Books: Hawthorne and His Circle
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Julian Hawthorne >> Hawthorne and His Circle
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"When I inquired for Bennoch, in the warehouse where two or three
clerks seemed to be taking account of stock, a boy asked me to write
my name on a slip of paper, and took it into his peculiar office. Then
appeared Mr. Riggs, the junior partner, looking haggard and anxious,
poor man. He is somewhat low of stature, and slightly deformed, and I
fancied that he felt the disgrace and trouble more on that account.
But he greeted me in a friendly way, though rather awkwardly, and
asked me to sit down a little while in his own apartment, where he
left me. I sat a good while, reading an old number of Blackwood's
Magazine, a pile of which I found on the desk, together with some
well-worn ledgers and papers, that looked as if they had been pulled
out of drawers and pigeon-holes and dusty corners, and were not there
in the regular course of business. By-and-by Mr. Riggs reappeared,
and, telling me that I must lunch with them, conducted me up-stairs,
and through entries and passages where I had been more than once
before, but could not have found my way again through those extensive
premises; and everywhere the packages of silk were piled up and ranged
on shelves, in paper boxes, and otherwise--a rich stock, but which had
brought ruin with it. At last we came to that pleasant drawing-room,
hung with a picture or two, where I remember enjoying the hospitality
of the firm, with their clerks all at the table, and thinking that
this was a genuine scene of the old life of London City, when the
master used to feed his 'prentices at a patriarchal board. After all,
the room still looked cheerful enough; and there was a good fire, and
the table was laid for four. In two or three minutes Bennoch came
in--not with that broad, warm, lustrous presence that used to gladden
me in our past encounters--not with all that presence, at
least--though still he was not less than a very genial man, partially
be-dimmed. He looked paler, it seemed to me, thinner, and rather
smaller, but nevertheless he smiled at greeting me, more brightly, I
suspect, than I smiled back at him, for in truth I was very sorry. Mr.
Twentyman, the middle partner, now came in, and appeared as much or
more depressed than his fellows in misfortune, and to bear it with a
greater degree of English incommunicativeness and reserve. But he,
too, met me hospitably, and I and these three poor ruined men sat down
to dinner--a good dinner enough, by-the-bye, and such as ruined men
need not be ashamed to eat, since they must needs eat something. It
was roast beef, and a boiled apple-pudding, and--which I was glad to
see, my heart being heavy--a decanter of sherry and another of port,
remnants of a stock which, I suppose, will not be replenished. They
ate pretty fairly, but scarcely like Englishmen, and drank a
reasonable quantity, but not as if their hearts were in it, or as if
the liquor went to their hearts and gladdened them. I gathered from
them a strong idea of what commercial failure means to English
merchants--utter ruin, present and prospective, and obliterating all
the successful past; how little chance they have of ever getting up
again; how they feel that they must plod heavily onward under a burden
of disgrace--poor men and hopeless men and men forever ashamed. I
doubt whether any future prosperity (which is unlikely enough to come
to them) could ever compensate them for this misfortune, or make them,
to their own consciousness, the men they were. They will be like a
woman who has once lost her chastity: no after-life of virtue will
take out the stain. It is not so in America, nor ought it to be so
here; but they said themselves they would never again have put
unreserved confidence in a man who had been bankrupt, and they could
not but apply the same severe rule to their own case. I was touched by
nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness
against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault
with anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple
dignity, too, in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism. I could
really have shed tears for them, to see how like men and Christians
they let the tears come to their own eyes. This is the true way to do;
a man ought not to be too proud to let his eyes be moistened in the
presence of God and of a friend. They talked of some little
annoyances, half laughingly. Bennoch has been dunned for his gas-bill
at Blackheath (only a pound or two) and has paid it. Mr. Twentyman
seems to have received an insulting message from some creditor. Mr.
Riggs spoke of wanting a little money to pay for some boots. It was
very sad, indeed, to see these men of uncommon energy and ability, all
now so helpless, and, from managing great enterprises, involving vast
expenditures, reduced almost to reckon the silver in their pockets.
