CIRCULATION***
Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman & Hall, Ltd. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Emigrants]
AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION AND PICTURES FROM ITALY {1}
BY CHARLES DICKENS
WITH 8 ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARCUS STONE, R.A.
LONDON CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD. 1913
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THOSE FRIENDS OF MINE IN AMERICA WHO, GIVING ME A WELCOME I MUST EVER GRATEFULLY AND PROUDLY REMEMBER, LEFT MY JUDGEMENT FREE; AND WHO, LOVING THEIR COUNTRY, CAN BEAR THE TRUTH, WHEN IT IS TOLD GOOD HUMOUREDLY, AND IN A KIND SPIRIT.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION OF “AMERICAN NOTES”
IT is nearly eight years since this book was first published. I present it, unaltered, in the Cheap Edition; and such of my opinions as it expresses, are quite unaltered too.
My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrust in America, have any existence not in my imagination. They can examine for themselves whether there has been anything in the public career of that country during these past eight years, or whether there is anything in its present position, at home or abroad, which suggests that those influences and tendencies really do exist. As they find the fact, they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such thing, they will consider me altogether mistaken.
Prejudiced, I never have been otherwise than in favour of the United States. No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores, with a stronger faith in the Republic than I had, when I landed in America.
I purposely abstain from extending these observations to any length. I have nothing to defend, or to explain away. The truth is the truth; and neither childish absurdities, nor unscrupulous contradictions, can make it otherwise. The earth would still move round the sun, though the whole Catholic Church said No.
I have many friends in America, and feel a grateful interest in the country. To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature, animosity, or partisanship, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one; and which I have disregarded for eight years, and could disregard for eighty more.
LONDON, June 22, 1850.
PREFACE TO THE “CHARLES DICKENS” EDITION OF “AMERICAN NOTES”
MY readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America, had, at that time, any existence but in my imagination. They can examine for themselves whether there has been anything in the public career of that country since, at home or abroad, which suggests that those influences and tendencies really did exist. As they find the fact, they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going, in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such indications, they will consider me altogether mistaken—but not wilfully.
Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States. I have many friends in America, I feel a grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing: which is always a very easy one.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION OF “AMERICAN NOTES” v PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION OF “AMERICAN NOTES” vii PREFACE TO THE “CHARLES DICKENS” EDITION OF “AMERICAN NOTES” ix AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION CHAPTER I Going Away 3 CHAPTER II The Passage out 10 CHAPTER III Boston 22 CHAPTER IV An American Railroad. Lowell and its Factory System 52 CHAPTER V Worcester. The Connecticut River. Hartford. New Haven. To 60 New York CHAPTER VI New York 67 CHAPTER VII Philadelphia, and its Solitary Prison 81 CHAPTER VIII Washington. The Legislature. And the President’s House 94 CHAPTER IX A Night Steamer on the Potomac River. Virginia Road, and a 107 Black Driver. Richmond. Baltimore. The Harrisburg Mail, and a Glimpse of the City. A Canal Boat CHAPTER X Some further Account of the Canal Boat, its Domestic Economy, 121 and its Passengers. Journey to Pittsburg across the Alleghany Mountains. Pittsburg CHAPTER XI From Pittsburg to Cincinnati in a Western Steamboat. 130 Cincinnati CHAPTER XII From Cincinnati to Louisville in another Western Steamboat; 137 and from Louisville to St. Louis in another. St. Louis CHAPTER XIII A Jaunt to the Looking-glass Prairie and back 147 CHAPTER XIV Return to Cincinnati. A Stage-coach Ride from that City to 153 Columbus, and thence to Sandusky. So, by Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara CHAPTER XV In Canada; Toronto; Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; St. John’s. 167 In the United States again; Lebanon; The Shaker Village; West Point CHAPTER XVI The Passage Home 182 CHAPTER XVII Slavery 189 CHAPTER XVIII Concluding Remarks 202 Postscript 210
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE EMIGRANTS Marcus Stone, R.A. Frontispiece THE SOLITARY PRISONER 90 BLACK AND WHITE 112 THE LITTLE WIFE 144
CHAPTER I GOING AWAY
I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a ‘state-room’ on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for ‘Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,’ was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this was the state-room concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months preceding: that this could by any possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting-house in the city of London: that this room of state, in short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain’s, invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed:—these were truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair slab, or perch, of which there were two within; and looked, without any expression of countenance whatever, at some friends who had come on board with us, and who were crushing their faces into all manner of shapes by endeavouring to squeeze them through the small doorway.
We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming below, which, but that we were the most sanguine people living, might have prepared us for the worst. The imaginative artist to whom I have already made allusion, has depicted in the same great work, a chamber of almost interminable perspective, furnished, as Mr. Robins would say, in a style of more than Eastern splendour, and filled (but not inconveniently so) with groups of ladies and gentlemen, in the very highest state of enjoyment and vivacity. Before descending into the bowels of the ship, we had passed from the deck into a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to the low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather. I had not at that time seen the ideal presentment of this chamber which has since gratified me so much, but I observed that one of our friends who had made the arrangements for our voyage, turned pale on entering, retreated on the friend behind him, smote his forehead involuntarily, and said below his breath, ‘Impossible! it cannot be!’ or words to that effect. He recovered himself however by a great effort, and after a preparatory cough or two, cried, with a ghastly smile which is still before me, looking at the same time round the walls, ‘Ha! the breakfast-room, steward—eh?’ We all foresaw what the answer must be: we knew the agony he suffered. He had often spoken of the saloon; had taken in and lived upon the pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand, at home, that to form a just conception of it, it would be necessary to multiply the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven, and then fall short of the reality. When the man in reply avowed the truth; the blunt, remorseless, naked truth; ‘This is the saloon, sir’—he actually reeled beneath the blow.
In persons who were so soon to part, and interpose between their else daily communication the formidable barrier of many thousand miles of stormy space, and who were for that reason anxious to cast no other cloud, not even the passing shadow of a moment’s disappointment or discomfiture, upon the short interval of happy companionship that yet remained to them—in persons so situated, the natural transition from these first surprises was obviously into peals of hearty laughter, and I can report that I, for one, being still seated upon the slab or perch before mentioned, roared outright until the vessel rang again. Thus, in less than two minutes after coming upon it for the first time, we all by common consent agreed that this state-room was the pleasantest and most facetious and capital contrivance possible; and that to have had it one inch larger, would have been quite a disagreeable and deplorable state of things. And with this; and with showing how,—by very nearly closing the door, and twining in and out like serpents, and by counting the little washing slab as standing-room,—we could manage to insinuate four people into it, all at one time; and entreating each other to observe how very airy it was (in dock), and how there was a beautiful port-hole which could be kept open all day (weather permitting), and how there was quite a large bull’s-eye just over the looking-glass which would render shaving a perfectly easy and delightful process (when the ship didn’t roll too much); we arrived, at last, at the unanimous conclusion that it was rather spacious than otherwise: though I do verily believe that, deducting the two berths, one above the other, than which nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins, it was no bigger than one of those hackney cabriolets which have the door behind, and shoot their fares out, like sacks of coals, upon the pavement.
Having settled this point to the perfect satisfaction of all parties, concerned and unconcerned, we sat down round the fire in the ladies’ cabin—just to try the effect. It was rather dark, certainly; but somebody said, ‘of course it would be light, at sea,’ a proposition to which we all assented; echoing ‘of course, of course;’ though it would be exceedingly difficult to say why we thought so. I remember, too, when we had discovered and exhausted another topic of consolation in the circumstance of this ladies’ cabin adjoining our state-room, and the consequently immense feasibility of sitting there at all times and seasons, and had fallen into a momentary silence, leaning our faces on our hands and looking at the fire, one of our party said, with the solemn air of a man who had made a discovery, ‘What a relish mulled claret will have down here!’ which appeared to strike us all most forcibly; as though there were something spicy and high-flavoured in cabins, which essentially improved that composition, and rendered it quite incapable of perfection anywhere else.
There was a stewardess, too, actively engaged in producing clean sheets and table-cloths from the very entrails of the sofas, and from unexpected lockers, of such artful mechanism, that it made one’s head ache to see them opened one after another, and rendered it quite a distracting circumstance to follow her proceedings, and to find that every nook and corner and individual piece of furniture was something else besides what it pretended to be, and was a mere trap and deception and place of secret stowage, whose ostensible purpose was its least useful one.
God bless that stewardess for her piously fraudulent account of January voyages! God bless her for her clear recollection of the companion passage of last year, when nobody was ill, and everybody dancing from morning to night, and it was ‘a run’ of twelve days, and a piece of the purest frolic, and delight, and jollity! All happiness be with her for her bright face and her pleasant Scotch tongue, which had sounds of old Home in it for my fellow-traveller; and for her predictions of fair winds and fine weather (all wrong, or I shouldn’t be half so fond of her); and for the ten thousand small fragments of genuine womanly tact, by which, without piecing them elaborately together, and patching them up into shape and form and case and pointed application, she nevertheless did plainly show that all young mothers on one side of the Atlantic were near and close at hand to their little children left upon the other; and that what seemed to the uninitiated a serious journey, was, to those who were in the secret, a mere frolic, to be sung about and whistled at! Light be her heart, and gay her merry eyes, for years!
The state-room had grown pretty fast; but by this time it had expanded into something quite bulky, and almost boasted a bay-window to view the sea from. So we went upon deck again in high spirits; and there, everything was in such a state of bustle and active preparation, that the blood quickened its pace, and whirled through one’s veins on that clear frosty morning with involuntary mirthfulness. For every gallant ship was riding slowly up and down, and every little boat was splashing noisily in the water; and knots of people stood upon the wharf, gazing with a kind of ‘dread delight’ on the far-famed fast American steamer; and one party of men were ‘taking in the milk,’ or, in other words, getting the cow on board; and another were filling the icehouses to the very throat with fresh provisions; with butchers’-meat and garden-stuff, pale sucking-pigs, calves’ heads in scores, beef, veal, and pork, and poultry out of all proportion; and others were coiling ropes and busy with oakum yarns; and others were lowering heavy packages into the hold; and the purser’s head was barely visible as it loomed in a state, of exquisite perplexity from the midst of a vast pile of passengers’ luggage; and there seemed to be nothing going on anywhere, or uppermost in the mind of anybody, but preparations for this mighty voyage. This, with the bright cold sun, the bracing air, the crisply-curling water, the thin white crust of morning ice upon the decks which crackled with a sharp and cheerful sound beneath the lightest tread, was irresistible. And when, again upon the shore, we turned and saw from the vessel’s mast her name signalled in flags of joyous colours, and fluttering by their side the beautiful American banner with its stars and stripes,—the long three thousand miles and more, and, longer still, the six whole months of absence, so dwindled and faded, that the ship had gone out and come home again, and it was broad spring already in the Coburg Dock at Liverpool.
I have not inquired among my medical acquaintance, whether Turtle, and cold Punch, with Hock, Champagne, and Claret, and all the slight et cetera usually included in an unlimited order for a good dinner—especially when it is left to the liberal construction of my faultless friend, Mr. Radley, of the Adelphi Hotel—are peculiarly calculated to suffer a sea-change; or whether a plain mutton-chop, and a glass or two of sherry, would be less likely of conversion into foreign and disconcerting material. My own opinion is, that whether one is discreet or indiscreet in these particulars, on the eve of a sea-voyage, is a matter of little consequence; and that, to use a common phrase, ‘it comes to very much the same thing in the end.’ Be this as it may, I know that the dinner of that day was undeniably perfect; that it comprehended all these items, and a great many more; and that we all did ample justice to it. And I know too, that, bating a certain tacit avoidance of any allusion to to-morrow; such as may be supposed to prevail between delicate-minded turnkeys, and a sensitive prisoner who is to be hanged next morning; we got on very well, and, all things considered, were merry enough.
When the morning—the morning—came, and we met at breakfast, it was curious to see how eager we all were to prevent a moment’s pause in the conversation, and how astoundingly gay everybody was: the forced spirits of each member of the little party having as much likeness to his natural mirth, as hot-house peas at five guineas the quart, resemble in flavour the growth of the dews, and air, and rain of Heaven. But as one o’clock, the hour for going aboard, drew near, this volubility dwindled away by little and little, despite the most persevering efforts to the contrary, until at last, the matter being now quite desperate, we threw off all disguise; openly speculated upon where we should be this time to-morrow, this time next day, and so forth; and entrusted a vast number of messages to those who intended returning to town that night, which were to be delivered at home and elsewhere without fail, within the very shortest possible space of time after the arrival of the railway train at Euston Square. And commissions and remembrances do so crowd upon one at such a time, that we were still busied with this employment when we found ourselves fused, as it were, into a dense conglomeration of passengers and passengers’ friends and passengers’ luggage, all jumbled together on the deck of a small steamboat, and panting and snorting off to the packet, which had worked out of dock yesterday afternoon and was now lying at her moorings in the river.
And there she is! all eyes are turned to where she lies, dimly discernible through the gathering fog of the early winter afternoon; every finger is pointed in the same direction; and murmurs of interest and admiration—as ‘How beautiful she looks!’ ‘How trim she is!’—are heard on every side. Even the lazy gentleman with his hat on one side and his hands in his pockets, who has dispensed so much consolation by inquiring with a yawn of another gentleman whether he is ‘going across’—as if it were a ferry—even he condescends to look that way, and nod his head, as who should say, ‘No mistake about that:’ and not even the sage Lord Burleigh in his nod, included half so much as this lazy gentleman of might who has made the passage (as everybody on board has found out already; it’s impossible to say how) thirteen times without a single accident! There is another passenger very much wrapped-up, who has been frowned down by the rest, and morally trampled upon and crushed, for presuming to inquire with a timid interest how long it is since the poor President went down. He is standing close to the lazy gentleman, and says with a faint smile that he believes She is a very strong Ship; to which the lazy gentleman, looking first in his questioner’s eye and then very hard in the wind’s, answers unexpectedly and ominously, that She need be. Upon this the lazy gentleman instantly falls very low in the popular estimation, and the passengers, with looks of defiance, whisper to each other that he is an ass, and an impostor, and clearly don’t know anything at all about it.
But we are made fast alongside the packet, whose huge red funnel is smoking bravely, giving rich promise of serious intentions. Packing-cases, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, and boxes, are already passed from hand to hand, and hauled on board with breathless rapidity. The officers, smartly dressed, are at the gangway handing the passengers up the side, and hurrying the men. In five minutes’ time, the little steamer is utterly deserted, and the packet is beset and over-run by its late freight, who instantly pervade the whole ship, and are to be met with by the dozen in every nook and corner: swarming down below with their own baggage, and stumbling over other people’s; disposing themselves comfortably in wrong cabins, and creating a most horrible confusion by having to turn out again; madly bent upon opening locked doors, and on forcing a passage into all kinds of out-of-the-way places where there is no thoroughfare; sending wild stewards, with elfin hair, to and fro upon the breezy decks on unintelligible errands, impossible of execution: and in short, creating the most extraordinary and bewildering tumult. In the midst of all this, the lazy gentleman, who seems to have no luggage of any kind—not so much as a friend, even—lounges up and down the hurricane deck, coolly puffing a cigar; and, as this unconcerned demeanour again exalts him in the opinion of those who have leisure to observe his proceedings, every time he looks up at the masts, or down at the decks, or over the side, they look there too, as wondering whether he sees anything wrong anywhere, and hoping that, in case he should, he will have the goodness to mention it.
