Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 63, January, 1863», страница 9
"We all of us are become wonderful story-tellers. Now it comes to pass that I have a little story to tell; my time is come at last"; and, watching every muscle of her face, and all the little veins of feeling that I had learned so well, I began.
Carefully I let in the light, until, without a shock, Miss Axtell learned that the room below contained Bernard McKey.
"They did not understand me," she said, "or they would not have brought me here thus."
After a long, long lull, Miss Axtell thanked me for telling her alone, where no one else could see how the knowledge played around her heart. Dear Miss Axtell, sitting there, in my father's house, only last March, with a holy joy stealing up, in spite of her endeavor to hide it from my eyes even, and suffusing her white face with warm, rosy tints, dear Miss Axtell, I hoped your day-dawn drawing near.
Miss Axtell said "she hated to have other people see her feel"; she asked "would I manage it for her, that no one should be nigh when she met Mr. McKey?"
It was that very evening that papa, calling Sophie and me into his room, told us a little of the former history of the people in his house.
"I want you to help me, children," he said; "ladies manage such things better than we men know how to."
I said, close to papa's astonished hearing, "I know all about it; just let me take care of this mission"; and he appointed me diplomate on the occasion.
Sophie was strangely disconcerted; she had such fearsome awe of the Axtells, "she couldn't think of interfering," she said, "unless to make gruel or some condiment."
I coaxed Miss Lettie to have her tea in her own room: she certainly did not look like going down. Under pretext of having the care of her, I seated sister Sophie at my station, and thus I had the house, outside of the tea-room, under my control.
"Come down now; don't lose time," I said to Miss Axtell, running up to her, half breathless from my haste.
"What for? What is it?" she said.
"Papa is anticipating some grand effort in the managerial line from me, regarding two people in his house, and I don't choose to manage at all. Mr. McKey is waiting to see you. I knocked to see, as I came up, and all the family are at tea."
I went down with her. There was no trembling, only a stately calm in her manner, as she drew near.
I knocked. Mr. McKey answered, "Come in," in his low, musical, variant tones. I turned the knob; the door opened. A moment later, I stood alone within the hall. I walked up and down, a true sentinel on true duty, that no enemy might draw near to hear the treaty of true peace which I knew was being written out by the Recording Angel for these two souls. They must have had a pleasant family-talk in the tea-room, they stayed so long.
At last I heard footsteps coming. I told Miss Lettie, thinking that she would leave; but no, she said "she would stay awhile"; and so, later on, the two were sitting there in quietness of joy, when my father came up to see his patient. Mr. Axtell was with him. They went in; indifferent words were spoken,—until, was it Abraham Axtell that I saw as I kept up my walking in the hall? What mysterious change had come to transfigure his face so that I scarcely believed the evidence of my own eyes? He came to the door and said, "Will you come in, Miss Percival?" I obeyed his request. He closed the door, and turned the key.
"In the presence of those against whom he had sinned he would confess his fault," were his first words; and he went on, he of whom they had asked a pardon, and drew a fiery picture of all that he had done, of the murder that he had doubly committed, for he had made another soul to bear his sin.
It was terrible to hear him accuse himself. It was touching to see this proud Axtell begging forgiveness. He offered the fatal cup to my father,—
"Therein lies the evidence of my murder. It was I who killed your daughter, Doctor Percival. Although no court on earth condemns me, the Judge of all the Earth holds me responsible for her death."
Doctor Percival tried to reason with him, said words of comfort, but he heeded them not: they might as well have fallen on the vacant air.
"Blessings be upon you two! if, out of suffering, God will send joy, it will be yours," Mr. Axtell said; and he offered his hand to Mr. McKey and his sister, as one does when taking farewell.
He went from them to my father, and offered his hand doubtingly, as if afraid it might be refused.
Papa took it in both his own. An instant later Mr. Axtell came to me. Surely he had no forgiveness to ask of Anna Percival. No; he only said, and I am certain that no one heard, save me, "I thank God that He has not let me shadow your life. Farewell!"
He left the room. We all looked, one at another, in that dim astonishment which is never expressed in words. Papa broke the spell by putting on fresh coals.
