Suburban Sketches by W.D. Howells

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[Illustration: "She lighted a potent pipe."]

SUBURBAN SKETCHES

BY W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOURNEYS" ETC.

CONTENTS

MRS. JOHNSON

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

A DAY'S PLEASURE

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

SCENE

JUBILEE DAYS

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS

FLITTING

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

SHE LIGHTED A POTENT PIPE

"BUT I SUPPOSE THIS WINE IS NOT MADE OF GRAPES, SIGNOR?"

LOOKING ABOUT, I SAW TWO WOMEN

THE YOUNG LADY IN BLACK, WHO ALIGHTED AT A MOST ORDINARY LITTLE STREET

THAT SWEET YOUNG BLONDE, WHO ARRIVES BY MOST TRAINS

FRANK AND LUCY STALKED AHEAD, WITH SHAWLS DRAGGING FROM THEIR ARMS

THEY SKIRMISH ABOUT HIM WITH EVERY SORT OF QUERY.

A GAUNT FIGURE OF FORLORN AND CURIOUS SMARTNESS.

THE SPECTACLE AS WE BEHELD IT

VACANT AND CEREMONIOUS ZEAL

MRS. JOHNSON

It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the horse-
car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home
in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by the
influences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew itself from its
sister drop, or could be better identified by the people against whom they
beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced
our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the
adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks gave, as it
peered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiar
cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots abandoned
hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished wooden houses, empty
mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and
mutilated ground, added their interest to the scene. A shaggy drift hung
upon the trees before our own house (which had been built some years
earlier), while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly upon the
embankments lifting its base several feet above the common level.

This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of turning
their thoughts effectually from earthly pleasures, came so far to
discover, continued with slight amelioration throughout the month of May
and far into June; and it was a matter of constant amazement with one who
had known less austere climates, to behold how vegetable life struggled
with the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as chill and damp as that of
a cellar, shot forth the buds and blossoms upon the pear-trees, called out
the sour Puritan courage of the currant-bushes, taught a reckless native
grape-vine to wander and wanton over the southern side of the fence, and
decked the banks with violets as fearless and as fragile as New England
girls; so that about the end of June, when the heavens relented and the
sun blazed out at last, there was little for him to do but to redden and
darken the daring fruits that had attained almost their full growth
without his countenance.

Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind of Paradise. The wind
blew all day from the southwest, and all day in the grove across the way
the orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon rattled merrily
up to our gate every morning; and if we had kept no other reckoning, we
should have known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were living in the
country with the conveniences and luxuries of the city about us. The house
was almost new and in perfect repair; and, better than all, the kitchen
had as yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic agencies which are
constantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosion, make
Herculaneums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households. Breakfast,
dinner, and tea came up with illusive regularity, and were all the most
perfect of their kind; and we laughed and feasted in our vain security. We
had out from the city to banquet with us the friends we loved, and we were
inexpressibly proud before them of the Help, who first wrought miracles of
cookery in our honor, and then appeared in a clean white apron, and the
glossiest black hair, to wait upon the table. She was young, and certainly
very pretty; she was as gay as a lark, and was courted by a young man
whose clothes would have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach,
to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to the idea of staying with
us till she married.

In fact, there was much that was extremely pleasant about the little place
when the warm weather came, and it was not wonderful to us that Jenny was
willing to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another to the window
if a large dog went by our door; and whole days passed without the
movement of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street, which flourished
in ragweed and butter-cups and daisies, and in the autumn burned, like the
borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure
flame of the succory. The neighborhood was in all things a frontier
between city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such civilization--
full of imposture, discomfort, and sublime possibility--as we yet possess,
went by the head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one
skilled in calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes' walk
would take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible
through the trees. We learned, like innocent pastoral people of the golden
age, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots,
and, like engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the different
whistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring railroad. The
trains shook the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kind
of company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Now
and then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows--which, tied
by long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against the
trunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and hammering--
came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening pears. All
round us carpenters were at work building new houses; but so far from
troubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense,
like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness in the lapse from all
fear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic.

We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes, which
the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as they ripened;
and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton blackberries, which,
after attaining the most stalwart proportions, were still as bitter as the
scrubbiest of their savage brethren, and which, when by advice left on the
vines for a week after they turned black, were silently gorged by secret
and gluttonous flocks of robins and orioles. As for our grapes, the frost
cut them off in the hour of their triumph.

So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be willing
to remain with us, and were as little prepared for her desertion as for
any other change of our moral state. But one day in September she came to
her nominal mistress with tears in her beautiful eyes and protestations of
unexampled devotion upon her tongue, and said that she was afraid she must
leave us. She liked the place, and she never had worked for any one that
was more of a lady, but she had made up her mind to go into the city. All
this, so far, was quite in the manner of domestics who, in ghost stories,
give warning to the occupants of haunted houses; and Jenny's mistress
listened in suspense for the motive of her desertion, expecting to hear no
less than that it was something which walked up and down the stairs and
dragged iron links after it, or something that came and groaned at the
front door, like populace dissatisfied with a political candidate. But it
was in fact nothing of this kind; simply, there were no lamps upon our
street, and Jenny, after spending Sunday evening with friends in East
Charlesbridge, was always alarmed, on her return, in walking from the
horse-car to our door. The case was hopeless, and Jenny and our household
parted with respect and regret.

