Kitabı oku: «Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio.», sayfa 19
FOR LADIES THAT “GO SHOPPING.”
Matrimony and the toothache may be survived, but of all the evils feminity is heir to, defend me from a shopping excursion. But, alas! bonnets, shoes and hose will wear out, and shop-keepers will chuckle over the sad necessity that places the unhappy owners within their dry-goods clutches. Felicitous Mrs. Figleaf! why taste that Paradisaical apple?
Some victimised females frequent the stores where soiled and damaged goods are skillfully announced as selling at an “immense sacrifice,” by their public-spirited and disinterested owners. Some courageously venture into more elegant establishments, where the claim of the applicant to notice, is measured by the costliness of her apparel, and where the clerks poise their eye-glass at any plebeian shopperess bold enough to inquire for silk under six dollars a yard. Others, still, are tortured at the counter of some fussy old bachelor, who always ties up, with distressing deliberation, every parcel he takes down for inspection, before he can open another, and moves round to execute your orders as if Mt. Atlas were fastened to his heels; or perhaps get petrified at the store of some snap-dragon old maid, whose victims serve as escape-valves for long years of bile, engendered by Cupid’s oversights. Meanwhile, the vexed question is still unsolved, Where can the penance of shopping be performed with the least possible wear and tear of patience and prunella? The answer seems to me to be contained in six letters – “Stewart’s.”
“Stewart’s?” I think I hear some old lady exclaim, dropping her knitting and peering over her spectacles; “Stewart’s! yes, if you have the mines of California to back you.” Now I have a profound respect for old ladies, as I stand self-pledged to join that respectable body on the advent of my very first gray hair; still, with due deference to their catnip and pennyroyal experience, I conscientiously repeat – “Stewart’s.”
You may stroll through his rooms free to gaze and admire, without being annoyed by an impertinent clerk dogging your footsteps; you can take up a fabric, and examine it, without being bored by a statement of its immense superiority over every article of the kind in the market, or without being deafened by a detailed account of the enormous sums that the mushroom aristocracy have considered themselves but too happy to expend, in order to secure a dress from that very desirable, and altogether unsurpassed, and unsurpassable, piece of goods!
You can independently say that an article does not exactly suit you, though your husband may not stand by you with a drawn sword. You will encounter no ogling, no impertinent cross-questioning, no tittering whispers, from the quiet, well-bred clerks, who attend to their own business and allow you to attend to yours.
’Tis true that you may see at Stewart’s, cobweb laces an inch or two wide, for fifty or one hundred dollars a yard, which many a brainless butterfly of fashion is supremely happy in sporting: but at the very next counter you may suit yourself, or your country cousin, to a sixpenny calico, or a shilling de laine; and, what is better, be quite as sure that her verdant queries will be as respectfully answered as if liveried Pompey stood waiting at the door to hand her to her carriage.
You can go into the silk department, where, by a soft descending light, you will see dinner dresses that remind you of a shivered rainbow, for passé married ladies who long since ceased to celebrate their birth-days, and who keep their budding daughters carefully immured in the nursery: or, at the same counter, you can select a modest silk for your minister’s wife, at six shillings a yard, that will cause no heart-burnings in the most Argus-eyed of Paul Pry parishes.
Then if you patronise those ever-to-be-abominated and always-to-be-shunned nuisances called parties, where fools of both sexes gather to criticise their host and hostess, and cut up characters and confectionary, you can step into that little room from which day-light is excluded, and select an evening dress, by gas-light, upon the effect of which you can, of course, depend, and to which artistic arrangement many a New York belle has probably owed that much prized possession – her “last conquest.”
Now, if you please, you can go into the upholstery-room and furnish your nursery windows with a cheap set of plain linen curtains; or you can expend a small fortune in regal crimson, or soft-blue damask drapery, for your drawing-room; and without troubling yourself to thread the never-ending streets of Gotham for an upholsteress, can have them made by competent persons in the upper loft of the building, who will also drape them faultlessly about your windows, should you so desire.
Now you can peep into the cloak room, and bear away on your graceful shoulders a six, twenty, thirty, or four hundred dollar cloak, as the length of your husband’s purse, or your own fancy (which in these degenerate days amounts to pretty much the same thing) may suggest.
Then there is the wholesale department, where you will see shawls, hosiery, flannels, calicoes, and de laines, sufficient to stock all the nondescript country stores, to say nothing of city consumption.