Miss Lettie said, "Poor Abraham!" and yet she looked so happy, so as I had never seen her yet!
A few moments later Jeffy came rushing in, his eyes dilate with amazement.
"The gentleman is gone," he said, "gone entirely."
It was even so. Mr. Axtell had gone, no one knew whither. It was late at night, when a letter came for Doctor Percival by a special messenger.
I never saw it. I only know that in it Mr. Axtell explained his intention of absence, and wrote, for his sister's sake, to make arrangements for her future. She was to return to Redleaf, at such time as she chose to go hence, with Mr. McKey; and to Aaron's and Sophie's care Mr. Axtell committed her.
Papa gave the letter to Miss Lettie. She read it in silence, and her face was immovable. I could divine nothing from it.
Last March! how long the time seems! Scarce six months have gone since I gave the record, and now the summer is dying.
I thought Miss Axtell would have ventured out on the bridge, far and high, ere now; but no, she says "the time is not yet,—that she will wait until Abraham comes home"; and Bernard McKey is content.
The solemn old house is closed. No longer Katie opens the door and Kino looks around the corner. Kino died, perhaps of grief: such deaths have been.
Miss Axtell has put off the old Dead-Sea-wave face. She has just put a calm, beautiful, happy one in at my door, to ask Anna Percival "why she sits and writes, when the last days of summer are drawing nigh?" Miss Axtell stays with me, and a great contentment sings to those who have ears to hear through all her life. If only Mr. Axtell would come home! Why does he stay away so long, and take such a dreary line of travel, where old earth is seamed in memoriam of man's rebellion? I'll send to him the althea-bud, when next his sister writes.
The leaves are fallen now. Winter is almost come. There is no need that I should send out the althea-fragment. Mr. Axtell wrote to me. Last night I received these words only,—and yet what need I more?
"God hath given me peace. I am coming home."
THE LEGEND OF RABBI BEN LEVI
Rabbi Ben Levi, on the Sabbath, read
A volume of the Law, in which it said,
"No man shall look upon my face and live."
And as he read, he prayed that God would give
His faithful servant grace with mortal eye
To look upon His face and yet not die.
Then fell a sudden shadow on the page,
And lifting up his eyes, grown dim with age,
He saw the Angel of Death before him stand,
Holding a naked sword in his right hand.
Rabbi Ben Levi was a righteous man,
Yet through his veins a chill of terror ran,
With trembling voice he said, "What wilt thou here?"
The Angel answered, "Lo! the time draws near
When thou must die; yet first, by God's decree,
Whate'er thou askest shall be granted thee."
Replied the Rabbi, "Let these living eyes
First look upon my place in Paradise."
Then said the Angel, "Come with me and look."
Rabbi Ben Levi closed the sacred book,
And rising, and uplifting his gray head,
"Give me thy sword," he to the Angel said,
"Lest thou shouldst fall upon me by the way."
The Angel smiled and hastened to obey,
Then led him forth to the Celestial Town,
And set him on the wall, whence gazing down,
Rabbi Ben Levi, with his living eyes,
Might look upon his place in Paradise.
Then straight into the city of the Lord
The Rabbi leaped with the Death Angel's sword,
And through the streets there swept a sudden breath
Of something there unknown, which men call death.
Meanwhile the Angel stayed without, and cried,
"Come back!" To which the Rabbi's voice replied,
"No! in the name of God, whom I adore,
I swear that hence I will depart no more!"
Then all the Angels cried, "O Holy One,
See what the son of Levi here has done!
The kingdom of Heaven he takes by violence,
And in Thy name refuses to go hence!"
The Lord replied, "My Angels, be not wroth;
Did e'er the son of Levi break his oath?
Let him remain; for he with mortal eye
Shall look upon my face and yet not die."
Beyond the outer wall the Angel of Death
Heard the great voice, and said, with panting breath,
"Give back the sword, and let me go my way."
Whereat the Rabbi paused and answered, "Nay!
Anguish enough already has it caused
Among the sons of men!" And while he paused,
He heard the awful mandate of the Lord
Resounding through the air, "Give back the sword!"
The Rabbi bowed his head in silent prayer;
Then said he to the dreadful Angel, "Swear,
No human eye shall look on it again;
But when thou takest away the souls of men,
Thyself unseen and with an unseen sword
Thou wilt perform the bidding of the Lord."