We had not before this thought it a grave disadvantage that our street was
unlighted. Our street was not drained nor graded; no municipal cart ever
came to carry away our ashes; there was not a water-butt within half a
mile to save us from fire, nor more than the one thousandth part of a
policeman to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy tax, I somehow
felt that we enjoyed the benefits of city government, and never looked
upon Charlesbridge as in any way undesirable for residence. But when it
became necessary to find help in Jenny's place, the frosty welcome given
to application at the intelligence offices renewed a painful doubt
awakened by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the offices were
polite enough; but when the young housekeeper had stated her case at the
first to which she applied, and the Intelligencer had called out to the
invisible expectants in the adjoining room, "Anny wan wants to do giner'l
housewark in Charlsbrudge?" there came from the maids invoked so loud, so
fierce, so full a "No!" as shook the lady's heart with an indescribable
shame and dread. The name that, with an innocent pride in its literary and
historical associations, she had written at the heads of her letters, was
suddenly become a matter of reproach to her; and she was almost tempted to
conceal thereafter that she lived in Charlesbridge, and to pretend that
she dwelt upon some wretched little street in Boston. "You see," said the
head of the office, "the gairls doesn't like to live so far away from the
city. Now if it was on'y in the Port...."

This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote reader an idea of the
affront offered to an inhabitant of Old Charlesbridge in these closing
words. Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report here all the
sufferings undergone by an unhappy family in finding servants, or to tell
how the winter was passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas! is it not the
history of a thousand experiences? Any one who looks upon this page could
match it with a tale as full of heartbreak and disaster, while I conceive
that, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I approach a subject of
unique interest.

The winter that ensued after Jenny's departure was the true sister of the
bitter and shrewish spring of the same year. But indeed it is always with
a secret shiver that one must think of winter in our regrettable climate.
It is a terrible potency, robbing us of half our lives, and threatening or
desolating the moiety left us with rheumatisms and catarrhs. There is a
much vaster sum of enjoyment possible to man in the more generous
latitudes; and I have sometimes doubted whether even the energy
characteristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing that it has its
spring not so much in pure aspiration as in the instinct of self-
preservation. Egyptian, Greek, Roman energy was an inner impulse; but ours
is too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We must endure our
winter, but let us not be guilty of the hypocrisy of pretending that we
like it. Let us caress it with no more vain compliments, but use it with
something of its own rude and savage sincerity.

I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those
midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak
and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan
longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand
of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for
some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive
train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework
forever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this was
impossible, and that, if we desired colored help, we must seek it at the
intelligence office, which is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited by
the orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery. To tell the truth
these orphans do not seem to grieve much for their bereavement, but lead a
life of joyous and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the city.
They are often to be seen sauntering up and down the street by which the
Charlesbridge cars arrive,--the young with a harmless swagger, and the old
with the generic limp which our Autocrat has already noted as attending
advanced years in their race. They seem the natural human interest of a
street so largely devoted to old clothes; and the thoughtful may see a
felicity in their presence where the pawnbrokers' windows display the
forfeited pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that we have yet
to redeem a whole race, pawned in our needy and reckless national youth,
and still held against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also the
Father of Lies. How gayly are the young ladies of this race attired, as
they trip up and down the side walks, and in and out through the pendent
garments at the shop doors! They are the black pansies and marigolds and
dark-blooded dahlias among womankind. They try to assume something of our
colder race's demeanor, but even the passer on the horse-car can see that
it is not native with them, and is better pleased when they forget us, and
ungenteelly laugh in encountering friends, letting their white teeth
glitter through the generous lips that open to their ears. In the streets
branching upwards from this avenue, very little colored men and maids play
with broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden pavements of the
entrances to the inner courts. Now and then a colored soldier or sailor--
looking strange in his uniform, even after the custom of several years--
emerges from those passages; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken
in years, and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick
sidewalk, cane in hand,--a vision of serene self-complacency, and so
plainly the expression of virtuous public sentiment that the great colored
louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken with a
sudden sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls.
At the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuffling with an
admirer through one of the low open windows, suspends the strife, and bids
him, "Go along now, do!" More rarely yet than the gentleman described, one
may see a white girl among the dark neighbors, whose frowzy head is
uncovered, and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and who, though
no doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that pale anomaly which
may sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds.

An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift,
seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the aggressive and
impudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly wickedness of
a low American street. A gayety not born of the things that bring its
serious joy to the true New England heart--a ragged gayety, which comes of
summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the conscience, and which
affects the countenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to some
inward music, and at times bursting into a line of song or a child-like
and irresponsible laugh--gives tone to the visible life, and wakens a very
friendly spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milder
climate, and is half persuaded that the orange-peel on the sidewalks came
from fruit grown in the soft atmosphere of those back courts.

