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A Modern Instance

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Bartley deplored his disagreeable sensations to the other boarders at
breakfast, and affectionately excused himself to them for not going to
church, when they turned into the office, and gathered there before the
Franklin stove, sensible of the day in freshly shaven chins and newly
blacked boots. The habit of church-going was so strong and universal in
Equity that even strangers stopping at the hotel found themselves the
object of a sort of hospitable competition with the members of the
different denominations, who took it for granted that they would wish to
go somewhere, and only suffered them a choice between sects. There was no
intolerance in their offer of pews, but merely a profound expectation, and
one might continue to choose his place of worship Sabbath after Sabbath
without offence. This was Bartley's custom, and it had worked to his favor
rather than his disadvantage: for in the rather chaotic liberality into
which religious sentiment had fallen in Equity, it was tacitly conceded
that the editor of a paper devoted to the interests of the whole town ought
not to be of fixed theological opinions.

Religion there had largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience,
and the visible church flourished on condition of providing for the social
needs of the community. It was practically held that the salvation of
one's soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have
nothing to do with it. Professors of the sternest creeds temporized with
sinners, and did what might be done to win them to heaven by helping them
to have a good time here. The church embraced and included the world. It no
longer frowned even upon social dancing,--a transgression once so heinous
in its eyes; it opened its doors to popular lectures, and encouraged
secular music in its basements, where, during the winter, oyster suppers
were given in aid of good objects. The Sunday school was made particularly
attractive, both to the children and the young men and girls who taught
them. Not only at Thanksgiving, but at Christmas, and latterly even at
Easter, there were special observances, which the enterprising spirits
having the welfare of the church at heart tried to make significant and
agreeable to all, and promotive of good feeling. Christenings and marriages
in the church were encouraged, and elaborately celebrated; death alone,
though treated with cut-flowers in emblematic devices, refused to lend
itself to the cheerful intentions of those who were struggling to render
the idea of another and a better world less repulsive. In contrast with
the relaxation and uncertainty of their doctrinal aim, the rude and bold
infidelity of old Squire Gaylord had the greater affinity with the mood of
the Puritanism they had outgrown. But Bartley Hubbard liked the religious
situation well enough. He took a leading part in the entertainments, and
did something to impart to them a literary cast, as in the series of
readings from the poets which he gave, the first winter, for the benefit of
each church in turn. At these lectures he commended himself to the sober
elders, who were troubled by the levity of his behavior with young people
on other occasions, by asking one of the ministers to open the exercises
with prayer, and another, at the close, to invoke the Divine blessing;
there was no especial relevancy in this, but it pleased. He kept himself,
from the beginning, pretty constantly in the popular eye. He was a speaker
at all public meetings, where his declamation was admired; and at private
parties, where the congealed particles of village society were united in
a frozen mass, he was the first to break the ice, and set the angular
fragments grating and grinding upon one another.

He now went to his room, and opened his desk with some vague purpose
of bringing up the arrears of his correspondence. Formerly, before his
interest in the newspaper had lapsed at all, he used to give his Sunday
leisure to making selections and writing paragraphs for it; but he now
let the pile of exchanges lie unopened on his desk, and began to rummage
through the letters scattered about in it. They were mostly from young
ladies with whom he had corresponded, and some of them enclosed the
photographs of the writers, doing their best to look as they hoped he might
think they looked. They were not love-letters, but were of that sort
which the laxness of our social life invites young people, who have met
pleasantly, to exchange as long as they like, without explicit intentions
on either side; they commit the writers to nothing; they are commonly
without result, except in wasting time which is hardly worth saving. Every
one who has lived the American life must have produced them in great
numbers. While youth lasts, they afford an excitement whose charm is hard
to realize afterward.

