Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, November, 1880

by Various

"Who likes to peruse them?"

"Why, you do, I should think, else you would have laid down that book long ago. You've been perfectly absorbed in it: there have been chapters which made your color come and go with their exciting interest. I've watched you;" and she shook her needle at him accusingly.

I scarcely remember how it was that when upon this the conversation became animated it instantly drifted into love-stories and love-affairs and jiltings and heart-breakings, and all the rest of it. Everybody had something to say which he fancied had never before been said about the tender passion; and suddenly a proposition fell from the lips of Mrs. Marcellus which certainly took the company by surprise. She said that she wished, just for curiosity's sake, every one present would tell her about the last love-affair he had had. It would really be fun: she wished they would. Objections and modest declinings were unanimous at first, of course, but our hostess insisted; and finally this conditional agreement was decided upon: that her desire should be acceded to, provided Mrs. Marcellus would relate her own experience in this line and tell the company the particulars of her last love-affair. She instantly consented, though I thought I detected a flying blush tinge her cheek at the rush of recollections brought about by the proposal.

The first autobiographer was Henry L. Thompkins himself. Mr. Thompkins is the principal banker of our place, and, from the almost dead level of Hurvillian impecuniosity, he is considered to be a man of colossal fortune. He is very well off in respect to wealth, and has been a widower for many years. In the grief and loneliness which engulfed him at the loss of his wife, he told us, he had sought solace in the warm affections of his sister, a widow lady with a large number of sons, and had recklessly adopted her boys and promised to be a father to them—an engagement which had placed him in such a position toward a lot of young spendthrifts that by actual experience he was now fully qualified to perform the part of the testy old uncle of Sheridan's plays, whose principal duty in life is to shake a stick in his nephew's face and exclaim, "Zounds! you young rascal!" or "Egad! you young dog!" But instead of one scapegrace nephew he had half a dozen to bleed him. During one of his visits to his sister, who lived in the West, he found there, also on a visit, a young lady who made a marked impression upon him. She was rather good-looking, kind, sensible and quiet in her ways. For her sake he lengthened his visit: every day her influence over him became stronger. On the final Sabbath of his stay it happened that of all the household he and she alone were able to attend service. The sermon had a distinct bearing on the sanctity of wedded life. As they walked home he resolved to sound her feelings on the subject of marriage. He began by saying that he was glad to see she was a friend of his family, because that empowered him to ask her this question: Would she like to become a member of it? She blushed, bit her lip and said, as Heaven was her judge, she would, but she had no fortune of her own, and she had seen too much of married life in poverty to dare to enter it under those circumstances. "Poverty!" exclaimed Mr. Thompkins: "you need have no fear of that. I will see that you have every comfort—indeed, every luxury." The girl was so startled she stood still in the street and gazed at him, tears flooding her handsome eyes. "Oh, Mr. Thompkins," she murmured, "you are the best man in the world, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I have felt from the first moment how really noble and generous you are; and it was only last evening I told Edward, when he took me to the Minstrels, that I believed if he'd muster up courage to ask his uncle for money enough to set him up in business, and tell him he wanted to marry and settle down, that you would do it." The only thing consoling about the affair was, that the girl never suspected anything. She married his eldest nephew, whom he has since set up in business three consecutive times (three consecutive failures following), and the couple are now rearing a plentiful crop of grand-nephews, who, though still young, have already developed to perfection the paternal eye for searching out the main chance, and invariably expect—nay, obstreperously claim—a full line of costly presents at Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving and all the anniversaries of everybody's birthday, wedding and demise.

