By Henry A. Beers.
⁂Century Magazine, June, 1883.
It was the evening of Commencement Day. The old church on the green, which had rung for many consecutive hours with the eloquence of slim young gentlemen in evening dress, exhorting the Scholar in Politics or denouncing the Gross Materialism of the Age, was at last empty and still. As it drew the dewy shadows softly about its eaves and filled its rasped interior with soothing darkness, it bore a whimsical likeness to some aged horse which, having been pestered all day with flies, was now feeding in peace along the dim pasture.
It was Clay who suggested this resemblance, and we all laughed appreciatively, as we used to do in those days at Clay’s clever sayings. There werefive of us strolling down the diagonal walk to our farewell supper at “Ambrose’s.” Arrived at that refectory, we found it bare of guests and had things quite to ourselves. After supper, we took our coffee out in the little court-yard, where a fountain dribbled, and the flutter of the grape-leaves on the trellises in the night wind invited to confidences.
“Well, Armstrong,” began Doddridge, “where are you going to spend the vacation?”
“Vacation!” answered Armstrong; “vacations are over for me.”
“You’re not going to work for your living at once?” inquired Berkeley.
“I’m going to work to-morrow,” replied Armstrong, emphatically: “I’m going down to New York to enter a law office.”
“I thought you had some notion of staying here and taking a course of graduate study.”
“No, sir! The sooner a man gets into harness, the better. I’ve wasted enough time in the last four years. The longer a man loafs around in this old place, under pretense of reading and that kind of thing, the harder it is for him to take hold.”
Armstrong was a rosy little man, with yellow hair and light eyes. His expression was one of irresolute good nature. His temper was sanguine and expansive, and he had been noted in college for anything but concentration of pursuit. He was gregarious in his habits, susceptible and subject to sudden enthusiasms. His good naturemade him a victim to all the bores and idlers in the class, and his room became a favorite resort for men on their way to recitation, being on the ground floor and near the lecture-rooms. They would drop in about half an hour before the bell rang, and make up a little game of “penny ante” around Armstrong’s center-table. In these diversions he seldom took part, as he had given it out publicly that he was “studying for a stand”; but his abstinence from the game in no wise damped the spirits of his guests. Occasionally his presence would receive the notice of the company somewhat as follows:
No. 1. “Make less noise, fellows: Charley is digging out that Puckle lesson.”No. 2. “You go into the bedroom, Charley, and shut the door, and then you won’t be bothered by the racket.”No. 3. “Oh, hang the Puckle! Come and take a hand, Charley. We’ll let you in this pool without an ante.”No. 4. “Why don’t you get a new pack of cards, Charley? It’s a disgrace to you to keep such a dirty lot of old pasteboards for your friends.”
No. 1. “Make less noise, fellows: Charley is digging out that Puckle lesson.”
No. 2. “You go into the bedroom, Charley, and shut the door, and then you won’t be bothered by the racket.”
No. 3. “Oh, hang the Puckle! Come and take a hand, Charley. We’ll let you in this pool without an ante.”
No. 4. “Why don’t you get a new pack of cards, Charley? It’s a disgrace to you to keep such a dirty lot of old pasteboards for your friends.”
In face of which abuse, Armstrong was as helpless as Telemachus under the visitation of the suitors. The resolute air with which he now declared his intention of grappling with life had therefore something comic about it, and Berkeley said, rather incredulously:
“I suppose you’ll keep up your reading along with your law?”
“No,” replied the other; “Themis is a jealous mistress. No; I’m going to bone right down to it.”
“Haven’t you changed your ideal of life lately?” asked Clay, a little scornfully.
“Perhaps I have,” said Armstrong, “perhaps I’ve had to.”
“Whatisyour ideal of life?” I inquired.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he answered, draining his coffee-cup solemnly, and putting it down with the manner of a man who has made up his mind. The rest of us arranged ourselves in attitudes of attention. “My ideal is independence,” began Armstrong. “I want to live my own life; and as the first condition of independence is money, I’m going for money. Culture and taste, and all that, are well enough when a man can afford it, but for a poor man it means just so many additional wants which he can’t gratify. My father is an educated man; a country minister with a small salary and a large family; and his education, instead of being a blessing, has been an actual curse to him. He has pined for all sorts of things which he couldn’t have—books, engravings, foreign travel, leisure for study, nice people and nice things about him. I’ve made up my mind that, whatever else I may be, I won’t be poor, and I won’t be a minister, and I won’t have a wife and brats hanging to me. I tell you that, next to ill health, poverty is the worst thingthat can happen to a man. All the sentimental grievances that are represented in novels and poetry as the deepest of human afflictions,—disappointed ambitions, death of friends, loss of faith, estrangements, having your girl go back on you,—they don’t signify very long if a man has sound health and a full purse. The ministers and novel writers and fellows that preach the sentimental view of life don’t believe it themselves. It’s a kind of professional or literary quackery with them. Just let them feel the pinch of poverty, and then offer them a higher salary or a chance to make a little ‘sordid gain’ in some way, and see how quick they’ll accept the call to ‘a higher sphere of usefulness.’ Berk, hand over a match, will you; this cigar has gone out.”
