 | CHAPTER VI.
MY DREAM-WIFE My wife and I, or, Harry Henderson's history |  |
6. CHAPTER VI.
MY DREAM-WIFE
ALL things prospered with me in my college life. I
had a sunny room commanding a fine prospect,
and uncle Jacob's parting liberality enabled me
to furnish it commodiously.
I bought the furniture of a departing senior at a reduced
price, and felt quite the spirit of a householder in my possessions.
I was well prepared on my studies and did not
find my tasks difficult.
My stock of interior garnishment included several French
lithographs, for the most part of female heads, looking up,
with very dark bright eyes, or looking down, with very long
dark eyelashes.
These heads of dream-women are, after all, not to be
laughed at; they show the yearning for womanly influences
and womanly society which follows the young man in his
enforced monastic seclusion from all family life and family
atmosphere. These little fanciful French lithographs, generally,
are chosen for quite other than artistic reasons. If
we search into it we shall find that one is selected because
it is like sister “Nell,” and another puts one in mind of
“Bessie,” and then again, there is another “like a girl I
used to know.” Now and then one of them has such a
piquant, provoking air of individuality, that one is sure
it must have been sketched from nature. Some teasing,
coaxing, “don't-care-what-you-think” sort of a sprite,
must have wreathed poppies and blue corn-flowers just so
in her hair, and looked gay defiance at the artist who drew
it. There was just such a saucy, spirited gipsy over my
searched the world over—with whom I held sometimes
airy colloquies—not in the least was she like my dream-wife,
but I liked her for all that, and thought I would
“give something” to know what she would have to say to
me, just for the curiosity of the thing.
The college was in a little village, and there was no particular
amity between the townspeople and the students.
I believe it is the understanding in such cases, that college
students are to be regarded and treated as a tribe of Bedouin
Arabs, whose hand is against every man, and they in
their turn are not backward to make good the character.
Public opinion shuts them up together—they are a state
within a state—with a public sentiment, laws, manners,
and modes of thinking of their own. It is a state, too,
without women. When we think of this, and remember
that all this experience is gone through in the most gaseous
and yeasty period of human existence, we no longer wonder
that there are college rows and scrapes, that all sort of
grotesque capers become hereditary and traditional; that
an apple-cart occasionally appears on top of one of the
steeples, that cannon balls are rolled surreptiously down the
college stairs, and that tutors' doors are mysteriously found
locked at recitation hours. One simply wonders that the
roof is not blown off, and the windows out, by the combined
excitability of so many fermenting natures.
There is a tendency now in society to open the college
course equally to women—to continue through college life
that interaction of the comparative influence of the sexes
which is begun in the family.
To a certain extent this experiment has been always
favorably tried in the New England rural Academies, where
young men are fitted for college in the same classes and
studies with women.
In these time-honored institutions, young women have
kept step with young men in the daily pursuit of science,
not only without disorder or unseemly scandal, but with
obtains in institutions where female association ceases altogether.
The presence of a couple of dozen of well-bred
ladies in the lecture and recitation rooms of a college would
probably be a preventive of many of the unseemly and
clumsy jokes wherewith it has been customary to diversify
the paths of science, to the affliction of the souls of professors.
But for us boys, there was no gospel of womanhood except
what was to be got from the letters of mothers and sisters,
and such imperfect and flitting acquaintance as we
could pick up in the streets with the girls of the village.
Now though there might be profit, could young men and
women see each other daily under the responsibility of serious
business, keeping step with one another in higher studies,
yet it by no means follows that this kind of flitting
glimpse-like acquaintance, formed merely in the exchange
of a few outside superficialities, can have any particularly
good effect. No element of true worthy friendship, of sober
appreciation, or manly or womanly good sense, generally
enters into these girl-and-boy flirtations, which are the
only substitute for family association during the barren
years of student life. The students were not often invited
into families, and those who gained a character as ladies'
men were not favorably looked upon by our elders. Now
and then by rare and exceptional good luck a college student
is made at home in some good family, where there is
a nice kind mother and the wholesome atmosphere of human
life; or, he forms the acquaintance of some woman,
older and wiser than himself, who can talk with him on all
the multitude of topics his college studies suggest. But
such cases are only exceptions. In general there is no
choice between flirtation and monastic isolation.