Bartley's correspondents were young ladies of his college town, where
he had first begun to see something of social life in days which he now
recognized as those of his green youth. They were not so very far removed
in point of time; but the experience of a larger world in the vacation he
had spent with a Boston student had relegated them to a moral remoteness
that could not readily be measured. His friend was the son of a family who
had diverted him from the natural destiny of a Boston man at Harvard, and
sent him elsewhere for sectarian reasons. They were rich people, devout
in their way, and benevolent, after a fashion of their own; and their son
always brought home with him, for the holidays and other short vacations,
some fellow-student accounted worthy of their hospitality through his
religious intentions or his intellectual promise. These guests were
indicated to the young man by one of the faculty, and he accepted their
companionship for the time with what perfunctory civility he could muster.
He and Bartley had amused themselves very well during that vacation. The
Hallecks were not fashionable people, but they lived wealthily: they had
a coachman and an inside man (whom Bartley at first treated with a
consideration, which it afterward mortified him to think of); their house
was richly furnished with cushioned seats, dense carpets, and heavy
curtains; and they were visited by other people of their denomination,
and of a like abundance. Some of these were infected with the prevailing
culture of the city, and the young ladies especially dressed in a style and
let fall ideas that filled the soul of the country student with wonder and
worship. He heard a great deal of talk that he did not understand; but
he eagerly treasured every impression, and pieced it out, by question
or furtive observation, into an image often shrewdly true, and often
grotesquely untrue, to the conditions into which he had been dropped. He
civilized himself as rapidly as his light permitted. There was a great
deal of church-going; but he and young Halleck went also to lectures and
concerts; they even went to the opera, and Bartley, with the privity of his
friend, went to the theatre. Halleck said that he did not think there was
much harm in a play; but that his people stayed away for the sake of the
example,--a reason that certainly need not hold with Bartley.

At the end of the vacation he returned to college, leaving his measure with
Halleck's tailor, and his heart with all the splendors and elegances of the
town. He found the ceilings very low and the fashions much belated in the
village; but he reconciled himself as well as he could. The real stress
came when he left college and the question of doing something for himself
pressed upon him. He intended to study law, but he must meantime earn his
living. It had been his fortune to be left, when very young, not only an
orphan, but an extremely pretty child, with an exceptional aptness for
study; and he had been better cared for than if his father and mother had
lived. He had been not only well housed and fed, and very well dressed, but
pitied as an orphan, and petted for his beauty and talent, while he was
always taught to think of himself as a poor boy, who was winning his own
way through the world. But when his benefactor proposed to educate him for
the ministry, with a view to his final use in missionary work, he revolted.
He apprenticed himself to the printer of his village, and rapidly picked up
a knowledge of the business, so that at nineteen he had laid by some money,
and was able to think of going to college. There was a fund in aid of
indigent students in the institution to which he turned, and the faculty
favored him. He finished his course with great credit to himself and the
college, and he was naturally inclined to look upon what had been done for
him earlier as an advantage taken of his youthful inexperience. He rebelled
against the memory of that tutelage, in spite of which he had accomplished
such great things. If he had not squandered his time or fallen into vicious
courses in circumstances of so much discouragement, if he had come out of
it all self-reliant and independent, he knew whom he had to thank for it.
The worst of the matter was that there was some truth in all this.