We were very glad that Mr. Thompkins so framed the concluding sentence of his story as to allow us to laugh. We knew very well, from the character of the second speaker, that we should require all our store of thrills and shivers for his recital. He was a long, thin, red-headed man named McLaughlin, who by perseverance had absorbed the most of the leather and findings trade of Hurville and round about, but was always talking of the brilliant and exciting early days of his career, when, fired by a story he had read of the dangers and pleasures of life before the mast, he resolved to run away, and did run away, to sea. His love-story was a wild and inconsequent recital, with staccato stops, of an adventure he had when he was a sailor and his vessel lay in one of the ports of India for some weeks—at Calcutta, I think. Anyhow, there were tiger-skins mixed up in it, and elephants' tusks, and long, moist, horrible serpents trailing after people, and a house where his lady-love lived which was provided with traps and secret panels in the walls and other such trifles; and the lady-love was a native woman who desired to renounce the faith of her people for him, but was interfered with by a cochineal-colored father of a very unpleasant sort, who rampaged around twirling the lance he used in pig-sticking, and often finishing off his enemies with a poisoned creese, such as you read about. Of course there was nothing left for McLaughlin but to fight a duel with this unreasonable parent—a duel which suddenly became contagious, the whole population of Calcutta joining in it; the foreseen conclusion of the terrific narrative being of course that everybody was killed except McLaughlin. No one dared even to smile at this sanguinary catastrophe, for McLaughlin was really a fiery-tempered fellow, and on more than one occasion had been known to back his opinions by inserting his hand under his right coat-tail to find an additional argument wherewith to enforce a similarity of political views. Nevertheless, our hostess slyly asked if it could be possible that the native lady who had wished to relinquish the faith of her cochineal-colored fathers was the amiable—and she might have said, the essentially pale and milk-and-watery—lady who was known to the community as Mrs. McLaughlin, and who would have been, save for the storm, "one of ours" to-night. Mac said, Of course not; but what was the use of sitting down to talk about the jogtrot events of these later years, during which destiny and leather had bound him, as it were, to Hurville? He thought we wanted romance while we were about it.

No. 3 was our military man, an ex-brigadier-general who still wears the Kossuth hat of his grade, and who holds, to the satisfaction of all, the berth of postmaster at Hurville. Like most amateur army-officers, the general thinks that as regards military tactics he is a very Napoleon, and he has so impressed this opinion on Hurville that we know full well, though the country at large may not, exactly what brigadier-general it was by whom the stamping out of the rebellion was principally performed. In the various engagements which have taken place between the armies of Europe during the last decade none have had so satisfactory a termination as they might had our postmaster-general (if I may so compound him) been in command of the field. The French, for instance: it seems a great pity that that brilliant people should not have put themselves in communication with Hurville, if only by wire, at the time of the disastrous Prussian war. There was our general, every Saturday evening at Mrs. Marcellus's, winning the most stupendous victories for them on a large map of the seat of war, with little flags mounted on pins stuck all over it; and it was really exciting to see how the general caused the Prussian standard to retreat at Sedan, the tri-color advancing in triumph at the head of an overwhelming body of troops rushing upon the enemy en masse, hemming him in on all sides, while the stirring tones of an imaginary brass band entoned the glorious Marseillaise, its clarion cry proclaiming once again to tout le monde that les enfants de la patrie had won another victory for la grande nation. "Marchons! marchons! tum-ti-tum—and victory or death!" Oh dear! what a surprise it was to us all when the cable-despatch came announcing a very different termination to the fray at Sedan! At first we were incredulous. The brigadier clapped his hand to his head, seized the paper, ran with it into a corner and turned his back on us, that he might study the matter from the strategic point of view undisturbed by uninformed comment. When he returned he said he saw quite clearly how it was: the French had failed to advance their left flank—the despatches showed it—and there was the fatal error. The despatches also showed quite clearly that the French had no left flank to advance, nor right either, not to speak of any rear; but the general said he couldn't help that—they should have advanced their left flank: that was the only really soldier-like thing for them to do. When armies meet on the battle-field they should almost always (I think he said) advance their left flank. Again (to hasten to recent events), here were these puerile, unspeakable, unutterable heathens, the Turks. Vile as their moral status was, their military advantages were such that had they had among their pachas one man who possessed the slightest glimmering of a conception of the art of war they would not only have held Stamboul, but they would have advanced their left flank right into the heart of Russia and set the Crescent flag to flying from the tops of the palaces on the banks of the Neva.

