Over the Teacups Part 19

"To be sure you are," answered the Tutor, "and what of it? I have two aunts, both younger than I am. Your years may be more than mine, but your life is fuller of youthful vitality than mine is. I never feel so young as when I have been with you. I don't believe in settling affinities by the almanac. You know what I have told you more than once; you have n't 'bared the ice-cold dagger's edge' upon me yet; may I not cherish the"....

What a pity that the listener did not hear the rest of the sentence and the reply to it, if there was one! The readings went on the same as before, but I thought that Number Five was rather more silent and more pensive than she had been.

I was much pleased when the American Annex came to me one day and told me that she and the English Annex were meditating an expedition, in which they wanted the other Teacups to join. About a dozen miles from us is an educational inst.i.tution of the higher grade, where a large number of young ladies are trained in literature, art, and science, very much as their brothers are trained in the colleges. Our two young ladies have already been through courses of this kind in different schools, and are now busy with those more advanced studies which are ventured upon by only a limited number of "graduates." They have heard a good deal about this inst.i.tution, but have never visited it.

Every year, as the successive cla.s.ses finish their course, there is a grand reunion of the former students, with an "exhibition," as it is called, in which the graduates of the year have an opportunity of showing their proficiency in the various branches taught. On that occasion prizes are awarded for excellence in different departments.

It would be hard to find a more interesting ceremony. These girls, now recognized as young ladies, are going forth as missionaries of civilization among our busy people. They are many of them to be teachers, and those who have seen what opportunities they have to learn will understand their fitness for that exalted office. Many are to be the wives and mothers of the generation next coming upon the stage.

Young and beautiful, "youth is always beautiful," said old Samuel Rogers,--their countenances radiant with developed intelligence, their complexions, their figures, their movements, all showing that they have had plenty of outdoor as well as indoor exercise, and have lived well in all respects, one would like to read on the wall of the hall where they are a.s.sembled,--

Siste, viator!

Si uxorem requiris, circ.u.mspice!

This proposed expedition was a great event in our comparatively quiet circle. The Mistress, who was interested in the school, undertook to be the matron of the party. The young Doctor, who knew the roads better than any of us, was to be our pilot. He arranged it so that he should have the two Annexes under his more immediate charge. We were all on the lookout to see which of the two was to be the favored one, for it was pretty well settled among The Teacups that a wife he must have, whether the bald spot came or not; he was getting into business, and he could not achieve a complete success as a bachelor.

Number Five and the Tutor seemed to come together as a matter of course.

I confess that I could not help regretting that our pretty Delilah was not to be one of the party. She always looked so young, so fresh,--she would have enjoyed the excursion so much, that if she had been still with us I would have told the Mistress that she must put on her best dress; and if she had n't one nice enough, I would give her one myself.

I thought, too, that our young Doctor would have liked to have her with us; but he appeared to be getting along very well with the Annexes, one of whom it seems likely that he will annex to himself and his fortunes, if she fancies him, which is not improbable.

The organizing of this expedition was naturally a cause of great excitement among The Teacups. The party had to be arranged in such a way as to suit all concerned, which was a delicate matter. It was finally managed in this way: The Mistress was to go with a bodyguard, consisting of myself, the Professor, and Number Seven, who was good company, with all his oddities. The young Doctor was to take the two Annexes in a wagon, and the Tutor was to drive Number Five in a good old-fas.h.i.+oned chaise drawn by a well-conducted family horse. As for the Musician, he had gone over early, by special invitation, to take a part in certain musical exercises which were to have a place in the exhibition. This arrangement appeared to be in every respect satisfactory. The Doctor was in high spirits, apparently delighted, and devoting himself with great gallantry to his two fair companions. The only question which intruded itself was, whether he might not have preferred the company of one to that of two. But both looked very attractive in their best dresses: the English Annex, the rosier and heartier of the two; the American girl, more delicate in features, more mobile and excitable, but suggesting the thought that she would tire out before the other. Which of these did he most favor? It was hard to say. He seemed to look most at the English girl, and yet he talked more with the American girl. In short, he behaved particularly well, and neither of the young ladies could complain that she was not attended to. As to the Tutor and Number Five, their going together caused no special comment. Their intimacy was accepted as an established fact, and nothing but the difference in their ages prevented the conclusion that it was love, and not mere friends.h.i.+p, which brought them together. There was, no doubt, a strong feeling among many people that Number Five's affections were a kind of Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein, say rather a high table-land in the region of perpetual, unmelting snow. It was hard for these people to believe that any man of mortal mould could find a foothold in that impregnable fortress,--could climb to that height and find the flower of love among its glaciers. The Tutor and Number Five were both quiet, thoughtful: he, evidently captivated; she, what was the meaning of her manner to him? Say that she seemed fond of him, as she might be were he her nephew,--one for whom she had a special liking. If she had a warmer feeling than this, she could hardly know how to manage it; for she was so used to having love made to her without returning it that she would naturally be awkward in dealing with the new experience.

