Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (766 page)

We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work, and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded), that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth — they had never had children. “Troubles,” commented my father “(as I myself have experienced, and many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune.” He was doubtless thinking of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born.

A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for the light it casts on the characters of the two friends:

“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.

Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons. I went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long roll of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or were visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, “of plain, New England manners and appearance,” wrote my father, “and they have been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly at Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the passage that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter is kept here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge, in narrow circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that she had been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not know Paris at all.” This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James.