What have we here? The captain’s boat! and yonder the captain himself. Now, by all our hopes and wishes, the very man he ought to be! A well-made, tight-built, dapper little fellow; with a ruddy face, which is a letter of invitation to shake him by both hands at once; and with a clear, blue honest eye, that it does one good to see one’s sparkling image in. ‘Ring the bell!’ ‘Ding, ding, ding!’ the very bell is in a hurry. ‘Now for the shore—who’s for the shore?’—‘These gentlemen, I am sorry to say.’ They are away, and never said, Good b’ye. Ah now they wave it from the little boat. ‘Good b’ye! Good b’ye!’ Three cheers from them; three more from us; three more from them: and they are gone.
To and fro, to and fro, to and fro again a hundred times! This waiting for the latest mail-bags is worse than all. If we could have gone off in the midst of that last burst, we should have started triumphantly: but to lie here, two hours and more in the damp fog, neither staying at home nor going abroad, is letting one gradually down into the very depths of dulness and low spirits. A speck in the mist, at last! That’s something. It is the boat we wait for! That’s more to the purpose. The captain appears on the paddle-box with his speaking trumpet; the officers take their stations; all hands are on the alert; the flagging hopes of the passengers revive; the cooks pause in their savoury work, and look out with faces full of interest. The boat comes alongside; the bags are dragged in anyhow, and flung down for the moment anywhere. Three cheers more: and as the first one rings upon our ears, the vessel throbs like a strong giant that has just received the breath of life; the two great wheels turn fiercely round for the first time; and the noble ship, with wind and tide astern, breaks proudly through the lashed and roaming water.
CHAPTER II THE PASSAGE OUT
WE all dined together that day; and a rather formidable party we were: no fewer than eighty-six strong. The vessel being pretty deep in the water, with all her coals on board and so many passengers, and the weather being calm and quiet, there was but little motion; so that before the dinner was half over, even those passengers who were most distrustful of themselves plucked up amazingly; and those who in the morning had returned to the universal question, ‘Are you a good sailor?’ a very decided negative, now either parried the inquiry with the evasive reply, ‘Oh! I suppose I’m no worse than anybody else;’ or, reckless of all moral obligations, answered boldly ‘Yes:’ and with some irritation too, as though they would add, ‘I should like to know what you see in me, sir, particularly, to justify suspicion!’
Notwithstanding this high tone of courage and confidence, I could not but observe that very few remained long over their wine; and that everybody had an unusual love of the open air; and that the favourite and most coveted seats were invariably those nearest to the door. The tea-table, too, was by no means as well attended as the dinner-table; and there was less whist-playing than might have been expected. Still, with the exception of one lady, who had retired with some precipitation at dinner-time, immediately after being assisted to the finest cut of a very yellow boiled leg of mutton with very green capers, there were no invalids as yet; and walking, and smoking, and drinking of brandy-and-water (but always in the open air), went on with unabated spirit, until eleven o’clock or thereabouts, when ‘turning in’—no sailor of seven hours’ experience talks of going to bed—became the order of the night. The perpetual tramp of boot-heels on the decks gave place to a heavy silence, and the whole human freight was stowed away below, excepting a very few stragglers, like myself, who were probably, like me, afraid to go there.
To one unaccustomed to such scenes, this is a very striking time on shipboard. Afterwards, and when its novelty had long worn off, it never ceased to have a peculiar interest and charm for me. The gloom through which the great black mass holds its direct and certain course; the rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; the broad, white, glistening track, that follows in the vessel’s wake; the men on the look-out forward, who would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars; the helmsman at the wheel, with the illuminated card before him, shining, a speck of light amidst the darkness, like something sentient and of Divine intelligence; the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain; the gleaming forth of light from every crevice, nook, and tiny piece of glass about the decks, as though the ship were filled with fire in hiding, ready to burst through any outlet, wild with its resistless power of death and ruin. At first, too, and even when the hour, and all the objects it exalts, have come to be familiar, it is difficult, alone and thoughtful, to hold them to their proper shapes and forms. They change with the wandering fancy; assume the semblance of things left far away; put on the well-remembered aspect of favourite places dearly loved; and even people them with shadows. Streets, houses, rooms; figures so like their usual occupants, that they have startled me by their reality, which far exceeded, as it seemed to me, all power of mine to conjure up the absent; have, many and many a time, at such an hour, grown suddenly out of objects with whose real look, and use, and purpose, I was as well acquainted as with my own two hands.
My own two hands, and feet likewise, being very cold, however, on this particular occasion, I crept below at midnight. It was not exactly comfortable below. It was decidedly close; and it was impossible to be unconscious of the presence of that extraordinary compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold. Two passengers’ wives (one of them my own) lay already in silent agonies on the sofa; and one lady’s maid (my lady’s) was a mere bundle on the floor, execrating her destiny, and pounding her curl-papers among the stray boxes. Everything sloped the wrong way: which in itself was an aggravation scarcely to be borne. I had left the door open, a moment before, in the bosom of a gentle declivity, and, when I turned to shut it, it was on the summit of a lofty eminence. Now every plank and timber creaked, as if the ship were made of wicker-work; and now crackled, like an enormous fire of the driest possible twigs. There was nothing for it but bed; so I went to bed.
It was pretty much the same for the next two days, with a tolerably fair wind and dry weather. I read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what) a good deal; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy-and-water with an unspeakable disgust, and ate hard biscuit perseveringly: not ill, but going to be.
It is the third morning. I am awakened out of my sleep by a dismal shriek from my wife, who demands to know whether there’s any danger. I rouse myself, and look out of bed. The water-jug is plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly I see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head.
Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she is wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature actually running of its own accord, with broken knees and failing legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling constantly. Before one can so much as wonder, she takes a high leap into the air. Before she has well done that, she takes a deep dive into the water. Before she has gained the surface, she throws a summerset. The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward. And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving, jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking: and going through all these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes altogether: until one feels disposed to roar for mercy.
A steward passes. ‘Steward!’ ‘Sir?’ ‘What is the matter? what do you call this?’ ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir, and a head-wind.’
A head-wind! Imagine a human face upon the vessel’s prow, with fifteen thousand Samsons in one bent upon driving her back, and hitting her exactly between the eyes whenever she attempts to advance an inch. Imagine the ship herself, with every pulse and artery of her huge body swollen and bursting under this maltreatment, sworn to go on or die. Imagine the wind howling, the sea roaring, the rain beating: all in furious array against her. Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds, in fearful sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air. Add to all this, the clattering on deck and down below; the tread of hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the striking of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead, heavy sound of thunder heard within a vault;—and there is the head-wind of that January morning.
I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the ship: such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling down of stewards, the gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far from exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast. I say nothing of them: for although I lay listening to this concert for three or four days, I don’t think I heard it for more than a quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down again, excessively sea-sick.
Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the term: I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen or heard described, though I have no doubt it is very common. I lay there, all the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no sense of weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal indifference, having a kind of lazy joy—of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title—in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may be allowed to illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after the incursion of the rioters into his bar at Chigwell. Nothing would have surprised me. If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of Home, a goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into that little kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and, apologising for being damp through walking in the sea, had handed me a letter directed to myself, in familiar characters, I am certain I should not have felt one atom of astonishment: I should have been perfectly satisfied. If Neptune himself had walked in, with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have looked upon the event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences.
Once—once—I found myself on deck. I don’t know how I got there, or what possessed me to go there, but there I was; and completely dressed too, with a huge pea-coat on, and a pair of boots such as no weak man in his senses could ever have got into. I found myself standing, when a gleam of consciousness came upon me, holding on to something. I don’t know what. I think it was the boatswain: or it may have been the pump: or possibly the cow. I can’t say how long I had been there; whether a day or a minute. I recollect trying to think about something (about anything in the whole wide world, I was not particular) without the smallest effect. I could not even make out which was the sea, and which the sky, for the horizon seemed drunk, and was flying wildly about in all directions. Even in that incapable state, however, I recognised the lazy gentleman standing before me: nautically clad in a suit of shaggy blue, with an oilskin hat. But I was too imbecile, although I knew it to be he, to separate him from his dress; and tried to call him, I remember, Pilot. After another interval of total unconsciousness, I found he had gone, and recognised another figure in its place. It seemed to wave and fluctuate before me as though I saw it reflected in an unsteady looking-glass; but I knew it for the captain; and such was the cheerful influence of his face, that I tried to smile: yes, even then I tried to smile. I saw by his gestures that he addressed me; but it was a long time before I could make out that he remonstrated against my standing up to my knees in water—as I was; of course I don’t know why. I tried to thank him, but couldn’t. I could only point to my boots—or wherever I supposed my boots to be—and say in a plaintive voice, ‘Cork soles:’ at the same time endeavouring, I am told, to sit down in the pool. Finding that I was quite insensible, and for the time a maniac, he humanely conducted me below.
There I remained until I got better: suffering, whenever I was recommended to eat anything, an amount of anguish only second to that which is said to be endured by the apparently drowned, in the process of restoration to life. One gentleman on board had a letter of introduction to me from a mutual friend in London. He sent it below with his card, on the morning of the head-wind; and I was long troubled with the idea that he might be up, and well, and a hundred times a day expecting me to call upon him in the saloon. I imagined him one of those cast-iron images—I will not call them men—who ask, with red faces, and lusty voices, what sea-sickness means, and whether it really is as bad as it is represented to be. This was very torturing indeed; and I don’t think I ever felt such perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard from the ship’s doctor that he had been obliged to put a large mustard poultice on this very gentleman’s stomach. I date my recovery from the receipt of that intelligence.
It was materially assisted though, I have no doubt, by a heavy gale of wind, which came slowly up at sunset, when we were about ten days out, and raged with gradually increasing fury until morning, saving that it lulled for an hour a little before midnight. There was something in the unnatural repose of that hour, and in the after gathering of the storm, so inconceivably awful and tremendous, that its bursting into full violence was almost a relief.
The labouring of the ship in the troubled sea on this night I shall never forget. ‘Will it ever be worse than this?’ was a question I had often heard asked, when everything was sliding and bumping about, and when it certainly did seem difficult to comprehend the possibility of anything afloat being more disturbed, without toppling over and going down. But what the agitation of a steam-vessel is, on a bad winter’s night in the wild Atlantic, it is impossible for the most vivid imagination to conceive. To say that she is flung down on her side in the waves, with her masts dipping into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over on the other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a hundred great guns, and hurls her back—that she stops, and staggers, and shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent throbbing at her heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped on by the angry sea—that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and wind, are all in fierce contention for the mastery—that every plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water in the great ocean its howling voice—is nothing. To say that all is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot convey it. Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage, and passion.
And yet, in the very midst of these terrors, I was placed in a situation so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong a sense of its absurdity as I have now, and could no more help laughing than I can at any other comical incident, happening under circumstances the most favourable to its enjoyment. About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the ladies’ cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a little Scotch lady—who, by the way, had previously sent a message to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might not be struck by lightning. They and the handmaid before mentioned, being in such ecstasies of fear that I scarcely knew what to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumbler full without delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa—a fixture extending entirely across the cabin—where they clung to each other in momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory expressions to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see them all roll slowly down to the other end! And when I staggered to that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their all rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once; and by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished, by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the group, it is necessary to recognise in this disconcerted dodger, an individual very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his hair, last, at Liverpool: and whose only article of dress (linen not included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper.
Of the outrageous antics performed by that ship next morning; which made bed a practical joke, and getting up, by any process short of falling out, an impossibility; I say nothing. But anything like the utter dreariness and desolation that met my eyes when I literally ‘tumbled up’ on deck at noon, I never saw. Ocean and sky were all of one dull, heavy, uniform, lead colour. There was no extent of prospect even over the dreary waste that lay around us, for the sea ran high, and the horizon encompassed us like a large black hoop. Viewed from the air, or some tall bluff on shore, it would have been imposing and stupendous, no doubt; but seen from the wet and rolling decks, it only impressed one giddily and painfully. In the gale of last night the life-boat had been crushed by one blow of the sea like a walnut-shell; and there it hung dangling in the air: a mere faggot of crazy boards. The planking of the paddle-boxes had been torn sheer away. The wheels were exposed and bare; and they whirled and dashed their spray about the decks at random. Chimney, white with crusted salt; topmasts struck; storm-sails set; rigging all knotted, tangled, wet, and drooping: a gloomier picture it would be hard to look upon.
I was now comfortably established by courtesy in the ladies’ cabin, where, besides ourselves, there were only four other passengers. First, the little Scotch lady before mentioned, on her way to join her husband at New York, who had settled there three years before. Secondly and thirdly, an honest young Yorkshireman, connected with some American house; domiciled in that same city, and carrying thither his beautiful young wife to whom he had been married but a fortnight, and who was the fairest specimen of a comely English country girl I have ever seen. Fourthly, fifthly, and lastly, another couple: newly married too, if one might judge from the endearments they frequently interchanged: of whom I know no more than that they were rather a mysterious, run-away kind of couple; that the lady had great personal attractions also; and that the gentleman carried more guns with him than Robinson Crusoe, wore a shooting-coat, and had two great dogs on board. On further consideration, I remember that he tried hot roast pig and bottled ale as a cure for sea-sickness; and that he took these remedies (usually in bed) day after day, with astonishing perseverance. I may add, for the information of the curious, that they decidedly failed.
The weather continuing obstinately and almost unprecedentedly bad, we usually straggled into this cabin, more or less faint and miserable, about an hour before noon, and lay down on the sofas to recover; during which interval, the captain would look in to communicate the state of the wind, the moral certainty of its changing to-morrow (the weather is always going to improve to-morrow, at sea), the vessel’s rate of sailing, and so forth. Observations there were none to tell us of, for there was no sun to take them by. But a description of one day will serve for all the rest. Here it is.
The captain being gone, we compose ourselves to read, if the place be light enough; and if not, we doze and talk alternately. At one, a bell rings, and the stewardess comes down with a steaming dish of baked potatoes, and another of roasted apples; and plates of pig’s face, cold ham, salt beef; or perhaps a smoking mess of rare hot collops. We fall to upon these dainties; eat as much as we can (we have great appetites now); and are as long as possible about it. If the fire will burn (it will sometimes) we are pretty cheerful. If it won’t, we all remark to each other that it’s very cold, rub our hands, cover ourselves with coats and cloaks, and lie down again to doze, talk, and read (provided as aforesaid), until dinner-time. At five, another bell rings, and the stewardess reappears with another dish of potatoes—boiled this time—and store of hot meat of various kinds: not forgetting the roast pig, to be taken medicinally. We sit down at table again (rather more cheerfully than before); prolong the meal with a rather mouldy dessert of apples, grapes, and oranges; and drink our wine and brandy-and-water. The bottles and glasses are still upon the table, and the oranges and so forth are rolling about according to their fancy and the ship’s way, when the doctor comes down, by special nightly invitation, to join our evening rubber: immediately on whose arrival we make a party at whist, and as it is a rough night and the cards will not lie on the cloth, we put the tricks in our pockets as we take them. At whist we remain with exemplary gravity (deducting a short time for tea and toast) until eleven o’clock, or thereabouts; when the captain comes down again, in a sou’-wester hat tied under his chin, and a pilot-coat: making the ground wet where he stands. By this time the card-playing is over, and the bottles and glasses are again upon the table; and after an hour’s pleasant conversation about the ship, the passengers, and things in general, the captain (who never goes to bed, and is never out of humour) turns up his coat collar for the deck again; shakes hands all round; and goes laughing out into the weather as merrily as to a birthday party.