For my part, I posed myself on the exemplary platform,
and remembering my uncle Jacob's advice, contemplated
life with the grim rigidity of a philosopher. I was going to
have no trifling, and surveyed the girls at church, on Sunday,
hour, who could hold no place in my serious meditations.
Plato or Aristotle, in person, could not have contemplated
life and society from a more serene height of composure.
I was favorably known by my teachers, and held rank at
the head of my class, and was stigmatized as a “dig,” by
frisky young gentlemen who enjoyed rolling cannon balls
down stairs—taking the tongue out of the chapel bell—
greasing the seats, and other thread-bare college jokes,
which they had not genius enough to vary, so as to give
them a spice of originality.
But one bright June Sunday—just one of those days that
seem made to put all one's philosophy into confusion, when
apple-blossoms were bursting their pink shells, and robins
singing, and leaves twittering and talking to each other in
undertones, there came to me a great revelation.
How innocently I brushed my hair and tied my neck tie,
on that fateful morning, contemplating my growing moustache
and whiskers hopefully in the small square of looking-glass
which served for me these useful purposes of
self-knowledge. I looked at my lineaments as those of a
free young junior, without fear and without anxiety, without
even an incipient inquiry what anybody else would
think of them—least of all any woman—and marched forth
obediently and took my wonted seat in that gallery of the
village church which was assigned to the college students
of Congregational descent; where, like so many sheep in
a pen, we joined in the services of the common sheep-fold.
I suppose there is moral profit even in the decent self-denial
of such weekly recurring religious exercises. To be
forced to a certain period of silence, order, quiet, and to
have therein a possibility and a suggestion of communion
with a Higher Power, and an out-look into immortality, is
something not to be undervalued in education, and justifies
the stringency with which our New England colleges preserve
and guard this part of their régime.
But it was to be confessed in our case, that the number
sympathy in the great purposes of the exercises, was not a
majority. A general, dull decency of demeanor was the
most frequent attainment, and such small recreations were
in vogue as could be pursued without drawing the attention
of the monitors. There was some telegraphy of
eyes between the girls of the village and some of the more
society-loving fellows, who had cultivated intimacies in
that quarter; there were some novels, stealthily introduced
and artfully concealed and read by the owner, while his
head, resting on the seat before him, seemed bowed in
devotion; and some artistic exercises in sketching caricatures
on the part of others. For my own part, having been
trained religiously, I gave strict outward and decorous attention;
but the fact was that my mind generally sailed off
on some cloud of fancy, and wandered through dream-land,
so that not a word of anything present reached my ear.
This habit of reverie and castle-building, repressed all the
week by the severe necessity of definite tasks, came upon
me Sundays as Bunyan describes the hot, sleepy atmosphere
of the enchanted ground.
Our pastor was a good man, who wrote a kind of smooth,
elegant, unexceptionable English; whose measured cadences
and easy flow, were, to use the scripture language, as a
“very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and
can play sweetly upon an instrument.” I heard him as
one hears murmurs and voices through one's sleep, while my
spirit went everywhere under the sun. I traveled in foreign
lands, I saw pictures, cathedrals; I had thrilling adventures
and hair-breadth escapes; formed strange and exciting acquaintances;
in short, was the hero of a romance, whose
scenes changed as airily and easily as the sunset clouds of
evening. So really and so vividly did this supposititious life
excite me that I have actually found myself with tears in
my eyes through the pathos of these unsubstantial visions.
It was in one of the lulling pauses of such a romance,
while I yet heard the voice of our good pastor proving
up my eyes, and became for the first time conscious of a
new face, in the third pew of the broad aisle below me.
It was a new one—one that certainly had never been there
before, and was altogether just the face to enter into the
most ethereal perceptions of my visionary life. I started with
a sort of awakening thrill, such, perhaps, as Adam had
when he woke from his sleep and saw his Eve. There, to
be sure, was the face of my dream-wife, incarnate and
visible! That face, so refined, so spiritual, so pure! a baptized,
Christianized Greek face! A cross between Venus
and the Virgin Mary! The outlines were purely, severely
classical, such as I have since seen in the Psyche of the
Naples gallery; but the large, tremulous, pathetic eyes
redeemed them from statuesque coldness. They were eyes
that thought, that looked deep into life, death, and eternity—so
I said to myself as I gazed down on her, and held
my breath with a kind of religious awe. The vision was all
in white, as such visions must be, and the gauzy crape bonnet
with its flowers upon her head, dissolved under my
eyes into a sort of sacred aureole, such as surrounds the
heads of saints. I saw her, and only her, through the remaining
hour of church. I studied every movement. The
radiant eyes were fixed upon the minister, and with an
expression so sadly earnest that I blushed for my own
wandering thoughts, and began to endeavor to turn my
mind to the truths I was hearing told; but, after all, I
thought more about her than the discourse. I saw her
search the hymn-book for the hymn, and wished that I
were down there to find it for her. I saw her standing
up, and looking down at her hymns with the wonderful eyes
veiled by long lashes, and singing—
One sovereign word can draw me thence,
I would obey the voice divine,
And all inferior joys resign.”