Naturally, knowing his bellicose proclivities, we were fully prepared to hear that the general's love-affair was intimately connected with the war-period; for Mrs. Marcellus herself proposed that the general should follow Mr. McLaughlin's example and relate, not his last love-affair necessarily, but his most romantic one. Everybody present respected the active, self-helpful wife of the postmaster too much to desire, even for a joke, that the fine sentiments which drew such a woman into marriage should be made the theme of a story told by a fireside for the beguilement of a winter's evening. So the general started by saying that prior to courting and wedding his dear wife he had been led into an affair of the heart: with a contrite spirit he confessed that that affair was one which might have had the most fatal consequences. Luckily, his eyes were opened in time. But had circumstances been otherwise, had the government at Washington known the brink on which he stood, he who was now honored by his country's confidence to the extent of the postmastership of the town of Hurville might instead be figuring in the reprobatory annals of the republic's history along with Benedict Arnold and Major André. The conviction instantly spread among the listeners that we were now to learn that the general himself on some important occasion had failed to advance his left flank: if so, we should have him on the hip in future—the left hip, of course. But the dreadful episode occurred, it seemed, not on the battle-field, but during the leisure hours when nothing was astir in camp. It was no question of infantry, cavalry or artillery, but the old, old story of a pair of brown eyes. "She" was a Southern girl; they met by chance; he ordered her to walk under the flag; she smiled at him as she did so; stolen interviews followed; she swore to renounce her allegiance to the "Lost Cause" and accompany him to the North. Deceived by her promises, he told her when, how and at what time the corps was to strike tents and leave the locality—secret information. On the night prior to the morning they had fixed upon to go the order to march was countermanded, and the general hastened to his lady-love to tell her the change of plans. Thinking to give her a lover's surprise, he crept up to the veranda of her house on tip-toe and noiselessly peered into the parlor where his enchantress was wont to sit swinging away the heavy hours in the sweet dalliance of a rocking-chair. To his surprise, he found she was not alone: a Confederate officer stood by her side, his arm encircling her taper waist, his lips ever and anon tasting the honey that dwelt on hers. In intervals between these caresses the treacherous beauty poured into her lover's ear all she had gleaned about the change of base of the army from her too credulous brigadier. A movement made the next day by the Confederates showed they had formed designs in accordance with the information the girl imparted, but the Unionist plan having been altered the consequence was in no degree disastrous to our troops.

The termination of this story found the listeners all very silent. No one seemed to know what comment to make. From the pained expression of the brigadier's face it was evident that he still looked upon the experience as one which but for an accident might have brought danger to the country and shame and disgrace to himself. Mrs. Marcellus said, as usual, just the right word. She assured the general that she could not see in what way he had swerved from his duty as a loyal soldier in the affair, since the lady had won his confidence by the false assertion that she desired to renew her allegiance to the flag.

The editor now had the floor. The editor is of course the oracle of the community, and his newspaper, in the opinion of the entire population of Hurville—including himself—is an organ which for real power and earnest writing exceeds any of the monster dailies of the large cities, whose fame, stupidly enough, extends the length and breadth of the land, while the Hurville Gazette blushes unseen, claiming only an average circulation of two thousand; and some say this is an exaggerated figure. The editor's story was of course thoroughly characteristic—editorial, so to speak—the recital going straight to the point at issue without redundant phraseology or extraneous matter of any kind: it was, in fact, a report, as epigrammatic as a six-lined local paragraph, boiled down to the utmost limit of concentrated fact-essence. Yet the gist of the story greatly surprised us. He had become interested in an anonymous female contributor of love-poems sent every week to a newspaper he was then editing in the West. At length, by dint of perseverance, he had unveiled the incognita of the poetess, in time won her affections, and finally married her. The general impression was that this must refer to a former wife, of whom we had never heard, for every one knew the editor's better half to be a diligent housekeeper, patient mother, a ceaseless sewing-machinist, a walking encyclopædia of cookery-recipes, and the least literary woman of our set. Poetry she never read, and she had even been known to sneer at rhymesters, especially those of her own sex, who, she averred, might find some better and more profitable way of passing their time than scribbling nonsense. Yet this change of views, the editor now assured us, was due solely to the influence of time and a very large and uncommonly obstreperous family of boys.