Now, if you are not weary, you can descend (under ground) into the carpet department, from whence you can hear the incessant roll of full-freighted omnibuses, the ceaseless tramp of myriad restless feet, and all the busy train of out-door life made audible in all the dialects of Babel. Here you can see every variety of carpet, from the homespun, unpretending straw, oil cloth, and Kidderminster, to the gorgeous Brussels and tapestry, (above whose traceried buds and flowers the daintiest foot might well poise itself, loth to crush,) up to the regal Axminster, of Scottish manufacture, woven without seam, and warranted, in these days of late suppers and tobacco smoking, to last a life-time.
Emerging from this subterranean region, you will ascend into daylight, and reflecting first upon all this immense outlay, and then upon the frequent and devastating conflagrations in New York, inquire with solicitude, Are you insured? and regret to learn that there is too much risk to effect an entire insurance, although Argus-eyed watchmen keep up a night-and-day patrol throughout the handsome building.
MODERN IMPROVEMENTS
“Modern improvements?” I wonder where they are? Perhaps it is the fashionable cloaks, that take leave of their shivering owners at the hips; or the long skirts, whose muddy trains every passing pedestrian pins to the sidewalk; or the Lilliputian bonnets, that never a string in shop-dom can keep within hailing distance of the head; or the flowing sleeves, through which the winter wind plays around the arm-pits; or the break-neck, high-heeled boots, which some little, dumpy feminine has introduced to gratify her rising ambition, and render her tall sisters hideous; or the gas-lit, furnace-heated houses, in which the owners’ eyes are extinguished, and their skins dried to a parchment; or, perhaps, it is the churches, of such cathedral dimness, that the clergyman must have candles at noonday, and where the congregation are forbidden to express their devotion by singing, and forced to listen to the trills and quavers of some scientific stage mountebank; or perhaps ’tis the brazen irreverence with which Young America jostles aside gray-headed Wisdom: perhaps the comfortless, forsaken fireside of the “strong-minded woman:” perhaps, the manly gossip, whose repetition of some baseless rumor dims the bright eyes of defenceless innocence with tears of anguish: perhaps the schools, where a superficial show of brilliancy on exhibition days, is considered the ne plus ultra of teaching: perhaps it is the time-serving clergyman, whose tongue is fettered by a monied clique: perhaps, the lawyers who lie – under a mistake! – perhaps it is the doctor, whom I saw yesterday at Aunt Jerusha’s sick-room, a little thing with bits of feet, and mincing voice, and lily-white hands, and perfumed moustache. I wanted to inquire what ailed Jerusha, so I waited to see him. I wanted to ask him how long it would take him to cure her, and if he preferred pills to powders, blisters to plasters, oat-meal to barley-gruel, wine-whey to posset, arrow-root to farina, and a few such little things, you know. He stared at me over his dicky, as if I had been an unevangelized kangaroo; then he sidled up to Jerusha, pryed open her mouth, and said “humph” – in Latin. Then he crossed his legs, and rolled up the whites of his eyes at the ceiling, as if he expected some Esculapian hand writing on the wall to enlighten him as to the seat of Aunt Jerusha’s complaint. Then, he drew from his pocket a box with a whole army of tiny bottles; and uncorking two of them he nipped out a little white speck from each, which he dissolved in four quarts of water, and told Jerusha “to take a drop of the water once in eight hours.” Tom Thumb and Lilliput! he might as well have tried to salt the Atlantic Ocean with a widower’s tear! He should be laid gently on a lily leaf, and consigned to the first stray zephyr.
Ah, you should have seen our good, old-fashioned Dr. Jalap; with a fist like a sledge-hammer, a tramp like a war-horse, and a laugh that would puzzle an echo. He wasn’t penurious of his physic: he didn’t care a pin how much he put down your throat – no, nor the apothecary either. He pill-ed and potioned, and emetic-ed, and blistered, and plastered, till you were so transparent, that even John Mitchell (and he’s the shortest-sighted being alive) could have seen through you. And then he braced you up with Iron and Quinine, till your muscles were like whip-cords, and your hair in a bristle of kinks. He was human-like, too; he didn’t stalk in as if Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington were boiled down to make his grandfather. No; he’d just as lief sit down on a butter-firkin as on a velvet lounge. He’d pick up Aunt Esther’s knitting-needles, and talk to grandpa about Bunker Hill, and those teetotally discomfrizzled, bragging British, and offer grandma a pinch of snuff, and trot the baby, and stroke the cat, and go to the closet and eat up the pickles and doughnuts, and make himself useful generally. He didn’t have to stupefy his patients with ether, so that they needn’t find out how clumsily he operated. No, it was quite beautiful to see him take a man’s head between his knees, and drag his double teeth out. He didn’t write a prescription for molasses and water, in High Dutch: he didn’t tell you that you were booked for the river Styx, and he was the only M. D. in creation who could annihilate the ferryman waiting to row you over. He didn’t drive through the town with his horse and gig, at break-neck speed, just as meeting was out, as if life and death were hanging on his profitless chariot wheels: he didn’t stick up over his door – “at home between nine and ten,” as if that consecrated hour were all he could bestow upon a clamorous public, when he was angling in vain for a patient every hour in the twenty-four; nor did he give little boys shillings to rush into church, and call him out in the middle of the service. No: Dr. Jalap was not a “modern improvement.”
