The Bostonians (7 page)

“I can show you an earnest effort towards it. That’s the most one can be sure of. But I am not sure you are worthy.”

“Is it something very Bostonian? I should like to see that,” said Basil Ransom.

“There are movements in other cities. Mrs. Farrinder goes everywhere; she may speak to-night.”

“Mrs. Farrinder, the celebrated—?”

“Yes, the celebrated; the great apostle of the emancipation of women. She is a great friend of Miss Birdseye.”

“And who is Miss Birdseye?”

“She is one of our celebrities. She is the woman in the world, I suppose, who has laboured most for every wise reform. I think I ought to tell you,” Miss Chancellor went on in a moment, “she was one of the earliest, one of the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists.”
⁴

She had thought indeed she ought to tell him that, and it threw her into a little tremor of excitement to do so. Yet if she had been afraid he would show some irritation at this news she was disappointed at the geniality with which he exclaimed:

“Why, poor old lady—she must be quite mature!”

It was therefore with some severity that she rejoined:

“She will never be old. She is the youngest spirit I know. But if you are not in sympathy perhaps you had better not come,” she went on.

“In sympathy with what, dear madam?” Basil Ransom asked, failing still, to her perception, to catch the tone of real seriousness. “If, as you say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of course one can’t sympathise with both.”

“Yes, but every one will, in his way—or in her way—plead the cause of the new truths. If you don’t care for them you won’t go with us.”

“I tell you I haven’t the least idea what they are! I have never yet encountered in the world any but old truths—as old as the sun and moon. How can I know? But do take me; it’s such a chance to see Boston.”

“It isn’t Boston—it’s humanity!” Miss Chancellor, as she made this remark, rose from her chair and her movement seemed to say that she consented. But before she quitted her kinsman to get ready, she observed to him that she was sure he knew what she meant; he was only pretending he didn’t.

“Well, perhaps after all I have a general idea,” he confessed; “but don’t you see how this little reunion will give me a chance to fix it?”

She lingered an instant with her anxious face. “Mrs. Farrinder will fix it!” she said; and she went to prepare herself.

It was in this poor young lady’s nature to be anxious, to have scruple within scruple and to forecast the consequences of things. She returned in ten minutes, in her bonnet, which she had apparently assumed in recognition of Miss Birdseye’s asceticism. As she stood there drawing on her gloves—her visitor had fortified himself against Mrs. Farrinder by another glass of wine—she declared to him that she quite repented of having proposed to him to go; something told her that he would be an unfavourable element.

“Why, is it going to be a spiritual
séance?”
⁵
Basil Ransom asked.

“Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye’s some inspirational speaking.” Olive Chancellor was determined to look him straight in the face as she said this; her sense of the way it might strike him operated as a cogent, not as a deterrent, reason.

“Why Miss Olive, it’s just got up on purpose for me!” cried the young Mississippian, radiant and clasping his hands. She thought him very handsome as he said this, but reflected that unfortunately men didn’t care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that she could always fall back upon; it had already been a comfort to her, on occasions of acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class, anyway. “And I want so much to see an old Abolitionist; I have never laid eyes on one,” Basil Ransom added.

“Of course you couldn’t see one in the South; you were too afraid of them to let them come there!” She was now trying to think of something she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record—if anything, in a person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other—her second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the elapsing moments into an un-reasoned terror of the effect of his presence. “Perhaps Miss Birdseye won’t like you,” she went on as they waited for the carriage.

“I don’t know; I reckon she will,” said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.

From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End;
ⁱ
the distance was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach,
^j
it being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of the street-car;
^k
not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to the South End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why, having to-night the advantage of a gentleman’s protection, she sent for a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the sense rather, of putting him in debt. As they rolled toward the South End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red houses, dusky in the lamplight, with protuberant fronts, approached by ladders of stone; as they proceeded with these contemplative undulations Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn’t tell why) into such a tremor:

“Don’t you believe, then, in the coming of a better day—in its being possible to do something for the human race?”

Poor Ransom perceived the defiance and he felt rather bewildered; he wondered what type, after all, he
had
got hold of and what game was being played with him. Why had she made advances if she wanted to pinch him this way? However, he was good for any game—that one as well as another—and he saw that he was “in” for something of which he had long desired to have a nearer view. “Well, Miss Olive,” he answered, putting on again his big hat, which he had been holding in his lap, “what strikes me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles.”