“Loud cries of ‘We will—we will’!” said Berkeley. “But can it be? Has the poick turned cynic, and the sickly sentimentalist become a materialist and a misogynist?”
(Armstrong was our class poet, and had worried the official muse on Presentation Day to the utterance of some four hundred lines filled with allusions to Alma Mater, Friendship’s Altar, the Elms of Yale, etc. His piece on that occasion had been “pronounced, by a well-known literary gentleman who was present, equal to the finest productions of our own Willis.”)
“I’ll bet the cigars,” said Doddridge, “that Armstrong marries the first girl he sees in New York.”
“Yes,” said Clay, “his boarding-house keeper’s daughter.”
“And has a dozen children before he is forty,” added Berkeley; “a dozen kids, and all of them girls. Charley is sure to be a begetter of wenches.”
“And writes birthday odes ‘To My Infant Daughter’ for the ‘Home Journal,’” continued Clay.
“No, no,” said the victim of this banter, shaking his head solemnly. “I shall give no hostages to Fortune. I mean to live snug and carry as little sail as possible: to leave only the narrowest margin out for Fate to tread on. The man who has the fewest exposed points leads, on the whole, the happiest life. How can a man enjoy himself freely when a piece of defective plumbing, the bursting of a toy pistol, the carelessness of a nurse, may plunge him into a life-long sorrow? I don’t say it’s a very noble life that I propose to myself, but it’s a safe one. I’m too nervous and anxious to stand the responsibilities of matrimony.”
“If you can’t stand responsibility,” said Doddridge, “I don’t see why you choose the law for a profession. You don’t seem to me cut out for a lawyer anyway. I always thought you meant to be some kind of a literary chap.”
“Yes,” said Berkeley, “why don’t you go for a snug berth under the government, or study for a tutorship here? That’s the life that would suit you, old man.”
“Not at all,” answered Armstrong; “I have a horror of any salaried position, or of any position where a man is obliged to conform his habits and opinions to other people’s. It is the worst sort of dependence. Now a lawyer in successful practice, and especially if he is a bachelor, is about as independent as a man can be. His relations with his clients are merely professional, and what he does or thinks privately is nobody’s business.”
“If you are going to be a mere lawyer,” asked Clay, “what becomes of your education and your intellectual satisfactions, etc.?”
“A man can get his best intellectual satisfactions out of the work of his profession,” answered Armstrong. “Besides, as to that, there’s time enough. Fifteen years of solid work will enable one to put by a fair competence, if he lives carefully and has no one but himself to support; and then he will be free to take up a hobby. Oh, I shall cultivate a hobby or two after awhile. It keeps the mind healthy to have some interest of the kind outside of one’s business. I may take to book-collecting or numismatics or raising orchids. Perhaps I may become an authority on ancient armor; time enough for that by and by. And then I can cut over to Europe every summer if I like, and no one to interfere with my down-sittings or my up-risings, my goings-out or my comings-in. Do you know,” he went on, after a pause, “how I always look to myself in the glass of the future? I figure myself like old Tulkinghorn, in‘Bleak House,’—going down into his reverberating vaults for a bottle of choice vintage, after the work of the day, and then sitting quietly in the twilight in his dusky, old-fashioned law chambers, sipping his wine while the room fills with the fragrance of southern grapes. The gay old silver-top!”
There was silence for a few minutes after Armstrong had finished his declaration. It was broken by Berkeley, who had risen, and was walking up and down in front of the fountain with his hands thrust into his pockets.
“You couldn’t lead that sort of life if you tried,” he said; “you aren’t built for it.”
“Don’t you make any mistake,” rejoined the other; “it’s the sort of life I’m going to live.”
“It’s a cowardly life,” retorted Berkeley.
“Did I say it wasn’t? I said it was safe. You can call it what you like.”
“Well,” replied Berkeley, seating himself again, “my ideal career is just the opposite of that.”
“Suppose you explain yours, then,” said Armstrong.