The Doctor drove a lively five-year-old horse, and took the lead. The Tutor followed with a quiet, steady-going nag; if he had driven the five-year-old, I would not have answered for the necks of the pair in the chaise, for he was too much taken up with the subject they were talking of, to be very careful about his driving. The Mistress and her escort brought up the rear,--I holding the reins, the Professor at my side, and Number Seven sitting with the Mistress.

We arrived at the inst.i.tution a little later than we had expected to, and the students were flocking into the hall, where the Commencement exercises were to take place, and the medal-scholars were to receive the tokens of their excellence in the various departments. From our seats we could see the greater part of the a.s.sembly,--not quite all, however of the pupils. A pleasing sight it was to look upon, this array of young ladies dressed in white, with their cla.s.s badges, and with the ribbon of the shade of blue affected by the scholars of the inst.i.tution. If Solomon in all his glory was not to be compared to a lily, a whole bed of lilies could not be compared to this garden-bed of youthful womanhood.

The performances were very much the same as most of us have seen at the academies and collegiate schools. Some of the graduating cla.s.s read their "compositions," one of which was a poem,--an echo of the prevailing American echoes, of course, but prettily worded and intelligently read. Then there was a song sung by a choir of the pupils, led by their instructor, who was a.s.sisted by the Musician whom we count among The Teacups.--There was something in one of the voices that reminded me of one I had heard before. Where could it have been? I am sure I cannot remember. There are some good voices in our village choir, but none so pure and bird-like as this. A sudden thought came into my head, but I kept it to myself. I heard a tremulous catching of the breath, something like a sob, close by me. It was the Mistress,--she was crying. What was she crying for? It was impressive, certainly, to listen to these young voices, many of them blending for the last time,--for the scholars were soon to be scattered all over the country, and some of them beyond its boundaries,--but why the Mistress was so carried away, I did not know. She must be more impressible than most of us; yet I thought Number Five also looked as if she were having a struggle with herself to keep down some rebellious signs of emotion.

The exercises went on very pleasingly until they came to the awarding of the gold medal of the year and the valedictory, which was to be delivered by the young lady to whom it was to be presented. The name was called; it was one not unfamiliar to our ears, and the bearer of it--the Delilah of our tea-table, Avis as she was known in the school and elsewhere--rose in her place and came forward, so that for the first time on that day, we looked upon her. It was a sensation for The Teacups. Our modest, quiet waiting-girl was the best scholar of her year. We had talked French before her, and we learned that she was the best French scholar the teacher had ever had in the school. We had never thought of her except as a pleasing and well-trained handmaiden, and here she was an accomplished young lady.

Avis went through her part very naturally and gracefully, and when it was finished, and she stood before us with the medal glittering on her breast, we did not know whether to smile or to cry,--some of us did one, and some the other.--We all had an opportunity to see her and congratulate her before we left the inst.i.tution. The mystery of her six weeks' serving at our table was easily solved. She had been studying too hard and too long, and required some change of scene and occupation. She had a fancy for trying to see if she could support herself as so many young women are obliged to, and found a place with us, the Mistress only knowing her secret.

"She is to be our young Doctor's wife!" the Mistress whispered to me, and did some more crying, not for grief, certainly.

Whether our young Doctor's long visits to a neighboring town had anything to do with the fact that Avis was at that inst.i.tution, whether she was the patient he visited or not, may be left in doubt. At all events, he had always driven off in the direction which would carry him to the place where she was at school.