The ardor of his satisfaction cooled in the two years following his
graduation, when in intervals of teaching country schools he was actually
reduced to work at his trade on a village newspaper. But it was as a
practical printer, through the freemasonry of the craft, that Bartley heard
of the wish of the Equity committee to place the Free Press in new hands,
and he had to be grateful to his trade for a primary consideration from
them which his collegiate honors would not have won him. There had not
yet begun to be that talk of journalism as a profession which has since
prevailed with our collegians, and if Bartley had thought, as other
collegians think, of devoting himself to newspaper life, he would have
turned his face toward the city where its prizes are won,--the ten and
fifteen dollar reporterships for which a font years' course of the classics
is not too costly a preparation. But, to tell the truth, he had never
regarded his newspaper as anything but a make-shift, by which he was to be
carried over a difficult and anxious period of his life, and enabled to
attempt something worthier his powers. He had no illusions concerning it;
if he had ever thought of journalism as a grand and ennobling profession,
these ideas had perished, in his experience in a village printing-office.
He came to his work in Equity with practical and immediate purposes which
pleased the committee better. The paper had been established some time
before, in one of those flurries of ambition which from time to time seized
Equity, when its citizens reflected that it was the central town in the
county, and yet not the shire-town. The question of the removal of the
county-seat had periodically arisen before; but it had never been so hotly
agitated as now. The paper had been a happy thought of a local politician,
whose conception of its management was that it might be easily edited by
a committee, if a printer could be found to publish it; but a few months'
experience had made the Free Press a terrible burden to its founders; it
could not be sustained, and it could not be let die without final disaster
to the interests of the town; and the committee began to cast about for a
publisher who could also be editor. Bartley, to whom it fell, could not be
said to have thrown his heart and soul into the work, but he threw all his
energy, and he made it more than its friends could have hoped. He
espoused the cause of Equity in the pending question with the zeal of a
_condottiere_, and did service no less faithful because of the cynical
quality latent in it. When the legislative decision against Equity put an
end to its ambitious hopes for the time being, he continued in control of
the paper, with a fair prospect of getting the property into his own hands
at last, and with some growing question in his mind whether, after all, it
might not be as easy for him to go into politics from the newspaper as from
the law. He managed the office very economically, and by having the
work done by girl apprentices, with the help of one boy, he made it
self-supporting. He modelled the newspaper upon the modern conception,
through which the country press must cease to have any influence in
public affairs, and each paper become little more than an open letter of
neighborhood gossip. But while he filled his sheet with minute chronicles
of the goings and comings of unimportant persons, and with all attainable
particulars of the ordinary life of the different localities, he continued
to make spicy hits at the enemies of Equity in the late struggle, and kept
the public spirit of the town alive. He had lately undertaken to make known
its advantages as a summer resort, and had published a series of encomiums
upon the beauty of its scenery and the healthfulness of its air and water,
which it was believed would put it in a position of rivalry with some of
the famous White Mountain places. He invited the enterprise of outside
capital, and advocated a narrow-gauge road up the valley of the river
through the Notch, so as to develop the picturesque advantages of that
region. In all this, the color of mockery let the wise perceive that
Bartley saw the joke and enjoyed it, and it deepened the popular impression
of his smartness.

This vein of cynicism was not characteristic, as it would have been in
an older man; it might have been part of that spiritual and intellectual
unruliness of youth, which people laugh at and forgive, and which one
generally regards in after life as something almost alien to one's self.
He wrote long, bragging articles about Equity, in a tone bordering on
burlesque, and he had a department in his paper where he printed humorous
squibs of his own and of other people; these were sometimes copied, and in
the daily papers of the State he had been mentioned as "the funny man of
the Equity Free Press." He also sent letters to one of the Boston journals,
which he reproduced in his own sheet, and which gave him an importance that
the best endeavor as a country editor would never have won him with the
villagers. He would naturally, as the local printer, have ranked a little
above the foreman of the saw-mill in the social scale, and decidedly below
the master of the Academy; but his personal qualities elevated him over the
head even of the latter. But above all, the fact that he was studying law
was a guaranty of his superiority that nothing else could have given; that
science is the fountain of the highest distinction in a country town.
Bartley's whole course implied that he was above editing the Free Press,
but that he did it because it served his turn. That was admirable.