As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity. This passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk), nobody knows. The head engineer has distinctly said that there never was such times—meaning weather—and four good hands are ill, and have given in, dead beat. Several berths are full of water, and all the cabins are leaky. The ship’s cook, secretly swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played upon by the fire-engine until quite sober. All the stewards have fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with plasters in various places. The baker is ill, and so is the pastry-cook. A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly bilious) it is death to him to look at. News! A dozen murders on shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea.
Divided between our rubber and such topics as these, we were running (as we thought) into Halifax Harbour, on the fifteenth night, with little wind and a bright moon—indeed, we had made the Light at its outer entrance, and put the pilot in charge—when suddenly the ship struck upon a bank of mud. An immediate rush on deck took place of course; the sides were crowded in an instant; and for a few minutes we were in as lively a state of confusion as the greatest lover of disorder would desire to see. The passengers, and guns, and water-casks, and other heavy matters, being all huddled together aft, however, to lighten her in the head, she was soon got off; and after some driving on towards an uncomfortable line of objects (whose vicinity had been announced very early in the disaster by a loud cry of ‘Breakers a-head!’) and much backing of paddles, and heaving of the lead into a constantly decreasing depth of water, we dropped anchor in a strange outlandish-looking nook which nobody on board could recognise, although there was land all about us, and so close that we could plainly see the waving branches of the trees.
It was strange enough, in the silence of midnight, and the dead stillness that seemed to be created by the sudden and unexpected stoppage of the engine which had been clanking and blasting in our ears incessantly for so many days, to watch the look of blank astonishment expressed in every face: beginning with the officers, tracing it through all the passengers, and descending to the very stokers and furnacemen, who emerged from below, one by one, and clustered together in a smoky group about the hatchway of the engine-room, comparing notes in whispers. After throwing up a few rockets and firing signal guns in the hope of being hailed from the land, or at least of seeing a light—but without any other sight or sound presenting itself—it was determined to send a boat on shore. It was amusing to observe how very kind some of the passengers were, in volunteering to go ashore in this same boat: for the general good, of course: not by any means because they thought the ship in an unsafe position, or contemplated the possibility of her heeling over in case the tide were running out. Nor was it less amusing to remark how desperately unpopular the poor pilot became in one short minute. He had had his passage out from Liverpool, and during the whole voyage had been quite a notorious character, as a teller of anecdotes and cracker of jokes. Yet here were the very men who had laughed the loudest at his jests, now flourishing their fists in his face, loading him with imprecations, and defying him to his teeth as a villain!
The boat soon shoved off, with a lantern and sundry blue lights on board; and in less than an hour returned; the officer in command bringing with him a tolerably tall young tree, which he had plucked up by the roots, to satisfy certain distrustful passengers whose minds misgave them that they were to be imposed upon and shipwrecked, and who would on no other terms believe that he had been ashore, or had done anything but fraudulently row a little way into the mist, specially to deceive them and compass their deaths. Our captain had foreseen from the first that we must be in a place called the Eastern passage; and so we were. It was about the last place in the world in which we had any business or reason to be, but a sudden fog, and some error on the pilot’s part, were the cause. We were surrounded by banks, and rocks, and shoals of all kinds, but had happily drifted, it seemed, upon the only safe speck that was to be found thereabouts. Eased by this report, and by the assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in at three o’clock in the morning.
I was dressing about half-past nine next day, when the noise above hurried me on deck. When I had left it overnight, it was dark, foggy, and damp, and there were bleak hills all round us. Now, we were gliding down a smooth, broad stream, at the rate of eleven miles an hour: our colours flying gaily; our crew rigged out in their smartest clothes; our officers in uniform again; the sun shining as on a brilliant April day in England; the land stretched out on either side, streaked with light patches of snow; white wooden houses; people at their doors; telegraphs working; flags hoisted; wharfs appearing; ships; quays crowded with people; distant noises; shouts; men and boys running down steep places towards the pier: all more bright and gay and fresh to our unused eyes than words can paint them. We came to a wharf, paved with uplifted faces; got alongside, and were made fast, after some shouting and straining of cables; darted, a score of us along the gangway, almost as soon as it was thrust out to meet us, and before it had reached the ship—and leaped upon the firm glad earth again!
I suppose this Halifax would have appeared an Elysium, though it had been a curiosity of ugly dulness. But I carried away with me a most pleasant impression of the town and its inhabitants, and have preserved it to this hour. Nor was it without regret that I came home, without having found an opportunity of returning thither, and once more shaking hands with the friends I made that day.
It happened to be the opening of the Legislative Council and General Assembly, at which ceremonial the forms observed on the commencement of a new Session of Parliament in England were so closely copied, and so gravely presented on a small scale, that it was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope. The governor, as her Majesty’s representative, delivered what may be called the Speech from the Throne. He said what he had to say manfully and well. The military band outside the building struck up “God save the Queen” with great vigour before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted; the in’s rubbed their hands; the out’s shook their heads; the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the Opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly withdrew from the bar to say a great deal among themselves and do a little: and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home upon the like occasions.
The town is built on the side of a hill, the highest point being commanded by a strong fortress, not yet quite finished. Several streets of good breadth and appearance extend from its summit to the water-side, and are intersected by cross streets running parallel with the river. The houses are chiefly of wood. The market is abundantly supplied; and provisions are exceedingly cheap. The weather being unusually mild at that time for the season of the year, there was no sleighing: but there were plenty of those vehicles in yards and by-places, and some of them, from the gorgeous quality of their decorations, might have ‘gone on’ without alteration as triumphal cars in a melodrama at Astley’s. The day was uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful; the whole aspect of the town cheerful, thriving, and industrious.
We lay there seven hours, to deliver and exchange the mails. At length, having collected all our bags and all our passengers (including two or three choice spirits, who, having indulged too freely in oysters and champagne, were found lying insensible on their backs in unfrequented streets), the engines were again put in motion, and we stood off for Boston.
Encountering squally weather again in the Bay of Fundy, we tumbled and rolled about as usual all that night and all next day. On the next afternoon, that is to say, on Saturday, the twenty-second of January, an American pilot-boat came alongside, and soon afterwards the Britannia steam-packet, from Liverpool, eighteen days out, was telegraphed at Boston.
The indescribable interest with which I strained my eyes, as the first patches of American soil peeped like molehills from the green sea, and followed them, as they swelled, by slow and almost imperceptible degrees, into a continuous line of coast, can hardly be exaggerated. A sharp keen wind blew dead against us; a hard frost prevailed on shore; and the cold was most severe. Yet the air was so intensely clear, and dry, and bright, that the temperature was not only endurable, but delicious.
How I remained on deck, staring about me, until we came alongside the dock, and how, though I had had as many eyes as Argus, I should have had them all wide open, and all employed on new objects—are topics which I will not prolong this chapter to discuss. Neither will I more than hint at my foreigner-like mistake in supposing that a party of most active persons, who scrambled on board at the peril of their lives as we approached the wharf, were newsmen, answering to that industrious class at home; whereas, despite the leathern wallets of news slung about the necks of some, and the broad sheets in the hands of all, they were Editors, who boarded ships in person (as one gentleman in a worsted comforter informed me), ‘because they liked the excitement of it.’ Suffice it in this place to say, that one of these invaders, with a ready courtesy for which I thank him here most gratefully, went on before to order rooms at the hotel; and that when I followed, as I soon did, I found myself rolling through the long passages with an involuntary imitation of the gait of Mr. T. P. Cooke, in a new nautical melodrama.
‘Dinner, if you please,’ said I to the waiter.
‘When?’ said the waiter.
‘As quick as possible,’ said I.
‘Right away?’ said the waiter.
After a moment’s hesitation, I answered ‘No,’ at hazard.
‘Not right away?’ cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start.
I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, ‘No; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much.’
At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, ‘Directly.’
‘Well! and that’s a fact!’ said the waiter, looking helplessly at me: ‘Right away.’
I saw now that ‘Right away’ and ‘Directly’ were one and the same thing. So I reversed my previous answer, and sat down to dinner in ten minutes afterwards; and a capital dinner it was.
The hotel (a very excellent one) is called the Tremont House. It has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe.
CHAPTER III BOSTON
In all the public establishments of America, the utmost courtesy prevails. Most of our Departments are susceptible of considerable improvement in this respect, but the Custom-house above all others would do well to take example from the United States and render itself somewhat less odious and offensive to foreigners. The servile rapacity of the French officials is sufficiently contemptible; but there is a surly boorish incivility about our men, alike disgusting to all persons who fall into their hands, and discreditable to the nation that keeps such ill-conditioned curs snarling about its gates.
When I landed in America, I could not help being strongly impressed with the contrast their Custom-house presented, and the attention, politeness and good humour with which its officers discharged their duty.
As we did not land at Boston, in consequence of some detention at the wharf, until after dark, I received my first impressions of the city in walking down to the Custom-house on the morning after our arrival, which was Sunday. I am afraid to say, by the way, how many offers of pews and seats in church for that morning were made to us, by formal note of invitation, before we had half finished our first dinner in America, but if I may be allowed to make a moderate guess, without going into nicer calculation, I should say that at least as many sittings were proffered us, as would have accommodated a score or two of grown-up families. The number of creeds and forms of religion to which the pleasure of our company was requested, was in very fair proportion.
Not being able, in the absence of any change of clothes, to go to church that day, we were compelled to decline these kindnesses, one and all; and I was reluctantly obliged to forego the delight of hearing Dr. Channing, who happened to preach that morning for the first time in a very long interval. I mention the name of this distinguished and accomplished man (with whom I soon afterwards had the pleasure of becoming personally acquainted), that I may have the gratification of recording my humble tribute of admiration and respect for his high abilities and character; and for the bold philanthropy with which he has ever opposed himself to that most hideous blot and foul disgrace—Slavery.
To return to Boston. When I got into the streets upon this Sunday morning, the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay: the signboards were painted in such gaudy colours; the gilded letters were so very golden; the bricks were so very red, the stone was so very white, the blinds and area railings were so very green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors so marvellously bright and twinkling; and all so slight and unsubstantial in appearance—that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime. It rarely happens in the business streets that a tradesman, if I may venture to call anybody a tradesman, where everybody is a merchant, resides above his store; so that many occupations are often carried on in one house, and the whole front is covered with boards and inscriptions. As I walked along, I kept glancing up at these boards, confidently expecting to see a few of them change into something; and I never turned a corner suddenly without looking out for the clown and pantaloon, who, I had no doubt, were hiding in a doorway or behind some pillar close at hand. As to Harlequin and Columbine, I discovered immediately that they lodged (they are always looking after lodgings in a pantomime) at a very small clockmaker’s one story high, near the hotel; which, in addition to various symbols and devices, almost covering the whole front, had a great dial hanging out—to be jumped through, of course.
The suburbs are, if possible, even more unsubstantial-looking than the city. The white wooden houses (so white that it makes one wink to look at them), with their green jalousie blinds, are so sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a child’s toy, and crammed into a little box.
The city is a beautiful one, and cannot fail, I should imagine, to impress all strangers very favourably. The private dwelling-houses are, for the most part, large and elegant; the shops extremely good; and the public buildings handsome. The State House is built upon the summit of a hill, which rises gradually at first, and afterwards by a steep ascent, almost from the water’s edge. In front is a green enclosure, called the Common. The site is beautiful: and from the top there is a charming panoramic view of the whole town and neighbourhood. In addition to a variety of commodious offices, it contains two handsome chambers; in one the House of Representatives of the State hold their meetings: in the other, the Senate. Such proceedings as I saw here, were conducted with perfect gravity and decorum; and were certainly calculated to inspire attention and respect.
There is no doubt that much of the intellectual refinement and superiority of Boston, is referable to the quiet influence of the University of Cambridge, which is within three or four miles of the city. The resident professors at that university are gentlemen of learning and varied attainments; and are, without one exception that I can call to mind, men who would shed a grace upon, and do honour to, any society in the civilised world. Many of the resident gentry in Boston and its neighbourhood, and I think I am not mistaken in adding, a large majority of those who are attached to the liberal professions there, have been educated at this same school. Whatever the defects of American universities may be, they disseminate no prejudices; rear no bigots; dig up the buried ashes of no old superstitions; never interpose between the people and their improvement; exclude no man because of his religious opinions; above all, in their whole course of study and instruction, recognise a world, and a broad one too, lying beyond the college walls.
It was a source of inexpressible pleasure to me to observe the almost imperceptible, but not less certain effect, wrought by this institution among the small community of Boston; and to note at every turn the humanising tastes and desires it has engendered; the affectionate friendships to which it has given rise; the amount of vanity and prejudice it has dispelled. The golden calf they worship at Boston is a pigmy compared with the giant effigies set up in other parts of that vast counting-house which lies beyond the Atlantic; and the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amidst a whole Pantheon of better gods.
Above all, I sincerely believe that the public institutions and charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect, as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them. I never in my life was more affected by the contemplation of happiness, under circumstances of privation and bereavement, than in my visits to these establishments.
It is a great and pleasant feature of all such institutions in America, that they are either supported by the State or assisted by the State; or (in the event of their not needing its helping hand) that they act in concert with it, and are emphatically the people’s. I cannot but think, with a view to the principle and its tendency to elevate or depress the character of the industrious classes, that a Public Charity is immeasurably better than a Private Foundation, no matter how munificently the latter may be endowed. In our own country, where it has not, until within these later days, been a very popular fashion with governments to display any extraordinary regard for the great mass of the people or to recognise their existence as improvable creatures, private charities, unexampled in the history of the earth, have arisen, to do an incalculable amount of good among the destitute and afflicted. But the government of the country, having neither act nor part in them, is not in the receipt of any portion of the gratitude they inspire; and, offering very little shelter or relief beyond that which is to be found in the workhouse and the jail, has come, not unnaturally, to be looked upon by the poor rather as a stern master, quick to correct and punish, than a kind protector, merciful and vigilant in their hour of need.
The maxim that out of evil cometh good, is strongly illustrated by these establishments at home; as the records of the Prerogative Office in Doctors’ Commons can abundantly prove. Some immensely rich old gentleman or lady, surrounded by needy relatives, makes, upon a low average, a will a-week. The old gentleman or lady, never very remarkable in the best of times for good temper, is full of aches and pains from head to foot; full of fancies and caprices; full of spleen, distrust, suspicion, and dislike. To cancel old wills, and invent new ones, is at last the sole business of such a testator’s existence; and relations and friends (some of whom have been bred up distinctly to inherit a large share of the property, and have been, from their cradles, specially disqualified from devoting themselves to any useful pursuit, on that account) are so often and so unexpectedly and summarily cut off, and reinstated, and cut off again, that the whole family, down to the remotest cousin, is kept in a perpetual fever. At length it becomes plain that the old lady or gentleman has not long to live; and the plainer this becomes, the more clearly the old lady or gentleman perceives that everybody is in a conspiracy against their poor old dying relative; wherefore the old lady or gentleman makes another last will—positively the last this time—conceals the same in a china teapot, and expires next day. Then it turns out, that the whole of the real and personal estate is divided between half-a-dozen charities; and that the dead and gone testator has in pure spite helped to do a great deal of good, at the cost of an immense amount of evil passion and misery.
The Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, at Boston, is superintended by a body of trustees who make an annual report to the corporation. The indigent blind of that state are admitted gratuitously. Those from the adjoining state of Connecticut, or from the states of Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire, are admitted by a warrant from the state to which they respectively belong; or, failing that, must find security among their friends, for the payment of about twenty pounds English for their first year’s board and instruction, and ten for the second. ‘After the first year,’ say the trustees, ‘an account current will be opened with each pupil; he will be charged with the actual cost of his board, which will not exceed two dollars per week;’ a trifle more than eight shillings English; ‘and he will be credited with the amount paid for him by the state, or by his friends; also with his earnings over and above the cost of the stock which he uses; so that all his earnings over one dollar per week will be his own. By the third year it will be known whether his earnings will more than pay the actual cost of his board; if they should, he will have it at his option to remain and receive his earnings, or not. Those who prove unable to earn their own livelihood will not be retained; as it is not desirable to convert the establishment into an alms-house, or to retain any but working bees in the hive. Those who by physical or mental imbecility are disqualified from work, are thereby disqualified from being members of an industrious community; and they can be better provided for in establishments fitted for the infirm.’
I went to see this place one very fine winter morning: an Italian sky above, and the air so clear and bright on every side, that even my eyes, which are none of the best, could follow the minute lines and scraps of tracery in distant buildings. Like most other public institutions in America, of the same class, it stands a mile or two without the town, in a cheerful healthy spot; and is an airy, spacious, handsome edifice. It is built upon a height, commanding the harbour. When I paused for a moment at the door, and marked how fresh and free the whole scene was—what sparkling bubbles glanced upon the waves, and welled up every moment to the surface, as though the world below, like that above, were radiant with the bright day, and gushing over in its fulness of light: when I gazed from sail to sail away upon a ship at sea, a tiny speck of shining white, the only cloud upon the still, deep, distant blue—and, turning, saw a blind boy with his sightless face addressed that way, as though he too had some sense within him of the glorious distance: I felt a kind of sorrow that the place should be so very light, and a strange wish that for his sake it were darker. It was but momentary, of course, and a mere fancy, but I felt it keenly for all that.
The children were at their daily tasks in different rooms, except a few who were already dismissed, and were at play. Here, as in many institutions, no uniform is worn; and I was very glad of it, for two reasons. Firstly, because I am sure that nothing but senseless custom and want of thought would reconcile us to the liveries and badges we are so fond of at home. Secondly, because the absence of these things presents each child to the visitor in his or her own proper character, with its individuality unimpaired; not lost in a dull, ugly, monotonous repetition of the same unmeaning garb: which is really an important consideration. The wisdom of encouraging a little harmless pride in personal appearance even among the blind, or the whimsical absurdity of considering charity and leather breeches inseparable companions, as we do, requires no comment.
Good order, cleanliness, and comfort, pervaded every corner of the building. The various classes, who were gathered round their teachers, answered the questions put to them with readiness and intelligence, and in a spirit of cheerful contest for precedence which pleased me very much. Those who were at play, were gleesome and noisy as other children. More spiritual and affectionate friendships appeared to exist among them, than would be found among other young persons suffering under no deprivation; but this I expected and was prepared to find. It is a part of the great scheme of Heaven’s merciful consideration for the afflicted.
In a portion of the building, set apart for that purpose, are work-shops for blind persons whose education is finished, and who have acquired a trade, but who cannot pursue it in an ordinary manufactory because of their deprivation. Several people were at work here; making brushes, mattresses, and so forth; and the cheerfulness, industry, and good order discernible in every other part of the building, extended to this department also.
On the ringing of a bell, the pupils all repaired, without any guide or leader, to a spacious music-hall, where they took their seats in an orchestra erected for that purpose, and listened with manifest delight to a voluntary on the organ, played by one of themselves. At its conclusion, the performer, a boy of nineteen or twenty, gave place to a girl; and to her accompaniment they all sang a hymn, and afterwards a sort of chorus. It was very sad to look upon and hear them, happy though their condition unquestionably was; and I saw that one blind girl, who (being for the time deprived of the use of her limbs, by illness) sat close beside me with her face towards them, wept silently the while she listened.
It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts; observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask he wears. Allowing for one shade of anxious expression which is never absent from their countenances, and the like of which we may readily detect in our own faces if we try to feel our way in the dark, every idea, as it rises within them, is expressed with the lightning’s speed and nature’s truth. If the company at a rout, or drawing-room at court, could only for one time be as unconscious of the eyes upon them as blind men and women are, what secrets would come out, and what a worker of hypocrisy this sight, the loss of which we so much pity, would appear to be!
The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room, before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell; and nearly so of taste: before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection, inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense—the sense of touch. There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened.
Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside her; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon.—From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.
Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound round her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.
She was seated in a little enclosure, made by school-desks and forms, writing her daily journal. But soon finishing this pursuit, she engaged in an animated conversation with a teacher who sat beside her. This was a favourite mistress with the poor pupil. If she could see the face of her fair instructress, she would not love her less, I am sure.
I have extracted a few disjointed fragments of her history, from an account, written by that one man who has made her what she is. It is a very beautiful and touching narrative; and I wish I could present it entire.
Her name is Laura Bridgman. ‘She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829. She is described as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance: and life was held by the feeblest tenure: but when a year and a half old, she seemed to rally; the dangerous symptoms subsided; and at twenty months old, she was perfectly well.
‘Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly developed themselves; and during the four months of health which she enjoyed, she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother’s account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence.
‘But suddenly she sickened again; her disease raged with great violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, suppurated, and their contents were discharged. But though sight and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child’s sufferings were not ended. The fever raged during seven weeks; for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room; it was a year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted.
‘It was not until four years of age that the poor child’s bodily health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of life and the world.
‘But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the silence of the tomb were around her: no mother’s smile called forth her answering smile, no father’s voice taught her to imitate his sounds:—they, brothers and sisters, were but forms of matter which resisted her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house, save in warmth, and in the power of locomotion; and not even in these respects from the dog and the cat.
‘But the immortal spirit which had been implanted within her could not die, nor be maimed nor mutilated; and though most of its avenues of communication with the world were cut off, it began to manifest itself through the others. As soon as she could walk, she began to explore the room, and then the house; she became familiar with the form, density, weight, and heat, of every article she could lay her hands upon. She followed her mother, and felt her hands and arms, as she was occupied about the house; and her disposition to imitate, led her to repeat everything herself. She even learned to sew a little, and to knit.’
The reader will scarcely need to be told, however, that the opportunities of communicating with her, were very, very limited; and that the moral effects of her wretched state soon began to appear. Those who cannot be enlightened by reason, can only be controlled by force; and this, coupled with her great privations, must soon have reduced her to a worse condition than that of the beasts that perish, but for timely and unhoped-for aid.
‘At this time, I was so fortunate as to hear of the child, and immediately hastened to Hanover to see her. I found her with a well-formed figure; a strongly-marked, nervous-sanguine temperament; a large and beautifully-shaped head; and the whole system in healthy action. The parents were easily induced to consent to her coming to Boston, and on the 4th of October, 1837, they brought her to the Institution.
‘For a while, she was much bewildered; and after waiting about two weeks, until she became acquainted with her new locality, and somewhat familiar with the inmates, the attempt was made to give her knowledge of arbitrary signs, by which she could interchange thoughts with others.
‘There was one of two ways to be adopted: either to go on to build up a language of signs on the basis of the natural language which she had already commenced herself, or to teach her the purely arbitrary language in common use: that is, to give her a sign for every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters by combination of which she might express her idea of the existence, and the mode and condition of existence, of any thing. The former would have been easy, but very ineffectual; the latter seemed very difficult, but, if accomplished, very effectual. I determined therefore to try the latter.
‘The first experiments were made by taking articles in common use, such as knives, forks, spoons, keys, &c., and pasting upon them labels with their names printed in raised letters. These she felt very carefully, and soon, of course, distinguished that the crooked lines spoon, differed as much from the crooked lines key, as the spoon differed from the key in form.
‘Then small detached labels, with the same words printed upon them, were put into her hands; and she soon observed that they were similar to the ones pasted on the articles.’ She showed her perception of this similarity by laying the label key upon the key, and the label spoon upon the spoon. She was encouraged here by the natural sign of approbation, patting on the head.
‘The same process was then repeated with all the articles which she could handle; and she very easily learned to place the proper labels upon them. It was evident, however, that the only intellectual exercise was that of imitation and memory. She recollected that the label book was placed upon a book, and she repeated the process first from imitation, next from memory, with only the motive of love of approbation, but apparently without the intellectual perception of any relation between the things.
‘After a while, instead of labels, the individual letters were given to her on detached bits of paper: they were arranged side by side so as to spell book, key, &c.; then they were mixed up in a heap and a sign was made for her to arrange them herself so as to express the words book, key, &c.; and she did so.
‘Hitherto, the process had been mechanical, and the success about as great as teaching a very knowing dog a variety of tricks. The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated everything her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her: her intellect began to work: she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make up a sign of anything that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot: it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome; and that henceforward nothing but patient and persevering, but plain and straightforward, efforts were to be used.
‘The result thus far, is quickly related, and easily conceived; but not so was the process; for many weeks of apparently unprofitable labour were passed before it was effected.
‘When it was said above that a sign was made, it was intended to say, that the action was performed by her teacher, she feeling his hands, and then imitating the motion.
‘The next step was to procure a set of metal types, with the different letters of the alphabet cast upon their ends; also a board, in which were square holes, into which holes she could set the types; so that the letters on their ends could alone be felt above the surface.
‘Then, on any article being handed to her, for instance, a pencil, or a watch, she would select the component letters, and arrange them on her board, and read them with apparent pleasure.
‘She was exercised for several weeks in this way, until her vocabulary became extensive; and then the important step was taken of teaching her how to represent the different letters by the position of her fingers, instead of the cumbrous apparatus of the board and types. She accomplished this speedily and easily, for her intellect had begun to work in aid of her teacher, and her progress was rapid.
‘This was the period, about three months after she had commenced, that the first report of her case was made, in which it was stated that “she has just learned the manual alphabet, as used by the deaf mutes, and it is a subject of delight and wonder to see how rapidly, correctly, and eagerly, she goes on with her labours. Her teacher gives her a new object, for instance, a pencil, first lets her examine it, and get an idea of its use, then teaches her how to spell it by making the signs for the letters with her own fingers: the child grasps her hand, and feels her fingers, as the different letters are formed; she turns her head a little on one side like a person listening closely; her lips are apart; she seems scarcely to breathe; and her countenance, at first anxious, gradually changes to a smile, as she comprehends the lesson. She then holds up her tiny fingers, and spells the word in the manual alphabet; next, she takes her types and arranges her letters; and last, to make sure that she is right, she takes the whole of the types composing the word, and places them upon or in contact with the pencil, or whatever the object may be.”
‘The whole of the succeeding year was passed in gratifying her eager inquiries for the names of every object which she could possibly handle; in exercising her in the use of the manual alphabet; in extending in every possible way her knowledge of the physical relations of things; and in proper care of her health.
‘At the end of the year a report of her case was made, from which the following is an extract.
‘“It has been ascertained beyond the possibility of doubt, that she cannot see a ray of light, cannot hear the least sound, and never exercises her sense of smell, if she have any. Thus her mind dwells in darkness and stillness, as profound as that of a closed tomb at midnight. Of beautiful sights, and sweet sounds, and pleasant odours, she has no conception; nevertheless, she seems as happy and playful as a bird or a lamb; and the employment of her intellectual faculties, or the acquirement of a new idea, gives her a vivid pleasure, which is plainly marked in her expressive features. She never seems to repine, but has all the buoyancy and gaiety of childhood. She is fond of fun and frolic, and when playing with the rest of the children, her shrill laugh sounds loudest of the group.
‘“When left alone, she seems very happy if she have her knitting or sewing, and will busy herself for hours; if she have no occupation, she evidently amuses herself by imaginary dialogues, or by recalling past impressions; she counts with her fingers, or spells out names of things which she has recently learned, in the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes. In this lonely self-communion she seems to reason, reflect, and argue; if she spell a word wrong with the fingers of her right hand, she instantly strikes it with her left, as her teacher does, in sign of disapprobation; if right, then she pats herself upon the head, and looks pleased. She sometimes purposely spells a word wrong with the left hand, looks roguish for a moment and laughs, and then with the right hand strikes the left, as if to correct it.
‘“During the year she has attained great dexterity in the use of the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes; and she spells out the words and sentences which she knows, so fast and so deftly, that only those accustomed to this language can follow with the eye the rapid motions of her fingers.
‘“But wonderful as is the rapidity with which she writes her thoughts upon the air, still more so is the ease and accuracy with which she reads the words thus written by another; grasping their hands in hers, and following every movement of their fingers, as letter after letter conveys their meaning to her mind. It is in this way that she converses with her blind playmates, and nothing can more forcibly show the power of mind in forcing matter to its purpose than a meeting between them. For if great talent and skill are necessary for two pantomimes to paint their thoughts and feelings by the movements of the body, and the expression of the countenance, how much greater the difficulty when darkness shrouds them both, and the one can hear no sound.
‘“When Laura is walking through a passage-way, with her hands spread before her, she knows instantly every one she meets, and passes them with a sign of recognition: but if it be a girl of her own age, and especially if it be one of her favourites, there is instantly a bright smile of recognition, a twining of arms, a grasping of hands, and a swift telegraphing upon the tiny fingers; whose rapid evolutions convey the thoughts and feelings from the outposts of one mind to those of the other. There are questions and answers, exchanges of joy or sorrow, there are kissings and partings, just as between little children with all their senses.”
‘During this year, and six months after she had left home, her mother came to visit her, and the scene of their meeting was an interesting one.
‘The mother stood some time, gazing with overflowing eyes upon her unfortunate child, who, all unconscious of her presence, was playing about the room. Presently Laura ran against her, and at once began feeling her hands, examining her dress, and trying to find out if she knew her; but not succeeding in this, she turned away as from a stranger, and the poor woman could not conceal the pang she felt, at finding that her beloved child did not know her.
‘She then gave Laura a string of beads which she used to wear at home, which were recognised by the child at once, who, with much joy, put them around her neck, and sought me eagerly to say she understood the string was from her home.
‘The mother now sought to caress her, but poor Laura repelled her, preferring to be with her acquaintances.
‘Another article from home was now given her, and she began to look much interested; she examined the stranger much closer, and gave me to understand that she knew she came from Hanover; she even endured her caresses, but would leave her with indifference at the slightest signal. The distress of the mother was now painful to behold; for, although she had feared that she should not be recognised, the painful reality of being treated with cold indifference by a darling child, was too much for woman’s nature to bear.
‘After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague idea seemed to flit across Laura’s mind, that this could not be a stranger; she therefore felt her hands very eagerly, while her countenance assumed an expression of intense interest; she became very pale; and then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt and anxiety, and never were contending emotions more strongly painted upon the human face: at this moment of painful uncertainty, the mother drew her close to her side, and kissed her fondly, when at once the truth flashed upon the child, and all mistrust and anxiety disappeared from her face, as with an expression of exceeding joy she eagerly nestled to the bosom of her parent, and yielded herself to her fond embraces.
‘After this, the beads were all unheeded; the playthings which were offered to her were utterly disregarded; her playmates, for whom but a moment before she gladly left the stranger, now vainly strove to pull her from her mother; and though she yielded her usual instantaneous obedience to my signal to follow me, it was evidently with painful reluctance. She clung close to me, as if bewildered and fearful; and when, after a moment, I took her to her mother, she sprang to her arms, and clung to her with eager joy.
‘The subsequent parting between them, showed alike the affection, the intelligence, and the resolution of the child.
‘Laura accompanied her mother to the door, clinging close to her all the way, until they arrived at the threshold, where she paused, and felt around, to ascertain who was near her. Perceiving the matron, of whom she is very fond, she grasped her with one hand, holding on convulsively to her mother with the other; and thus she stood for a moment: then she dropped her mother’s hand; put her handkerchief to her eyes; and turning round, clung sobbing to the matron; while her mother departed, with emotions as deep as those of her child.
