Littlepage Manuscripts: Satanstoe, The Chainbearer & The Redskins (Complete Edition). James Fenimore Cooper

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ admitting that he was not quite so zealous as a Christian. The church being the repository of the faith, if not the faith itself, it follows that its friends are akin to religion, though not absolutely religious. I have always liked a man the better for being what I call a sound, warm-hearted churchman, though his habits may have been a little free.

      It was necessary to supply the place left vacant by the emigration of Mr. Worden, or to abandon a school that had got to be the nucleus of knowledge in Westchester. There was a natural desire, at first, to obtain another scholar from home; but no such person offering, a Yale College graduate was accepted, though not without sundry rebellions, and plenty of distrust. The moment he appeared, Col. Follock, and Major Nicholas Oothout, another respectable Dutch neighbour, withdrew their sons; and from that hour Dirck never went to school again. It is true, Westchester was not properly a Dutch county, like Rockland, and Albany, and Orange, and several others along the river; but it had many respectable families in it, of that extraction, without alluding to such heavy people as the Van Cortlandts, Felipses, Beekmans, and two or three others of that stamp. Most of our important county families had a different origin, as in the case of the Morrises, of Morrisania, and of the Manor of Fordham, the Pells, of Pelham, the Heathcotes, of Mamanneck, the branch of the de Lanceys, at West Farms, the Jays, of Rye, &c., &c. All these came of the English, or the Huguenot stock. Among these last, more or less Dutch blood was to be found, however; though Dutch prejudices were a good deal weakened. Although few of these persons sent their boys to this school, they were consulted in the selection of a master; and I have always supposed that their indifference was the cause that the county finally obtained the services of a Yankee, from Yale.

      The name of the new pedagogue was Jason Newcome, or, as he pronounced the latter appellation himself, Noo-come. As he affected a pedantic way of pronouncing the last syllable long, or as it was spelt, he rather called himself Noo-comb, instead of Newcome, as is the English mode, whence he soon got the nick-name of Jason Old Comb among the boys; the lank, orderly arrangement of his jet-black, and somewhat greasy-looking locks, contributing their share towards procuring for him the sobriquet, as I believe the French call it. As this Mr. Newcome will have a material part to play in the succeeding portions of this narrative, it may be well to be a little more minute in his description.

      I found Jason fully established in the school, on my return from college. I remember we met very much like two strange birds, that see each other for the first time on the same dunghill; or two quadrupeds, in their original interview in a common herd. It was New Haven against Newark; though the institution, after making as many migrations as the House of Loretto, finally settled down at Princeton, a short time before I took my degree. I was consequently entitled to call myself a graduate of Newark,—a sort of scholar that is quite as great a curiosity in the country as a Queen Anne’s farthing, or a book printed in the fifteenth century. I remember the first evening we two spent in company, as well as if the meeting occurred only last night. It was at Satanstoe, and Mr. Worden was present. Jason had a liberal supply of puritanical notions, which were bred in-and-in in his moral, and I had almost said, in his physical system; nevertheless, he could unbend; and I did not fail to observe that very evening, a gleam of covert enjoyment on his sombre countenance, as the hot-stuff, the cards, and the pipes were produced, an hour or two before supper,—a meal we always had hot and comfortable. This covert satisfaction, however, was not exhibited without certain misgiving looks, as if the neophyte in these innocent enjoyments distrusted his right to possess his share. I remember in particular, when my mother laid two or three new, clean packs of cards on the table, that Jason cast a stealthy glance over his shoulder, as if to make certain that the act was not noted by the minister, or the “neighbours.” The neighbours!—what a contemptible being a man becomes, who lives in constant dread of the comments and judgments of these social supervisors! and what a wretch, the habit of deferring to no principle better than their decision has made many a being, who has had originally the materials of something better in him, than has been developed by the surveillance of ignorance, envy, vulgarity, gossiping and lying! In those cases in which education, social position, opportunities and experience have made any material difference between the parties, the man who yields to such a government, exhibits the picture of a giant held in bondage by a pigmy. I have always remarked, too, that they who are best qualified to sit in this neighbourhood-tribunal, generally keep most aloof from it, as repugnant to their tastes and habits, thus leaving its decisions to the portion of the community least qualified to make such as are either just or enlightened.

      I felt a disposition to laugh outright, at the manner in which Jason betrayed a sneaking consciousness of crime, as he saw my meek, innocent, simple-minded, just and warm-hearted mother lay the cards on the table that evening. His sense of guilt was purely conventional, while my mother’s sense of innocence existed in the absence of false instruction, and in the purity of her intentions. One had been taught no exaggerated and false notion of sin,—nay, a notion that is impious, as it is clearly impious in man to torture acts that are perfectly innocent, per se, into formal transgressions of the law of God,—while the other had been educated under the narrow and exaggerated notions of a provincial sect, and had obtained a species of conscience that was purely dependent on his miserable schooling. I heard my grandfather say that Jason actually showed the white of his eyes the first time he saw Mr. Worden begin to deal, and he still looked, the whole time we were at whist, as if he expected some one might enter, and tell of his delinquency, I soon discovered that Jason had a much greater dread of being told of, than of doing such things as taking a hand at whist, or drinking a glass of punch, from which I inferred his true conscience drew perceptible distinctions between the acts and the penalties he had been accustomed to see inflicted on them. He was much disposed to a certain sort of frailty; but it was a sneaking disposition to the last.

      But, the amusing part of the exhibition, that first evening of our acquaintance, was Mr. Worden’s showing off his successor’s familiarity with the classics. Jason had not the smallest notion of quantity; and he pronounced the Latin very much as one would read Mohawk, from a vocabulary made out by a hunter, or a savant of the French Academy. As I had received the benefit of Mr. Worden’s own instruction, I could do better, and, generally, my knowledge of the classics went beyond that of Jason’s. The latter’s English, too, was long a source of amusement with us all, though my grandfather often expressed strong disgust at it. Even Col. Follock did not scruple to laugh at Newcome’s English, which, as he frequently took occasion to say, “hat a ferry remarkaple sount to it.” As this peculiarity of Jason’s extended a good way into the Anglo-Saxon race, in the part of the country in which he was born, it may be well to explain what I mean a little more at large.

      Jason was the son of an ordinary Connecticut farmer, of the usual associations, and with no other pretension to education than such as was obtained in a common school, or any reading which did not include the Scriptures, some half-dozen volumes of sermons and polemical works, all the latter of which were vigorously as well as narrowly one-sided, and a few books that had been expressly written to praise New England, and to undervalue all the rest of the earth. As the family knew nothing of the world beyond the limits of its own township, and an occasional visit to Hartford, on what is called “election-day,” Jason’s early life was necessarily of the most contracted experience. His English, as a matter of course, was just that of his neighbourhood and class of life; which was far from being either very elegant or very Doric. But on this rustic, provincial, or rather, hamlet foundation, Jason had reared a superstructure of New Haven finish and proportions. As he kept school before he went to college, while he was in college, and after he left college, the whole energies of his nature became strangely directed to just such reforms of language as would be apt to strike the imagination of a pedagogue of his calibre. In the first place, he had brought from home with him a great number of sounds that were decidedly vulgar and vicious, and with these in full existence in himself, he had commenced his system of reform on other people. As is common with all tyros, he fancied a very little knowledge sufficient authority for very great theories. His first step was to improve the language, by adapting sound to spelling and he insisted on calling angel, an-gel, because a-n spelt an; chamber, cham-ber, for the same reason; and so on through a long catalogue of similarly constructed words.

      “English,” СКАЧАТЬ