Gala-days.
by Gail Hamilton.
GALA-DAYS
PART I
Once there was a great noise in our house,--a thumping and battering and grating. It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the garret. I did it myself because I wanted it done. If I had said, "Halicarnassus, will you fetch my trunk down?" he would have asked me what trunk? and what did I want of it? and would not the other one be better? and couldn't I wait till after dinner?--and so the trunk would probably have had a three-days journey from garret to basement. Now I am strong in the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the one and spared the other, and got the trunk downstairs myself.
Halicarnassus heard the uproar. He must have been deaf not to hear it; for the old ark banged and bounced, and scraped the paint off the stairs, and pitched head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the plastering, and dented the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward, uncompromising, unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life.
By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus loomed up the back stairs. I stood hot and panting, with the inside of my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rubbed off three knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk had crushed it against a sharp edge of the doorway.
"Now, then?" said Halicarnassus interrogatively.
"To be sure," I replied affirmatively.
He said no more, but went and looked up the garret-stairs. They bore traces of a severe encounter, that must be confessed.
"Do you wish me to give you a bit of advice?" he asked.
"No!" I answered promptly.
"Well, then, here it is. The next time you design to bring a trunk down-stairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out the beams, and let the garret down into the cellar. It will make less uproar, and not take so much to repair damages."
He intended to be severe. His words passed by me as the idle wind. I perched on my trunk, took a pasteboard box-cover and fanned myself. I was very warm. Halicarnassus sat down on the lowest stair and remained silent several minutes, expecting a meek explanation, but not getting it, swallowed a bountiful piece of what is called in homely talk, "humble-pie," and said,--
"I should like to know what's in the wind now."
I make it a principle always to resent an insult and to welcome repentance with equal alacrity. If people thrust out their horns at me wantonly, they very soon run against a stone-wall; but the moment they show signs of contrition, I soften. It is the best way. Don't insist that people shall grovel at your feet before you accept their apology.
That is not magnanimous. Let mercy temper justice. It is a hard thing at best for human nature to go down into the Valley of Humiliation; and although, when circumstances arise which make it the only fit place for a person, I insist upon his going, still no sooner does he actually begin the descent than my sense of justice is appeased, my natural sweetness of disposition resumes sway, and I trip along by his side chatting as gaily as if I did not perceive it was the Valley of Humiliation at all, but fancied it the Delectable Mountains. So, upon the first symptoms of placability, I answered cordially,--
"Halicarnassus, it has been the ambition of my life to write a book of travels. But to write a book of travels, one must first have travelled."
"Not at all," he responded. "With an atlas and an encyclopaedia one can travel around the world in his arm-chair."
"But one cannot have personal adventures," I said. "You can, indeed, sit in your arm-chair and describe the crater of Vesuvius; but you cannot tumble into the crater of Vesuvius from your arm-chair."
"I have never heard that it was necessary to tumble in, in order to have a good view of the mountain."
"But it s necessary to do it, if one would make a readable book."
"Then I should let the book slide,--rather than slide myself."
"If you would do me the honor to listen," I said, scornful of his paltry attempt at wit, "you would see that the book is the object of my travelling. I travel to write. I do not write because I have travelled. I am not going to subordinate my book to my adventures. My adventures are going to be arranged beforehand with a view to my book."
"A most original way of getting up a book!"
"Not in the least. It is the most common thing in the world. Look at our dear British cousins."
"And see them make guys of themselves. They visit a magnificent country that is trying the experiment of the world, and write about their shaving-soap and their babies' nurses."
"Just where they are right. Just why I like the race, from Trollope down. They give you something to take hold of. I tell you, Halicarnassus, it is the personality of the writer, and not the nature of the scenery or of the institutions, that makes the interest. It stands to reason. If it were not so, one book would be all that ever need be written, and that book would be a census report. For a republic is a republic, and Niagara is Niagara forever; but tell how you stood on the chain-bridge at Niagara--if there is one there--and bought a cake of shaving-soap from a tribe of Indians at a fabulous price, or how your baby jumped from the arms of the careless nurse into the Falls, and immediately your own individuality is thrown around the scenery, and it acquires a human interest. It is always five miles from one place to another, but that is mere almanac and statistics. Let a poet walk the five miles, and narrate his experience with birds and bees and flowers and grasses and water and sky, and it becomes literature. And let me tell you further, sir, a book of travels is just as interesting as the person who writes it is interesting. It is not the countries, but the persons, that are 'shown up.' You go to France and write a dull book. I go to France and write a lively book.
But France is the same. The difference is in ourselves."
Halicarnassus glowered at me. I think I am not using strained or extravagant language when I say that he glowered at me. Then he growled out,--
"So your book of travels is just to put yourself into pickle."
