Three weeks afterward I had a letter from Edward Mayne by flag of truce; that was the week before Fredericksburg; and then the agony again began. It did not last very long. In the early spring came Chancellorsville, and there Edward was slightly wounded and taken prisoner; he was removed to the hospital at Point Lookout; his aunt went to nurse him, but I did not go; he was doing very well, and I thought it was wiser not. And one day in May—ah! that day!—I was looking out of my window, and I see now the blue sky, the little white clouds, the roses, and the ivied wall that I saw when my mother came in and said Mrs. Daingerfield had come to take me to Edward, who was very ill and anxious to see me. I remember how the blood seemed to sink away from my heart, and for a moment I thought I was going to die; but in another moment I knew that I should live. I was eager and excited, and not unhappy, from that time until the end was at hand.
I had never been in a hospital before, and there was a long ward full of men, who all looked to me as if they were dying, through which I passed to reach the room in which Edward Mayne lay alone. He heard me coming, and, as I opened the door, he raised himself in bed and put out his hand to me....
That night the dreadful pain left him, and his aunt said he seemed brighter and more hopeful; but when the surgeon saw him in the morning, he shook his head. When the sun set, Edward knew that he should never again see its evening glories. Into that dark, still room came a greater than Solomon, and as the dread shadow of his wings fell on my life, I hushed my prayers and tears. We sat and watched and waited; and there came back a feeble strength into the worn frame, and he told us what he wished. He said that perhaps he had been wrong, but he had thought himself right; at least, he had given his life for his faith, and soon, soon he would know all. Then he asked them to leave him alone with me for a little while, and when they came back into the room, nothing remained of him but the cast-off mortality. The sun was rising in the east, but his soul was far beyond it; and the sunlight came in and kissed the quiet pale face, that looked so peaceful and so happy there could be no lamentation over it.
That day came his parole; the parole which we had so exerted ourselves to obtain that he might go home to get well; and now it had found him far beyond the captivity of bar or flesh—a freed spirit, 'gone up on high.'
The kindness of the Government induced us to ask one more favor, which was granted us. They let us take him home to Washington and bury him in the place he had always wished to be buried in; and some Confederate prisoners were given permission to attend his funeral. So he was buried as a soldier should be buried, borne to the grave by his comrades, and mourned by the woman dearest to him. He lies now on the sunniest slope in that green graveyard, where the waters rush near his resting place, and the trees make a shade for the daisies that brighten above him.
He died as the sun rose on the first of June; we buried him early on the morning of the fifth. That night I left Washington, glad that it was to be no longer my place of residence, glad that my family would soon follow me to make another home where I could be stung by no associations. The old house passed into the hands of my elder sister, who is married to a Congressman from the West. But during this winter I have been so often homesick, and this early spring has been so chill and bleak compared with the May days of Washington, that I was fain to come back for a brief hour; and I have chosen to come in these last May days, that the first of June might find me here, true to the memory of the past.
There is nothing left of the old days; the place is changed from what it once was; the streets swarm with soldiers and strange faces; the houses are used by Government, or are dwelt in by strangers; there is scarcely a trace in this Sodom of the Sodom before the flood. No, there is nothing left for me now, of the things I used to know, except the little wren, whose song broke my heart this morning; and there is nothing here for me to care for, except that young grave in Georgetown, whose white cross bears but the initials and the date. I must now try to make myself a new life elsewhere, and to-morrow I go forth, shaking off the dust that soils my garments; hoping for the promise of the rainbow in this storm—and sure of the strength that will not fail me. O world! be better than thy wont to thy poor, weary child! O earth! be kindly to a bruised reed! O hope! thou wilt not leave me till the end—the end for which I wait.
WORD-STILTS
If the reader is so favored as to possess a copy of the 'Comparative Physiognomy' of Dr. James W. Redfield (a work long out of market, and which never had much of a sale), he may find in a chapter concerning the likeness between certain men and parrots some wise remarks on ridiculous eccentricities in literature. 'In inferior minds,' says the Doctor,'the love of originality shows itself in oddity.' 'There is many a sober innovator,' he continues, farther on,' whose delight it is to ponder
'O'er many a volume of forgotten lore,'
that he may not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares these writers to parrots.
