own conscience or his Maker, in allowing himself to be so absorbed by "business," beyond what is necessary to the comfortable support of his family, that he is as much a stranger to his own wife and children as if he were only a boarder in the family, – bodily present indeed at two or three meals a day, but totally ignorant of the ponderosity of the domestic machinery, or at what cost of health, or mental and moral deterioration, to his wife, this unrelieved strain is being carried out from day to day.
Perhaps you will answer, Who is to decide what is "a necessary and comfortable support for a family"? I can only ask, if there is not a great wrong unredressed, when a man knows nothing of the different mental or moral characteristics of the children he has launched into a world of temptation and trial, and is also quite content to remain ignorant. I think all intelligent, thinking persons will agree on this point. Also when a man, professional or other, seldom or never addresses a word to his wife about anything but the family expenses, or his favorite mode of cooking any pet article of food. Sure I am that any wife who is not a hopeless idiot, will chafe under such treatment, until, at last, her fate being too much for her, mental and moral deterioration fairly set in, and she hopelessly revolves in her narrow bounds without even a desire that the children, once so dear to her, should ever peep over and beyond them. The friends whom she might and ought to have retained for herself and them, she has gradually, one by one, lost sight of; her husband being never at home to care whether they came or stayed away – his interests, and his friends, being quite separate and apart. Meantime his house shines, his meals are well prepared, and his "buttons" are in place.
This picture is not overdrawn. I can produce you its counterparts any hour in the twenty-four. By and by, the oldest boy outgrows pinafores and jackets, and steps round in long-tails. No father has been at hand, to point out the quicksands he should have avoided, or to encourage him by his sympathy or love to do right. But the devil in all his Protean shapes has been at his elbow, delighted at that father's indifference. Presently some wild oat sown, brings to that home, as yet publicly undisgraced, its full-grown harvest of shame. Now come storms of reproach, under which the loving mother weeps and cowers, as if she, God help her! were guilty. Alas! and alas! were such young wayward feet ever turned right by such injudiciousness and injustice? Does not that boy know that it is the disgrace alone that father feels, and not the shipwreck of his child's soul? Does that father say, even to himself, "Oh, Absalom! my son! my son!" Not at all: he feels only a blind rage, a vexatious thwarting and hindering of his own affairs, which his son has brought about.
"His son?"
It is about the first time he ever regarded him in that relationship.
There is another kind of father and husband, quite the antipodes of this. He devotes himself entirely to the domestic side of the question. He has no "business" to occupy him, nor does he desire to have. He loves his wife devotedly, and the more children he has the better he is pleased. Their mother and themselves are enveloped in a warm atmosphere of love. Never was a harsh, pettish, or fretful word heard from his amiable lips. He plays with the children all day; he fixes kites and balls without stint for them; he tends the baby; and when a crisis comes, and the maid-of-all-work disappears, discouraged at the eleventh baby, he washes the dishes, if need be, as serenely as if he were born to it. Meantime these really bright children, loving and loved, grow apace. The mother is growing old. Love is a good thing, but there is a far-off questioning look in her gentle eyes, vainly searching those children's future. Her hands are now helplessly tied, and she sees no outward tendency toward business in his. She "loves him" – how can she help it? —thus far; but the years move on so quickly, and her children grow so tall! She remembers sadly the advantages of education she had, as she looks into the fair faces of her girls. Ah! how long will she continue to "love" their father? And how will those children, in after years, gauge that "love" which placed such obstacles between them and their best advancement? At what point in their young lives will they, chafing, let go the irresolute hand, that could only lead them up and down that narrow garden-path, when the broad highway of development lay in sight, and untrodden?
I am fully persuaded that if even I had created human beings, I couldn't have improved upon the original programme. I used to think that I should like to sweep the whole pussy-cat tribe of my fellow-creatures out of existence, with one wave of my wand. I am convinced now, that as a means of grace, they had better remain. Their sublime indifference as to the period in which the most momentous questions are to be settled, is instructive to hurricane natures. The fatalistic way in which they subside into their own comfortable chimney-corner, while all the moral elements are in a wild tornado outside, is calming to the spirit. The placidity with which they can eat, and sleep, and drink, and be merry, side by side with the corpses of dead hopes and abortive projects, over which humanity stands weeping and wringing her hands, is as good as a dose of opium. We look at them, and, wiping the cold perspiration from our brow, we ask, Is it possible, then, that we have been lashing ourselves into all this fury, when there is really to be no shipwreck? Are we really on the high road to lunacy without knowing it, and in the near proximity to such sublime self-poise and calmness? We slink into our corner to reflect; and get that much breathing-time and wind to go at the demon again. So you see they are of use, as I told you.