Berkeley hesitated a few moments before beginning. He was a lean, tallish fellow, with a Scotch cast of countenance, a small blue eye, high cheek bones, a freckled skin, and whity-brown hair. He had a dry, cautious humor, fed by much out-of-the-way reading. He had been distinguished in college by methodical habits, a want of ambition, a disposition to keep to himself, and a mixture of selfishness andbonhomiewhich made him a coldfriend but an agreeable companion. It was therefore with some surprise that we heard him deliver himself as follows:
“I believe that the greatest mistake a man can make is in not getting enough out of life. I want to lead a full life, to have a wide experience, to develop my whole nature to the utmost, to touch mankind at the largest possible number of points. I want adventure, change, excitement, emotion, suffering even,—I don’t care what, so long as it is not stagnation. Just consider what there is on this planet to be seen, learned, enjoyed, and what a miserably small share of it most people appropriate. Why, there are men in my village who have never been outside the county and seldom out of the township; who have never heard a word of any language but English; never seen a city or a mountain or the ocean—or, indeed, any body of water bigger than Fresh Pond or the Hogganum River; never been in a theatre, steamboat, library, or cathedral. Cathedral! Their conception of a church is limited to the white wooden meeting-house at ‘the center.’ Their art-gallery is the wagon of a travelling photographer. Their metropolitan hotel is the stoop and bar-room of the ‘Uncas House.’ Their university is the unpainted school-house on the hill. Their literature is the weekly newspaper from the county town. But take the majority of educated men even. What a rusty, small kind of existence they lead! They are in a rut, just the same as the others, onlythe rut is a trifle wider. If I had my way I would never do the same work or talk with the same people—hardly live in the same place for two days running. Life is too short to do a thing twice. When I come to the end of mine I don’t want to sayJ’ai manqué la vie; but make my brag, with the Wife of Bath,
‘Unto this day it doth myn herte boteThat I have had my world as in my time.’”
‘Unto this day it doth myn herte boteThat I have had my world as in my time.’”
“Well, how are you going to do all those fine things?” inquired Armstrong. “For instance, that about not living in one place two days running. I’m afraid you’ll find that inconvenient, not to say expensive.”
“Oh, you mustn’t take me too literally. I may have to travel on foot or take a steerage passage, but I shall keep going all the same. I haven’t made any definite plans yet. I shall probably strike for something in the diplomatic line,—secretary of legation, or some small consulship perhaps. But the principle is the main thing, and the principle is: Don’t do anything because it’s the nearest and easiest and most obvious thing to do, but make up your mind to get the best. Look at the lazy way in which men accept their circumstances. There is the matter of acquaintance, for instance—we let chance determine it. We know the men that we can’t help knowing,—the ones in the next house, cousins and second cousins, business connections,etc. Here at college, now, we get acquainted with the fellows at the eating club or in the same society, or those who happen to sit next us in the class-room, because their names begin with the same letter. That’s it; it’s just a sample of our whole life. Our friendships, like everything else about us, are determined by the alphabet. We go with the Z’s because some arbitrary system of classification has put us among them, instead of fighting our way up to the A’s, where we naturally belong. The consequence is that one’s friends are mostly dreadful bores.”
“I’m sure we are all much obliged to you,” murmured Clay, parenthetically.
“There are about two or three thousand people in the world,” continued Berkeley, “supremely worth knowing. Why shouldn’tIknow them?—— I will! Everybody knows two or three thousand people,—mostly very stupid people,—or, rather, he lets them know him. Why shouldn’t he use some choice in the matter? Why not know Thackeray and Carlyle, Lord Palmerston and the Pope, and the Emperor of China and all the great statesmen, authors, African explorers, military commanders, artists, hereditary nobles, actresses, wits and belles of the best society, instead of putting up with Tom, Dick, and Harry?”
“Berkeley, ‘with whom the bell-mouthed flask had wrought!’” exclaimed Clay. “Decidedly, Berk, you should take your coffee without cognac.”
“Let me suggest,” put in Doddridge, “thatsome of those parties you mentioned are not so easy to get introductions to.”
“Oh, I say again, you mustn’t take me too literally. But even the top swells are easier to know than you think. All that is wanted is a little cheek. But take it in a smaller way; say that we resolve to cultivate the best society within our reach. Doubtless there are numbers of interesting and distinguished people right here in New Haven whose acquaintance it would be worth while to have. But how long would you beggars live here without making the least effort to look them out, and meanwhile put up with the same old every-day bores—like me, or Polisson here? And it’s the same way with marriage. A fellow blunders into matrimony with the first attractive girl that gives him the opportunity. He knows, if he takes the time to think about it, that there are a thousand others better than she, if he will wait and look through the world a little. ‘Juxtaposition in fine,’ as Clough says.”