Now it is a well-known peculiarity of parrots that they have a passion for perching themselves in places where they will be on a level with the heads of the superior race whose utterances they imitate. The perch a parrot affects is almost always an altitude of about six feet, or the height of the tallest men. They feel their inferiority keenly if you leave them to hop about on the floor. It occurs to us that nothing could please a parrot more, if it could be, than a pair of stilts on which it could hop comfortably.
The literary parrot, more fortunate than his feathered fellow, finds stilts in words—obsolete words, such as men do not use in common intercourse with their fellows. Modern rhymesters more and more affect this thing. Every day sees some outre old word resurrected from its burial of rubbish, and set in the trochaics and spondees of love songs and sonnets. Dabblers in literature, who would walk unseen, pigmies among a race of giants, get on their word-stilts, and straightway the ear-tickled critics and the unconsciously nose-led public join in pæans of applause. Sage men, who do not exactly see through the thing, nod their heads approvingly, and remark: 'Something in that fellow!' And the delighted ladies, prone as the dear creatures often are to be pleased with jingle that they don't understand, exclaim: 'A'n't he delightful!'
The lamented Professor Alexander once produced a very excellent poem, which contained only words of a single syllable, forcibly illustrating the power of simple language. We should be glad to reproduce it here, by way of contrapose to our own accompanying poem, but cannot now recall it to memory in its completeness. Any child, who could talk as we all talk in our families, could read and understand fully the poem to which I refer. But ask any child to read the lines we have hammered out below, and tell you what they mean! Nay, ask any man to do it, and see if he can do it. Probably not one in a hundred usual readers, could 'read and translate' the word-stilts with which we have trammelled our poetic feet, except with the aid of patient and repeated communion with his English dictionary. There are, however, no words employed here which may not be found in the standard dictionaries of our tongue.
To it:
THE POET INVOKETH HIS MUSE
Come, ethel muse, with fluxion tip my pen,
For rutilant dignotion would I earn;
As rhetor wise depeint me unto men:
A thing or two I ghess they'll have to learn
Ere they percipience can claim of what I'm up
To, in macrology so very sharp as this;
Off food oxygian hid them come and sup,
Until, from very weariness, they all dehisce.
THE POET SEEKETH THE READER'S FORBEARANCE
Delitigate me not, O reader mine,
If here you find not all like flies succinous;
My hand is porrect—kindly take't in thine,
While modestly my caput is declinous;
Nor think that I sugescent motives have,
In asking thee to read my chevisance.
I weet it is depectible—but do not rave,
Nor despumate on me with look askance.
Existimation greatly I desire;
'Tis so expetible I have sad fears
That, excandescent, you will not esquire
My meaning; see, I madefy my cheek with tears,
On my bent knees implore forbearance kind;
Be not retose in haught; I know 'tis sad,
But get your Webster down, and you will find
That he's to blame, not I—so don't get mad!
THE POET COMMENCETH TO SING
The morning dawned. The rorid earth upon,
Old Sol looked down, to do his work siccate,
My sneek I raised to greet the ethe sun,
And sauntering forth passed out my garden gate.
A blithe specht sat on yon declinous tree
Bent on delection to its bark extern;
A merle anear observed (it seemed to me)
The work, in hopes to make owse how to learn.
A drove of kee passed by; I made a stond,
For fast as kee how could my old legs travel?
But—immorigerous brutes!—with feet immund
They seemed to try my broadcloth garb to javel.
The semblance of a mumper then I wore,
Though a faldisdory before I might have graced;
Eftsoons I found, when standing flames before,
The mud to siccate, it was soon erased.
If we should turn our attention studiously to this line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow dips' of parrot-poetry.
A GREAT SOCIAL PROBLEM
My dear Continental:
When the meteorological question was despatched, ladies have long had a habit of calling upon their servants to furnish them with small talk; high wages, huge appetites, daintiness, laziness, breakage, impertinence, are fruitful topics which they daily treat exhaustively; always arriving at the hopeless conclusion: 'Did you ever hear of anything like it?' and 'I wonder what we are coming to!'