‘It has been remarked in former reports, that she can distinguish different degrees of intellect in others, and that she soon regarded, almost with contempt, a new-comer, when, after a few days, she discovered her weakness of mind. This unamiable part of her character has been more strongly developed during the past year.
‘She chooses for her friends and companions, those children who are intelligent, and can talk best with her; and she evidently dislikes to be with those who are deficient in intellect, unless, indeed, she can make them serve her purposes, which she is evidently inclined to do. She takes advantage of them, and makes them wait upon her, in a manner that she knows she could not exact of others; and in various ways shows her Saxon blood.
‘She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried too far, or she becomes jealous. She wants to have her share, which, if not the lion’s, is the greater part; and if she does not get it, she says, “My mother will love me.”
‘Her tendency to imitation is so strong, that it leads her to actions which must be entirely incomprehensible to her, and which can give her no other pleasure than the gratification of an internal faculty. She has been known to sit for half an hour, holding a book before her sightless eyes, and moving her lips, as she has observed seeing people do when reading.
‘She one day pretended that her doll was sick; and went through all the motions of tending it, and giving it medicine; she then put it carefully to bed, and placed a bottle of hot water to its feet, laughing all the time most heartily. When I came home, she insisted upon my going to see it, and feel its pulse; and when I told her to put a blister on its back, she seemed to enjoy it amazingly, and almost screamed with delight.
‘Her social feelings, and her affections, are very strong; and when she is sitting at work, or at her studies, by the side of one of her little friends, she will break off from her task every few moments, to hug and kiss them with an earnestness and warmth that is touching to behold.
‘When left alone, she occupies and apparently amuses herself, and seems quite contented; and so strong seems to be the natural tendency of thought to put on the garb of language, that she often soliloquizes in the finger language, slow and tedious as it is. But it is only when alone, that she is quiet: for if she becomes sensible of the presence of any one near her, she is restless until she can sit close beside them, hold their hand, and converse with them by signs.
‘In her intellectual character it is pleasing to observe an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and a quick perception of the relations of things. In her moral character, it is beautiful to behold her continual gladness, her keen enjoyment of existence, her expansive love, her unhesitating confidence, her sympathy with suffering, her conscientiousness, truthfulness, and hopefulness.’
Such are a few fragments from the simple but most interesting and instructive history of Laura Bridgman. The name of her great benefactor and friend, who writes it, is Dr. Howe. There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who, after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference.
A further account has been published by Dr. Howe, since the report from which I have just quoted. It describes her rapid mental growth and improvement during twelve months more, and brings her little history down to the end of last year. It is very remarkable, that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep. And it has been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and confused manner on her fingers: just as we should murmur and mutter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances.
I turned over the leaves of her Diary, and found it written in a fair legible square hand, and expressed in terms which were quite intelligible without any explanation. On my saying that I should like to see her write again, the teacher who sat beside her, bade her, in their language, sign her name upon a slip of paper, twice or thrice. In doing so, I observed that she kept her left hand always touching, and following up, her right, in which, of course, she held the pen. No line was indicated by any contrivance, but she wrote straight and freely.
She had, until now, been quite unconscious of the presence of visitors; but, having her hand placed in that of the gentleman who accompanied me, she immediately expressed his name upon her teacher’s palm. Indeed her sense of touch is now so exquisite, that having been acquainted with a person once, she can recognise him or her after almost any interval. This gentleman had been in her company, I believe, but very seldom, and certainly had not seen her for many months. My hand she rejected at once, as she does that of any man who is a stranger to her. But she retained my wife’s with evident pleasure, kissed her, and examined her dress with a girl’s curiosity and interest.
She was merry and cheerful, and showed much innocent playfulness in her intercourse with her teacher. Her delight on recognising a favourite playfellow and companion—herself a blind girl—who silently, and with an equal enjoyment of the coming surprise, took a seat beside her, was beautiful to witness. It elicited from her at first, as other slight circumstances did twice or thrice during my visit, an uncouth noise which was rather painful to hear. But of her teacher touching her lips, she immediately desisted, and embraced her laughingly and affectionately.
I had previously been into another chamber, where a number of blind boys were swinging, and climbing, and engaged in various sports. They all clamoured, as we entered, to the assistant-master, who accompanied us, ‘Look at me, Mr. Hart! Please, Mr. Hart, look at me!’ evincing, I thought, even in this, an anxiety peculiar to their condition, that their little feats of agility should be seen. Among them was a small laughing fellow, who stood aloof, entertaining himself with a gymnastic exercise for bringing the arms and chest into play; which he enjoyed mightily; especially when, in thrusting out his right arm, he brought it into contact with another boy. Like Laura Bridgman, this young child was deaf, and dumb, and blind.
Dr. Howe’s account of this pupil’s first instruction is so very striking, and so intimately connected with Laura herself, that I cannot refrain from a short extract. I may premise that the poor boy’s name is Oliver Caswell; that he is thirteen years of age; and that he was in full possession of all his faculties, until three years and four months old. He was then attacked by scarlet fever; in four weeks became deaf; in a few weeks more, blind; in six months, dumb. He showed his anxious sense of this last deprivation, by often feeling the lips of other persons when they were talking, and then putting his hand upon his own, as if to assure himself that he had them in the right position.
‘His thirst for knowledge,’ says Dr. Howe, ‘proclaimed itself as soon as he entered the house, by his eager examination of everything he could feel or smell in his new location. For instance, treading upon the register of a furnace, he instantly stooped down, and began to feel it, and soon discovered the way in which the upper plate moved upon the lower one; but this was not enough for him, so lying down upon his face, he applied his tongue first to one, then to the other, and seemed to discover that they were of different kinds of metal.
‘His signs were expressive: and the strictly natural language, laughing, crying, sighing, kissing, embracing, &c., was perfect.
‘Some of the analogical signs which (guided by his faculty of imitation) he had contrived, were comprehensible; such as the waving motion of his hand for the motion of a boat, the circular one for a wheel, &c.
‘The first object was to break up the use of these signs and to substitute for them the use of purely arbitrary ones.
‘Profiting by the experience I had gained in the other cases, I omitted several steps of the process before employed, and commenced at once with the finger language. Taking, therefore, several articles having short names, such as key, cup, mug, &c., and with Laura for an auxiliary, I sat down, and taking his hand, placed it upon one of them, and then with my own, made the letters key. He felt my hands eagerly with both of his, and on my repeating the process, he evidently tried to imitate the motions of my fingers. In a few minutes he contrived to feel the motions of my fingers with one hand, and holding out the other he tried to imitate them, laughing most heartily when he succeeded. Laura was by, interested even to agitation; and the two presented a singular sight: her face was flushed and anxious, and her fingers twining in among ours so closely as to follow every motion, but so slightly as not to embarrass them; while Oliver stood attentive, his head a little aside, his face turned up, his left hand grasping mine, and his right held out: at every motion of my fingers his countenance betokened keen attention; there was an expression of anxiety as he tried to imitate the motions; then a smile came stealing out as he thought he could do so, and spread into a joyous laugh the moment he succeeded, and felt me pat his head, and Laura clap him heartily upon the back, and jump up and down in her joy.
‘He learned more than a half-dozen letters in half an hour, and seemed delighted with his success, at least in gaining approbation. His attention then began to flag, and I commenced playing with him. It was evident that in all this he had merely been imitating the motions of my fingers, and placing his hand upon the key, cup, &c., as part of the process, without any perception of the relation between the sign and the object.
‘When he was tired with play I took him back to the table, and he was quite ready to begin again his process of imitation. He soon learned to make the letters for key, pen, pin; and by having the object repeatedly placed in his hand, he at last perceived the relation I wished to establish between them. This was evident, because, when I made the letters pin, or pen, or cup, he would select the article.
‘The perception of this relation was not accompanied by that radiant flash of intelligence, and that glow of joy, which marked the delightful moment when Laura first perceived it. I then placed all the articles on the table, and going away a little distance with the children, placed Oliver’s fingers in the positions to spell key, on which Laura went and brought the article: the little fellow seemed much amused by this, and looked very attentive and smiling. I then caused him to make the letters bread, and in an instant Laura went and brought him a piece: he smelled at it; put it to his lips; cocked up his head with a most knowing look; seemed to reflect a moment; and then laughed outright, as much as to say, “Aha! I understand now how something may be made out of this.”
‘It was now clear that he had the capacity and inclination to learn, that he was a proper subject for instruction, and needed only persevering attention. I therefore put him in the hands of an intelligent teacher, nothing doubting of his rapid progress.’
Well may this gentleman call that a delightful moment, in which some distant promise of her present state first gleamed upon the darkened mind of Laura Bridgman. Throughout his life, the recollection of that moment will be to him a source of pure, unfading happiness; nor will it shine less brightly on the evening of his days of Noble Usefulness.
The affection which exists between these two—the master and the pupil—is as far removed from all ordinary care and regard, as the circumstances in which it has had its growth, are apart from the common occurrences of life. He is occupied now, in devising means of imparting to her, higher knowledge; and of conveying to her some adequate idea of the Great Creator of that universe in which, dark and silent and scentless though it be to her, she has such deep delight and glad enjoyment.
Ye who have eyes and see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind! Self-elected saints with gloomy brows, this sightless, earless, voiceless child may teach you lessons you will do well to follow. Let that poor hand of hers lie gently on your hearts; for there may be something in its healing touch akin to that of the Great Master whose precepts you misconstrue, whose lessons you pervert, of whose charity and sympathy with all the world, not one among you in his daily practice knows as much as many of the worst among those fallen sinners, to whom you are liberal in nothing but the preachment of perdition!
As I rose to quit the room, a pretty little child of one of the attendants came running in to greet its father. For the moment, a child with eyes, among the sightless crowd, impressed me almost as painfully as the blind boy in the porch had done, two hours ago. Ah! how much brighter and more deeply blue, glowing and rich though it had been before, was the scene without, contrasting with the darkness of so many youthful lives within!
At SOUTH BOSTON, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered together. One of these, is the State Hospital for the insane; admirably conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical, and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper Asylum at Hanwell. ‘Evince a desire to show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people,’ said the resident physician, as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a Juryman on a Commission of Lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall, with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand. Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and when the weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a matter of course, among a throng of mad-women, black and white, were the physician’s wife and another lady, with a couple of children. These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to perceive at a glance that even their presence there, had a highly beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.
Leaning her head against the chimney-piece, with a great assumption of dignity and refinement of manner, sat an elderly female, in as many scraps of finery as Madge Wildfire herself. Her head in particular was so strewn with scraps of gauze and cotton and bits of paper, and had so many queer odds and ends stuck all about it, that it looked like a bird’s-nest. She was radiant with imaginary jewels; wore a rich pair of undoubted gold spectacles; and gracefully dropped upon her lap, as we approached, a very old greasy newspaper, in which I dare say she had been reading an account of her own presentation at some Foreign Court.
I have been thus particular in describing her, because she will serve to exemplify the physician’s manner of acquiring and retaining the confidence of his patients.
‘This,’ he said aloud, taking me by the hand, and advancing to the fantastic figure with great politeness—not raising her suspicions by the slightest look or whisper, or any kind of aside, to me: ‘This lady is the hostess of this mansion, sir. It belongs to her. Nobody else has anything whatever to do with it. It is a large establishment, as you see, and requires a great number of attendants. She lives, you observe, in the very first style. She is kind enough to receive my visits, and to permit my wife and family to reside here; for which it is hardly necessary to say, we are much indebted to her. She is exceedingly courteous, you perceive,’ on this hint she bowed condescendingly, ‘and will permit me to have the pleasure of introducing you: a gentleman from England, Ma’am: newly arrived from England, after a very tempestuous passage: Mr. Dickens,—the lady of the house!’
We exchanged the most dignified salutations with profound gravity and respect, and so went on. The rest of the madwomen seemed to understand the joke perfectly (not only in this case, but in all the others, except their own), and be highly amused by it. The nature of their several kinds of insanity was made known to me in the same way, and we left each of them in high good humour. Not only is a thorough confidence established, by those means, between the physician and patient, in respect of the nature and extent of their hallucinations, but it is easy to understand that opportunities are afforded for seizing any moment of reason, to startle them by placing their own delusion before them in its most incongruous and ridiculous light.
Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman, whose manner of dealing with his charges, I have just described. At every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured since the creation of the world.
In the labour department, every patient is as freely trusted with the tools of his trade as if he were a sane man. In the garden, and on the farm, they work with spades, rakes, and hoes. For amusement, they walk, run, fish, paint, read, and ride out to take the air in carriages provided for the purpose. They have among themselves a sewing society to make clothes for the poor, which holds meetings, passes resolutions, never comes to fisty-cuffs or bowie-knives as sane assemblies have been known to do elsewhere; and conducts all its proceedings with the greatest decorum. The irritability, which would otherwise be expended on their own flesh, clothes, and furniture, is dissipated in these pursuits. They are cheerful, tranquil, and healthy.
Once a week they have a ball, in which the Doctor and his family, with all the nurses and attendants, take an active part. Dances and marches are performed alternately, to the enlivening strains of a piano; and now and then some gentleman or lady (whose proficiency has been previously ascertained) obliges the company with a song: nor does it ever degenerate, at a tender crisis, into a screech or howl; wherein, I must confess, I should have thought the danger lay. At an early hour they all meet together for these festive purposes; at eight o’clock refreshments are served; and at nine they separate.
Immense politeness and good breeding are observed throughout. They all take their tone from the Doctor; and he moves a very Chesterfield among the company. Like other assemblies, these entertainments afford a fruitful topic of conversation among the ladies for some days; and the gentlemen are so anxious to shine on these occasions, that they have been sometimes found ‘practising their steps’ in private, to cut a more distinguished figure in the dance.
It is obvious that one great feature of this system, is the inculcation and encouragement, even among such unhappy persons, of a decent self-respect. Something of the same spirit pervades all the Institutions at South Boston.
There is the House of Industry. In that branch of it, which is devoted to the reception of old or otherwise helpless paupers, these words are painted on the walls: ‘WORTHY OF NOTICE. SELF-GOVERNMENT, QUIETUDE, AND PEACE, ARE BLESSINGS.’ It is not assumed and taken for granted that being there they must be evil-disposed and wicked people, before whose vicious eyes it is necessary to flourish threats and harsh restraints. They are met at the very threshold with this mild appeal. All within-doors is very plain and simple, as it ought to be, but arranged with a view to peace and comfort. It costs no more than any other plan of arrangement, but it speaks an amount of consideration for those who are reduced to seek a shelter there, which puts them at once upon their gratitude and good behaviour. Instead of being parcelled out in great, long, rambling wards, where a certain amount of weazen life may mope, and pine, and shiver, all day long, the building is divided into separate rooms, each with its share of light and air. In these, the better kind of paupers live. They have a motive for exertion and becoming pride, in the desire to make these little chambers comfortable and decent.
I do not remember one but it was clean and neat, and had its plant or two upon the window-sill, or row of crockery upon the shelf, or small display of coloured prints upon the whitewashed wall, or, perhaps, its wooden clock behind the door.
The orphans and young children are in an adjoining building separate from this, but a part of the same Institution. Some are such little creatures, that the stairs are of Lilliputian measurement, fitted to their tiny strides. The same consideration for their years and weakness is expressed in their very seats, which are perfect curiosities, and look like articles of furniture for a pauper doll’s-house. I can imagine the glee of our Poor Law Commissioners at the notion of these seats having arms and backs; but small spines being of older date than their occupation of the Board-room at Somerset House, I thought even this provision very merciful and kind.