THE OLD MERCHANT WANTS A SITUATION
“An elderly gentleman, formerly a well-known merchant, wishes a situation; he will engage in any respectable employment not too laborious.” —New York Daily Paper.
I don’t know the old man. I never saw him on ’change, in a fine suit of broadcloth, leaning on his gold-headed cane; while brokers, and insurance officers, and presidents of banks raised their hats deferentially, and the crowd respectfully made way for him. I never kept account of the enormous taxes he annually paid the city, or saw his gallant ships ploughing the blue ocean with their costly freight, to foreign ports. I never saw him in his luxurious home, taking his quiet siesta, lulled by the liquid voice of his fairy daughter. No: nor did I hear the auctioneer’s hammer in that home, nor see the red flag floating, like a signal of distress, before the door. I didn’t read the letter that recalled his only boy from college, or see the humbled family, as they passed, shrinking, over the threshold, into poor lodgings, whose landlord coarsely stipulated for “a week’s rent in advance.”
“Any occupation not too laborious.” How mournfully the old man’s words fall upon the ear! Life to commence anew, with the silver head, and bent form, and faltering step, and palsied hand of age! With the first ray of morning light, that hoary head must be lifted from an unquiet pillow, to encounter the drenching rain, and driving sleet, and piercing cold. No reprieve from that wearisome ledger, for the throbbing brow and dimmed eye. Beardless clerks make a jest of “the old boy;” superciliously repeating, in his sensitive ear, their mutual master’s orders. With them he meekly receives his weekly pittance; sighing, as he counts it over, to think of the few comforts it will bring to the drooping hearts at home. Foot-weary, he travels through the crowded streets; his threadbare coat, and napless hat, and dejected face, all unnoticed by the thriving young merchant, whom the old man helped to his present prosperous business position. The birth-days of his delicate daughter come and go, all unmarked by the joy-bestowing gift. With trouble and exposure, sickness comes at last: then, the tardy foot, and careless, professional touch of the callous-hearted dispensary doctor: then, the poor man’s hearse stands before the door; then winds unheeded through busy streets, to the “Potter’s field,” while his former cotemporaries take up the daily paper, and sipping their wine, say carelessly, as if they had a quit-claim from sorrow, “Well, Old Smith, the broken-down millionaire, is dead.”
Ah, there are tragedies of which editors and printers little dream, woven in their daily advertising sheets: the office boy feeds the fire with many a tear-blotted manuscript, penned by trembling fingers, all unused to toil.
A MOVING TALE
The Smiths have just been moving. They always move “for the last time,” on the first of May. “Horrid custom!” exclaims Smith, wiping the perspiration from his brow, and pulling up his depressed dickey. “How my blood curdles and my bones ache, at the thought!” It was on Tuesday, the third of May, that the afflicting rite was celebrated. Cartmen – four of them – were engaged the Saturday previous, to be on hand at six o’clock on Tuesday morning, to transport the household goods from the habitation of ’52-3 to that of ’53-4. Smith was to pay them three dollars each – twelve dollars in all. They would not come for a mill less; Smith tried them thoroughly.
On Monday, Smith’s house is turned into a sort of Bedlam, minus the beds. They are tied up, ready for the next morning’s Hegira; the Smiths sleeping on the floor on Monday night. Smith can’t sleep on the floor; he grows restless; he receives constant reminders from Mrs. Smith to take his elbow out of the baby’s face; he has horrid visions and rolls about: therefore, he is not at all surprised, on waking at cock-crow, to find his head in the fire-place, and his hair powdered with soot. The occasion of his waking at that time, was a dream of an unpleasant nature. He dreamed that he had rolled off the world backwards, and lodged in a thorn-bush. Of course, such a thing was slightly improbable; but how could Smith be responsible for a dream?