He sat a long time with these girls' letters before him, and lost himself
in a pensive reverie over their photographs, and over the good times he
used to have with them. He mused in that formless way in which a young
man thinks about young girls; his soul is suffused with a sense of their
sweetness and brightness, and unless he is distinctly in love there is no
intention in his thoughts of them; even then there is often no intention.
Bartley might very well have a good conscience about them; he had broken no
hearts among them, and had only met them half-way in flirtation. What he
really regretted, as he held their letters in his hand, was that he had
never got up a correspondence with two or three of the girls whom he had
met in Boston. Though he had been cowed by their magnificence in the
beginning, he had never had any reverence for them; he believed that they
would have liked very well to continue his acquaintance; but he had not
known how to open a correspondence, and the point was one on which he was
ashamed to consult Halleck. These college belles, compared with them, were
amusingly inferior; by a natural turn of thought, he realized that they
were inferior to Marcia Gaylord, too, in looks and style, no less than
in an impassioned preference for himself. A distaste for their somewhat
veteran ways in flirtation grew upon him as he thought of her; he
philosophized against them to her advantage; he could not blame her if she
did not know how to hide her feelings for him. Yet he knew that Marcia
would rather have died than let him suppose that she cared for him, if she
had known that she was doing it. The fun of it was, that she should not
know; this charmed him, it touched him, even; he did not think of it
exultingly, as the night before, but sweetly, fondly, and with a final
curiosity to see her again, and enjoy the fact in her presence. The acrid
little jets of smoke which escaped from the joints of his stove from time
to time annoyed him; he shut his portfolio at last, and went out to walk.




IV.


The forenoon sunshine, beating strong upon the thin snow along the edges of
the porch floor, tattered them with a little thaw here and there; but it
had no effect upon the hard-packed levels of the street, up the middle of
which Bartley walked in a silence intensified by the muffled voices of
exhortation that came to him out of the churches. It was in the very heart
of sermon-time, and he had the whole street to himself on his way up to
Squire Gaylord's house. As he drew near, he saw smoke ascending from the
chimney of the lawyer's office,--a little white building that stood apart
from the dwelling on the left of the gate, and he knew that the old man was
within, reading there, with his hat on and his long legs flung out toward
the stove, unshaven and unkempt, in a grim protest against the prevalent
Christian superstition. He might be reading Hume or Gibbon, or he might be
reading the Bible,--a book in which he was deeply versed, and from which
he was furnished with texts for the demolition of its friends, his
adversaries. He professed himself a great admirer of its literature, and,
in the heat of controversy, he often found himself a defender of its
doctrines when he had occasion to expose the fallacy of latitudinarian
interpretations. For liberal Christianity he had nothing but contempt, and
refuted it with a scorn which spared none of the worldly tendencies of the
church in Equity. The idea that souls were to be saved by church sociables
filled him with inappeasable rancor; and he maintained the superiority of
the old Puritanic discipline against them with a fervor which nothing but
its re-establishment could have abated. It was said that Squire Gaylord's
influence had largely helped to keep in place the last of the rigidly
orthodox ministers, under whom his liberalizing congregation chafed for
years of discontent; but this was probably an exaggeration of the native
humor. Mrs. Gaylord had belonged to this church, and had never formally
withdrawn from it, and the lawyer always contributed to pay the minister's
salary. He also managed a little property for him so well as to make him
independent when he was at last asked to resign by his deacons.

In another mood, Bartley might have stepped aside to look in on the Squire,
before asking at the house door for Marcia. They relished each other's
company, as people of contrary opinions and of no opinions are apt to do.
Bartley loved to hear the Squire get going, as he said, and the old man
felt a fascination in the youngster. Bartley was smart; he took a point as
quick as lightning; and the Squire did not mind his making friends with
the Mammon of Righteousness, as he called the visible church in Equity. It
amused him to see Bartley lending the church the zealous support of the
press, with an impartial patronage of the different creeds. There had been
times in his own career when the silence of his opinions would have greatly
advanced him, but he had not chosen to pay this price for success; he liked
his freedom, or he liked the bitter tang of his own tongue too well, and he
had remained a leading lawyer in Equity, when he might have ended a judge,
or even a Congressman. Of late years, however, since people whom he could
have joined in their agnosticism so heartily, up to a certain point, had
begun to make such fools of themselves about Darwinism and the brotherhood
of all men in the monkey, he had grown much more tolerant. He still clung
to his old-fashioned deistical opinions; but be thought no worse of a man
for not holding them; he did not deny that a man might be a Christian, and
still be a very good man.