Here again, I was greatly pleased with the inscriptions on the wall, which were scraps of plain morality, easily remembered and understood: such as ‘Love one another’—‘God remembers the smallest creature in his creation:’ and straightforward advice of that nature. The books and tasks of these smallest of scholars, were adapted, in the same judicious manner, to their childish powers. When we had examined these lessons, four morsels of girls (of whom one was blind) sang a little song, about the merry month of May, which I thought (being extremely dismal) would have suited an English November better. That done, we went to see their sleeping-rooms on the floor above, in which the arrangements were no less excellent and gentle than those we had seen below. And after observing that the teachers were of a class and character well suited to the spirit of the place, I took leave of the infants with a lighter heart than ever I have taken leave of pauper infants yet.
Connected with the House of Industry, there is also an Hospital, which was in the best order, and had, I am glad to say, many beds unoccupied. It had one fault, however, which is common to all American interiors: the presence of the eternal, accursed, suffocating, red-hot demon of a stove, whose breath would blight the purest air under Heaven.
There are two establishments for boys in this same neighbourhood. One is called the Boylston school, and is an asylum for neglected and indigent boys who have committed no crime, but who in the ordinary course of things would very soon be purged of that distinction if they were not taken from the hungry streets and sent here. The other is a House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders. They are both under the same roof, but the two classes of boys never come in contact.
The Boylston boys, as may be readily supposed, have very much the advantage of the others in point of personal appearance. They were in their school-room when I came upon them, and answered correctly, without book, such questions as where was England; how far was it; what was its population; its capital city; its form of government; and so forth. They sang a song too, about a farmer sowing his seed: with corresponding action at such parts as ‘’tis thus he sows,’ ‘he turns him round,’ ‘he claps his hands;’ which gave it greater interest for them, and accustomed them to act together, in an orderly manner. They appeared exceedingly well-taught, and not better taught than fed; for a more chubby-looking full-waistcoated set of boys, I never saw.
The juvenile offenders had not such pleasant faces by a great deal, and in this establishment there were many boys of colour. I saw them first at their work (basket-making, and the manufacture of palm-leaf hats), afterwards in their school, where they sang a chorus in praise of Liberty: an odd, and, one would think, rather aggravating, theme for prisoners. These boys are divided into four classes, each denoted by a numeral, worn on a badge upon the arm. On the arrival of a new-comer, he is put into the fourth or lowest class, and left, by good behaviour, to work his way up into the first. The design and object of this Institution is to reclaim the youthful criminal by firm but kind and judicious treatment; to make his prison a place of purification and improvement, not of demoralisation and corruption; to impress upon him that there is but one path, and that one sober industry, which can ever lead him to happiness; to teach him how it may be trodden, if his footsteps have never yet been led that way; and to lure him back to it if they have strayed: in a word, to snatch him from destruction, and restore him to society a penitent and useful member. The importance of such an establishment, in every point of view, and with reference to every consideration of humanity and social policy, requires no comment.
One other establishment closes the catalogue. It is the House of Correction for the State, in which silence is strictly maintained, but where the prisoners have the comfort and mental relief of seeing each other, and of working together. This is the improved system of Prison Discipline which we have imported into England, and which has been in successful operation among us for some years past.
America, as a new and not over-populated country, has in all her prisons, the one great advantage, of being enabled to find useful and profitable work for the inmates; whereas, with us, the prejudice against prison labour is naturally very strong, and almost insurmountable, when honest men who have not offended against the laws are frequently doomed to seek employment in vain. Even in the United States, the principle of bringing convict labour and free labour into a competition which must obviously be to the disadvantage of the latter, has already found many opponents, whose number is not likely to diminish with access of years.
For this very reason though, our best prisons would seem at the first glance to be better conducted than those of America. The treadmill is conducted with little or no noise; five hundred men may pick oakum in the same room, without a sound; and both kinds of labour admit of such keen and vigilant superintendence, as will render even a word of personal communication amongst the prisoners almost impossible. On the other hand, the noise of the loom, the forge, the carpenter’s hammer, or the stonemason’s saw, greatly favour those opportunities of intercourse—hurried and brief no doubt, but opportunities still—which these several kinds of work, by rendering it necessary for men to be employed very near to each other, and often side by side, without any barrier or partition between them, in their very nature present. A visitor, too, requires to reason and reflect a little, before the sight of a number of men engaged in ordinary labour, such as he is accustomed to out of doors, will impress him half as strongly as the contemplation of the same persons in the same place and garb would, if they were occupied in some task, marked and degraded everywhere as belonging only to felons in jails. In an American state prison or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade myself that I was really in a jail: a place of ignominious punishment and endurance. And to this hour I very much question whether the humane boast that it is not like one, has its root in the true wisdom or philosophy of the matter.
I hope I may not be misunderstood on this subject, for it is one in which I take a strong and deep interest. I incline as little to the sickly feeling which makes every canting lie or maudlin speech of a notorious criminal a subject of newspaper report and general sympathy, as I do to those good old customs of the good old times which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third King George, in respect of her criminal code and her prison regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries on the earth. If I thought it would do any good to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or that their wonderful escapes were effected by the prison-turnkeys who, in those admirable days, had always been felons themselves, and were, to the last, their bosom-friends and pot-companions. At the same time I know, as all men do or should, that the subject of Prison Discipline is one of the highest importance to any community; and that in her sweeping reform and bright example to other countries on this head, America has shown great wisdom, great benevolence, and exalted policy. In contrasting her system with that which we have modelled upon it, I merely seek to show that with all its drawbacks, ours has some advantages of its own.
The House of Correction which has led to these remarks, is not walled, like other prisons, but is palisaded round about with tall rough stakes, something after the manner of an enclosure for keeping elephants in, as we see it represented in Eastern prints and pictures. The prisoners wear a parti-coloured dress; and those who are sentenced to hard labour, work at nail-making, or stone-cutting. When I was there, the latter class of labourers were employed upon the stone for a new custom-house in course of erection at Boston. They appeared to shape it skilfully and with expedition, though there were very few among them (if any) who had not acquired the art within the prison gates.
The women, all in one large room, were employed in making light clothing, for New Orleans and the Southern States. They did their work in silence like the men; and like them were over-looked by the person contracting for their labour, or by some agent of his appointment. In addition to this, they are every moment liable to be visited by the prison officers appointed for that purpose.
The arrangements for cooking, washing of clothes, and so forth, are much upon the plan of those I have seen at home. Their mode of bestowing the prisoners at night (which is of general adoption) differs from ours, and is both simple and effective. In the centre of a lofty area, lighted by windows in the four walls, are five tiers of cells, one above the other; each tier having before it a light iron gallery, attainable by stairs of the same construction and material: excepting the lower one, which is on the ground. Behind these, back to back with them and facing the opposite wall, are five corresponding rows of cells, accessible by similar means: so that supposing the prisoners locked up in their cells, an officer stationed on the ground, with his back to the wall, has half their number under his eye at once; the remaining half being equally under the observation of another officer on the opposite side; and all in one great apartment. Unless this watch be corrupted or sleeping on his post, it is impossible for a man to escape; for even in the event of his forcing the iron door of his cell without noise (which is exceedingly improbable), the moment he appears outside, and steps into that one of the five galleries on which it is situated, he must be plainly and fully visible to the officer below. Each of these cells holds a small truckle bed, in which one prisoner sleeps; never more. It is small, of course; and the door being not solid, but grated, and without blind or curtain, the prisoner within is at all times exposed to the observation and inspection of any guard who may pass along that tier at any hour or minute of the night. Every day, the prisoners receive their dinner, singly, through a trap in the kitchen wall; and each man carries his to his sleeping cell to eat it, where he is locked up, alone, for that purpose, one hour. The whole of this arrangement struck me as being admirable; and I hope that the next new prison we erect in England may be built on this plan.
I was given to understand that in this prison no swords or fire-arms, or even cudgels, are kept; nor is it probable that, so long as its present excellent management continues, any weapon, offensive or defensive, will ever be required within its bounds.
Such are the Institutions at South Boston! In all of them, the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to, as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong Heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand. I have described them at some length; firstly, because their worth demanded it; and secondly, because I mean to take them for a model, and to content myself with saying of others we may come to, whose design and purpose are the same, that in this or that respect they practically fail, or differ.
I wish by this account of them, imperfect in its execution, but in its just intention, honest, I could hope to convey to my readers one-hundredth part of the gratification, the sights I have described, afforded me.
To an Englishman, accustomed to the paraphernalia of Westminster Hall, an American Court of Law is as odd a sight as, I suppose, an English Court of Law would be to an American. Except in the Supreme Court at Washington (where the judges wear a plain black robe), there is no such thing as a wig or gown connected with the administration of justice. The gentlemen of the bar being barristers and attorneys too (for there is no division of those functions as in England) are no more removed from their clients than attorneys in our Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors are, from theirs. The jury are quite at home, and make themselves as comfortable as circumstances will permit. The witness is so little elevated above, or put aloof from, the crowd in the court, that a stranger entering during a pause in the proceedings would find it difficult to pick him out from the rest. And if it chanced to be a criminal trial, his eyes, in nine cases out of ten, would wander to the dock in search of the prisoner, in vain; for that gentleman would most likely be lounging among the most distinguished ornaments of the legal profession, whispering suggestions in his counsel’s ear, or making a toothpick out of an old quill with his penknife.
I could not but notice these differences, when I visited the courts at Boston. I was much surprised at first, too, to observe that the counsel who interrogated the witness under examination at the time, did so sitting. But seeing that he was also occupied in writing down the answers, and remembering that he was alone and had no ‘junior,’ I quickly consoled myself with the reflection that law was not quite so expensive an article here, as at home; and that the absence of sundry formalities which we regard as indispensable, had doubtless a very favourable influence upon the bill of costs.
In every Court, ample and commodious provision is made for the accommodation of the citizens. This is the case all through America. In every Public Institution, the right of the people to attend, and to have an interest in the proceedings, is most fully and distinctly recognised. There are no grim door-keepers to dole out their tardy civility by the sixpenny-worth; nor is there, I sincerely believe, any insolence of office of any kind. Nothing national is exhibited for money; and no public officer is a showman. We have begun of late years to imitate this good example. I hope we shall continue to do so; and that in the fulness of time, even deans and chapters may be converted.
In the civil court an action was trying, for damages sustained in some accident upon a railway. The witnesses had been examined, and counsel was addressing the jury. The learned gentleman (like a few of his English brethren) was desperately long-winded, and had a remarkable capacity of saying the same thing over and over again. His great theme was ‘Warren the ěn_gine_ driver,’ whom he pressed into the service of every sentence he uttered. I listened to him for about a quarter of an hour; and, coming out of court at the expiration of that time, without the faintest ray of enlightenment as to the merits of the case, felt as if I were at home again.
In the prisoner’s cell, waiting to be examined by the magistrate on a charge of theft, was a boy. This lad, instead of being committed to a common jail, would be sent to the asylum at South Boston, and there taught a trade; and in the course of time he would be bound apprentice to some respectable master. Thus, his detection in this offence, instead of being the prelude to a life of infamy and a miserable death, would lead, there was a reasonable hope, to his being reclaimed from vice, and becoming a worthy member of society.
I am by no means a wholesale admirer of our legal solemnities, many of which impress me as being exceedingly ludicrous. Strange as it may seem too, there is undoubtedly a degree of protection in the wig and gown—a dismissal of individual responsibility in dressing for the part—which encourages that insolent bearing and language, and that gross perversion of the office of a pleader for The Truth, so frequent in our courts of law. Still, I cannot help doubting whether America, in her desire to shake off the absurdities and abuses of the old system, may not have gone too far into the opposite extreme; and whether it is not desirable, especially in the small community of a city like this, where each man knows the other, to surround the administration of justice with some artificial barriers against the ‘Hail fellow, well met’ deportment of everyday life. All the aid it can have in the very high character and ability of the Bench, not only here but elsewhere, it has, and well deserves to have; but it may need something more: not to impress the thoughtful and the well-informed, but the ignorant and heedless; a class which includes some prisoners and many witnesses. These institutions were established, no doubt, upon the principle that those who had so large a share in making the laws, would certainly respect them. But experience has proved this hope to be fallacious; for no men know better than the judges of America, that on the occasion of any great popular excitement the law is powerless, and cannot, for the time, assert its own supremacy.
The tone of society in Boston is one of perfect politeness, courtesy, and good breeding. The ladies are unquestionably very beautiful—in face: but there I am compelled to stop. Their education is much as with us; neither better nor worse. I had heard some very marvellous stories in this respect; but not believing them, was not disappointed. Blue ladies there are, in Boston; but like philosophers of that colour and sex in most other latitudes, they rather desire to be thought superior than to be so. Evangelical ladies there are, likewise, whose attachment to the forms of religion, and horror of theatrical entertainments, are most exemplary. Ladies who have a passion for attending lectures are to be found among all classes and all conditions. In the kind of provincial life which prevails in cities such as this, the Pulpit has great influence. The peculiar province of the Pulpit in New England (always excepting the Unitarian Ministry) would appear to be the denouncement of all innocent and rational amusements. The church, the chapel, and the lecture-room, are the only means of excitement excepted; and to the church, the chapel, and the lecture-room, the ladies resort in crowds.
Wherever religion is resorted to, as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous; and they who enlarge with the greatest pertinacity on the difficulty of getting into heaven, will be considered by all true believers certain of going there: though it would be hard to say by what process of reasoning this conclusion is arrived at. It is so at home, and it is so abroad. With regard to the other means of excitement, the Lecture, it has at least the merit of being always new. One lecture treads so quickly on the heels of another, that none are remembered; and the course of this month may be safely repeated next, with its charm of novelty unbroken, and its interest unabated.
The fruits of the earth have their growth in corruption. Out of the rottenness of these things, there has sprung up in Boston a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.
The only preacher I heard in Boston was Mr. Taylor, who addresses himself peculiarly to seamen, and who was once a mariner himself. I found his chapel down among the shipping, in one of the narrow, old, water-side streets, with a gay blue flag waving freely from its roof. In the gallery opposite to the pulpit were a little choir of male and female singers, a violoncello, and a violin. The preacher already sat in the pulpit, which was raised on pillars, and ornamented behind him with painted drapery of a lively and somewhat theatrical appearance. He looked a weather-beaten hard-featured man, of about six or eight and fifty; with deep lines graven as it were into his face, dark hair, and a stern, keen eye. Yet the general character of his countenance was pleasant and agreeable. The service commenced with a hymn, to which succeeded an extemporary prayer. It had the fault of frequent repetition, incidental to all such prayers; but it was plain and comprehensive in its doctrines, and breathed a tone of general sympathy and charity, which is not so commonly a characteristic of this form of address to the Deity as it might be. That done he opened his discourse, taking for his text a passage from the Song of Solomon, laid upon the desk before the commencement of the service by some unknown member of the congregation: ‘Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning on the arm of her beloved!’