Is it not possible that we may be coming to—no servants at all? To me the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps; hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can, and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue his tastes to suit the whims of the enemigos pagados, as the Spaniards call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly employés (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and Tide—because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic economy that work is inversely as the increase of wages. Nowadays, if a housekeeper visits a prison, he envies the whiteness of the floors and the brightness of the coppers he sees there, and thinks, with a sigh, how well it might be for his subscalaneans, if they could be made to take a course of neatness for a few months in some such an institution.
Vain wish! The future is theirs, and they know it. Their services will become gradually more worthless, until we shall find them only in grand establishments: mere appendages kept for fashion and for show; as useless as the rudimental legs of a snake, which he has apparently only to indicate the distinguished class in animated nature he may claim to belong to. We shall live to say, as Perrault sang:
'J'aperçus l'ombre d'un cocher
Tenant l'ombre d'une brosse
Nettoyant l'ombre d'un carrosse.'
Alas! I fear that even these shadows of servants will one day vanish and disappear from us altogether.
Time was when classes in society were as well defined as races still are. The currents ran side by side, and never intermingled. Some were born to furnish the blessings of life, and others to enjoy them. Some to wait, and others to be waited upon. The producing class accepted their destiny cheerfully, believed in their 'betters,' and were proud to serve them. The last eighty years have pretty much broken down these comfortable boundary lines between men. The feudal retainer, who was ready to give his life for his lord, the clever valet, who took kicks and caning as a matter of course when his master was in liquor or had lost at cards, even the old family servants, are species as extinct as the Siberian elephant, or the cave bear, or the dodo. And now the advance of the Union armies southward has destroyed the last lingering type of the servant post: the faithful black.
In this country there never was much distinction of classes. The unwillingness of New England help to admit of any superiority on the part of their masters has furnished many amusing stories. Later, when the Irish element penetrated into every kitchen, farmyard, and stable, floating off the native born into higher stations, service became limited to immigrants and to negroes. But the immigrant soon learned the popular motto, 'I'm as good as you are,' and only remained a serving man until he could save enough money to set up for himself: not a difficult matter in the United States; and never so easy as at this moment. The demands of the Government for soldiers and for supplies threaten us with a labor famine in spite of the large immigration. In Europe labor is scarce and in demand. Commerce, manufactures, colonization have outrun the supply. Wages have doubled in England and in France within the last twenty years, and are rising. With increase of wages comes always decrease of subordination. The knowledge of reading, now becoming general, and exercised almost exclusively in cheap and worthless newspapers, and the progress of the democratic movement, which for good or for evil is destined to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of the members against the belly.
Gradually has sprung up the feeling that it is degrading to be a servant; a terrible lion in the path of the quiet housekeeper in search of assistants. There may arise some day a purer and a wiser state of society, wherein the relation of master and man will be satisfactory to both. A merchant exercises a much sharper control over his clerk than over any servant in his house, and it is cheerfully submitted to. The soldier, who is worse paid and worse fed than a servant, is a mere puppet in the hands of his officers, obliged to obey the nod of twenty masters, and to do any work he may be ordered to, without the noble privilege of 'giving notice;' and yet there is never any difficulty in obtaining a reasonable supply of soldiers—because clerks and soldiers do not think themselves degraded by their positions, and servants do. It may be a prejudice, but it is one which drives hundreds of women, who might be fat and comfortable, to starve themselves over needlework in hovels; and often to prefer downright vice, if they can hope to conceal it, to virtue and a home in a respectable family. Any logic, you perceive, is quite powerless against a prejudice of this size and strength.
But is it altogether a prejudice? Is it not a sound view of that condition of life?
I confess that it has long been a matter of surprise to me that men should be found willing to hire themselves out for domestic service in a country where bread and meat may so easily be obtained in other ways, and where even independent manual labor is so often considered derogatory to the dignity of the native born. To do our dirty work that it disgusts us to do for ourselves, to stand behind our chairs at table, to obey our whims and caprices, to have never a moment they can call their own, to keep down their temper when we lose ours, to be compelled to ask for permission to go out for a walk, seems to me a sad existence even with good food and wages.