Bennoch and I sat by the fireside a little while after his partners
had left the room, and then he told me that he blamed himself, as
holding the principal position in the firm, for not having exercised a
stronger controlling influence over their operations. The two other
men had recently gone into speculations, of the extent of which he had
not been fully aware, and he found the liabilities of the firm very
much greater than he had expected. He said this without bitterness,
and said it not to the world, but only to a friend. I am exceedingly
sorry for him; it is such a changed life that he must lead hereafter,
and with none of the objects before him which he might heretofore have
hoped to grasp. No doubt he was ambitious of civic, and even of
broader public distinction; and not unreasonably so, having the gift
of ready and impressive speech, and a behavior among men that wins
them, and a tact in the management of affairs, and many-sided and
never-tiring activity. To be a member of Parliament--to be lord
mayor--whatever an eminent merchant of the world's metropolis may
be--beyond question he had dreamed wide-awake of these things. And now
fate itself could hardly accomplish them, if ever so favorably
inclined. He has to begin life over again, as he began it twenty-five
years ago, only under infinite disadvantages, and with so much of his
working-day gone forever.
"At parting, I spoke of his going to America; but he appeared to think
that there would be little hope for him there. Indeed, I should be
loath to see him transplanted thither myself, away from the warm,
cheerful, juicy English life into our drier and less genial sphere; he
is a good guest among us, but might not do well to live with us."
Bennoch was never lord mayor or member of Parliament; I do not know
that he cared to be either; but he lived to repay all his creditors
with interest, and to become once more a man in easy circumstances,
honored and trusted as well as loved by all who knew him, and active
and happy in all good works to the end of his days. There could be no
keeping down such a man, even in England; and when I knew him, in
after years, he was the Bennoch of yore, grown mellow and wise.
We were now ready for the Continent, when symptoms of some malady
began to manifest themselves among the younger persons of the family,
which presently culminated in an attack of the measles. It was six
weeks before we were in condition to take the road again. Meanwhile we
were professionally attended by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, a
homoeopathist, a friend of Emerson and of Henry James the elder, a
student of Swedenborg, and, at this particular juncture, interested in
spiritualism. In a biography of my father and mother, which I
published in 1884, I alluded to this latter circumstance, and some
time afterwards I received from his wife a letter which I take this
opportunity to print:
"4 FINCHLEY ROAD, N. W., June 19, 1885.
"DEAR SIR,--May I beg of you in any future edition of the Life of your
father to leave out your passage upon my husband and spiritualism? He
is utterly opposed to it now. On Mr. Home's first appearance in
England very remarkable things did occur; but from the first I was a
most decided opponent, and by my firmness I have kept all I know and
love from having anything to do with it for at least thirty-five
years. You may imagine, therefore, I feel hurt at seeing so
spiritually minded a man as my husband really is to be mixed up with
so evil a thing as spiritism. You will pardon a faithful wife her just
appreciation of his character. One other author took the liberty of
using his name in a similar way, and I wrote to him also. Believe me,
"Yours faithfully,
"E. A. WILKINSON."
The good doctor and his wife are now, I believe, both of them in the
world where good spirits go, and no doubt they have long ere this
found out all about the rights and wrongs of spiritism and other
matters, but there is no doubt that at the time of my father's
acquaintance with him the doctor was a very earnest supporter of the
cult. He was a man of mark and of brains and of most lovable personal
quality; he wrote books well worth deep study; Emerson speaks of "the
long Atlantic roll" of their style. Henry James named his third son
after him--the gentle and brave "Wilkie" James, who was my school-mate
at Sanborn's school in Concord after our return to America, and who
was wounded in the fight at Fort Fisher while leading his negro
soldiers to the assault. But for the present, Dr. Wilkinson, so far
as we children knew him, was a delightful and impressive physician,
who helped us through our measles in masterly style, under all the
disadvantages of a foggy London winter.