“Of course, with such a brilliant destiny before you,you’llnever marry,” said I.
“Yes, I think I shall. I fancy that the noblest possibilities of life are never realized without marriage. Yes, I can think of nothing finer than to have a lot of manly boys and sweet girls growing up around one. But when I marry it shall be so as to give completeness and expansion to life, not narrowness and dullness. I shall never marry and settle down. Settle down! What a damnableexpression that is! A man ought to settleup. I mean to have my fling first, too. I should like to gamble a bit at Baden-Baden. I should like to go out to Colorado and have a lick at mining speculations. I want to rough it some too, and see how life is lived close to the bone: ship for a voyage before the mast; enlist for a campaign or two somewhere and have joy of battle; join the gypsies or the Mormons or the Shakers for awhile, and taste all the queerness of things. And then I want to float for another while on the very top-most crest of society. I want to fight a duel or two, elope with a marquise, do a little of everything for the experience’s sake, as a man ought to take opium once in his life just to know how it feels.”
Whether it was indeed the cognac, or only the unusual excitement attending this outburst of pent-up fire, Berkeley’s cheek had got a flush upon it. Perhaps, too, it was owing to the influences of the day and the hour, the splash of the fountain, the rustle of the vine-leaves, and the wavering shadows which played about the court-yard as the gas-jets flickered in the breeze of night, that made his boastful words seem less extravagantly out of character than they otherwise would. The silence which followed his speech was broken by Clay, who sat with his foot on the rim of the fountain, balancing on the hind legs of his chair, and looking thoughtfully at the slender jet as it rose and fell. He still wore the dress suit in which he hadfigured on the Commencement platform in the afternoon, and which set off the aristocratic grace of his slight figure. There was a pale intellectual light in his face, and his black eyes had the glow of genius.
“I think,” he began, “that Berkeley makes a mistake in confounding a full life with a restless one. I believe in a full experience too, but the satisfactions should be inward ones. Take the matter of foreign travel, for one thing, on which you lay so much stress. It is a great stimulus to the imagination, no doubt; but then foreign countries are accessible to the imagination by other means—through books and art, for example. I think it likely that the reality is, quite as often as not, disappointing. Place, after all, is indifferent. ‘The soul is its own place’: you can’t get rid of yourself by going abroad, and it’s himself that a man gets sooner tired of than of anything else. Then as to acquaintances, I don’t know that I should care to know personally such men as Thackeray and Carlyle, and the big composers and artists and other people that you mentioned. It might be equally disenchanting. They put the best of themselves into their books, or pictures, or music. I certainly would not seek their society through a formal introduction, at all events. It is hard for a small man to keep his self-respect in face of a great man when he obtains his acquaintance as a special favor. If I could meet some of those fellows, quite naturally and accidentally, on equalterms, I might like it, but not otherwise. But, leaving that point out of account, I think that the career which Berkeley proposes to himself would turn out very hollow. It would result in the superficial gratification of the curiosity and the senses; and, as soon as the novelty got rubbed off, what is there left?”
“So then,” said Berkeley, “you’ve swung into line with Armstrong, have you? You mean to plod along in some professional rut too. What has got into all our idealists?”
“Not by any means,” answered Clay. “Armstrong talks about independence, and yet destines himself to the worst kind of dependence—slavery to money-getting. Most people, it seems to me, spend the best part of their lives not in living, but in getting the means to live. We’ll give Armstrong, say twenty years, to lay up enough money to retire on and begin to live. What sort of a position will he be in then to enjoy his independence? His nature will have got so subdued to what it works in that the only safety for him will be to keep on at the law.”
“All right! Then I’ll keep on,” interjected Armstrong.
“What the devil doyoumean to do then?” asked Berkeley of Clay.
“I don’t quite know yet,” replied the latter. “I shall ‘loaf and invite my soul’ whenever I feel like it. I shall live as I go along, and not postpone it till I am forty. I sha’n’t put myself intoany mill that will grind me just so much a day. I need my leisure too badly for that. I presume I shall spend most of my time at first in reading and walking. Then, whenever I think of anything to write I shall write it, and if I can sell what I write to some publisher or other, so much the better. If not, go on as before.”
“Meanwhile, where will your bread and butter come from?” asked Armstrong.
“Oh, I sha’n’t starve. I can get some sort of hack work—something that won’t take much of my time, and which I can do with my left hand. But the great point, after all, is to make your wants simple; to live like an Arab, content with a few dates and a swallow from the gourd. ‘Lessen your denominator.’ It’s easier than raising your numerator, and the quotient is the same.”