He handled his text in all kinds of ways, and twisted it into all manner of shapes; but always ingeniously, and with a rude eloquence, well adapted to the comprehension of his hearers. Indeed if I be not mistaken, he studied their sympathies and understandings much more than the display of his own powers. His imagery was all drawn from the sea, and from the incidents of a seaman’s life; and was often remarkably good. He spoke to them of ‘that glorious man, Lord Nelson,’ and of Collingwood; and drew nothing in, as the saying is, by the head and shoulders, but brought it to bear upon his purpose, naturally, and with a sharp mind to its effect. Sometimes, when much excited with his subject, he had an odd way—compounded of John Bunyan, and Balfour of Burley—of taking his great quarto Bible under his arm and pacing up and down the pulpit with it; looking steadily down, meantime, into the midst of the congregation. Thus, when he applied his text to the first assemblage of his hearers, and pictured the wonder of the church at their presumption in forming a congregation among themselves, he stopped short with his Bible under his arm in the manner I have described, and pursued his discourse after this manner:
‘Who are these—who are they—who are these fellows? where do they come from? Where are they going to?—Come from! What’s the answer?’—leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with his right hand: ‘From below!’—starting back again, and looking at the sailors before him: ‘From below, my brethren. From under the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one. That’s where you came from!’—a walk up and down the pulpit: ‘and where are you going’—stopping abruptly: ‘where are you going? Aloft!’—very softly, and pointing upward: ‘Aloft!’—louder: ‘aloft!’—louder still: ‘That’s where you are going—with a fair wind,—all taut and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory, where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’—Another walk: ‘That’s where you’re going to, my friends. That’s it. That’s the place. That’s the port. That’s the haven. It’s a blessed harbour—still water there, in all changes of the winds and tides; no driving ashore upon the rocks, or slipping your cables and running out to sea, there: Peace—Peace—Peace—all peace!’—Another walk, and patting the Bible under his left arm: ‘What! These fellows are coming from the wilderness, are they? Yes. From the dreary, blighted wilderness of Iniquity, whose only crop is Death. But do they lean upon anything—do they lean upon nothing, these poor seamen?’—Three raps upon the Bible: ‘Oh yes.—Yes.—They lean upon the arm of their Beloved’—three more raps: ‘upon the arm of their Beloved’—three more, and a walk: ‘Pilot, guiding-star, and compass, all in one, to all hands—here it is’—three more: ‘Here it is. They can do their seaman’s duty manfully, and be easy in their minds in the utmost peril and danger, with this’—two more: ‘They can come, even these poor fellows can come, from the wilderness leaning on the arm of their Beloved, and go up—up—up!’—raising his hand higher, and higher, at every repetition of the word, so that he stood with it at last stretched above his head, regarding them in a strange, rapt manner, and pressing the book triumphantly to his breast, until he gradually subsided into some other portion of his discourse.
I have cited this, rather as an instance of the preacher’s eccentricities than his merits, though taken in connection with his look and manner, and the character of his audience, even this was striking. It is possible, however, that my favourable impression of him may have been greatly influenced and strengthened, firstly, by his impressing upon his hearers that the true observance of religion was not inconsistent with a cheerful deportment and an exact discharge of the duties of their station, which, indeed, it scrupulously required of them; and secondly, by his cautioning them not to set up any monopoly in Paradise and its mercies. I never heard these two points so wisely touched (if indeed I have ever heard them touched at all), by any preacher of that kind before.
Having passed the time I spent in Boston, in making myself acquainted with these things, in settling the course I should take in my future travels, and in mixing constantly with its society, I am not aware that I have any occasion to prolong this chapter. Such of its social customs as I have not mentioned, however, may be told in a very few words.
The usual dinner-hour is two o’clock. A dinner party takes place at five; and at an evening party, they seldom sup later than eleven; so that it goes hard but one gets home, even from a rout, by midnight. I never could find out any difference between a party at Boston and a party in London, saving that at the former place all assemblies are held at more rational hours; that the conversation may possibly be a little louder and more cheerful; and a guest is usually expected to ascend to the very top of the house to take his cloak off; that he is certain to see, at every dinner, an unusual amount of poultry on the table; and at every supper, at least two mighty bowls of hot stewed oysters, in any one of which a half-grown Duke of Clarence might be smothered easily.
There are two theatres in Boston, of good size and construction, but sadly in want of patronage. The few ladies who resort to them, sit, as of right, in the front rows of the boxes.
The bar is a large room with a stone floor, and there people stand and smoke, and lounge about, all the evening: dropping in and out as the humour takes them. There too the stranger is initiated into the mysteries of Gin-sling, Cock-tail, Sangaree, Mint Julep, Sherry-cobbler, Timber Doodle, and other rare drinks. The house is full of boarders, both married and single, many of whom sleep upon the premises, and contract by the week for their board and lodging: the charge for which diminishes as they go nearer the sky to roost. A public table is laid in a very handsome hall for breakfast, and for dinner, and for supper. The party sitting down together to these meals will vary in number from one to two hundred: sometimes more. The advent of each of these epochs in the day is proclaimed by an awful gong, which shakes the very window-frames as it reverberates through the house, and horribly disturbs nervous foreigners. There is an ordinary for ladies, and an ordinary for gentlemen.
In our private room the cloth could not, for any earthly consideration, have been laid for dinner without a huge glass dish of cranberries in the middle of the table; and breakfast would have been no breakfast unless the principal dish were a deformed beef-steak with a great flat bone in the centre, swimming in hot butter, and sprinkled with the very blackest of all possible pepper. Our bedroom was spacious and airy, but (like every bedroom on this side of the Atlantic) very bare of furniture, having no curtains to the French bedstead or to the window. It had one unusual luxury, however, in the shape of a wardrobe of painted wood, something smaller than an English watch-box; or if this comparison should be insufficient to convey a just idea of its dimensions, they may be estimated from the fact of my having lived for fourteen days and nights in the firm belief that it was a shower-bath.
CHAPTER IV AN AMERICAN RAILROAD. LOWELL AND ITS FACTORY SYSTEM
BEFORE leaving Boston, I devoted one day to an excursion to Lowell. I assign a separate chapter to this visit; not because I am about to describe it at any great length, but because I remember it as a thing by itself, and am desirous that my readers should do the same.
I made acquaintance with an American railroad, on this occasion, for the first time. As these works are pretty much alike all through the States, their general characteristics are easily described.
There are no first and second class carriages as with us; but there is a gentleman’s car and a ladies’ car: the main distinction between which is that in the first, everybody smokes; and in the second, nobody does. As a black man never travels with a white one, there is also a negro car; which is a great, blundering, clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in, from the kingdom of Brobdingnag. There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell.
The cars are like shabby omnibuses, but larger: holding thirty, forty, fifty, people. The seats, instead of stretching from end to end, are placed crosswise. Each seat holds two persons. There is a long row of them on each side of the caravan, a narrow passage up the middle, and a door at both ends. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal; which is for the most part red-hot. It is insufferably close; and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may happen to look at, like the ghost of smoke.
In the ladies’ car, there are a great many gentlemen who have ladies with them. There are also a great many ladies who have nobody with them: for any lady may travel alone, from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere. The conductor or check-taker, or guard, or whatever he may be, wears no uniform. He walks up and down the car, and in and out of it, as his fancy dictates; leans against the door with his hands in his pockets and stares at you, if you chance to be a stranger; or enters into conversation with the passengers about him. A great many newspapers are pulled out, and a few of them are read. Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy. If you are an Englishman, he expects that that railroad is pretty much like an English railroad. If you say ‘No,’ he says ‘Yes?’ (interrogatively), and asks in what respect they differ. You enumerate the heads of difference, one by one, and he says ‘Yes?’ (still interrogatively) to each. Then he guesses that you don’t travel faster in England; and on your replying that you do, says ‘Yes?’ again (still interrogatively), and it is quite evident, don’t believe it. After a long pause he remarks, partly to you, and partly to the knob on the top of his stick, that ‘Yankees are reckoned to be considerable of a go-ahead people too;’ upon which you say ‘Yes,’ and then he says ‘Yes’ again (affirmatively this time); and upon your looking out of window, tells you that behind that hill, and some three miles from the next station, there is a clever town in a smart lo-ca-tion, where he expects you have concluded to stop. Your answer in the negative naturally leads to more questions in reference to your intended route (always pronounced rout); and wherever you are going, you invariably learn that you can’t get there without immense difficulty and danger, and that all the great sights are somewhere else.
If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger’s seat, the gentleman who accompanies her gives him notice of the fact, and he immediately vacates it with great politeness. Politics are much discussed, so are banks, so is cotton. Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high: the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins; which is an unspeakable comfort to all strong politicians and true lovers of their country: that is to say, to ninety-nine men and boys out of every ninety-nine and a quarter.
Except when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive. When there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours, many mere logs half hidden in the swamp, others mouldered away to spongy chips. The very soil of the earth is made up of minute fragments such as these; each pool of stagnant water has its crust of vegetable rottenness; on every side there are the boughs, and trunks, and stumps of trees, in every possible stage of decay, decomposition, and neglect. Now you emerge for a few brief minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New England church and school-house; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the stumps, the logs, the stagnant water—all so like the last that you seem to have been transported back again by magic.
The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road, where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted ‘WHEN THE BELL RINGS, LOOK OUT FOR THE LOCOMOTIVE.’ On it whirls headlong, dives through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road. There—with mechanics working at their trades, and people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, and pigs burrowing, and unaccustomed horses plunging and rearing, close to the very rails—there—on, on, on—tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.
I was met at the station at Lowell by a gentleman intimately connected with the management of the factories there; and gladly putting myself under his guidance, drove off at once to that quarter of the town in which the works, the object of my visit, were situated. Although only just of age—for if my recollection serve me, it has been a manufacturing town barely one-and-twenty years—Lowell is a large, populous, thriving place. Those indications of its youth which first attract the eye, give it a quaintness and oddity of character which, to a visitor from the old country, is amusing enough. It was a very dirty winter’s day, and nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud, which in some parts was almost knee-deep, and might have been deposited there, on the subsiding of the waters after the Deluge. In one place, there was a new wooden church, which, having no steeple, and being yet unpainted, looked like an enormous packing-case without any direction upon it. In another there was a large hotel, whose walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it had exactly the appearance of being built with cards. I was careful not to draw my breath as we passed, and trembled when I saw a workman come out upon the roof, lest with one thoughtless stamp of his foot he should crush the structure beneath him, and bring it rattling down. The very river that moves the machinery in the mills (for they are all worked by water power), seems to acquire a new character from the fresh buildings of bright red brick and painted wood among which it takes its course; and to be as light-headed, thoughtless, and brisk a young river, in its murmurings and tumblings, as one would desire to see. One would swear that every ‘Bakery,’ ‘Grocery,’ and ‘Bookbindery,’ and other kind of store, took its shutters down for the first time, and started in business yesterday. The golden pestles and mortars fixed as signs upon the sun-blind frames outside the Druggists’, appear to have been just turned out of the United States’ Mint; and when I saw a baby of some week or ten days old in a woman’s arms at a street corner, I found myself unconsciously wondering where it came from: never supposing for an instant that it could have been born in such a young town as that.
There are several factories in Lowell, each of which belongs to what we should term a Company of Proprietors, but what they call in America a Corporation. I went over several of these; such as a woollen factory, a carpet factory, and a cotton factory: examined them in every part; and saw them in their ordinary working aspect, with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary everyday proceedings. I may add that I am well acquainted with our manufacturing towns in England, and have visited many mills in Manchester and elsewhere in the same manner.
I happened to arrive at the first factory just as the dinner hour was over, and the girls were returning to their work; indeed the stairs of the mill were thronged with them as I ascended. They were all well dressed, but not to my thinking above their condition; for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful of their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated with such little trinkets as come within the compass of their means. Supposing it confined within reasonable limits, I would always encourage this kind of pride, as a worthy element of self-respect, in any person I employed; and should no more be deterred from doing so, because some wretched female referred her fall to a love of dress, than I would allow my construction of the real intent and meaning of the Sabbath to be influenced by any warning to the well-disposed, founded on his backslidings on that particular day, which might emanate from the rather doubtful authority of a murderer in Newgate.
These girls, as I have said, were all well dressed: and that phrase necessarily includes extreme cleanliness. They had serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks, and shawls; and were not above clogs and pattens. Moreover, there were places in the mill in which they could deposit these things without injury; and there were conveniences for washing. They were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment of young women: not of degraded brutes of burden. If I had seen in one of those mills (but I did not, though I looked for something of this kind with a sharp eye), the most lisping, mincing, affected, and ridiculous young creature that my imagination could suggest, I should have thought of the careless, moping, slatternly, degraded, dull reverse (I have seen that), and should have been still well pleased to look upon her.
The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of. Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance: no doubt there were. But I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power.
They reside in various boarding-houses near at hand. The owners of the mills are particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the possession of these houses, whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thorough inquiry. Any complaint that is made against them, by the boarders, or by any one else, is fully investigated; and if good ground of complaint be shown to exist against them, they are removed, and their occupation is handed over to some more deserving person. There are a few children employed in these factories, but not many. The laws of the State forbid their working more than nine months in the year, and require that they be educated during the other three. For this purpose there are schools in Lowell; and there are churches and chapels of various persuasions, in which the young women may observe that form of worship in which they have been educated.
At some distance from the factories, and on the highest and pleasantest ground in the neighbourhood, stands their hospital, or boarding-house for the sick: it is the best house in those parts, and was built by an eminent merchant for his own residence. Like that institution at Boston, which I have before described, it is not parcelled out into wards, but is divided into convenient chambers, each of which has all the comforts of a very comfortable home. The principal medical attendant resides under the same roof; and were the patients members of his own family, they could not be better cared for, or attended with greater gentleness and consideration. The weekly charge in this establishment for each female patient is three dollars, or twelve shillings English; but no girl employed by any of the corporations is ever excluded for want of the means of payment. That they do not very often want the means, may be gathered from the fact, that in July, 1841, no fewer than nine hundred and seventy-eight of these girls were depositors in the Lowell Savings Bank: the amount of whose joint savings was estimated at one hundred thousand dollars, or twenty thousand English pounds.
I am now going to state three facts, which will startle a large class of readers on this side of the Atlantic, very much.
Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses. Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries. Thirdly, they have got up among themselves a periodical called THE LOWELL OFFERING, ‘A repository of original articles, written exclusively by females actively employed in the mills,’—which is duly printed, published, and sold; and whereof I brought away from Lowell four hundred good solid pages, which I have read from beginning to end.
The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim, with one voice, ‘How very preposterous!’ On my deferentially inquiring why, they will answer, ‘These things are above their station.’ In reply to that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.
It is their station to work. And they do work. They labour in these mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably work, and pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to indulge in such amusements, on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in England have not formed our ideas of the ‘station’ of working people, from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us by their novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right or wrong.
For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanising and laudable. I know no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolise the means of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to do so.
Of the merits of the Lowell Offering as a literary production, I will only observe, putting entirely out of sight the fact of the articles having been written by these girls after the arduous labours of the day, that it will compare advantageously with a great many English Annuals. It is pleasant to find that many of its Tales are of the Mills and of those who work in them; that they inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence. A strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air; and though a circulating library is a favourable school for the study of such topics, it has very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life. Some persons might object to the papers being signed occasionally with rather fine names, but this is an American fashion. One of the provinces of the state legislature of Massachusetts is to alter ugly names into pretty ones, as the children improve upon the tastes of their parents. These changes costing little or nothing, scores of Mary Annes are solemnly converted into Bevelinas every session.
It is said that on the occasion of a visit from General Jackson or General Harrison to this town (I forget which, but it is not to the purpose), he walked through three miles and a half of these young ladies all dressed out with parasols and silk stockings. But as I am not aware that any worse consequence ensued, than a sudden looking-up of all the parasols and silk stockings in the market; and perhaps the bankruptcy of some speculative New Englander who bought them all up at any price, in expectation of a demand that never came; I set no great store by the circumstance.