On the 5th of January, 1858--we were ready to start the next
day--Bennoch came to take tea with us and bid us farewell. "He keeps
up a manly front," writes my father, "and an aspect of cheerfulness,
though it is easy to see that he is a very different man from the
joyous one whom I knew a few months since; and whatever may be his
future fortune, he will never get all the sunshine back again. There
is a more determinate shadow on him now, I think, than immediately
after his misfortunes; the old, equable truth weighs down upon him,
and makes him sensible that the good days of his life have probably
all been enjoyed, and that the rest is likely to be endurance, not
enjoyment. His temper is still sweet and warm, yet, I half fancy, not
wholly unacidulated by his troubles--but now I have written it, I
decide that it is not so, and blame myself for surmising it. But it
seems most unnatural that so buoyant and expansive a character should
have fallen into the helplessness of commercial misfortune; it is most
grievous to hear his manly and cheerful allusions to it, and even his
jokes upon it; as, for example, when we suggested how pleasant it
would be to have him accompany us to Paris, and he jestingly spoke of
the personal restraint under which he now lived. On his departure,
Julian and I walked a good way down Oxford Street and Holborn with
him, and I took leave of him with the truest wishes for his welfare."
The next day we embarked at Folkestone for France, and our new life
began.
XIII
Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous
woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused
mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson
comforters--Rivers of human gore--Curling mustachios and nothing to
do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the
MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her
constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--Sitting
up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion
reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-anemones--If you were in
the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an
Esquimau?
No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years'
residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the
consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions
from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour
of tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and
formed associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting,
take deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show
their strength only when we test them by removing ourselves from their
physical sphere.
Accordingly, though he looked forward with pleasure to leaving England
for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow
seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only
partly bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted
him--an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may
have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we
returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal,
America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death
was hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest
her best days were past. But something there was in England that
touched a deep, kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else.
America might be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and
thus he found himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the
boundaries of his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this
predicament, combined with his gradually failing health, led him to
say, in a moment of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is
to come to an end, I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while
it lasts."
It is true that Rome, vehemently as at first he rebelled against it,
came at last to hold a power over him. Rome, if you give it
opportunity, subtly fastens its grasp upon both brain and heart, and
claims sympathies which are as undeniable as our human nature itself.
Yet there is something morbid in our love for the mystic city, like a
passion for some beautiful but perilous woman with a past--such as
Miriam in The Marble Faun, for example. Only an exceptionally
vigorous and healthy constitution can risk it without danger. Had my
father visited Rome in his young manhood, he might have both cared for
it less and in a sense have enjoyed it more than he did during these
latter years of his life.
But from the time we left London, and, indeed, a little before that,
he was never quite himself physically. Our departure was made at the
most inclement moment of a winter season of unusual inclemency; they
said (as they always do) that no weather to be compared with it had
been known for twenty years. We got up before dawn in London, and
after a dismal ride in the train to Folkestone, where the bitter waves
of the English Channel left edgings of ice on the shingle beach where
I went to pick up shells, we were frost-bitten all our two-hours
passage across to Boulogne, where it became cold in dead earnest, and
so continued all through Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, and down the
Mediterranean to Genoa and Civita Vecchia, and thence up the long,
lonely, bandit-haunted road to Rome, and in Rome, with exasperating
aggravations, right up to April, or later. My own first recollection
of St. Peter's is that I slid on the ice near one of the fountains in
the piazza of that famous edifice; and my father did the same, with a
savage satisfaction, no doubt, at thus proving that everything was
what it ought not to be. Either in London, or at some intermediate
point between that and Paris, he caught one of the heaviest colds that
ever he had; and its feverish and debilitating effects were still
perceptible in May. "And this is sunny Italy--and this is genial
Rome!" he wrathfully exclaims. It was like looking forward to the
Garden of Eden all one's life, and going to vast trouble and expense
to get there, and, on arriving, finding the renowned spot to be a sort
of Montreal ice-palace. The palaces of Rome are not naturally fitted
to be ice-palaces, and the cold feels all the colder in them by
consequence.