“No, it’s not the same,” Berkeley retorted. “Renunciation and enjoyment are not the same. It makes a heap of difference whether you have a thing or simply do without it. The plain living and high thinking philosophy may do for Clay, whose mind to him a kingdom is; but a fellow like me, whose mind is only a small Central American republic, can’t live on the revenues of the spirit. The fact is, Clay, you’ve read too much Emerson. I went into that myself once, but I soon found out that it wouldn’t wear. I want mine thicker. The worst thing about the career of a literary man or an artist is that if he fails there are no compensations; and success is mighty uncertain.Nobody doubts that you are smart enough, Clay, and I am sure we expect great things of you, whatever line you take up. But, for the sake of the argument, suppose you have grubbed along in a small way, living on crusts and water, till you are fifty, without doing any really good work. Then where are you? You haven’t had any fun. You’ve no other string to your bow. You haven’t that practical experience of the world which would enable you to turn your hand to something else. You have no influence or reputation; for, of all poor things, poor art of any kind is the worst—hateful to gods and men and columns. In short, where are you? You’re out of the dance; you don’t count.”
“Yes,” added Armstrong, “and you’ve no professional success or solid standing in the community; and, what’s worse, you’ve no money, which might make up for the want of all the rest.”
“I don’t think you get my meaning. I may fail,” said Clay, proudly; “I may never even try to succeed, in your sense of the word. I decline all mean competitions and all low views of success. The noblest ideal of life—at least, the noblest to me—is self-culture in the high meaning of the word; the harmonious development of one’s whole nature. Armstrong has drawn a picture of his future in the likeness of old Tulkinghorn. I suppose we are all accustomed to put our anticipations into some such concrete shape before our mind’s eye. The typical situation which I am fond ofimagining is something like this: I like to fancy myself sitting in a dark old upper room in some remote farm-house, at the close of a winter day, after three or four hours of steady reading or writing. The room is full of books—thebestbooks. There is a little fire on the hearth, there is a dingy curtain at the window. It is solitary and still, and when the light gets too scant to let me read any more, I fill my pipe, and go and stand in the window. Outside, there is a row of leafless elms, and beyond that a dim, wide landscape of lakes and hills, and beyond that a red, windy sunset. I can sit in that window and smoke my pipe and have my own thoughts till the hills grow black. There is no one to say to me ‘Go’ or ‘Come’; no patient to visit; no confounded case on the docket next morning at nine; no distasteful, mean, slavish job of any kind. How can I fail to have thoughts worth the thinking, and to live a rich and free life when I breathe every day the bracing air of nature and the great poets? Isn’t such a life in itself the best kind of success, even if a man accomplishes nothing in particular that you can put your hand on?”
“Yes, I know,” said Armstrong, taking a long breath. “I have felt that way too. But a man has got to put all that sternly behind him and do the world’s work for the world’s wages, if he means to amount to anything. It’s only a finer kind of self-indulgence, after all—egoistic Hedonism and that sort of thing.”
“It won’t be all standing at windows and looking at sunsets,” added Doddridge. “Has it ever occurred to you that, before entering on a life of self-denial and devotion to rather vague ideals, a man ought to be mighty sure of himself? Can you keep up the culture business without growing in on yourself unhealthily, and then getting sick of inaction? Don’t you think there will be times of disappointment and doubt when you look around and see fellows without half your talents getting ahead of you in the world?”
“Of course,” answered Clay, “I shall have to make sacrifices, and I shall have to stick to them when made. But there have always been plenty of people willing to make similar sacrifices for similar compensations. Men have gone out into the wilderness or shut themselves up in the cloister for opportunities of study or self-communion, or for other objects which were perhaps at bottom no more truly devotional than mine. Nowadays such opportunities may be had by any man who will keep himself free from the servitude of a bread-winning profession. It is not necessary now to cryEcce in desertoorEcce in penetralibus. Oh, I shall have my dark days; but whenever the blue devils get thick I shall take to the woods and return to sanity.”
“You mean to live in the country, then?” I inquired.
“Yes; most of the time, at any rate. Nature is fully half of life to me.”
Again there was a pause.
“Well, you next, Polisson,” said Armstrong, finally. “Let’s hear what your programme is.”
“Oh, nothing in the least interesting,” I replied. “My future is all cut and dried. I shall spend the next two years in the south of France—mainly at Lyons—to learn the details of the silk manufacture. Then I shall come home to go into my father’s store for a year as a clerk in the importing department. At the close of that year the governor will take me in as junior partner, and I shall marry my second cousin. We shall live with my parents, and I am going to be very domestic, though, as a matter of form, I shall join one or two clubs. I shall go down town every morning at nine, and come up at five.”