“That’s what men say to women to make them patient in the position they have made for them.”

“Oh the position of women!” Basil Ransom exclaimed. “The position of women is to make fools of men. I would change my position for yours any day,” he went on. “That’s what I said to myself as I sat there in your elegant home.”

He could not see, in the dimness of the carriage, that she had flushed quickly, and he did not know that she disliked to be reminded of certain things which, for her, were mitigations of the hard feminine lot. But the passionate quaver with which, a moment later, she answered him sufficiently assured him that he had touched her at a tender point.

“Do you make it a reproach to me that I happen to have a little money? The dearest wish of my heart is to do something with it for others—for the miserable.”

Basil Ransom might have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was joking. “I don’t know why I should care what you think,” she said.

“Don’t care—don’t care. What does it matter? It is not of the slightest importance.”

He might say that, but it was not true; she felt that there were reasons why she should care. She had brought him into her life and she should have to pay for it. But she wished to know the worst at once. “Are you against our emancipation?” she asked, turning a white face on him in the momentary radiance of a street-lamp.

“Do you mean your voting and preaching and all that sort of thing?” He made this inquiry, but seeing how seriously she would take his answer he was almost frightened and hung fire. “I will tell you when I have heard Mrs. Farrinder.”

They had arrived at the address given by Miss Chancellor to the coachman, and their vehicle stopped with a lurch. Basil Ransom got out; he stood at the door with an extended hand, to assist the young lady. But she seemed to hesitate; she sat there with her spectral face. “You hate it!” she exclaimed, in a low tone.

“Miss Birdseye will convert me,” said Ransom, with intention; for he had grown very curious, and he was afraid that now, at the last, Miss Chancellor would prevent his entering the house. She alighted without his help, and behind her he ascended the high steps of Miss Birdseye’s residence. He had grown very curious, and among the things he wanted to know was why in the world this ticklish spinster had written to him.

IV

S
he had told him before they started that they should be early; she wished to see Miss Birdseye alone, before the arrival of any one else. This was just for the pleasure of seeing her—it was an opportunity; she was always so taken up with others. She received Miss Chancellor in the hall of the mansion, which had a salient front, an enormous and very high number—756—painted in gilt on the glass light above the door, a tin sign bearing the name of a doctress (Mary J. Prance)
¹
suspended from one of the windows of the basement, and a peculiar look of being both new and faded—a kind of modern fatigue—like certain articles of commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn. The hall was very narrow; a considerable part of it was occupied by a large hat-tree from which several coats and shawls already depended; the rest offered space for certain lateral demonstrations on Miss Birdseye’s part. She sidled about her visitors, and at last went round to open for them a door of further admission, which happened to be locked inside. She was a little old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom noticed—the vast, fair, protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details. In her large countenance her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a kind of instalment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she would smile more if she had time, but that you could see, without this, that she was gentle and easy to beguile.

She always dressed in the same way: she wore a loose black jacket, with deep pockets, which were stuffed with papers, memoranda of a voluminous correspondence; and from beneath her jacket depended a short stuff dress. The brevity of this simple garment was the one device by which Miss Birdseye managed to suggest that she was a woman of business, that she wished to be free for action. She belonged to the Short-Skirts League,
²
as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements. Basil Ransom knew very little about such a life as hers, but she seemed to him a revelation of a class, and a multitude of socialistic figures, of names and episodes that he had heard of, grouped themselves behind her. She looked as if she had spent her life on platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries,
³
in
seances;
in her faded face there was a kind of reflection of ugly lecture-lamps; with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a public speaker with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social reforms are usually discussed. She talked continually, in a voice of which the spring seemed broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire; and when Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ransom because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder, she gave the young man a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an injustice) to be present on such an interesting occasion. She struck him as very poor but it was only afterwards that he learned she had never had a penny in her life. No one had an idea how she lived; whenever money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. She had suffered in the same way by the relaxation of many European despotisms, for in former years much of the romance of her life had been in smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators. Her refugees had been very precious to her; she was always trying to raise money for some cadaverous Pole, to obtain lessons for some shirtless Italian. There was a legend that an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her affections, and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she had never possessed anything, and it was open to grave doubts that she could have entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those days, only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more appealing.