_ VOLUME I. BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER X.
Verena Tarrant came in the very next day from Cambridge to Charles
Street; that quarter of Boston is in direct communication with the
academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who,
in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss
Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a
leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some
blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these
perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not
inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time,
it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her
native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive Chancellor had been an
idea of her mother's, and Verena listened open-eyed while this lady, in
the seclusion of the little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was
"off," as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of conduct
for her. The girl was both submissive and unworldly, and she listened to
her mother's enumeration of the possible advantages of an intimacy with
Miss Chancellor as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It
was still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put on with
her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather, buttoned her little jacket
(the buttons were immense and gilt), and presented her with twenty cents
to pay her car-fare.
There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a
thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than
in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her
mother was queer. She was queer, indeed--a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy,
whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to
was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told
her she had never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in
danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to reconsecrate it, was the
ambition of her heart; this was one of the many reasons why Providence
had judged her worthy of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born
not only to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel a
visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong places, like a
country-made garment. As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs.
Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she
was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young
man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had
called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the exercise of this function), had
afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community,
where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort
(Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still later (though before
the development of the healing faculty) achieved distinction in the
spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only
he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her
version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of
prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile
being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss
Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the
future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had gazed on
the future together until they found that the past had completely
forsaken them and that the present offered but a slender foothold. Mrs.
Tarrant, in other words, incurred the displeasure of her family, who
gave her husband to understand that, much as they desired to remove the
shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour which struck them
as too unfettered. These had prevailed, to their thinking, at Cayuga,
and they naturally felt it was no use for him to say that his residence
there had been (for him--the community still existed) but a momentary
episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for the spiritual
picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which the discountenanced pair
now sought consolation.
Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed capable of
opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but now put to a genuine
test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft,
moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty,
in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh
sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died, leaving,
after all, very little money; he had spent his modest fortune upon the
blacks. Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she
found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of
nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a
social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without
measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin;
it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom. When she
went to Miss Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.
The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted some of the
others (she should never forget the tipped-up nose of Mrs. Farrinder),
and the superior portal remained ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She
had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had
contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a
dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred
religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms, chiefly of the
negative order, and had gone of an evening to a _seance_ or a lecture as
regularly as she had eaten her supper. Her husband always had tickets
for lectures; in moments of irritation at the want of a certain sequence
in their career, she had remarked to him that it was the only thing he
did have. The memory of all the winter nights they had tramped through
the slush (the tickets, alas! were not car-tickets) to hear Mrs. Ada T.
P. Foat discourse on the "Summer-land," came back to her with
bitterness. Selah was quite enthusiastic at one time about Mrs. Foat,
and it was his wife's belief that he had been "associated" with her
(that was Selah's expression in referring to such episodes) at Cayuga.
The poor woman, matrimonially, had a great deal to put up with; it took,
at moments, all her belief in his genius to sustain her. She knew that
he was very magnetic (that, in fact, was his genius), and she felt that
it was his magnetism that held her to him. He had carried her through
things where she really didn't know what to think; there were moments
when she suspected that she had lost the strong moral sense for which
the Greenstreets were always so celebrated.
Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would
not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight
judgement; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown
dreadfully limp. She had blinked and compromised and shuffled; she asked
herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that she should
have wanted to help her husband, in those exciting days of his
mediumship, when the table, sometimes, wouldn't rise from the ground,
the sofa wouldn't float through the air, and the soft hand of a lost
loved one was not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle.
Mrs. Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural effect,
and she consoled her conscience on such occasions by reflecting
that she ministered to a belief in immortality. She was glad,
somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had emerged from the phase of
spirit-intercourse; her ambition for her daughter took another form than
desiring that she, too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet
among Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of the
darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on table and wall,
the little touches on cheek and foot, the music in the air, the rain of
flowers, the sense of something mysteriously flitting, were most
tenderly cherished. She hated her husband for having magnetised her so
that she consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought of
which to-day would suddenly make her face burn; hated him for the manner
in which, somehow, as she felt, he had lowered her social tone; yet at
the same time she admired him for an impudence so consummate that it had
ended (in the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the
misery of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as a kind
of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug, and yet her knowledge
had this imperfection, that he had never confessed it--a fact that was
really grand when one thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had
never allowed that he wasn't straight; the pair had so often been in the
position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet he had never given
her a glance that the whole circle mightn't have observed. Even in the
privacy of domestic intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations,
ways of putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just
herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched, altogether in
the key of public life.
So it had come to pass, in her distended and demoralised conscience,
that with all the things she despised in her life and all the things she
rather liked, between being worn out with her husband's inability to
earn a living and a kind of terror of his consistency (he had a theory
that they lived delightfully), it happened, I say, that the only very
definite criticism she made of him to-day was that he didn't know how to
speak. That was where the shoe pinched--that was where Selah was slim.