I have attended a large number of celebrations, commencements, banquets, soirees, and so forth, and done my best to help on a good many of them. In fact, I have become rather too well known in connection with "occasions," and it has cost me no little trouble. I believe there is no kind of occurrence for which I have not been requested to contribute something in prose or verse. It is sometimes very hard to say no to the requests. If one is in the right mood when he or she writes an occasional poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier. "Why, that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bullieve," the unlettered applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes to write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to say that Ropers,--the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers, author of the Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,--was accustomed to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just given birth to a couplet. It is not quite so bad as that with most of us who are called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some grand meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance has had more good honest work put into it than the minister's sermon of that week had cost him. If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and easily at her launching, it does not mean that no great pains have been taken to secure the result. Because a poem is an "occasional" one, it does not follow that it has not taken as much time and skill as if it had been written without immediate, accidental, temporary motive.

Pindar's great odes were occasional poems, just as much as our Commencement and Phi Beta Kappa poems are, and yet they have come down among the most precious bequests of antiquity to modern times.

The mystery of the young Doctor's long visits to the neighboring town was satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his relations with our charming "Delilah,"--for Delilah we could hardly help calling her. Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the teacups, now the princess, or, what was better, the pride of the school to which she had belonged, fit for any position to which she might be called, was to be the wife of our young Doctor. It would not have been the right thing to proclaim the fact while she was a pupil, but now that she had finished her course of instruction there was no need of making a secret of the engagement.

So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I hoped and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter where it might have been looked for.

What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events? They were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like the rest of us, and women, like some of the rest of us. They behaved perfectly. They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring the young lady to the tea-table where she had played her part so becomingly.

It is safe to say that each of the Annexes world have liked to be asked the lover's last question by the very nice young man who had been a pleasant companion at the table and elsewhere to each of them. That same question is the highest compliment a man can pay a woman, and a woman does not mind having a dozen or more such compliments to string on the rosary of her remembrances. Whether either of them was glad, on the whole, that he had not offered himself to the other in preference to herself would be a mean, shabby question, and I think altogether too well of you who are reading this paper to suppose that you would entertain the idea of asking it.

It was a very pleasant occasion when the Doctor brought Avis over to sit with us at the table where she used to stand and wait upon us. We wondered how we could for a moment have questioned that she was one to be waited upon, and not made for the humble office which nevertheless she performed so cheerfully and so well.

Commencements and other Celebrations, American and English.

The social habits of our people have undergone an immense change within the past half century, largely in consequence of the vast development of the means of intercourse between different neighborhoods.

Commencements, college gatherings of all kinds, church a.s.semblages, school anniversaries, town centennials,--all possible occasions for getting crowds together are made the most of. "'T is sixty years since,"--and a good many years over,--the time to which my memory extends. The great days of the year were, Election,--General Election on Wednesday, and Artillery Election on the Monday following, at which time lilacs were in bloom and 'lection buns were in order; Fourth of July, when strawberries were just going out; and Commencement, a grand time of feasting, fiddling, dancing, jollity, not to mention drunkenness and fighting, on the cla.s.sic green of Cambridge. This was the season of melons and peaches. That is the way our boyhood chronicles events. It was odd that the literary festival should be turned into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great occasion. They had been so for generations, and it was only gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies and solemnities of the present sober anniversary.

Nowadays our celebrations smack of the Sunday-school more than of the dancing-hall. The aroma of the punch-bowl has given way to the milder flavor of lemonade and the cooling virtues of ice-cream. A strawberry festival is about as far as the dissipation of our social gatherings ventures. There was much that was objectionable in those swearing, drinking, fighting times, but they had a certain excitement for us boys of the years when the century was in its teens, which comes back to us not without its fascinations. The days of total abstinence are a great improvement over those of unlicensed license, but there was a picturesque element about the rowdyism of our old Commencement days, which had a charm for the eye of boyhood. My dear old friend,--book-friend, I mean,--whom I always called Daddy Gilpin (as I find Fitzgerald called Wordsworth, Daddy Wordsworth),--my old friend Gilpin, I say, considered the donkey more picturesque in a landscape than the horse. So a village fete as depicted by Teniers is more picturesque than a teetotal picnic or a Sabbath-school strawberry festival. Let us be thankful that the vicious picturesque is only a remembrance, and the virtuous commonplace a reality of to-day.

What put all this into my head is something which the English Annex has been showing me. Most of my readers are somewhat acquainted with our own church and village celebrations. They know how they are organized; the women always being the chief motors, and the machinery very much the same in one case as in another. Perhaps they would like to hear how such things are managed in England; and that is just what they may learn from the pamphlet which was shown me by the English Annex, and of which I will give them a brief account.