The Angel took the sword again, and swore,
And walks on earth unseen forevermore.
* * * * *
MY FRIEND THE WATCH
For two years I have had a most faithful, intimate, and useful friend, whom I have constantly worn next my heart. I do not know him for a Spiritualist, but by some mysterious sympathy he hears the incessant, ghostly foot-falls of Time, and repeats them accurately to my ear. While I wake he tells me how Time is passing. While I sleep he is still marking his steps, so that sometimes I have a feeling of awe, as if my mysterious friend were counting my own life away. Then again I am sure that in the faint, persistent monotone of his voice I hear the singing of the old mower's inevitable scythe. The Imagination contemplates this friend of mine with wonder. But Science sees him holding the hand of a captain in his ship at sea, or of a conductor in a train on shore, and honors in him the friend of civilization.
His native place is Waltham, in Massachusetts, and he invited me but a few days since to accompany him in a little visit thither. I cheerfully assented, and we took the cars in Boston, at the Worcester Depot, and after passing a range of unsavory back-yards and ill-favored houses, and winding beneath streets and by the side of kennels, we emerged upon the broad meadows and marshes from which rise in the distance the Roxbury and Brookline hills. The whole region is covered with bright, wooden houses. The villages have a pert, thrifty, contented air, which no suburbs in the world surpass. If the houses are very white and a village looks like a camp, it is because the instinct of the inhabitants assures them that they may strike their tents to-morrow and move Westward or elsewhere to a greater prosperity. In older countries the stained and ancient stone houses are symbols of the inflexible state of society to which they belong. The dwellers are anchored to that condition. There is no "Westward ho" for them. Like father, like son. The hod-carrier's son carries hods. Even the headsman's office is hereditary.
"Yes, yes," hummed my friend, in his patient, persistent monotone, "the American citizen is an aërial plant. He has no roots. There is no wrenching, when he changes place. If there were, how could he overrun the continent in time? He must carry lighter weight than Caesar's soldiers. What has he to do with old houses? His very inventions would make his house intolerable to him in twenty or thirty years."
"But we are going at this very moment to see your ancestral halls, are we not?" I modestly inquired.
"Yes," he replied; "but they are not ten years old, and every year changes them."
By this time we were gliding through the gardens of Brookline and Brighton, which have been afflicted of late years with the Mansard epidemic. It has swept the whole region. Scarcely a house has escaped. Even the newest are touched,—sometimes only upon the extremities or outbuildings, but more frequently they are covered all over with the Mansard.
"That affection of the house-top," whispered I to my friend, "was originally derived from the dome of the Invalides, and has raged now for a century and a half."
"Yes," replied my companion, gravely, "we are not very fastidious in our importations."
He went on murmuring to himself as usual. Then he resumed more audibly,—
"I suppose that most people, upon looking at me, would take me for a foreigner. But you know how peculiarly native American I am. I am indeed only a watch, and," added my modest friend, glancing at the gold chain which hung from my waistcoat button-hole to the pocket, "if you will pardon my melancholy joke, I am for putting Americans only upon guard."
This military expression suddenly sent my thoughts elsewhere; and for some time the rattling of the cars sounded in my ears like another rattling, and the gentle Charles River was to my eyes the historic Rapidan or Rappahannock.
"Don't you think," unobtrusively ticked my watch, "that the exhortation to encourage home-industry has a peculiar force just now? I mean nothing personal; and I hope you will not think me too forward or fast."
"I have never had reason to think so," I answered; "and I am so used to look upon your candid face to know exactly what the hour is, that I shall be very much obliged, if you will tell me the time of day in this matter also; unless, indeed, you should find the jar of the cars too much for you, and prefer to stop before you talk."
"If I stopped, I certainly could not talk," my watch answered; "and did you ever know me to stop on account of any jar?"
I hastened to exculpate myself from any intention of unkind insinuation, and my watch ticked steadily on.
"If your mill turns only by a stream that flows to you through your neighbor's grounds, your neighbor has your flour at his mercy. You can grind your grist when he chooses, not when you will."
