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_ VOLUME I. BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER IV.
She 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) 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, 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, in _seances_;
in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion 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 afterward 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 doubt 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.
She had just come down to see Doctor Prance--to see whether she wouldn't
like to come up. But she wasn't in her room, and Miss Birdseye guessed
she had gone out to her supper; she got her supper at a boarding-table
about two blocks off. Miss Birdseye expressed the hope that Miss
Chancellor had had hers; she would have had plenty of time to take it,
for no one had come in yet; she didn't know what made them all so late.
Ransom perceived that the garments suspended to the hat-rack were not a
sign that Miss Birdseye's friends had assembled; if he had gone a little
further still he would have recognised the house as one of those in
which mysterious articles of clothing are always hooked to something in
the hall. Miss Birdseye's visitors, those of Doctor Prance, and of other
tenants--for Number 756 was the common residence of several persons,
among whom there prevailed much vagueness of boundary--used to leave
things to be called for; many of them went about with satchels and
reticules, for which they were always looking for places of deposit.
What completed the character of this interior was Miss Birdseye's own
apartment, into which her guests presently made their way, and where
they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle.
Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to
render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no
more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose,
empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that
she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history
had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot
glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless. It struck even
Basil Ransom with its flatness, and he said to himself that his cousin
must have a very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house. He
did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally disliked it, and
that in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence
and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her
taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste
was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility
was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence
of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm of
humanity. Miss Birdseye was always trying to obtain employment, lessons
in drawing, orders for portraits, for poor foreign artists, as to the
greatness of whose talent she pledged herself without reserve; but in
point of fact she had not the faintest sense of the scenic or plastic
side of life.
Toward nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners smote the majestic
person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might have contributed to answer that
question of Miss Chancellor's in the negative. She was a copious,
handsome woman, in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of
success; she had a rustling dress (it was evident what _she_ thought
about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded
arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career
as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of
feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because she
seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained,
to ask you how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the
measurements were so correct. You could contest neither the measurements
nor the nobleness, and had to feel that Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself.
There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the
American matron and the public character. There was something public in
her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of
exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk,
over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogised by a
leading citizen. Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of
being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and
distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she
pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit.
If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for
granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at
you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at
her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of
women; the ends she laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman
in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was held
to have a very fine manner, and to embody the domestic virtues and the
graces of the drawing-room; to be a shining proof, in short, that the
forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a
husband, and his name was Amariah.
Doctor Prance had come back from supper and made her appearance in
response to an invitation that Miss Birdseye's relaxed voice had tinkled
down to her from the hall over the banisters, with much repetition, to
secure attention. She was a plain, spare young woman, with short hair
and an eye-glass; she looked about her with a kind of near-sighted
deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to
generalise in any way, or supposed to have come up for any purpose more
social than to see what Miss Birdseye wanted this time. By nine o'clock
twenty other persons had arrived, and had placed themselves in the
chairs that were ranged along the sides of the long, bald room, in which
they ended by producing the similitude of an enormous street-car. The
apartment contained little else but these chairs, many of which had a
borrowed aspect, an implication of bare bedrooms in the upper regions; a
table or two with a discoloured marble top, a few books, and a
collection of newspapers piled up in corners. Ransom could see for
himself that the occasion was not crudely festive; there was a want of
convivial movement, and, among most of the visitors, even of mutual
recognition. They sat there as if they were waiting for something; they
looked obliquely and silently at Mrs. Farrinder, and were plainly under
the impression that, fortunately, they were not there to amuse
themselves. The ladies, who were much the more numerous, wore their
bonnets, like Miss Chancellor; the men were in the garb of toil, many of
them in weary-looking overcoats. Two or three had retained their
overshoes, and as you approached them the odour of the india-rubber was
perceptible. It was not, however, that Miss Birdseye ever noticed
anything of that sort; she neither knew what she smelled nor tasted what
she ate. Most of her friends had an anxious, haggard look, though there
were sundry exceptions--half-a-dozen placid, florid faces. Basil Ransom
wondered who they all were; he had a general idea they were mediums,
communists, vegetarians. It was not, either, that Miss Birdseye failed
to wander about among them with repetitions of inquiry and friendly
absences of attention; she sat down near most of them in turn, saying
"Yes, yes," vaguely and kindly, to remarks they made to her, feeling for
the papers in the pockets of her loosened bodice, recovering her cap and
sacrificing her spectacles, wondering most of all what had been her idea
in convoking these people. Then she remembered that it had been
connected in some way with Mrs. Farrinder; that this eloquent woman had
promised to favour the company with a few reminiscences of her last
campaign; to sketch even, perhaps, the lines on which she intended to
operate during the coming winter. This was what Olive Chancellor had
come to hear; this would be the attraction for the dark-eyed young man
(he looked like a genius) she had brought with her. Miss Birdseye made
her way back to the great lecturess, who was bending an indulgent
attention on Miss Chancellor; the latter compressed into a small space,
to be near her, and sitting with clasped hands and a concentration of
inquiry which by contrast made Mrs. Farrinder's manner seem large and
free. In her transit, however, the hostess was checked by the arrival of
fresh pilgrims; she had no idea she had mentioned the occasion to so
many people--she only remembered, as it were, those she had
forgotten--and it was certainly a proof of the interest felt in Mrs.
Farrinder's work. The people who had just come in were Doctor and Mrs.
Tarrant and their daughter Verena; he was a mesmeric healer and she was
of old Abolitionist stock. Miss Birdseye rested her dim, dry smile upon
the daughter, who was new to her, and it floated before her that she
would probably be remarkable as a genius; her parentage was an
implication of that. There was a genius for Miss Birdseye in every bush.
Selah Tarrant had effected wonderful cures; she knew so many people--if
they would only try him. His wife was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet;
she had kept a runaway slave in her house for thirty days. That was
years before, when this girl must have been a child; but hadn't it
thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't she naturally
have some gift? The girl was very pretty, though she had red hair. _
Read next: Chapter 5
Read previous: Chapter 3
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