But I am going too fast. The first thing my father did, after getting
on board the little Channel steamer, was to go down in the cabin and
drink a glass of brandy-and-water, hot, with sugar; and he afterwards
remarked that "this sea-passage was the only enjoyable part of the
day." But the wind cut like a scimitar, and he came on deck
occasionally only--as when I came plunging down the companion-way to
tell him, with the pride of a discoverer, that France was broad in
sight, and the sun was shining on it. "Oh!" exclaimed my mother,
looking up from her, pale discomfortableness on a sofa, with that
radiant smile of hers, and addressing poor Miss Shepard, who was still
further under the sinister influence of those historic alpine
fluctuations which have upset so many. "Oh, Ada, Julian says the sun
is shining on France!" Ada never stirred. She was the most amiable and
philosophic of young ladies; but if thought could visit her reeling
brain at that moment, she probably wondered why Providence had been so
inconsiderate as to sever Britain from its Gallic base in those old
geologic periods before man was yet born to sea-sickness.
Sunshine on the pale, smooth acclivities of France, and half a dozen
bluff-bowed fishing-boats, pitching to the swell, were all that was
notable on our trip across; and of Boulogne I remember nothing, except
the confused mountain of the family luggage on the pier, and
afterwards of its being fed into the baggage-car of the train.
Ollendorff abandoned me thus early in my travels; nor was my father
much better off. But Miss Shepard, now restored to life, made amends
for her late incompetence by discoursing with excited French officials
with what seemed to me preternatural intelligence; indeed, I half
doubted whether there were not some conspiracy to deceive in that
torrent of outlandish sounds which she and they were so rapidly
pouring forth to one another. However, all turned out well, and there
we were, in a compartment of a French railway-train, smelling of stale
tobacco, with ineffective zinc foot-warmers, and an increasing veil of
white frost on the window-panes, which my sisters and myself spent our
time in trying to rub off that France might become visible. But the
white web was spun again as fast as we dissipated it, and nothing was
to be seen, at all events, but long processions of poplars, which
interested me only because I imagined myself using them as lances in
some romantic Spenserian adventure of knight-errantry--for the spell
of that chivalric dream still hung about me. So we came to Amiens, a
pallid, clean, chilly town, with high-shouldered houses and a tall
cathedral, and thence went on to Paris at five o'clock. It was already
dusk, and our transit to the Hotel de Louvre in crowded cabs, through
streets much unlike London, is the sum of my first impressions of the
wonderful city.
Then, marshalled by princely yet deferential personages in rich
costumes, we proceeded up staircases and along gilded corridors to a
suite of sumptuous apartments, with many wax candles in candelabra,
which were immediately lighted by an attendant, and their lustre was
reflected from tall mirrors which panelled the rooms. The furniture
thus revealed was costly and elegant, but hardly comfortable to an
English-bred sense; the ceilings were painted, the floor rich with
glowing carpets. But the glow of color was not answered by a glow of
any other sort; a deadly chill pervaded this palatial place, which
fires, as big as one's fist, kindled in fireplaces as large as hall
bedrooms, did nothing to dissipate. Hereupon our elders had compassion
on us, and, taking from the tall, awful bedsteads certain crimson
comforters, they placed each of us in an easy-chair and tucked the
comforters in over us. These comforters, covered with crimson silk,
were of great thickness, but also of extraordinary lightness, and for
a few minutes we had no confidence in their power to thaw us. But they
were filled with swan's-down; and presently a novel and delightful
sensation--that of warmth--began to steal upon us. It steadily
increased, until in quarter of an hour there might be seen upon our
foreheads and noses, which were the only parts of us open to view, the
beads of perspiration. It was a marvellous experience. The memory of
the crimson comforters has remained with me through life; light as
sunset clouds, they accomplished the miracle of importing tropic
warmth into the circle of the frozen arctic. I think we must have been
undressed and night-gowned before this treatment; at any rate, I have
forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed we somehow got, and slept the
blessed sleep of childhood.