How miserably gross, and worldly, and unworthy I felt
spirituality,—something that should make me worthy to
touch the hem of her garment!
When the blessing was prnounced, I hastened down and
stood where I might see her as she passed out of church.
I had not been alone in my discoveries: there had been
dozens of others that saw the same star, and there were
whisperings, and elbowings, and consultings, as a knot of
juniors and seniors stationed themselves as I had done,
to see her pass out.
As she passed by she raised her eyes slowly, and as it
were by accident, and they fell like a ray of sunlight on one
of our number,—Jim Fellows—who immediately bowed.
A slight pink flush rose in her cheeks as she gracefully
returned the salutation, and passed on. Jim was instantly
the great man of the hour; he knew her, it seems.
“It's Miss Ellery, of Portland. Have n't you heard of
her?” he said, with an air of importance. “She 's the great
beauty of Portland. They call her the `little divinity.'
Met her last summer, at Mount Desert,” he added, with
the comfortable air of a man in possession of the leading
fact of the hour—the fact about which everybody else is
inquiring.
I walked home behind her in a kind of trance, disdaining
to join in what I thought the very flippant and unworthy
comments of the boys. I saw the last wave of her white
garments as she passed between the two evergreens in
front of deacon Brown's square white house, which at that
moment became to me a mysterious and glorified shrine;
there the angel held her tabernacle.
At this moment I met Miss Dotha Brown, the deacon's
eldest daughter, a rosy-cheeked, pleasant-faced girl, to
whom I had been introduced the week before. Instantly
she was clothed upon with a new interest in my eyes, and
I saluted her with empressement; if not the rose, she at
least was the clay that was imbibing the perfume of the
rose; and I don't doubt that my delight at seeing her assumed
charming Sunday,” I said, with emphasis. “Perfectly charming,”
said Miss Brown, sympathetically.
“You have an interesting young friend staying with you,
I observe,” said I.
“Who, Miss Ellery? oh, yes. Oh! Mr. Henderson, she
is the sweetest girl!” said Dotha, with effusion.
I did n't doubt it, and listened eagerly to her praises, and
was grateful to Miss Brown for the warm invitation to
“call” which followed. Miss Ellery was to make them a
long visit, and she would be so happy to introduce me.
That evening Miss Ellery was a topic of excited discussion
in our entry, and Jim Fellows plumed himself largely
on his Mount Desert experiences, which he related in a
way to produce the impression that he had been regarded
with a favorable eye by the divinity.
I was in a state of silent indignation, at him, at all the
rest of the boys, at everybody in general, being fully persuaded
that they were utterly incapable of understanding
or appreciating this wonderful creature.
“Hal, why don't you talk?” said one of them to me, when
I had sat silent, pretending to read for a long time; “What
do you think of her?”
“Oh, I'm no ladies' man, as you all know,” I said, evasively,
and actually pretended not to have remarked Miss
Ellery except in a cursory manner.
Then followed a period of weeks and months, when that
one image was never for a moment out of my thoughts.
By a strange law of our being, a certain idea can accompany
us everywhere, not stopping or interrupting the course
of the thought, but going on in a sort of shadowy way with
it, as an invisible presence.
The man or woman who cherishes an ideal is always
liable to this accident, that the spiritual image often descends
like a mantle, and invests some very ordinary person,
who is, for the time being, transfigured,—“a woman
clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet.”
us, that gives this passage in life its critical power. It would
seem as if there were in some men, and some women,
preparation for a grand interior illumination and passion,
like that hoard of mystical gums and spices which the
phenix was fabled to prepare for its funeral pile; all the
aspiration and poetry and romance, the upheaval toward an
infinite and eternal good, a divine purity and rest, may be
enkindled by the touch of a very ordinary and earthly
hand, and, burning itself out, leave only cold ashes of experience.