I nodded. My watch ticked on,—
"When you live on a marsh where the tide may suddenly rise house-high without warning, if you are a wise man, you will keep a boat always moored at the door."
"I certainly will," responded I, with energy.
"Very well. Every nation lives on that marsh which is called War. While war is possible,—that is to say, in any year this side of the Millennium,—there is but one sure means of safety, and that is actual independence. At this moment England is the most striking illustration of this truth. She is the most instructive warning to us, because she is the least independent and the most hated nation in the world. England and France and the United States are the three great maritime powers. We all know how much love is lost just now between England and ourselves. How is it with her ancient enemy across the Channel? The answer is contained in the reported remark of Louis Napoleon: 'Why do the English try to provoke a war with me? They know, if I should declare war against England, that there is not an old woman in France who would not sell her last shift to furnish me with means to carry it on.' Great Britain is at this moment under the most enormous bonds to keep the peace. They are the bonds of vital dependence upon the rest of the world.—Shall I stop?" asked my watch.
"No, no; lose no time; go regularly on," answered I.
"Very well; while England sneers and rages at us, let us be warned by her. She lives by her looms; but her looms and her laborers are fed from abroad. Therefore she lies at the mercy of her enemies, and she takes care never to make friends. She snarls and shows her teeth at us. She sees us desperately fighting, and yet she can neither spring nor bite. It is the moment most favorable for her to strike, but she cannot improve it. She hopes and prays for the ruin of our government, seeing, that, if it falls from internal disease, and not from a foreign blow, her most threatening political and commercial rival is overthrown. And she does not shrink from those hopes and prayers, although she knows that the result she so ardently desires will be the establishment by military power of a huge slave-empire, a counter-civilization to that of Christianity. Fear of her life makes England false and timid. Her dependence upon other nations has compelled her to abdicate her position as the head of Saxon civilization, which is the gradual enlarging of liberty as the only permanent security of universal international prosperity and peace. Indeed, it is not denied that the tone of British opinion in regard to human slavery is radically changed. That change is the measure of the timidity and sophistication, the moral deterioration inevitably produced in any people by the consciousness of its dependence for the means of labor and life upon other nations. The crack of the plantation-whip scares Washington no longer, but it pierces the heart of Westminster with terror.
"See how utterly mean and mortifying is her attitude toward us. John Bull looks across the highway of the world into his neighbor's house. 'D' ye see,' he mutters, 'that man chastising his son in his house yonder? Let's play that they are not related, and ask him what he means by assaulting an innocent passenger.' Then he turns to the rest of the people in the street, who know exactly how virtuous and mild John Bull is in his own family-relations, who have watched his tender forbearance with his eldest son Erin, and his long-suffering suavity with his youngest son India, and says to them,—'To a moral citizen of the world it is very shocking to see such an insolent attack upon a peaceable person. That man is an intolerable bully. If he were smaller, I'd step over and kick him.'—Do you feel drowsy?" asked my watch.
"I was never more awake," I answered; "but you seem to me,—although, when I look at you and think of Waltham, it is the most natural thing in the world,—yet you do seem hard upon Old England, Mother England, spite of all."
"Ah!" ticked my American watch, "not even I would for a moment seem to be unjust to all that is manly and noble and friendly in England and among Englishmen. There are two nations there, as Disraeli had already said in one sense, when Gasparin said it in another. There is the sound old stock from which flowers the finest modern civilization. From that come the sweetness, the candor, the perception and sympathy of men like Mill and Cairnes and Bright. From that springs all the nobler thought of England. It is to that thought, to that spirit of lofty humanity and pure justice, that Garibaldi appeals in his address to the English people from his prison,—an appeal which seems utterly ludicrous, if you think of it as addressed to the historic John Bull, but which is perfectly intelligible and appropriate, if you remember that Sir Philip Sidney was an Englishman as well as George IV., and that John Stuart Mill is no less English than Lord Palmerston or Russell. It is with that spirit that American civilization is truly harmonious. But there is the other, merely trading, short-sighted, selfish spirit, which is typified by the coarse John Bull of the pictures, and which has touched almost to a frenzy of despair Carlyle in the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" and Tennyson in "Maud." That is the dominant England of the hour. That is the England which lives at the mercy of rivals. And that is the England which, consequently, with feverish haste, proclaims equal belligerence between the leaders of an insurrection for the extension and fortification of slavery and the nation which defends its existence against them. That is the England whose prime-minister alleges that a friendly power has authorized an insult, while at the very moment in which he speaks he carries in his pocket the express disclaimer of that power. That is the England which incessantly taunts and reviles and belies a kindred people, whose sole fault is that they were too slow to believe their brothers parricides, and who were credulous enough to suppose that England loved not only the profit, but the principle, of Liberty under Law."