It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was
from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge to
look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was a
matron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffee
soothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a certain
tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all out will to ask for
references. It was only her barbaric laughter and her lawless eye that
betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her
ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization
that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged
by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness mixed with that of
the desert in her veins: her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors
on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinkets
that bought the original African pair on the other side.

The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen, she conjured
from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the flitting
Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and was
quite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious talent.
Something original and authentic mingled with the accustomed flavors; and,
though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland camps arose
from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance of
such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely
running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a
musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before
breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had
mastered her instrument; and thereafter there was no faltering in her
performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or from
suggestion. She was so quick to receive new ideas in her art, that, when
the Roman statuary who stayed a few weeks with us explained the mystery of
various purely Latin dishes, she caught their principle at once; and
visions of the great white cathedral, the Coliseum, and the "dome of
Brunelleschi" floated before us in the exhalations of the Milanese
_risotto_, Roman _stufadino_, and Florentine _stracotto_ that smoked
upon our board. But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson
chiefly excelled. She was one of those cooks--rare as men of genius
in literature--who love their own dishes; and she had, in her personally
child-like simplicity of taste, and the inherited appetites of her
savage forefathers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as we could
learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings and tea. Through the same
primitive instincts, no doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in our
artless flatteries of her skill; she waited jealously at the head of the
kitchen stairs to hear what was said of her work, especially if there were
guests; and she was never too weary to attempt emprises of cookery.

While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like a
turban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings in
which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our
sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed and
the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand
at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent odors. If
we surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe from her
lips, and put it behind her, with a low mellow chuckle, and a look of
half-defiant consciousness; never guessing that none of her merits took us
half so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned to conceal.

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking, because of her
failing eyesight; and we persuaded her that spectacles would both become
and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of steel-bowed
glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first, but had clearly
no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether, and they had
passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard her mellow note of
laughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside our door, and, opening
it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles of massive frame. We then
learned that their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago, in
the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they should
be gold-bowed; and I hope the manes of the dead were half as happy in
these votive spectacles as the simple soul that offered them.

She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whom
were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During his
life-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was only
within a few years that she had gone into service. She cherished a natural
haughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although disposed to do all
she could of her own motion. Being told to say when she wanted an
afternoon, she explained that when she wanted an afternoon she always took
it without asking, but always planned so as not to discommode the ladies
with whom she lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven within
three years, which made us doubt the success of her system in all cases,
though she merely held out the fact as an assurance of her faith in the
future, and a proof of the ease with which places were to be found. She
contended, moreover, that a lady who had for thirty years had a house of
her own, was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive visits from
friends where she might be living, but that they ought freely to come and
go like other guests. In this spirit she once invited her son-in-law,
Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with her; and her defied mistress,
on entering the dining-room, found the Professor at pudding and tea
there,--an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a black
face rendered yet more effective by a pair of green goggles. It appeared
that this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, and
that he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason of
being blind as well as black.

I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion of
the Caucasian race in all respects. In fact, she had very good
philosophical and Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstart
people of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no creditable or
pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies,
whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook upon a Down-East
schooner, was a man of letters, and had written a book to show the
superiority of the black over the white branches of the human family. In
this he held that, as all islands have been at their discovery found
peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity was first created
of that color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her husband's work (a sole
copy in the library of an English gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be
bought for money), but she often developed its arguments to the lady of
the house; and one day, with a great show of reluctance, and many protests
that no personal slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson
believed the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the
leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his
original blackness. "And he went out from his presence a leper as white as
snow," said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. "Leprosy,
leprosy," she added thoughtfully,--"nothing but leprosy bleached you out."

It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint and
degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite idea
that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness and
slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable approach
to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit of charity,
no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of her elder and
wholesomer blood. When she went to church, she said, she always went to a
white church, though while with us I am bound to say she never went to
any. She professed to read her Bible in her bedroom on Sundays; but we
suspected, from certain sounds and odors which used to steal out of this
sanctuary, that her piety more commonly found expression in dozing and
smoking.

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claim
honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her own
family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must
endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from
the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when I
thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin,
and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every
other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope for
covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic
to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, in
spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant generalizations,
to establish their whiteness, that we must have been very cruel and silly
people to turn her sacred fables even into matter of question. I have no
doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce--
it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the
baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family--have as light skins and as
golden hair in heaven as her reverend maternal fancy painted for them in
our world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, which
had ruined the delicate complexion, and had knotted into black woolly
tangles the once wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I
would fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea
so many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin
keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in
infancy. But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was
the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more
be taken in proof, of the one assertion than of the other. When she came
to us, it was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled her
mother in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-school
lessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her in
the evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural influences of the
hour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before words
of one syllable.

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