Miss Ellery was a well-bred young lady, of decorous and
proper demeanor, of careful religious education, of no particular
strength either of mind or emotion, good tempered,
and with an instinctive approbativeness that made her
desirous to please every body, which created for her the
reputation that Miss Brown expressed in calling her “a
sweet girl.” She was always most agreeable to those with
whom she was thrown, and for the time being appeared
to be, and was sincerely interested in them; but her mind
was like a well-polished looking-glass, retaining not a
trace of anything absent or distant.
She was gifted by nature with wonderful beauty, and
beauty of that peculiar style that stirs the senses of the
poetical and the ideal; her gentle approbativeness, and
the graceful facility of her manner, were such as not at
least to destroy the visions which her beauty created. In a
quiet way she enjoyed being adored—made love to, but she
never overstepped the bounds of strict propriety. She received
me with graciousness, and I really think found something
in my society which was agreeably stimulating to
her. I was somewhat out of the common track of her
adorers; my ardor and enthusiasm gave her a new emotion.
I wrote poems to her, which she read with a graceful pensiveness
and laid away among her trophies in her private
writing-desk. I called her my star, my inspiration, my
ight, and she beamed down on me with a pensive purity.
“Yes, she was delighted to have me read Tennyson to her,”
was lounging in the little front parlor of the Brown house,
fancying myself Sir Galahad, and reading with emotion,
how his “blade was strong, because his heart was pure;”
and Miss Ellery murmured “How lovely!” and I was in
paradise.
And then there came wonderful moonlight evenings—
evenings when every leaf stirring had a penciled reproduction
flickering in light and shade on the turf; and we
walked together under arches of elm trees, and I talked and
quoted poetry; and she listened and assented in the sweetest
manner possible. All my hopes, my plans, my dreams,
my speculations, my philosophies, came out to sun themselves
under the magic of those lustrous eyes. Her replies
and utterances were greatly in disproportion to mine; but
I received them, and made much of them, as of old the
priests of Delphi did with those of the inspired maiden.
There must be deep meaning in it all, because she was a
priestess; and I was not backward to supply it.
I have often endeavored to analyze the sources of the
illusion cast over men by such characters as that of Miss
Ellery. In their case the instinctive action of approbativeness
assumes the semblance of human sympathy, and brings
them for the time being into the life-sphere, and under the
influence, of any person whom they wish to please, so that
they with a temporary sincerity reflect back the ideas and
feelings of others. There is just the same illusive sort of
charm in this reflection of our own thoughts and emotions
from another mind, as there is in the reflection of objects in
a placid lake. There is no warmth and no reality to it;
and yet, for the time being, it is often the most entrancing
thing in the world, and gives back to you the glow of your
own heart, the fervor of your imagination, and even every
little flower of fancy, and twig of feeling, with a wonderful
faithfulness of reproduction.
It is not real sympathy, because, like the image in the
lake, it is only there when you are present; and when you
are away, reflects with equal facility the next comer.
But men always have been, and to the end of time always
will be, fascinated by such women, and will suppose
this mere reflecting power of a highly polished surface to
be the sympathetic response for which the heart longs.
So I had no doubt that Miss Ellery was a woman of all
sorts of high literary tastes and moral heroisms, for there
was nothing so high or so deep in the aspirations of poets or
sages in my readings to her, that could not be reflected
and glorified in those wonderful eyes.
Neither are such women hypocrites, as they are often
called. What they give back to you is for the time being
a sincere reflection, and if there is no depth to it, if it
passes away with the passing hour, it is simply because
their natures—smooth, shallow, and cold—have no deeper
power of retention.
The fault lies in expecting more of a thing than there is
in its nature—a fault we shall more or less all go on committing
till the great curtain falls.
I wrote all about her to my mother; and received the usual
cautionary maternal epistle, reminding me that I was yet
far from that goal in life when I was warranted in asking
any woman to be my wife; and suggesting that my taste
might later with maturity; warning me against premature
commitments—in short, saying all that good, anxious
mothers usually say to young juniors in college in similar
circumstances.
In reply, I told my mother that I had found a woman
worthy the devotion of a life—a woman who would be inspiration
and motive and reward. I extolled her purity
and saintliness. I told my mother that she was forming
and leading me to all that was holy and noble. In short I
meant to win her though the seven labors of Hercules were
to be performed seven times over to reach her.
