Gala Days
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23 GALA-DAYS (1863)
by "Gail Hamilton" (Abigail Dodge)
CONTENTS
GALA DAYS
A CALL TO MY COUNTRYWOMEN
A SPASM OF SENSE
CAMILLA'S CONCERT
CHERI
SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY
SUCCESS IN LIFE
HAPPIEST DAYS
CHAPTER I
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!"
Is it begun? Not yet.
No wonder that eclipses were a terror to men before Science
came queening it through the universe, compelling all these
fearful sights and great signs into her triumphal train, and
commanding us to be no longer afraid of our own shadow. The
sure and steadfast Moon, shuddering from the fullness of her
splendor into wild and ghostly darkness, might well wake
strange apprehensions. She is reeling in convulsive agony.
She is sickening and swooning in the death-struggle. The
principalities and powers of darkness, the eternal foes of
men, are working their baleful spell with success to cast the
sweet Moon from her path, and force her to work woe and disaster
upon the earth. Some fell monster, roaming through the heavens,
seeking whom he may devour,--some dragon, "monstrous, horrible,
and waste," whom no Redcrosse Knight shall pierce with his
trenchand blade, is swallowing with giant gulps the writhing
victim. Blow shrill and loud your bugle blasts! Beat with
fierce clangor your brazen cymbals! Push up wild shrieks and
groans, and horrid cries,
"That all the woods may answer, and your echoes ring,"
and the foul fiend perchance be scared away by deafening din.
O, sad for those who lived before the ghouls were disinherited;
for whom the woods and waters, and the deep places, were
peopled with mighty, mysterious foes; who saw evil spirits in
the earth forces, and turned her gold into consuming fire. For
us, later born, Science has dived into the caverns, and scaled
the heights, and fathomed the depths, forcing from coy yet
willing Nature the solution of her own problems, and showing
us everywhere, GOD. We are not children of fate, trembling at
the frown of fairies and witches and gnomes, but the children
of our Father. If we ascend up into heaven, he is there. If
we take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost
parts of the sea, even there shall his hand lead, and his right
hand hold.
Is it begun? Not--well, I don't know, though. Something seems
to be happening up in the northwest corner. Certainly, a bit
of that round disk has been shaved off. I will wait five
minutes. Yes, the battle is begun. The shadow advances. The
moon yields. But there are watchers in the heaven as well as
in the earth. There is sympathy in the skies. Up floats an
argosy of compassionate clouds, and fling their fleecy veil
around the pallid moon, and bear her softly on their snowy
bosoms. But she moves on, impelled. She sweeps beyond the
sad clouds. Deeper and deeper into the darkness. Closer and
closer the Shadow clutches her in his inexorable arms. Wan and
weird becomes her face, wrathful and wild the astonished winds;
and for all her science and her faith, the Earth trembles in
the night, and a hush of awe quivers through the angry,
agitated air. On, still on, till the fair and smiling moon is
but a dull and tawny orb, with no beauty to be desired; on,
still on, till even that cold, coppery light wanes into sullen
darkness. Whether it is a cloud kindly hiding the humbled
queen, or whether the queen is indeed merged in the abyss of
the Shadow, I cannot tell, and it is dismal waiting to see.
The wildness is gone with the moon, and there is nothing left
but a dark night. I wonder how long before she will reappear?
Are the people in the moon staring through an eclipse of the
Sun? I should like to see her come out again, and clothe
herself in splendor. I think I will go back to Walden. Ah!
even my philosopher, aping Homer, nods. It shimmers a little,
on the lake, among the mountains--of the moon.
I declare! I believe I have been asleep. What of it? It is
just as well. I have no doubt the moon will come out again all
right,--which is more than I shall do if I go on in this way.
I feel already as if the top of my head was coming off. Once
I was very unhappy, and I sat up all night to make the most of
it. It was many hundred years ago, when I was younger than I
am now, and did not know that misery was not a thing to be
caressed and cosseted and coddled, but a thing to be taken,
neck and heels, and turned out doors. So I sat up to revel in
the ecstasy of woe. I went along swimmingly into the little
hours, but by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it,
and I grew desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up,
however, so I shocked myself into a torpid animation with a
cold bath, it being mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos,
managed to keep agoing till daylight. Once since then I was
very happy, and could not keep my eyes shut. Those are the
only two times I ever sat up all night, and, on the whole, I
think I will go to bed; wherefore, O people on the earth,
marking eagerly the moon's eclipse, and O people on the moon,
crowding your craggy hills to see an eclipse of the sun, Good
night!
Then the lost June came back. Frost melted out of the air,
summer melted in, and my book beckoned me onward with a
commanding gesture. Consequently I took my trunk, Halicarnassus
his cane, and we started on our travels. But the shadow of the
eclipse hung over us still. An evil omen came in the beginning.
Just as I was stepping into the car, I observed a violent smoke
issuing from under it. I started back in alarm.
"They are only getting up steam," said Halicarnassus. "Always
do, when they start."
"I know better!" I answered briskly, for there was no time to
be circumlocutional. "They don't get up steam under the cars."
"Why not? Bet a sixpence you couldn't get Uncle Cain's Dobbin
out of his jog-trot without building a fire under him."
"I know that wheel is on fire," I said, not to be turned from
the direct and certain line of assertion into the winding ways
of argument.
"No matter," replied Halicarnassus, conceding everything, "we
are insured."
Upon the strength of which consolatory information I went in.
By and by a man entered and took a seat in front of us. "The
box is all afire," chuckled he to his neighbor, as if it were
a fine joke. By and by several people who had been looking out
of the windows drew in their heads, went into the next car.
"What do you suppose they did that for?" I asked Halicarnassus.
"More aristocratical. Belong to old families. This is a new
car, don't you see? We are parvenus."
"Nothing of the sort," I rejoined. "This car is on fire, and
they have gone into the next one so as not to be burned up."
"They are not going to write books, and can afford to run away
from adventures."
"But suppose I am burned up in my adventure?"
"Obviously, then, your book will end in smoke."
I ceased to talk, for I was provoked at his indifference. I
leave every impartial mind to judge for itself whether the
circumstances were such as to warrant composure. To be sure,
somebody said the car was to be left at Jeru; but Jeru was
eight miles away, and any quantity of mischief might be done
before we reached it,--if indeed we were not prevented from
reaching it altogether. It was a mere question of dynamics.
Would dry wood be able to hold its own against a raging fire
for half an hour? Of course the conductor thought it would;
but even conductors are not infallible; and you may imagine how
comfortable it was to sit and know that a fire was in full
blast beneath you, and to look down every few minutes expecting
to see the flames forking up under your feet. I confess I was
not without something like a hope that one tongue of the
devouring element would flare up far enough to give Halicarnassus
a start; but it did not. No casualty occurred. We reached Jeru
in safety; but that does not prove that there was no danger, or
that indifference was anything but the most foolish hardihood.
If our burning car had been in mid-ocean, serenity would have been
sublimity, but to stay in the midst of peril when two steps would
take one out of it is idiocy. And that there was peril is
conclusively shown by the fact that the very next day the Eastern
Railroad Depot took fire and was burned to the ground. I have in
my own mind no doubt that it was a continuation of the same fire,
and if we had stayed in the car much longer, we should have shared
the same fate.
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