“Quite a neat little destiny,” said Armstrong. “I wish I had your backing. Come, Dodd, what’s yours? You’re the only man left.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” said Doddridge, slowly.
He was a large, spare man, with a swarthy skin, a wide mouth, a dark, steady eye, and a long jaw. There was an appearance of power and will about him which was well borne out by his character. He had been a systematic though not a laborious student, and while maintaining a stand comfortably near the head of the class, had taken a course in the Law School during Senior year, doing his double duties with apparent ease. He was a constant speaker in the debates of the LinonianSociety, and the few who attended the meetings of that moribund school of eloquence spoke of Doddridge’s speeches as oases in the waste of forensic dispute, being always distinguished by vigor and soundness, though without any literary quality, such as Clay’s occasional performances had. Berkeley, who covered his own lazy and miscellaneous reading with the mask of eclecticism, and proclaimed his disbelief in a prescribed course of study, was wont to say that Doddridge was the only man that he knew who was using the opportunities given by the college for all they were worth, and really getting out of “the old curric” that mental discipline which it professed to impart. Though rather taciturn, he was not unsocial, and was fond of his pipe in the evening. He liked a joke, especially if it was of a definite kind, and at some one’s expense touching a characteristic weakness of the man. There was at bottom something a little hard about him, though every one agreed that he was a good fellow. We all felt sure that he would make a distinguished success in practical life; and we doubtless thought—if we thought about it at all—that with his clear foresight and habits of steady work, he had already decided upon his career. His words were therefore a surprise.
“What! you don’t mean to say that you are going to drift, Dodd?” inquired Armstrong.
“Drift? Well, no; not exactly. I shall keep my steering apparatus well in hand, but I haven’t decided yet what port to run for. There’s nohurry. I have an uncle in the Northwest in the lumber business, who would give me a chance. I may go out there and look about awhile at first. If it doesn’t promise much, there is the law to fall back upon. My father has a fruit farm at Byzantium in western New York,—where I come from, you know,—and he is part owner of the Byzantium weekly ‘Bugle.’ I’ve no doubt I could get on as editor, and go to the Legislature. Or I might do worse than begin on the farm; farming is looking up in that section. I may try several things till I find the right one.”
“That’s queer,” said Armstrong. “I thought you had made up your mind to enter the Columbia Law School.”
“Hardly,” answered Doddridge, “though I may, after all. The main point is to keep yourself in readiness for any work, and take the best thing that turns up—like Berkeley here,” he added, drily.
Armstrong looked at his watch and remarked that it was nearly midnight.
“Boys,” said I, “in fifteen years from to-night let’s have a supper here and see how each man of us has worked out his theory of life, and how he likes it as far as he has got.”
“Oh, give us twenty,” said Doddridge, laughing, as we all arose and prepared to break up. “No one accomplishes anything in this latitude before he is forty.”
It was in effect just fifteen years from the summer of our graduation that I started out to look up systematically my quondam classmates and compare notes with them. The course of my own life had been quite other than I had planned. For one thing, I had lived in New Orleans and not in New York, and my occasions had led me seldom to the North. The first visit I paid was to Berkeley. I had heard that he was still unmarried, and that he had been for years settled, as minister, over a small Episcopal parish on the Hudson. The steamer landed me one summer afternoon at a little dock on the west bank; and after obtaining from the dock-keeper precise directions for finding the parsonage, I set out on foot. After a walk of a mile along a road skirted by handsome country seats, but contrasting strangely in its loneliness with the broad thoroughfare of the river constantly occupied by long tows of barges and rafts, I came to the rectory gate. The house was a stone cottage, covered with trailers, and standing well back from the road. In the same inclosure, surrounded by a grove of firs, was a little stone chapel with high pitched roof and rustic belfry. In front of the house I spied a figure which I recognized as Berkeley. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and was pecking away with a hoe at the gravel walk, whistling meanwhile his old favorite “Bonny Doon.” He turned as I came up the driveway, and regarded me at first without recognition. He, for his part, was little changed by time. There wasthe same tall, narrow-shouldered, slightly stooping figure; the face, smooth-shaved, with a spot of wintry red in the cheek, and the old humorous cast in the small blue eyes.
“You don’t know me from Adam,” I said, pausing in front of him.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, directly. “Polisson, old man, upon my conscience I’m glad to see you, but I didn’t know you till you spoke. You’ve been having the yellow fever, haven’t you? Come in—come into the house.”