"Say, rather," I answered, with sweet humility,--"say, rather, it is to shrine myself in amber. As the insignificant fly, encompassed with molten glory, passes into a crystallized immortality, his own littleness uplifted into loveliness by the beauty in which he is imprisoned, so I, wrapped around by the glory of my land, may find myself niched into a fame which my unattended and naked merit could never have claimed."
Halicarnassus was a little stunned, but presently recovering himself, suggested that I had travelled enough already to make out a quite sizable book.
"Travelled!" I said, looking him steadily in the face,--"travelled! I went once up to Tudiz huckleberrying; and once, when there was a freshet, you took a superannuated broom and paddled me around the orchard in a leaky pig's-trough!"
He could not deny it; so he laughed, and said,--
"Ah, well!--ah, well! Suit yourself. Take your trunk and pitch into Vesuvius, if you like. I won't stand in your way."
His acquiescence was ungraciously, and I believe I may say ambiguously, expressed; but it mattered little, for I gathered up my goods and chattels, strapped them into my trunk, and waited for the summer to send us on our way rejoicing,--the gentle and gracious young summer, that had come by the calendar, but had lost her way on the thermometer.
O these delaying Springs, that mock the merry-making of ancestral England! Is the world grown so old and stricken in years, that, like King David, it gets no heat? Why loiters, where lingers, the beautiful, calm-breathing June? Rosebuds are bound in her trailing hair, and the sweet of her garments always used to waft a scented gale over the happy hills.
"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where the daisies, pinks, and violets grow; Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west-wind she shot along; And where she went the flowers took thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."
So sang a rough-handed, silver-voiced, sturdy old fellow, harping unconsciously the notes of my lament, and the tones of his sorrow wail through the green boughs today, though he has been lying now these two hundred years in England's Sleeping Palace, among silent kings and queens. Fair and fresh and always young is my lost maiden, and "beautiful exceedingly." Her habit was to wreathe her garland with the May, and everywhere she found most hearty welcome; but May has come and gone, and June is still missing. I look longingly afar, but there is no flutter of her gossamer robes over the distant hills. No white cloud floats down the blue heavens, a chariot of state, bringing her royally from the court of the King. The earth is mourning her absence.
A blight has fallen upon the roses, and the leaves are gone gray and mottled. The buds started up to meet and greet their queen, but her golden sceptre was not held forth, and they are faint and stunned with terror. The censer which they would have swung on the breezes, to gladden her heart, is hidden away out of sight, and their own hearts are smothered with the incense. The beans and the peas and the tasselled corn are struck with surprise, as if an eclipse had staggered them, and are waiting to see what will turn up, determined it shall not be themselves, unless something happens pretty soon. The tomatoes are thinking, with homesick regret, of the smiling Italian gardens, where the sun ripened them to mellow beauty, with many a bold caress, and they hug their ruddy fruit to their own bosoms, and Frost, the cormorant, will grab it all, since June disdains the proffered gift, and will not touch them with her tender lips. The money-plants are growing pale, and biting off their finger-tips with impatience. The marigold whispers his suspicion over to the balsam-buds, and neither ventures to make a move, quite sure there is something wrong. The scarlet tassel-flower utterly refuses to unfold his brave plumes. The Zinnias look up a moment, shuddering with cold chills, conclude there is no good in hurrying, and then just pull their brown blankets around them, turn over in their beds, and go to sleep again. The morning-glories rub their eyes, and are but half awake, for all their royal name. The Canterbury-bells may be chiming velvet peals down in their dark cathedrals, but no clash nor clangor nor faintest echo ripples up into my Garden World. Not a bee drones his drowsy song among the flowers, for there are no flowers there. One venturesome little phlox dared the cold winds, and popped up his audacious head, but his pale, puny face shows how near he is to being frozen to death.
The poor birds are shivering in their nests. They sing a little, just to keep up their spirits, and hop about to preserve their circulation, and capture a bewildered bug or two, but I don't believe there is an egg anywhere round. Not only the owl, but the red-breast, and the oriole, and the blue-jay, for all his feathers, is a-cold. Nothing flourishes but witch-grass and canker-worms. Where is June?--the bright and beautiful, the warm and clear and balm-breathing June, with her matchless, deep, intense sky, and her sunshine, that cleaves into your heart, and breaks up all the winter there? What are these sleety fogs about? Go back into the January thaw, where you belong! What have the chill rains, and the raw winds, and the dismal, leaden clouds, and all these flannels and furs to do with June, the perfect June of hope and beauty and utter joy? Where is the June? Has she lost her way among the narrow, interminable defiles of your crooked old city streets? Go out and find her! You do not want her there. No blade nor blossom will spring from your dingy brick, nor your dull, dead stone, though you prison her there for a thousand years of wandering.
Take her by the hand tenderly, and bid her forth into the waiting country, which will give her a queenly reception, and laurels worth the wearing. Have you fallen in love with her--on the Potomac, O soldiers?