The next speaker was the head of the firm of E.T. Perkins & Co., dry-goods merchants of the Perkins Block. An extremely religious though not a bigoted man, generous, good-natured and jovial, everybody likes him, and we all looked forward with pleasure to hearing his story. He seemed to have difficulty at first in remembering anything sufficiently unusual in its incidents to interest us; for, as he said, we all knew that he had married Mrs. Perkins when he was a clerk in the dry-goods store of her late father, and had succeeded to the business on his death, his wife giving great impetus to trade by her own extravagance in dress, which spread like a contagion among the other ladies of the town, who until then had been mostly satisfied with nice calicoes and cheap merinos. As for love-affairs, continued Mr. Perkins, if he had ever had any before he met Mrs. Perkins he couldn't remember them; but in a friendly way a curious kind of thing had happened to him many years ago in New York, when he was in the white-goods department of one of the big wholesale houses. He was a very young man, not twenty-one, and trying hard to do right amid the trials and temptations of the great city. He was a church-member, and in aid of the funds of the church to which he belonged he had taken one winter a subscription to a course of lectures to be delivered in some hall down town which has now disappeared. Seats were reserved for ticket-holders; and so it happened that he found himself twice a week seated next a lady and her husband to whom he had been previously introduced by a friend after service one Sunday evening, but with whom he had had till then but a bowing acquaintance. Now they fell to chatting of course. He considered the lady very handsome, though older than himself—about thirty perhaps. She was of a full figure—might even have been called stout—with rosy cheeks, pouting lips, laughing black eyes, glossy hair, and a gay, pleasant manner that was very attractive. Her husband was very much the senior of his wife, and was cross, ugly, lame and asthmatic. Sometimes he would leave the hall in the middle of a lecture and go and sit outside in the cold till it was over, when he would join his wife, grumbling at everything in general and her in particular. During these absences Mr. Perkins and the lady had time to exchange many of their views on various subjects, which were found to be very much in accord. In brief, the acquaintance was so pleasant that young Perkins, at the last lecture of the course (the husband having stepped out), made bold to hint that he would be glad to have it continue, and would be happy to call, if agreeable. To his surprise, the lady whispered a few hurried words in his ear of a startling character. Her husband was exceedingly jealous—utterly without cause, of course—and the idea of a young gentleman calling at the house in a friendly way was one that was not to be entertained for an instant. This was a state of things such as young Perkins had never dreamed possible except in the exaggerated and wearisome pages of long-winded novels and unreadable poems in cantos. He immediately exalted himself into a hero of romance, nor was the sensation diminished when he felt the folds of a bit of note-paper slipped between his fingers as he shook hands with the lady at parting. When he returned home he made himself acquainted with the contents of the mysterious billetdoux, and the sentiment of adventure was heightened when he read therein a request which the lady must have written previously to coming to the lecture-hall, since it was in ink. She desired, she said, to bid him adieu before parting for ever, and as it was impossible for her to do that at her own home, on account of something, she had asked a friend of hers to let her see him at her house. The call must be made at rather an unusual hour—half-past six in the morning. She was going to see a departing friend to the boat, and she would stop in Hudson street on her way back. Now, what was more natural, continued Mr. Perkins, for a foolish young fellow to do than to go to the place on the day appointed? The hour was rather unusual, and the morning being bitterly cold the experience was anything but pleasant. The friend's house proved to be in a very disagreeable neighborhood, and the parlor into which he was ushered was a small, musty room, with a dirty carpet on the floor, and otherwise furnished with a few cane-seat chairs and a rickety marble-topped centre-table, the place being rendered still more uninviting by a sheet-iron stove which belched forth volumes of smoke from the unwilling beginnings of a rebellious fire that had just been kindled in it. Mr. Perkins sat down in the cheerless apartment, and waited long, half numbed with cold. Having left his home so early, he was breakfast-less, and that fact did not render his condition any the more comfortable. The romance of the adventure oozed out of him from every pore in an almost perceptible stream. The absurdity of the situation became every moment more painfully apparent, when at length in walked the lady. But could this indeed be she? Why, she was completely changed. Instead of the gay, bright, trim, rosy, laughing, sparkling-eyed lady of the evenings, he beheld a stout, untidy, sallow-complexioned, faded-out woman of forty. She was old enough to be his mother—old enough to be ashamed of herself. Never was a youth's foolish illusion more quickly dispelled. He took her proffered hand listlessly, and declined the invitation to reseat himself, pleading the necessity for getting to the store at once. His exit must have been farcical in its abruptness. The most jealous husband in the world could have found no occasion for complaint in such conduct, unless indeed he had changed his views and objected to his wife being treated so cavalierly. The lady's billetdoux had indeed possessed the essential element of truth, as opposed to the fiction of poetry: they bade each other adieu before parting for ever.