We passed in through the porch, which was covered with sweet-pea vines trained on strings, and entered the library, where Berkeley resumed his coat. The room was lined with book-shelves loaded to the ceiling, while piles of literature had overflowed the cases and stood about on the floor in bachelor freedom. After the first greetings and inquiries, Berkeley carried my valise upstairs, and then returning, said:
“I’m a methodical though not methodistical person, or rather parson (excuse the Fullerism); and as you have got to stay with me till I let you go, that is, several days at the least (don’t interrupt), I’ll keep a little appointment for the next hour, if you will excuse me. A boy comes three times a week to blow the bellows for my organ practice. Perhaps you would like to step into the church and hear me.”
I assented, and we went out into the yard and found the boy already waiting in the churchporch. Berkeley and his assistant climbed into the organ loft, while I seated myself in the chancel to listen. The instrument was small but sweet, and Berkeley really played very well. The interior of the little church was plain to bareness; but the sun, which had fallen low, threw red lights on the upper part of the undecorated walls, and rich shadows darkened the lower half. Through the white, pointed windows I saw the trembling branches of the firs. I had been hurrying for a fortnight past over heated railways, treading fiery pavements, and lodging in red-hot city hotels. But now the music and the day’s decline filled me with a sense of religious calm, and for a moment I envied Berkeley. After his practicing was over the organist locked the chapel door, and we paced up and down in the fir-grove on the matting of dark red needles, and watched the river, whose eastern half still shone in the evening light. After supper we sat out on the piazza, which commanded a view of the Hudson. Berkeley opened a bottle of Chablis and produced some very old and dry Manilla cheroots, and, leaning back in our wicker chairs, we proceeded to “talk Cosmos.”
“You are very comfortably fixed here,” I began; “but this is not precisely what I expected to find you doing, after your declaration of principles, fifteen years ago, you may remember, on our Commencement night.”
“Fifteen years! So it is—so it is,” he answered, with a sigh. “Well,l’homme propose, you know.I don’t quite remember what it was that I said on that occasion: dreadful nonsense, no doubt. As Thackeray says, a boyisan ass. Whatever it was, it proceeded, I suppose, from some temporary mood rather than from any permanent conviction; though, to be sure, I slipped into this way of life almost by accident at first. But, being in, I have found it easy to continue. I am rather too apt, perhaps, to stay where I am put. I am a quietist by constitution.” He paused, and I waited for him to enter upon a fuller and more formal apology. Finally, he went on much as follows:
“Just after I left college I made application through some parties at Washington for a foreign consulate. While I was waiting for the application to be passed on (it was finally unsuccessful), I came up here to visit my uncle, who was the rector of this parish. He was a widower, without any children, and the church was his hobby. It is a queer little affair, something like the old field-kirks or chapels of ease in some parts of England. It was built partly by my uncle and partly by a few New York families who have country places here, and who use it in the summer. This is all glebe land,” he said, indicating, with a sweep of his hand, the twilight fields below the house sloping down toward the faintly glimmering river. “My uncle had a sort of prescription or lien by courtesy on the place. There’s not much salary to speak of, but he had a nice plum of his own, and lived inexpensively. Well, that first summer I mopedabout here, got acquainted with the summer residents, read a good deal of the time, took long walks into the interior,—a rough, aboriginal country, where they still talk Dutch,—and waited for an answer to my application. When it came at last, I fretted about it considerably, and was for starting off in search of something else. I had an idea of getting a place as botanist on Coprolite’s survey of the Nth parallel, and I wrote to New Haven for letters. I thought it would be a good outdoor, horseback sort of life, and might lead to something better. But that fell through, and meanwhile the dominie kept saying: ‘My dear fellow, don’t be in too much of a hurry to begin. Young America goes so fast nowadays that it is like the dog in the hunting story,—aleetlebit ahead of the hare. Why not stay here for awhile and ripen—ripen?’ The dominie had a good library,—all my old college favorites, old Burton, old Fuller, and Browne, etc., and it seemed the wisest course to follow his advice for the present. But in the fall my uncle had a slight stroke of paralysis, and really needed my help for awhile; so that what had been a somewhat aimless life, considered as loafing, became all at once a duty. At first he had a theological student, from somewhere across the river, come to stay in the house and read service for him on Sundays. But he was a ridiculous animal, whose main idea of a minister’s duties was to intone the responses in a sonorous manner. He used to practice this onweek days in his surplice, and I remember especially the cadence with which he delivered the sentence: ‘Yea, like a brokenwallshall ye be and as a ruinedhedge.’