Now the fact is, my mother might have saved herself
her anxiety. Miss Ellery was perfectly willing to be my
guiding star, my inspiration, my light, within reasonable
limits, while making a visit in an otherwise rather dull town.
being incessantly admired, and would have made a very
good image for some Church of the Perpetual Adoration;
but after all, Miss Ellery was as incapable of forming an
ineligible engagement of marriage with a poor college
student, as the most sensible and collected of Walter Scott's
heroines.
Looking back upon this part of my life, I can pity myself
with as quiet and dispassionate a perception as if I were a
third person. The illusion, for the time being, was so real,
the feelings called up by it so honest and earnest and
sacred; and supposing there had been a tangible reality to
it—what might not such a woman have made of me, or of
any man?
And suppose it pleased God to send forth an army of such
women, as I thought her to be, among the lost children of
men, women armed not only with the outward and visible
sign of beauty, but with that inward and spiritual grace
which beauty typifies, one might believe that the golden age
would soon be back upon us.
Miss Ellery adroitly avoided all occasions of any critical
commitment on my part or on her's. Women soon learn a vast
amount of tact and diplomacy on that subject: but she gave
me to understand that I was peculiarly congenial to her, and
encouraged the outflow of all my romance with the gentlest
atmosphere of indulgence. To be sure, I was not the only
one whom she thus held with bonds of golden gossamer. She
reigned a queen, and had a court at her feet, and the
deacon's square, white, prosaic house bristled with the activity
and vivacity of Miss Ellery's adorers.
Among them, Will Marshall was especially distinguished.
Will was a senior, immensely rich, good-natured as the
longest summer day is long, but so idle and utterly incapable
of culture that only the liberality of the extra sum paid to
a professor who held him in guardianship secured his stay in
college classes. It has been my observation that money
will secure a great variety of things in this lower world, and
Will was a sort of favorite with us all. His good nature
was without limit, and he scattered his money with a free
hand, and so we generally spoke of him as “Poor Will;” a
nice fellow, if he couldn't write a decent note, and blundered
through all his recitations.
Will laid himself, so to speak, at Miss Ellery's feet. He
was flush of bouquets and confectionery. He caused the village
livery stable to import forthwith a turnout worthy to be
a car of Venus herself.
I saw all this, but it never entered my head that Miss
Ellery would cast a moment's thought other than those of
the gentlest womanly compassion on poor Will Marshall.
The time of the summer vacation drew nigh, and with the
close of the term closed the vision of my idyllic experiences
with Miss Ellery. To the last, she was so gentle and easy
to be entreated. Her lovely eyes cast on me such bright
encouraging glances; and she accorded me a farewell moonlight
ramble, wherein I walked not on earth, but in the
seventh heaven of felicity. Of course there was nothing
definite. I told her that I was a poor soldier of fortune, but
might I only wear her name in my bosom, it would be a
sacred talisman, and give strength to my arm, and she
sighed, and looked lovely, and she did not say me nay.
I went home to my mother, and wearied that much-enduring
woman, all through the vacation, with the hot and
cold fits of my fever. Blessed souls! these mothers, who
bear and watch and rear the restless creatures, who by
and by come to them with the very heart gone out of them
for love of another woman—some idle girl, perhaps, that
never knew what it was either to love or care, and that plays
with hearts as kittens do with pinballs!
I wrote to Miss Ellery letters long, overflowing, and got
back little neatly-worded notes on scented paper, speaking
in a general way of the charms of friendship.
But the first news that met me on my return to college
broke my soap-bubble at one touch.
“Hurrah! Hal—who do you guess is engaged?”
“I don't know.”
“Guess.”
“I couldn't guess.”
“Why, Miss Ellery—engaged to Bill Marshall.”
Alnaschar, in the Arabian tale, could not have been more
astonished when his basket of glass-ware fell in glittering
nothingness. I stood stupid with astonishment.
“She engaged to Will Marshall!—why, boys, he's a fool!”
“But you see he's rich. Oh, it's all arranged; they are to be
married next month, and go to Europe for their wedding
tour,” said Jim Fellows.
And so my idol fell from its pedestal—and my first dream
dissolved.
| CHAPTER VI.
MY DREAM-WIFE My wife and I, or, Harry Henderson's history | |