He couldn't hold the attention of an audience, he was not acceptable as
a lecturer. He had plenty of thoughts, but it seemed as if he couldn't
fit them into each other. Public speaking had been a Greenstreet
tradition, and if Mrs. Tarrant had been asked whether in her younger
years she had ever supposed she should marry a mesmeric healer, she
would have replied: "Well, I never thought I should marry a gentleman
who would be silent on the platform!" This was her most general
humiliation; it included and exceeded every other, and it was a poor
consolation that Selah possessed as a substitute--his career as a
healer, to speak of none other, was there to prove it--the eloquence of
the hand. The Greenstreets had never set much store on manual activity;
they believed in the influence of the lips. It may be imagined,
therefore, with what exultation, as time went on, Mrs. Tarrant found
herself the mother of an inspired maiden, a young lady from whose lips
eloquence flowed in streams. The Greenstreet tradition would not perish,
and the dry places of her life would, perhaps, be plentifully watered.
It must be added that, of late, this sandy surface had been irrigated,
in moderation, from another source. Since Selah had addicted himself to
the mesmeric mystery, their home had been a little more what the home of
a Greenstreet should be. He had "considerable many" patients, he got
about two dollars a sitting, and he had effected some most gratifying
cures. A lady in Cambridge had been so much indebted to him that she had
recently persuaded them to take a house near her, in order that Doctor
Tarrant might drop in at any time. He availed himself of this
convenience--they had taken so many houses that another, more or less,
didn't matter--and Mrs. Tarrant began to feel as if they really had
"struck" something.
Even to Verena, as we know, she was confused and confusing; the girl had
not yet had an opportunity to ascertain the principles on which her
mother's limpness was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon
occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to her brain, when
she extended an arm from which a crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back
to seize the passing occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a
volubility of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and by
the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of good society.
She had, in particular, a way of explaining confidentially--and in her
desire to be graphic she often made up the oddest faces--the
interpretation that you must sometimes give to the manners of the best
people, and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them, which
made Verena wonder what secret sources of information she possessed.
Verena took life, as yet, very simply; she was not conscious of so many
differences of social complexion. She knew that some people were rich
and others poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by
such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether it were right,
in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll in luxury. But except
when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight
that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity
that appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was looking for
something to "put on"), Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as
good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her
imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of
fashion. It was impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would
take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at others she
thought that every one who looked at her wished to insult her. At
moments she was full of suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly
ladies) whom Selah mesmerised; then again she appeared to have given up
everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from this publication
she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had
returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken
her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical
equanimity.
It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was most beyond her
daughter; it was when she discovered extraordinary though latent
longings on the part of people they met to make their acquaintance, that
the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn.
All her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she regarded her
mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful teacher. She was perplexed
sometimes by her worldliness; that, somehow, was not a part of the
higher life which every one in such a house as theirs must wish above
all things to lead; and it was not involved in the reign of justice,
which they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account
should be kept of every little snub. Her father seemed to Verena to move
more consecutively on the high plane; though his indifference to
old-fashioned standards, his perpetual invocation of the brighter day,
had not yet led her to ask herself whether, after all, men are more
disinterested than women. Was it interest that prompted her mother to
respond so warmly to Miss Chancellor, to say to Verena, with an air of
knowingness, that the thing to do was to go in and see her
_immediately_? No italics can represent the earnestness of Mrs.
Tarrant's emphasis. Why hadn't she said, as she had done in former
cases, that if people wanted to see them they could come out to their
home; that she was not so low down in the world as not to know there was
such a ceremony as leaving cards? When Mrs. Tarrant began on the
question of ceremonies she was apt to go far; but she had waived it in
this case; it suited her more to hold that Miss Chancellor had been very
gracious, that she was a most desirable friend, that she had been more
affected than any one by Verena's beautiful outpouring; that she would
open to her the best saloons in Boston; that when she said "Come soon"
she meant the very next day, that this was the way to take it, anyhow
(one must know when to go forward gracefully); and that in short she,
Mrs. Tarrant, knew what she was talking about.
Verena accepted all this, for she was young enough to enjoy any journey
in a horse-car, and she was ever-curious about the world; she only
wondered a little how her mother knew so much about Miss Chancellor just
from looking at her once. What Verena had mainly observed in the young
lady who came up to her that way the night before was that she was
rather dolefully dressed, that she looked as if she had been crying
(Verena recognised that look quickly, she had seen it so much), and that
she was in a hurry to get away. However, if she was as remarkable as her
mother said, one would very soon see it; and meanwhile there was nothing
in the girl's feeling about herself, in her sense of her importance, to
make it a painful effort for her to run the risk of a mistake. She had
no particular feeling about herself; she only cared, as yet, for outside
things. Even the development of her "gift" had not made her think
herself too precious for mere experiments; she had neither a particle of
diffidence nor a particle of vanity. Though it would have seemed to you
eminently natural that a daughter of Selah Tarrant and his wife should
be an inspirational speaker, yet, as you knew Verena better, you would
have wondered immensely how she came to issue from such a pair. Her
ideas of enjoyment were very simple; she enjoyed putting on her new hat,
with its redundancy of feather, and twenty cents appeared to her a very
large sum. _