“He got the huckleberry, as we used to say in college, on that particular text, and it has stuck by me ever since. The dominie fired him out after a fortnight, and one day said to me: ‘Jack, why don’tyoustudy for orders and take up the succession here? You are a bookworm, and the life seems to be to your liking.’ Of course, I declined very vigorously in the beginning, though offering to stay on so long as the dominie needed my help. I used to do lay reading on Sundays when he was too feeble. Gradually, ‘the idea of the life did sweetly creep into my study of imagination.’ The quaintness of the place appealed to me. And here was a future all cut out for me: no preliminary struggle, no contact with vulgar people, no cut-throat competition, but everything gentlemanly and independent about it. I had strong doubts touching my theology, and used to discuss them with my uncle; but he said,—and said rightly, I now think,—‘You young fellows in college fancy that it’s a mighty fine, bold thing to effect radicalism and atheism, and the Lord knows what all; but it won’t stick to you when you get older. Experience will soften your heart, and you’ll find after awhile that belief and doubt are not matters of the pure reason, but of the will. It is a question ofattitude. Besides, the church is broadenough to cover a good many private differences in opinion. It isn’t as if you were going to be a blue-nosed Presbyterian. You can stay here and make your studies with me, instead of going into a seminary, and when you are ready to go before the bishop I’ll see that you get the right send-off.’ In short, here I am! My uncle died two years after, when I was already in orders, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“I should think you would get lonely sometimes, and make a strike for a city parish,” I suggested.
“Why—no, I don’t think I should care for ordinary parish work. The beauty of my position here is its uniqueness. In winter I keep the church open for the Aborigines till they get snowed up and stop coming, and then I put down to New York for a month or two of work at the Astor Library. Last winter I held service for two Sundays running with one boy for congregation. Finally I announced to him that the church would be closed until spring.”
“What in the——: well, what do you find to do all alone up here?”
“Oh, there’s always plenty to do, if you’ll only do it. I’ve been cultivating some virtuosities, among other things. Remind me to show you my etchings when we go in. Did you notice, perhaps, that little head over the table, on the north wall? No? Then I smatter botany some. I’ll let you look over myhortus siccusbefore you go. It has some very rare ferns; one of them is a new species,and Fungus—who exchanges with me—swore that he was going to have it named after me. I sent the first specimen to have it described in his forthcoming report. But doubtless all this sort of thing is a bore to you. Well, lately I have been going into genealogy, and I find it more and more absorbing. Those piles of blank-books and manuscripts on the floor at the south end are all crammed with genealogical notes and material.”
“I should think you would find it pretty dry fodder,” I said.
“That is because you take an outside, unsympathetic view of it. Now, to an amateur it’s anything but dry. There is as much excitement in hunting down a missing link in a pedigree that you have been on the trail of for a long time, as there is in the chase of any other kind of game.”
“Do you ever get across the water? Travel, if I remember right, played a large part in your scheme of life once.”
“Yes; I’ve been over once, for a few months. But my income, though very comfortable for the statics of existence, is rather short for the dynamics, and so I mostly stay at home.”
“Did you meet any interesting people over there? Any of the crowned heads, famous wits, etc., whom you once proposed to cultivate?”
“No; nobody in particular. I went in a very quiet way. I had some good letters to people in England, but I didn’t present them. The idea of introductions became a bore as I got nearer to it.”
“And, of course, you didn’t elope with the marquise?”
“Was that in my scheme? Well—no, I did not.”
“You might have done worse, old man. You ought to have a wife, to keep you from getting rusty up here. And, besides, a fellow that goes so much into genealogy should take some interest in posterity. You ought to cultivate the science practically.”
“Oh, I’m past all danger of matrimony now,” said Berkeley, with a laugh. “There was a girl that I was rather sweet on a few years ago. I was looking up a pedigree for her papa, and I found that I was related to her myself, in eight different ways, though none of them very near. I explained it to her one evening. It took me an hour to do it, and I fancy she thought it a little slow. At all events, when I afterward hinted that we might make the eight ways nine, she answered that our relationship was so intricate already that she couldn’t think of complicating it any further. No, you may put me down as safe.”
After this, we sat listening in silence to the distant beat of paddle-wheels where a steamer was moving up river.
“The river is a deal of company,” resumed my host. “Thirty-six steamers pass here every twenty-four hours. That now is theMary Powell.”
“Well,” I said, answering not so much to his last remark as to the whole trend of his autobiography,“I suppose you are happy in this way of life, since you seem to prefer it. But it would be terribly monotonous to me.”
“Happy?” replied Berkeley, doubtfully. “I don’t know. Happiness is a subjective matter. Youarehappy if you think yourself so. As for me, I cultivate an obsolete mood—the old-fashioned humor of melancholy. I don’t suppose now that a light-hearted, French kind of chap like you can understand, in the least, what those fine, crusty old Elizabethans meant when they wrote,