"It is very sad; but it certainly seems so," said I.
"Seems, my dear friend? nay, it is," ticked my watch, persistently. "It is the inevitable penalty of national deterioration which any people must pay that in its haste to be rich forgets to secure its actual independence. Thus Richard Cobden, the most sagacious of English statesmen, is the most unflinching apostle of peace, because he knows that England has put it out of her power to go to war. I saw you reading his late argument against a blockade. Did you reflect that it was really an argument against war? 'How absurd,' he cries, 'that a commercial nation, which lives by imports and exports, paying for the one by the other, should, by shutting up ports in which it wishes to buy and sell, cut its own hands and feet off, and so bleed to death!' 'In a commercial nation,' says the orator, 'the system of blockade is mere suicide.'
"But a blockade may be clearly as effective a means of warfare as a cannonade. If you can cut off your enemy from all that he gives and all that he gets from without, you have taken the first great step in war. Unless he can supply himself, he must presently surrender or perish. For war is brute force. It is a process of terrible compulsion. 'Do this,' says War, 'or you shall burn, and starve, and hunger, and be shot, and die.'
"The point to be settled between the two combatants is, which can stand starving and shooting longest. If one of them depends for his food upon the sale to others of what he makes, and depends for what he makes upon what he can get from others, it is easy enough to see, that, if the other is self-supporting, his victory is sure, if he have only the means to cut off supplies. England is at the mercy of a skilful and effective blockade. No wonder her shrewdest statesman implores her to see it.
"'My dear John Bull,' says Cobden, 'an honorable member of your Parliament, a miller and grain-merchant, estimates that the food imported into England between September of last year and June of this year was equal to the sustenance of between three and four millions of people for a twelve-month; and his remark to me was, that, if that food had not been brought from America, all the money in Lombard Street could not have purchased it elsewhere, because elsewhere it did not exist.'
"That is the position of a nation with the hand of another upon its throat.—Do I tire you?" ticked my watch.
"Not at all. I am listening intently, and trying to see what you are coming to," I answered.
"We are coming, and very rapidly, to West Newton and the Waltham Watch-Factory," ticked my companion.
"I hope so. It was where I understood you to invite me to go," said I.
"Courage, my friend! Before we get to the factory, let us understand the reason of it. Let me finish showing you why I have a national pride in my ancestral halls, and why I think that the American flag floats over that building as appropriately as over Fort Adams or Monroe."
"I have always trusted you implicitly," I answered.
"Well, then, England is a nation whose mill grinds at the will of a neighbor. Is it wonderful that so sagacious a statesman as Cobden says that the blockade is a terrible thing for a commercial people? Take the estimate of his authority, and imagine the supply of food from this country into England stopped, and the bumptious little island necklaced with Monitors to cut off the Continental supply. Do we not hold one of her hands with our grain, and the other with our cotton? The grain she gets, but the cotton is substantially stopped; what is the consequence? Listen to Mr. Cobden. The case, he says, 'is so grave, so alarming, and presents itself to those who reflect upon what may be the state of things six months hence in such a hideous aspect, that it is apt to beget thoughts of some violent remedy.' He computes that by Christmas the Government must come to the aid of the pauper operatives, of whom there are now seven hundred and fifty thousand, a number which will then have increased to nearly a million.
"Of all nations, then, the industrial example of England is to be avoided by every sensible people. She has been willing to wear chains, because they were gold. But the pre-Millennial nations must be able to stand alone; and we at this moment know more than ever that we must work out our own national salvation, not only without aid, which we had no reason to ask, but without sympathy, which we had every honorable right to expect. But, to be a truly independent people, we must practically prove our self-sufficiency; and at this moment patriotism shows itself not only in defending the nation against the Rebellion, but in the heartiest encouragement of every art and manufacture for which our opportunities and capacities fit us."