Then there are your critical people, like John Randolph, who actually stopped his dying, to correct the pronunciation of a friend who was waiting to close his eyes. So they will stop you in the midst of a ravishing bit of poetry, or the narration of a story, to dissect the sentiment of it by some glaring Drummond light, that they keep remorselessly on hand for such purposes, while you, poor wretch, dropped suddenly from your sublime height, lose both your place and your temper.
Now you can't say this isn't educational.
Then there is your human chameleon, who takes its color from the last leaf it feeds on. You quote one of its yesterday-expressed opinions, with full assurance of faith, as exactly coinciding with your own. Up comes a third party, and demands how you can so misrepresent the chameleon's views, because that very day it expressed a totally different opinion to this third party. You ask the chameleon for an explanation; when it coolly informs you that consistency is the vice of little minds; and that to unsay to-day what you said yesterday, is a proof of progress. You retire with a muttered wish that the chameleon would furnish you with a pair of seven-league boots, with which to overtake his "progress."
Then there is that social wasp, "I told you so;" who, vulture-like, hovers over the fallen, ready to insert his cruel beak at any sore place one has made, tripping. The guillotine is nothing to the bits of quivering flesh he tears out.
Then there is your routine person, who sneezes precisely at six, and sits down precisely at seven, and rises precisely at eight, and looks out of the window precisely at nine, and keeps this up month after month, and year after year, without the shadow of turning, and in the teeth of imperative exigencies, and with a stony stoicism, and pettiness of purpose, which is exasperating enough to bring on a fit of apoplexy in the beholder.
Nobody can say that this is not equal to any authorized penance in the church, to the sufferer, whose blood has not turned to milk and water. In fact, I have often wondered why our Roman Catholic friends, who have so many excellencies, need trouble themselves to suggest or appoint anything of the kind, when life is so full of crosses and discipline in the raw. When it is so teeming with cross-purposes, that every person you meet seems obstinately bent either upon forming a partnership which, like oil and water, will forever be opposed to mingling, or throwing pebble after pebble into some ocean, expecting that the little circle it makes, will reach to the farthest shore of worldly fame or ambition. In fact, when I have visited lunatic asylums, it has really seemed to me that mad as their inmates undoubtedly are, there is little need to dissever them from their comrades on the outside.
You will perceive from this that I consider life a discipline. I do. No response was ever heartier. When one bubble after another bursts, this, you see, is a comforting reflection to settle down upon. There was once a man who read the lists of deaths every day, hoping to see that of some woman, the whole sisterhood of whom he hated. When he came to one, he always exclaimed, "Thank God, there's another of 'em gone!" My moral is obvious.
Commend me to the person who can say No with a will, when it is needed; who is not deterred from it for fear of being called "disagreeable," or "being thought to be always in hot water." Any water but lukewarm water for me! One of my favorite passages in the Good Book is this: "I would that thou wert either cold or hot; but because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." The joke comes in here: that your timid conservative is always the first to raise the signal of distress on any emergency for the speedy arrival of "that disagreeable person who is always in hot water." He likes him marvellously as such crises of his existence? Now, beyond dispute, everybody likes to travel on a smooth-beaten road without jolting, if possible; but in order for this, somebody must make a great turn-over generally, in clearing away the stones that obstruct it. Now, I consider it a cowardly piece of business for either man or woman, to travel miles around that road, rather than take hold and do their fair share of the disagreeable work, either from indolence, or from fear that they might offend one who might possibly prefer that the road should remain in its normal condition. Oh, how glad they are when somebody else has taken this troublesome pioneership off their shoulders! How they rub their lazy hands, and smirk, and say, "You see you do these things so well! I never was constituted for it"! Which translated, means, that they prefer sacrificing a principle to sacrificing their ease or popularity; as if anybody liked to keep all the time fighting – as if other people didn't love ease too!