Household Papers and Stories. Гарриет Бичер-Стоу

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      Here the hickory stick broke in two, and the two brands fell controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and coals, and calling for Jenny and the hearth-brush. Your wood fire has this foible, that it needs something to be done to it every five minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend—they do not strike us as unreasonable.

      When Jenny had laid down her brush she said—

      “Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics.”

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      “Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms,” said I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition. “Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation.”

      “There papa goes with subjective and objective!” said Marianne. “For my part, I never can remember which is which.”

      “I remember,” said Jenny; “it’s what our old nurse used to call internal and out-ternal—I always remember by that.”

      “Come, my dears,” said my wife, “let your father read;” so I went on as follows:—

      I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill Carberry, to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed into “that undiscovered country” of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.

      “I’ll tell you what, Chris,” he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, “do you know what I chose this house for? Because it’s a social-looking house. Look there, now,” he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors—“look at those long south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam. I’m getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things we’ll have there! the nicest times—everything free and easy, you know—just what I’ve always 23 wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go. And here now’s the library—fancy this full of books and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as you please and ask no questions—all the same as if it were your own, you know.”

      “And Sophie, what will she say to all this?”

      “Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital girl to keep things going. Oh, Sophie’ll make a house of this, you may depend!”

      A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes and through straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the parlor furniture, with which he seemed pleased as a child with a new toy.

      “Look here,” he said; “see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a pattern on each; well, the sofa’s just like them, and the curtains to match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and borders. I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie’s governor furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you see. Messrs. Curtain & Collamore are coming to make the rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order.”

      “Why, Bill,” said I, “you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope you’ll be able to keep it up; but law business comes in rather slowly at first, old fellow.”

      “Well, you know it isn’t the way I should furnish, if my capital was the one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie’s people do it, and let them—a girl doesn’t want to come down out of the style she has always lived in.”

      I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.

      24

      But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we all went to see Bill in his new house, splendidly lighted up and complete from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned. The running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.

      Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood and show her principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn, mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten. Not but that Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood, as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of women in whom housekeeping was more than an art or a science—it was, so to speak, a religion. Sophie’s mother, aunts, and grandmothers, for nameless generations back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They might have been genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic town of Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows’ tails are kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the fire-wood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher, visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the neatness of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls and the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the housewives were set Zionward at once.

      Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough when a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished house, where the articles are not too 25 expensive to be reasonably renewed as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon her care—when splendid crystals cut into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and rust stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and passageway.

      Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and aunts—she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of flies, warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers, made of cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid out—even the curtain tassels had each its little shroud—and bundles of receipts, and of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation and purification and care of all these articles, were stuffed into the poor girl’s head, before guiltless of cares as the feathers that floated above it.

      Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture were to be kept at such an ideal point of perfection that he needed another house to live in—for, poor fellow, he found the difference between having a house and a home. It was only a year or two after that my wife and I started our ménage on very different principles, and Bill would often drop in upon us, wistfully lingering in the cosy armchair between my writing-table and my wife’s sofa, and saying with a sigh how confoundedly pleasant things looked there—so pleasant to have a bright, open fire, and geraniums and roses and birds, and all that sort of thing, and to dare to stretch out one’s legs and move without thinking what one was going to hit. “Sophie is a good girl!” he would say, “and wants to have everything right, but you see they won’t let her. They’ve loaded her with so many things that have to be kept in lavender that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her health; and then, you СКАЧАТЬ