Some of us remember the Rev. Mr. Haweis, his lectures and his violin, which interested and amused us here in Boston a few years ago. Now Mr.

Haweis, a.s.sisted by his intelligent and spirited wife, has charge of the parish of St. James, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone, London. On entering upon the twenty-fifth year of his inc.u.mbency in Marylebone, and the twenty-eighth of his ministry in the diocese of London, it was thought a good idea to have an "Evening Conversazione and Fete." We can imagine just how such a meeting would be organized in one of our towns.

Ministers, deacons, perhaps a member of Congress, possibly a Senator, and even, conceivably, his Excellency the Governor, and a long list of ladies lend their names to give l.u.s.tre to the occasion. It is all very pleasant, unpretending, unceremonious, cheerful, well ordered, commendable, but not imposing.

Now look at our Marylebone parish celebration, and hold your breath while the procession of great names pa.s.ses before you. You learn at the outset that it is held UNDER ROYAL PATRONAGE, and read the names of two royal highnesses, one highness, a prince, and a princess. Then comes a list before which if you do not turn pale, you must certainly be in the habit of rouging: three earls, seven lords, three bishops, two generals (one of them Lord Wolseley), one admiral, four baronets, nine knights, a crowd of right honorable and honorable ladies (many of them peeresses), and a mob of other personages, among whom I find Mr. Howells, Bret Harte, and myself.

Perhaps we are disposed to smile at seeing so much made of t.i.tles; but after what we have learned of Lord Timothy Dexter and the high-sounding names appropriated by many of our own compatriots, who have no more claim to them than we plain Misters and Misseses, we may feel to them something as our late friend Mr. Appleton felt to the real green turtle soup set before him, when he said that it was almost as good as mock.

The entertainment on this occasion was of the most varied character. The programme makes the following announcement:

Friday, 4 July, 18-.

At 8 P. M. the Doors will Open.

Mr. Haweis will receive his Friends.

The Royal Handbell Ringers will Ring.

The Fish-pond will be Fished.

The Stalls will be Visited.

The Phonograph will Utter.

Refreshments will be called for, and they will come,--Tea, Coffee, and Cooling Drinks. Spirits will not be called for, from the Vasty Deep or anywhere else,--nor would they come if they were.

At 9.30 Mrs. Haweis will join the a.s.sembly.

I am particularly delighted with this last feature in the preliminary announcement. It is a proof of the high regard in which the estimable and gifted lady who shares her husband's labors is held by the people of their congregation, and the friends who share in their feelings. It is such a master stroke of policy, too, to keep back the princ.i.p.al attraction until the guests must have grown eager for her appearance: I can well imagine how great a saving it must have been to the good lady's nerves, which were probably pretty well tried already by the fatigues and responsibilities of the busy evening. I have a right to say this, for I myself had the honor of attending a meeting at Mr. Haweis's house, where I was a princ.i.p.al guest, as I suppose, from the fact of the great number of persons who were presented to me. The minister must be very popular, for the meeting was a regular jam,--not quite so tremendous as that greater one, where but for the aid of Mr. Smalley, who kept open a breathing-s.p.a.ce round us, my companion and myself thought we should have been asphyxiated.

The company was interested, as some of my readers maybe, to know what were the attractions offered to the visitors besides that of meeting the courteous entertainers and their distinguished guests. I cannot give these at length, for each part of the show is introduced in the programme with apt quotations and pleasantries, which enlivened the catalogue. There were eleven stalls, "conducted on the cooperative principle of division of profits and interest; they retain the profits, and you take a good deal of interest, we hope, in their success."

Stall No. 1. Edisoniana, or the Phonograph. Alluded to by the Roman Poet as Vox, et praeterea nihil.

Stall No. 2. Money-changing.

Stall No. 3. Programmes and General Enquiries.

Stall No. 4. Roses.

A rose by any other name, etc. Get one. You can't expect to smell one without buying it, but you may buy one without smelling it.

Stall No. 5. Lasenby Liberty Stall. (I cannot explain this. Probably articles from Liberty's famous establishment.)

Stall No. 6. Historical Costumes and Ceramics.

Stall No. 7. The Fish-pond.