On Tuesday morning, the Smiths are up with the dawn. The household being mustered, it is found that the servant girl, who had often averred that, “she lived out, just for a little exercise,” had deserted her colors. The grocer on the corner politely informs Smith, (whom Mrs. S. had sent on an errand of inquiry) that, on the night previous, the servant left with him a message for her employers, to the effect that “she didn’t consider moving the genteel thing, at all; and that a proper regard for her character and position in society, had induced her to get a situation in the family of a gentleman who owned the house he lived in.”
This is severe: Smith feels it keenly; Mrs. Smith leans her head against her husband’s vest pattern, and says “She is quite crushed,” and “wonders how Smith can have the heart to whistle. But, it is always so,” she remarks. “Woman is the weaker vessel, and man delights to trample on her.” Smith indignantly denies this sweeping assertion, and says “he tramples on nothing;” when Mrs. Smith points to a bandbox containing her best bonnet, which he has just put his foot through. Smith is silent.
The cartmen were to be on the premises at six o’clock. Six o’clock comes – half-past six – seven o’clock – but no cartmen. Here is a dilemma! The successors to the Smiths are to be on the ground at eight o’clock; and being on the ground, they will naturally wish to get into the house; which they cannot well do, unless the Smiths are out of it.
Smith takes a survey of his furniture, with a feeling of intense disgust. He wishes his cumbrous goods were reduced to the capacity of a carpet-bag, which he could pick up and walk away with. The mirrors and pianoforte are his especial aversion. The latter is a fine instrument, with an Eolian attachment. He wishes it had a sheriff’s attachment; in fact, he would have been obliged to any officer who should, at that wretched moment, have sold out the whole establishment, at the most “ruinous sacrifice,” ever imagined by an auctioneer’s fertile “marvelousness.”
– Half-past seven, and no cartmen yet. What is to be done? Ah! here they come, at last. Smith is at a loss to know what excuse they will make. Verdant Smith! They make no excuse. They simply tell him, with an air which demands his congratulations, that they “picked up a nice job by the way, and stopped to do it. You see,” says the principal, “we goes in for all we can get, these times, and there’s no use of anybody’s grumbling. Kase, you see, if one don’t want us, another will; and it’s no favor for anybody to employ us a week either side the first of May.” The rascal grins, as he says this; and Smith, perceiving the strength of the cartman’s position, wisely makes no reply.
They begin to load. Just as they get fairly at work, the Browns (the Smiths’ successors) arrive, with an appalling display of stock. Brown is a vulgar fellow, who has suddenly become rich, and whose ideas of manliness all center in brutality. He is furious because the Smiths are not “clean gone.” He “can’t wait there, all day, in the street.” He orders his men to “carry the things into the house,” and heads the column himself with a costly rocking-chair in his arms. As Brown comes up with his rocking-chair, Smith, at the head of his men, descends, with a bureau, from the second floor.
“They met, ’twas in a crowd” —
on the stairs, and Smith
“Thought that Brown would shun him,”
– but he didn’t! The consequence was, they came in collision; or, rather, Smith’s bureau and Brown’s rocking-chair came in collision. Now, said bureau was an old-fashioned, hardwood affair, made for service, while Brown’s rocking-chair was a flimsy, showy fabric, of modern make. The meeting on the stairs occasions some squeezing, and more stumbling, and Brown suddenly finds himself and chair under the bureau, to the great injury of his person and his furniture. (Brown has since recovered, but the case of the rocking-chair is considered hopeless.) This discomfiture incenses the Browns to a high degree, and they determine to be as annoying as possible; so they persist in bringing their furniture into the house, and up stairs, as the Smiths are carrying theirs out of the house, and down stairs. Collisions are, of course, the order of the day; but the Smiths do not mind this much, as they have a great advantage, viz: their furniture is not half so good as Brown’s. After a few smashes, Brown receives light on this point, and orders his forces to remain quiet, while the foe evacuates the premises; so the Smiths retire in peace – and much of their furniture in pieces.