My watch here ticked so loudly and defiantly that I feared some neighboring passenger might have a Frodsham or Jurgensen in his pocket and feel insulted.
"A nation like ours," steadily ticked my watch, "seated upon a continent from sea to sea, with so propitious a variety of climate and with such imperial resources of every kind, if it brought all its powers to bear upon its productions and opportunities, would be absolutely invincible, because entirely independent. It need not, therefore, sit a cynic recluse on the Western sea. It need not, therefore, deny nor delay the dawn of the Millennial day, which the poet beheld, when
'The war-drum throbbed no longer, and the
battle-flags were furled,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation
of the world.'
"Tick, tick, tick," urged my watch. But I made no reply.
"Why, then," it continued, "do we consent to look longer to Europe for any of the essential conveniences of life? Why are our clothes not made of American cloth or of American silk? Why are our railroads not laid with American iron? Yes, and why,—pardon me, but we are very near Waltham,—why is our time not told by American watches? Tea and coffee, doubtless, we cannot grow, nor do lemons and bananas ripen in our sun. But has not the time come when every hearty American will say, 'All that I can get here which is good enough and cheap enough for the purpose, I will not look for elsewhere; and all that I can do to develop every resource and possibility, I will do with all my heart'?"
"I do not wish to dampen your enthusiasm," answered I, "but I remember a story of that friend of Southern liberty and author of the Fugitive-Slave Bill, Mason of Virginia. He appeared in the Senate during the Secession winter, in a suit of Southern-made clothes. The wool was grown and spun and woven in Virginia, and Mason wore it to show that Virginia unassisted could clothe her children. But a shrewder man than Mason quietly turned up the buttons on the Secession coat and showed upon them the stamp of a Connecticut factory."
"Have you ever found me unreasonable?" ticked my friend. "Have you ever seen even my hand tremble, as it pointed out to you so many hours in which you have been earnestly interested? I am not excited even by my own existence, and I claim nothing extravagant. There will always be some things that we may not be able to make advantageously. Absolute independence of the rest of the world is no more possible than desirable. But everything which tends to increase instead of diminishing a vital dependence is nationally dangerous. I think, if you will consider me attentively, you will agree that I ought to know that trade is everywhere controlled by positive laws; nor will any wise watch expect them to be long or willingly disregarded by the most enthusiastic patriotism. Knowing that, we do not need to go far to discover why so many important conveniences are still made for us by foreign hands. The immense and compact population of Europe compels a marvellous division of labor, whereby the detail of work is more perfected, and it also forces a low rate of wages, with which in a new country sparely peopled like ours the manufacture of the same wares can scarcely compete. This is the great practical difficulty; but it can be obviated in two ways. If a people assume that the fostering of its own manufactures is a cardinal necessity, it can secure that result either by the coarse process of compulsory duties upon all foreign importations, or by developing the ingenuity and skill which will so cheapen the manufacture itself as to make up the difference of outlay in wages.
"Then, if the work is as well done and as cheaply furnished"–ticked my watch, a little proudly and triumphantly.
"Then it needs only to be known, to be universally and heartily welcomed," said I. "Patriotism and the laws of trade will coincide, and there will be no excuse for depending longer upon the foreign supply."
"But the fact must be made known," ticked my watch, thoughtfully.
"It certainly must," I answered.
"Well, it is a fact that a man can get a better watch more cheaply, if he buys an American instead of a foreign one."
Friendship and gratitude inspired my reply.
"I will put my mouth to the 'Atlantic Trumpet,'—I mean 'Monthly,'—and blow a blast."
"That is not necessary; but as we are very near the station at West Newton where we leave the railroad, and as I have endeavored to show you the national importance of doing everything for ourselves that we reasonably can, you will probably interest your hearers more, if you give them a little description of your visit to my birthplace. Excuse me, but I have watched you pretty constantly for two years, and, if you will be governed by me, as you have generally been during that time, you will not undertake any very elaborate mechanical description, but say a few words merely of what you are going to see."