The next morning my father, apparently as an accompaniment of his
cold, was visited by a severe nosebleed; no importance was attached to
it, beyond its preventing him from going forth to superintend the
examination of our luggage at the custom-house--the mountain having
been registered through from London. This duty was, therefore, done by
Miss Shepard and my mother. The next day, at dinner, the nosebleeding
began again. "And thus," observed my father, "my blood must be
reckoned among the rivers of human gore which have been shed in Paris,
and especially in the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotines used
to stand"--and where our restaurant was. But these bleedings, which
came upon him at several junctures during his lifetime, and were
uniformly severe and prolonged, probably had a significance more
serious than was supposed. The last one occurred not many weeks before
his death, and it lasted twenty-four hours; he was never the same
afterwards. He joked about it then, as now, but there was the
forewarning of death in it.
But that day lies still unsuspected in the future, six years away. For
the present, we were in splendid Paris, with Napoleon III. in the
Tuileries, and Baron Haussmann regnant in the stately streets. For a
week we went to and fro, admiring and--despite the cold, the
occasional icy rains, and once even a dark fog--delighted. In spirit
and in substance, nothing could be more different from London. For my
part, I enjoyed it without reservation; the cold, which depressed my
sick father, exhilarated me. For Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the
Louvre, the Madeleine, the pictures, and the statues, I cared little
or nothing; I hardly even heeded the column of the Place Vendome or
the mighty mass of the Arc de Triomphe. But the Frenchiness of it all
captivated me. The throngs in the streets were kaleidoscopic in
costume and character: priests, soldiers, gendarmes, strange figures
with turbans and other Oriental accoutrements; women gayly dressed and
wearing their dresses with an air; men with curling mustachios, and
with nothing to do, apparently, but amuse themselves; romantic artists
with soft felt hats and eccentric beards; grotesque figures of poverty
in rags and with ominous visages, such as are never seen in London;
martial music, marching regiments, with gorgeous generals on
horseback, with shining swords; church processions; wedding pageants
crowding in and out of superb churches; newspapers, shop-signs, and
chatter, all in French, even down to the babble of the small children.
And the background of this parade was always the pleasant, light-hued
buildings, the majority of them large and of a certain uniformity of
aspect, as if they had been made in co-operation, and to look pretty,
instead of independently and incongruously, as in England. These
people seemed to be all playing and prattling; nobody worked; even the
shopkeepers held holiday in their shops. Such was my boyish idea of
Paris. Napoleon had been emperor only five or six years; he had been
married to Eugenie only four or five; and, so far as one could judge
who knew nothing of political coups d'etat and crimes, he was the
right man in the right place. Moreover, the French bread was a
revelation; it tasted better than cake, and was made in loaves six
feet long; and the gingerbread, for sale on innumerable out-door
stalls, was better yet, with quite a new flavor. I ate it as I walked
about with my father. He once took a piece himself, and, said he, "I
desired never to taste any more." How odd is, sometimes, the behavior
of grown-up people!
But even my father enjoyed the French cookery, though he was in some
doubt whether it were not a snare of the evil one to lure men to
indulgence. We dined in the banquet-hall of our hotel once or twice
only; in general we went to neighboring restaurants, where the food
was just as good, but cost less. I was always hungry, but hungrier
than ever in Paris. "I really think," wrote my father, "that Julian
would eat a whole sheep." In his debilitated state he had little
appetite either for dinners or for works of art; he looked even upon
the Venus of Milo with coldness. "It seemed," wrote he, speaking of
the weather one morning, "as if a cold, bitter, sullen agony were
interposed between each separate atom of our bodies. In all my
experience of bad atmospheres, methinks I never knew anything so
atrocious as this. England has nothing to compare with it." The "grip"
was a disease unnamed at that epoch, but I should suppose that it was
very vividly described in the above sentence. He had the grip, and
for nearly six months he saw everything through its medium.
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