The four carts form quite a respectable procession; but there is no disguising the fact that the furniture looks very shabby (and whose furniture does not look shabby, piled on carts?); so the Smiths prudently take a back street, that no one may accuse them of owning it. Smith has to carry the baby and a large mirror, which Mrs. S. was afraid to trust to the cartmen, there being no insurance on either. It being a windy day, both the mirror and Smith’s hat veer to all points of the compass, while the baby grows very red in the face at not being able to possess himself of them. Between the wind, the mirror, his hat and the baby, Smith has an unpleasant walk of it.
About ten o’clock, they arrive at their new residence, and find, to their horror, that their predecessors have not begun to move. They inquire the reason. The feminine head of the family informs them, with tears in her eyes, that her husband, (Mr. Jonas Jenkins,) has been sick in Washington for five weeks; that, in consequence of his affliction, they have not been able to provide a new tenement; that she is quite unwell, and that one of her children (she has six) is ill, also; that she don’t know what is to become of them, &c., &c. Smith sets his hat on the back of his head, gives a faint tug at his neck-tie and confesses himself – quenched! His furniture looks more odious every minute. He once felt much pride in it, but he feels none now: he feels only disgust. The cartmen begin to growl out that they “can’t stand here all day,” and request to be informed “where we shall drop the big traps.” Hereupon, Smith ventures, with a ghastly attempt at a smile, to inquire of Mrs. Jenkins why she didn’t tell him, when he called, on Saturday, of her inability to procure a house? To which that lady innocently replies that she didn’t wish to give him any “unnecessary trouble!” which reply satisfies him as to Mrs. Jenkin’s claim to force of intellect.
At this juncture, Smith falls into a profound reverie. He thinks that, after all, Fourier is right – “that the Solidarity of the human race is an entity;” that “nobody can be happy, until everybody is happy.” He agrees with the great philosopher, that the “series distributes the harmonies.” He realizes that “society is organized (or, rather, disorganized) on a wrong basis;” that it is in an “amorphous condition,” whereas it should be “crystalized.” With our celebrated “down east” poet, Ethan Spike, Esq., he begins to think that,
“The etarnal bung is loose,”
and that, unless it be soon tightened, there is danger that
“All nater will be spilt.”
He comes to the conclusion, finally, that “something must be done,” and that speedily, to “secure a home for every family.”
At this point, he is aroused by his tormenters, the cartmen, who inform him that they are in a “Barkis” state of mind, (willin’) to receive their twelve dollars. Smith pays the money, and turns to examine the premises. He finds that Mrs. Jenkins has packed all her things in the back basement and the second-floor sitting-room. Poor thing! she has done her best, after all. She is in ill health; her husband is sick, and away from home; and her children are not well. God pity the unfortunate who live in cities, especially in the “moving season.” But Smith is a kind-hearted man. With a few exceptions, the Smiths are a kind-hearted race – and that’s probably the reason they are so numerous.
Smith puts on a cheerful countenance, and busies himself in arranging his furniture. Mrs. Smith, kind soul, forgets the destruction of her bandbox and bonnet, and cares not how long or how loud Smith whistles. Suddenly the prospect brightens! Mrs. Jenkins’ brother-in-law appears, and announces that he has found rooms for her, a little higher up town. Cartmen are soon at the door, and the Jenkinses are on their “winding way” to their new residence.
– But the Smiths’ troubles are not yet over. The painters, who were to have had the house all painted the day before, have done nothing but leave their paint-pots in the hall, and a little Smithling, being of an investigating turn of mind, and hungry, withal, attempts to make a late breakfast off the contents of one of them. He succeeds in eating enough to disgust him with his bill of fare, and frighten his mamma into hysterics. A doctor is sent for: he soon arrives, and, after attending to the mother, gives the young adventurer a facetious chuck under the chin, and pronounces him perfectly safe. The parents are greatly relieved, for Willy is a pet; and they confidently believe him destined to be President of the United States, if they can only keep paint-pots out of his way.
It takes the Smiths some ten days to get “to rights.” The particulars of their further annoyances – how the carpets didn’t fit; how the cartmen “lost the pieces;” how the sofas couldn’t be made to look natural; how the pianoforte was too large to stand behind the parlor door, and too small to stand between the front windows; how the ceiling was too low, and the book-case too high; how a bottle of indelible ink got into the bureau by mistake and “marked” all Mrs. Smith’s best dresses – I forbear to inflict on the reader. Suffice it to say, the Smiths are in “a settled state;” although their apartments give signs of the recent manifestation of a strong disturbing force – reminding one, somewhat, of a “settlement” slowly recovering from the visitation of an earthquake. Still, they are thankful for present peace, and are determined, positively, not to move again – until next May.