The fact is, my dear Continental, that the relation between master and servant has to be readjusted to suit the times. Indeed it is readjusting itself. We see the signs, although we may not perceive their significance. Our life is a dream. I use this venerable saying in another sense than the one generally intended by it: I mean that we live half our lives, if not more, in the imagination; and that the imagination of every-day people is a dream made up of feelings brought together from the habits, theories, and prejudices of the past of all lands and all nations of men. The reality that was once in them has long since been out of them; yet these vague and shadowy fancies are all-powerful and govern our actions. So that morally we go about like maskers in the carnival, dressed in the old clothes of our ancestors. With this difference, that most of us do not see how shabby and threadbare they are, and how unsuited to our present wants. And the few who do see this have an inbred fondness for the old romantic rags, and wear some of them in spite of their better judgment. Our moneyed class cling in particular to the dream of an aristocracy, and love to look down upon somebody. The man who made his fortune yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a nouveau riche and a parvenu. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than their masters. I have seen an ardent democrat, who had roared equal rights from many a stump, furious with the impertinence of a waiter, whose answer, if it had come from an equal, he would scarcely have noticed. And was not the waiter a man and a fellow voter? What distinction of class have we in this country? It is true that the property qualification we have discarded in our political system we have retained as our test of social position. Indeed, no abstract rights of man can make up the difference between rich and poor. But Fortune is nowhere so blind nor so busy in twirling her wheel; and our two classes are so apt to change places, that frequently the only difference between the master and the footman who stands behind him, is the difference of capital. And Europe is treading the same democratic path as ourselves, limping along after us as fast as her old legs will carry her. The time will come when the class from which we have so long enlisted recruits for our batteries de cuisine will find some other career better suited to their expanded views.
What then? Do you suggest that we may lay a hand upon the colored element, after the example of our honored President? But
'While flares the epaulette like flambeau
On Corporal Cuff and Ensign Sambo,'
can you expect either of these distinguished officers to leave the service of the United States for ours? What with intelligent contrabandism, emancipation, the right of suffrage, and the right to ride in omnibuses, we fear that their domestic usefulness will be sadly impaired.
Oh for machinery! automaton flunkies, requiring only to be wound up and kept oiled! What a housekeeping Utopia! Thomson foreshadowed a home paradise of this kind when he wrote the 'Castle of Indolence:'
'You need but wish, and, instantly obeyed,
Fair ranged the dishes rose and thick the glasses played.'
But as yet invention has furnished no reapers and mowers for within doors. We have only dumb waiters; poor, creaking things, that break and split, like their flesh-and-blood namesakes, and distribute the smell of the kitchen throughout the house. Heine once proposed a society to ameliorate the condition of the rich. He must have meant a model intelligence office. I wish it had been established, for we may all need its aid.
What are we to do when we come to the last of the servants? Darwin says that the Formica rufescens would perish without its slaves; we are almost as dependent as these confederate ants. Our social civilization is based upon servants. Certainly, the refinements of life, as we understand it, could not exist Without them, and it is difficult to see how any business of magnitude could be carried on. Briareus himself could not take care of a large country place, with its stables, barns, horses, cattle, and crops, even if Mrs. B. had the same physical advantages, and was willing to help him. Must we tempt them back by still larger salaries, or increase their social consideration, telling them, as a certain clergyman once said of his order, that 'they are supported, and not hired'?—changing the word help, as we have servant, into household officer or assistant manager, or adopt a Chinese euphemism, such as steward of the table or governor of the kitchen? Fourier does something of this kind; in his system the class names of young scullions are cherubs and seraphs! Or shall we adopt the coöperative plan of Mill and others, and offer John an interest in the family—say, possibly, the position of resident son-in-law after ten years of honesty, sobriety, and industry—with a seat at table in the mean while? Or must all the work be done by women, and a proprietor have to seal his Biddies more sanctorum in Utah? Or might not poor relations, now confessedly nuisances, be made useful in this way? Some marquis asked Sophie Arnould why she did not discharge her stupid porter? 'I have often thought of it,' she answered, 'mais que voulez vous, c'est mon père.'
These resources failing, we must drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or phalanstères à la Fourier, or, worse than either, to mammoth hotels. American tastes incline that way. There we may live in huge gilded pens, as characterless as sheep in the flock, attended upon by waiters, chambermaids, and cooks, who will have a share in the profits, and consequently will be happy to do anything to increase the income of their house.
I see no other remedy, and I offer this great social problem to the serious thoughts of your readers.
Yours ever, G. V.