The audacious humor of his position sufficed with a people who liked a
joke rather better than anything else; in his old age, his infidelity was
something that would hardly have been changed, if possible, by a popular
vote. Even his wife, to whom it had once been a heavy cross, borne with
secret prayer and tears, had long ceased to gainsay it in any wise. Her
family had opposed her yoking with an unbeliever when she married him,
but she had some such hopes of converting him as women cherish who give
themselves to men confirmed in drunkenness. She learned, as other women do,
that she could hardly change her husband in the least of his habits, and
that, in this great matter of his unbelief, her love was powerless. It
became easier at last for her to add self-sacrifice to self-sacrifice than
to vex him with her anxieties about his soul, and to act upon the feeling
that, if he must be lost, then she did not care to be saved. He had never
interfered with her church-going; he had rather promoted it, for he liked
to have women go; but the time came when she no longer cared to go without
him; she lapsed from her membership, and it was now many years since she
had worshipped with the people of her faith, if, indeed, she were still of
any faith. Her life was silenced in every way, and, as often happens with
aging wives in country towns, she seldom went out of her own door, and
never appeared at the social or public solemnities of the village. Her
husband and her daughter composed and bounded her world,--she always talked
of them, or of other things as related to them. She had grown an elderly
woman, without losing the color of her yellow hair; and the bloom of
girlhood had been stayed in her cheeks as if by the young habit of
blushing, which she had kept. She was still what her neighbors called very
pretty-appearing, and she must have been a beautiful girl. The silence of
her inward life subdued her manner, till now she seemed always to have come
from some place on which a deep hush had newly fallen.

She answered the door when Bartley turned the crank that snapped the
gong-bell in its centre; and the young man, who was looking at the street
while waiting for some one to come, confronted her with a start. "Oh!" he
said, "I thought it was Marcia. Good morning, Mrs. Gaylord. Isn't Marcia at
home?"

"She went to church, this morning," replied her mother. "Won't you walk
in?"

"Why, yes, I guess I will, thank you," faltered Bartley, in the
irresolution of his disappointment. "I hope I sha'n't disturb you."

"Come right into the sitting-room. She won't be gone a great while, now,"
said Mrs. Gaylord, leading the way to the large square room into which
a door at the end of the narrow hall opened. A slumberous heat from a
sheet-iron wood-stove pervaded the place, and a clock ticked monotonously
on a shelf in the corner. Mrs. Gaylord said, "Won't you take a chair?" and
herself sank into the rocker, with a deep feather cushion in the seat, and
a thinner feather cushion tied half-way up the back. After the more active
duties of her housekeeping were done, she sat every day in this chair with
her knitting or sewing, and let the clock tick the long hours of her life
away, with no more apparent impatience of them, or sense of their dulness,
than the cat on the braided rug at her feet, or the geraniums in the pots
at the sunny window. "Are you pretty well to-day?" she asked.

"Well, no, Mrs. Gaylord, I'm not," answered Bartley. "I'm all out of sorts.
I haven't felt so dyspeptic for I don't know how long."

Mrs. Gaylord smoothed the silk dress across her lap,--the thin old black
silk which she still instinctively put on for Sabbath observance, though it
was so long since she had worn it to church. "Mr. Gaylord used to have it
when we were first married, though he aint been troubled with it of late
years. He seemed to think then it was worse Sundays."

"I don't believe Sunday has much to do with it, in my case. I ate some
mince-pie and some toasted cheese last night, and I guess they didn't agree
with me very well," said Bartley, who did not spare himself the confession
of his sins when seeking sympathy: it was this candor that went so far to
convince people of his good-heartedness.

"I don't know as I ever heard that meat-pie was bad," said Mrs. Gaylord,
thoughtfully. "Mr. Gaylord used to eat it right along all through his
dyspepsia, and he never complained of it. And the cheese ought to have made
it digest."

"Well, I don't know what it was," replied Bartley, plaintively submitting
to be exonerated, "but I feel perfectly used up. Oh, I suppose I shall get
over it, or forget all about it, by to-morrow," he added, with strenuous
cheerfulness. "It isn't anything worth minding."

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