Are you wooing her with honeyed words on the bloody soil of Virginia?
Is she tranced by your glittering sword-shine in ransomed Tennessee?
Is she floating on a lotus-leaf in Florida lagoons? Has she drunk Nepenthe in the orange-groves? Is she chasing golden apples under the magnolias? Are you toying with the tangles of her hair in the bright sea-foam? O, rouse her from her trance, loose the fetters from her lovely limbs, and speed her to our Northern skies, that moan her long delay.
Or is she frightened by the thunders of the cannonade sounding from shore to shore, and wakening the wild echoes? Does she fear to breast our bristling bayonets? Is she stifled by the smoke of powder? Is she crouching down Caribbean shores, terror-stricken and pallid? Sweet June, fear not! The flash of loyal steel will only light you along your Northern road. Beauty and innocence have nothing to dread from the sword a patriot wields. The storm that rends the heavens will make earth doubly fair. Your pathway shall lie over Delectable Mountains, and through vinelands of Beulah. Come quickly, tread softly, and from your bountiful bosom scatter seeds as you come, that daisies and violets may softly shine, and sweetly twine with the amaranth and immortelle that spring already from heroes' hearts buried in soldiers'
graves.
"But there is no use in placarding her," said Halicarnassus. "We shall have no warm weather till the eclipse is over."
"So ho!" I said. "Having exhausted every other pretext for delay, you bring out an eclipse! and pray when is this famous affair to come off?"
"Tomorrow if the weather prove favorable, if not, on the first fair night."
Then indeed I set my house in order. Here was something definite and trustworthy. First an eclipse, then a book, and yet I pitied the moon as I walked home that night. She came up the heavens so round and radiant, so glorious in her majesty, so confident in her strength, so sure of triumphal march across the shining sky; not knowing that a great black shadow loomed right athwart her path to swallow her up.
She never dreamed that all her royal beauty should pass behind a pall, that all her glory should be demeaned by pitiless eclipse, and her dome of delight become the valley of humiliation! Is there no help? I said.
Can no hand lead her gently another way? Can no voice warn her of the black shadow that lies in ambuscade? None. Just as the young girl leaves her tender home, and goes fearless to her future,--to the future which brings sadness for her smiling, and patience for her hope, and pain for her bloom, and the cold requital of kindness, or the unrequital of coldness for her warmth of love, so goes the moon, unconscious and serene, to meet her fate. But at least I will watch with her. Trundle up to the window here, old lounge! you are almost as good as a grandmother. Steady there! broken-legged table. You have gone limping ever since I knew you; don't fail me tonight. Shine softly, Kerosena, next of kin to the sun, true monarch of mundane lights! calmly superior to the flickering of all the fluids, and the ghastliness of all the gases, though it must be confessed you don't hold out half as long as you used when first your yellow banner was unfurled. Shine softly tonight, and light my happy feet through the Walden woods, along the Walden shores, where a philosopher sits in solitary state. He shall keep me awake by the Walden shore till the moon and the shadow meet. How tranquil sits the philosopher, how grandly rings the man! Here, in his homespun house, the squirrels click under his feet, the woodchucks devour his beans, and the loon laughs on the lake. Here rich men come, and cannot hide their lankness and their poverty. Here poor men come, and their gold shines through their rags. Hither comes the poet, and the house is too narrow for their thoughts, and the rough walls ring with lusty laughter. O happy Walden wood and woodland lake, did you thrill through all your luminous aisles and all your listening shores for the man that wandered there?
Is it begun? Not yet. The kitchen clock has but just struck eleven, and my watch lacks ten minutes of that. What if the astronomers made a mistake in their calculations, and the almanacs are wrong, and the eclipse shall not come off? Would it be strange? Would it not be stranger if it were not so? How can a being, standing on one little ball, spinning forever around and around among millions of other balls larger and smaller, breathlessly the same endless waltz,--how can he trace out their paths, and foretell their conjunctions? How can a puny creature fastened down to one world, able to lift himself but a few paltry feet above, to dig but a few paltry feet below its surface, utterly unable to divine what shall happen to himself in the next moment,--how can he thrust out his hand into inconceivable space, and anticipate the silent future? How can his feeble eye detect the quiver of a world? How can his slender strength weigh the mountains in scales, and the bills in a balance? And yet it is. Wonderful is the Power that framed all these spheres, and sent them on their great errands; but more wonderful still the Power that gave to finite mind its power, to stand on one little point, and sweep the whole circle of the skies. Almost as marvelous is it that man, being man, can divine the universe, as that God, being God, could devise it. Cycles of years go by. Suns and moons and stars tread their mysterious rounds, but steady eyes are following them into the awful distances, steady hands are marking their eternal courses. Their multiplied motions shall yet be resolved into harmony, and so the music of the spheres shall chime with the angels' song, "Glory to God in the highest!"