In this brief account of Lowell, and inadequate expression of the gratification it yielded me, and cannot fail to afford to any foreigner to whom the condition of such people at home is a subject of interest and anxious speculation, I have carefully abstained from drawing a comparison between these factories and those of our own land. Many of the circumstances whose strong influence has been at work for years in our manufacturing towns have not arisen here; and there is no manufacturing population in Lowell, so to speak: for these girls (often the daughters of small farmers) come from other States, remain a few years in the mills, and then go home for good.
The contrast would be a strong one, for it would be between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow. I abstain from it, because I deem it just to do so. But I only the more earnestly adjure all those whose eyes may rest on these pages, to pause and reflect upon the difference between this town and those great haunts of desperate misery: to call to mind, if they can in the midst of party strife and squabble, the efforts that must be made to purge them of their suffering and danger: and last, and foremost, to remember how the precious Time is rushing by.
I returned at night by the same railroad and in the same kind of car. One of the passengers being exceedingly anxious to expound at great length to my companion (not to me, of course) the true principles on which books of travel in America should be written by Englishmen, I feigned to fall asleep. But glancing all the way out at window from the corners of my eyes, I found abundance of entertainment for the rest of the ride in watching the effects of the wood fire, which had been invisible in the morning but were now brought out in full relief by the darkness: for we were travelling in a whirlwind of bright sparks, which showered about us like a storm of fiery snow.
CHAPTER V WORCESTER. THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN. TO NEW YORK
LEAVING Boston on the afternoon of Saturday the fifth of February, we proceeded by another railroad to Worcester: a pretty New England town, where we had arranged to remain under the hospitable roof of the Governor of the State, until Monday morning.
These towns and cities of New England (many of which would be villages in Old England), are as favourable specimens of rural America, as their people are of rural Americans. The well-trimmed lawns and green meadows of home are not there; and the grass, compared with our ornamental plots and pastures, is rank, and rough, and wild: but delicate slopes of land, gently-swelling hills, wooded valleys, and slender streams, abound. Every little colony of houses has its church and school-house peeping from among the white roofs and shady trees; every house is the whitest of the white; every Venetian blind the greenest of the green; every fine day’s sky the bluest of the blue. A sharp dry wind and a slight frost had so hardened the roads when we alighted at Worcester, that their furrowed tracks were like ridges of granite. There was the usual aspect of newness on every object, of course. All the buildings looked as if they had been built and painted that morning, and could be taken down on Monday with very little trouble. In the keen evening air, every sharp outline looked a hundred times sharper than ever. The clean cardboard colonnades had no more perspective than a Chinese bridge on a tea-cup, and appeared equally well calculated for use. The razor-like edges of the detached cottages seemed to cut the very wind as it whistled against them, and to send it smarting on its way with a shriller cry than before. Those slightly-built wooden dwellings behind which the sun was setting with a brilliant lustre, could be so looked through and through, that the idea of any inhabitant being able to hide himself from the public gaze, or to have any secrets from the public eye, was not entertainable for a moment. Even where a blazing fire shone through the uncurtained windows of some distant house, it had the air of being newly lighted, and of lacking warmth; and instead of awakening thoughts of a snug chamber, bright with faces that first saw the light round that same hearth, and ruddy with warm hangings, it came upon one suggestive of the smell of new mortar and damp walls.
So I thought, at least, that evening. Next morning when the sun was shining brightly, and the clear church bells were ringing, and sedate people in their best clothes enlivened the pathway near at hand and dotted the distant thread of road, there was a pleasant Sabbath peacefulness on everything, which it was good to feel. It would have been the better for an old church; better still for some old graves; but as it was, a wholesome repose and tranquillity pervaded the scene, which after the restless ocean and the hurried city, had a doubly grateful influence on the spirits.
We went on next morning, still by railroad, to Springfield. From that place to Hartford, whither we were bound, is a distance of only five-and-twenty miles, but at that time of the year the roads were so bad that the journey would probably have occupied ten or twelve hours. Fortunately, however, the winter having been unusually mild, the Connecticut River was ‘open,’ or, in other words, not frozen. The captain of a small steamboat was going to make his first trip for the season that day (the second February trip, I believe, within the memory of man), and only waited for us to go on board. Accordingly, we went on board, with as little delay as might be. He was as good as his word, and started directly.
It certainly was not called a small steamboat without reason. I omitted to ask the question, but I should think it must have been of about half a pony power. Mr. Paap, the celebrated Dwarf, might have lived and died happily in the cabin, which was fitted with common sash-windows like an ordinary dwelling-house. These windows had bright-red curtains, too, hung on slack strings across the lower panes; so that it looked like the parlour of a Lilliputian public-house, which had got afloat in a flood or some other water accident, and was drifting nobody knew where. But even in this chamber there was a rocking-chair. It would be impossible to get on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair. I am afraid to tell how many feet short this vessel was, or how many feet narrow: to apply the words length and width to such measurement would be a contradiction in terms. But I may state that we all kept the middle of the deck, lest the boat should unexpectedly tip over; and that the machinery, by some surprising process of condensation, worked between it and the keel: the whole forming a warm sandwich, about three feet thick.
It rained all day as I once thought it never did rain anywhere, but in the Highlands of Scotland. The river was full of floating blocks of ice, which were constantly crunching and cracking under us; and the depth of water, in the course we took to avoid the larger masses, carried down the middle of the river by the current, did not exceed a few inches. Nevertheless, we moved onward, dexterously; and being well wrapped up, bade defiance to the weather, and enjoyed the journey. The Connecticut River is a fine stream; and the banks in summer-time are, I have no doubt, beautiful; at all events, I was told so by a young lady in the cabin; and she should be a judge of beauty, if the possession of a quality include the appreciation of it, for a more beautiful creature I never looked upon.
After two hours and a half of this odd travelling (including a stoppage at a small town, where we were saluted by a gun considerably bigger than our own chimney), we reached Hartford, and straightway repaired to an extremely comfortable hotel: except, as usual, in the article of bedrooms, which, in almost every place we visited, were very conducive to early rising.
We tarried here, four days. The town is beautifully situated in a basin of green hills; the soil is rich, well-wooded, and carefully improved. It is the seat of the local legislature of Connecticut, which sage body enacted, in bygone times, the renowned code of ‘Blue Laws,’ in virtue whereof, among other enlightened provisions, any citizen who could be proved to have kissed his wife on Sunday, was punishable, I believe, with the stocks. Too much of the old Puritan spirit exists in these parts to the present hour; but its influence has not tended, that I know, to make the people less hard in their bargains, or more equal in their dealings. As I never heard of its working that effect anywhere else, I infer that it never will, here. Indeed, I am accustomed, with reference to great professions and severe faces, to judge of the goods of the other world pretty much as I judge of the goods of this; and whenever I see a dealer in such commodities with too great a display of them in his window, I doubt the quality of the article within.
In Hartford stands the famous oak in which the charter of King Charles was hidden. It is now inclosed in a gentleman’s garden. In the State House is the charter itself. I found the courts of law here, just the same as at Boston; the public institutions almost as good. The Insane Asylum is admirably conducted, and so is the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.
I very much questioned within myself, as I walked through the Insane Asylum, whether I should have known the attendants from the patients, but for the few words which passed between the former, and the Doctor, in reference to the persons under their charge. Of course I limit this remark merely to their looks; for the conversation of the mad people was mad enough.
There was one little, prim old lady, of very smiling and good-humoured appearance, who came sidling up to me from the end of a long passage, and with a curtsey of inexpressible condescension, propounded this unaccountable inquiry:
‘Does Pontefract still flourish, sir, upon the soil of England?’
‘He does, ma’am,’ I rejoined.
‘When you last saw him, sir, he was—’
‘Well, ma’am,’ said I, ‘extremely well. He begged me to present his compliments. I never saw him looking better.’
At this, the old lady was very much delighted. After glancing at me for a moment, as if to be quite sure that I was serious in my respectful air, she sidled back some paces; sidled forward again; made a sudden skip (at which I precipitately retreated a step or two); and said:
‘I am an antediluvian, sir.’
I thought the best thing to say was, that I had suspected as much from the first. Therefore I said so.
‘It is an extremely proud and pleasant thing, sir, to be an antediluvian,’ said the old lady.
‘I should think it was, ma’am,’ I rejoined.
The old lady kissed her hand, gave another skip, smirked and sidled down the gallery in a most extraordinary manner, and ambled gracefully into her own bed-chamber.
In another part of the building, there was a male patient in bed; very much flushed and heated.
‘Well,’ said he, starting up, and pulling off his night-cap: ‘It’s all settled at last. I have arranged it with Queen Victoria.’
‘Arranged what?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Why, that business,’ passing his hand wearily across his forehead, ‘about the siege of New York.’
‘Oh!’ said I, like a man suddenly enlightened. For he looked at me for an answer.
‘Yes. Every house without a signal will be fired upon by the British troops. No harm will be done to the others. No harm at all. Those that want to be safe, must hoist flags. That’s all they’ll have to do. They must hoist flags.’
Even while he was speaking he seemed, I thought, to have some faint idea that his talk was incoherent. Directly he had said these words, he lay down again; gave a kind of a groan; and covered his hot head with the blankets.
There was another: a young man, whose madness was love and music. After playing on the accordion a march he had composed, he was very anxious that I should walk into his chamber, which I immediately did.
By way of being very knowing, and humouring him to the top of his bent, I went to the window, which commanded a beautiful prospect, and remarked, with an address upon which I greatly plumed myself:
‘What a delicious country you have about these lodgings of yours!’
‘Poh!’ said he, moving his fingers carelessly over the notes of his instrument: ‘Well enough for such an Institution as this!’
I don’t think I was ever so taken aback in all my life.
‘I come here just for a whim,’ he said coolly. ‘That’s all.’
‘Oh! That’s all!’ said I.
‘Yes. That’s all. The Doctor’s a smart man. He quite enters into it. It’s a joke of mine. I like it for a time. You needn’t mention it, but I think I shall go out next Tuesday!’
I assured him that I would consider our interview perfectly confidential; and rejoined the Doctor. As we were passing through a gallery on our way out, a well-dressed lady, of quiet and composed manners, came up, and proffering a slip of paper and a pen, begged that I would oblige her with an autograph, I complied, and we parted.
‘I think I remember having had a few interviews like that, with ladies out of doors. I hope she is not mad?’
‘Yes.’
‘On what subject? Autographs?’
‘No. She hears voices in the air.’
‘Well!’ thought I, ‘it would be well if we could shut up a few false prophets of these later times, who have professed to do the same; and I should like to try the experiment on a Mormonist or two to begin with.’
In this place, there is the best jail for untried offenders in the world. There is also a very well-ordered State prison, arranged upon the same plan as that at Boston, except that here, there is always a sentry on the wall with a loaded gun. It contained at that time about two hundred prisoners. A spot was shown me in the sleeping ward, where a watchman was murdered some years since in the dead of night, in a desperate attempt to escape, made by a prisoner who had broken from his cell. A woman, too, was pointed out to me, who, for the murder of her husband, had been a close prisoner for sixteen years.
‘Do you think,’ I asked of my conductor, ‘that after so very long an imprisonment, she has any thought or hope of ever regaining her liberty?’
‘Oh dear yes,’ he answered. ‘To be sure she has.’
‘She has no chance of obtaining it, I suppose?’
‘Well, I don’t know:’ which, by-the-bye, is a national answer. ‘Her friends mistrust her.’
‘What have they to do with it?’ I naturally inquired.
‘Well, they won’t petition.’
‘But if they did, they couldn’t get her out, I suppose?’
‘Well, not the first time, perhaps, nor yet the second, but tiring and wearying for a few years might do it.’
‘Does that ever do it?’
‘Why yes, that’ll do it sometimes. Political friends’ll do it sometimes. It’s pretty often done, one way or another.’
I shall always entertain a very pleasant and grateful recollection of Hartford. It is a lovely place, and I had many friends there, whom I can never remember with indifference. We left it with no little regret on the evening of Friday the 11th, and travelled that night by railroad to New Haven. Upon the way, the guard and I were formally introduced to each other (as we usually were on such occasions), and exchanged a variety of small-talk. We reached New Haven at about eight o’clock, after a journey of three hours, and put up for the night at the best inn.
New Haven, known also as the City of Elms, is a fine town. Many of its streets (as its alias sufficiently imports) are planted with rows of grand old elm-trees; and the same natural ornaments surround Yale College, an establishment of considerable eminence and reputation. The various departments of this Institution are erected in a kind of park or common in the middle of the town, where they are dimly visible among the shadowing trees. The effect is very like that of an old cathedral yard in England; and when their branches are in full leaf, must be extremely picturesque. Even in the winter time, these groups of well-grown trees, clustering among the busy streets and houses of a thriving city, have a very quaint appearance: seeming to bring about a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it; which is at once novel and pleasant.
After a night’s rest, we rose early, and in good time went down to the wharf, and on board the packet New York for New York. This was the first American steamboat of any size that I had seen; and certainly to an English eye it was infinitely less like a steamboat than a huge floating bath. I could hardly persuade myself, indeed, but that the bathing establishment off Westminster Bridge, which I left a baby, had suddenly grown to an enormous size; run away from home; and set up in foreign parts as a steamer. Being in America, too, which our vagabonds do so particularly favour, it seemed the more probable.
The great difference in appearance between these packets and ours, is, that there is so much of them out of the water: the main-deck being enclosed on all sides, and filled with casks and goods, like any second or third floor in a stack of warehouses; and the promenade or hurricane-deck being a-top of that again. A part of the machinery is always above this deck; where the connecting-rod, in a strong and lofty frame, is seen working away like an iron top-sawyer. There is seldom any mast or tackle: nothing aloft but two tall black chimneys. The man at the helm is shut up in a little house in the fore part of the boat (the wheel being connected with the rudder by iron chains, working the whole length of the deck); and the passengers, unless the weather be very fine indeed, usually congregate below. Directly you have left the wharf, all the life, and stir, and bustle of a packet cease. You wonder for a long time how she goes on, for there seems to be nobody in charge of her; and when another of these dull machines comes splashing by, you feel quite indignant with it, as a sullen cumbrous, ungraceful, unshiplike leviathan: quite forgetting that the vessel you are on board of, is its very counterpart.
There is always a clerk’s office on the lower deck, where you pay your fare; a ladies’ cabin; baggage and stowage rooms; engineer’s room; and in short a great variety of perplexities which render the discovery of the gentlemen’s cabin, a matter of some difficulty. It often occupies the whole length of the boat (as it did in this case), and has three or four tiers of berths on each side. When I first descended into the cabin of the New York, it looked, in my unaccustomed eyes, about as long as the Burlington Arcade.
The Sound which has to be crossed on this passage, is not always a very safe or pleasant navigation, and has been the scene of some unfortunate accidents. It was a wet morning, and very misty, and we soon lost sight of land. The day was calm, however, and brightened towards noon. After exhausting (with good help from a friend) the larder, and the stock of bottled beer, I lay down to sleep; being very much tired with the fatigues of yesterday. But I woke from my nap in time to hurry up, and see Hell Gate, the Hog’s Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious localities, attractive to all readers of famous Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History. We were now in a narrow channel, with sloping banks on either side, besprinkled with pleasant villas, and made refreshing to the sight by turf and trees. Soon we shot in quick succession, past a light-house; a madhouse (how the lunatics flung up their caps and roared in sympathy with the headlong engine and the driving tide!); a jail; and other buildings: and so emerged into a noble bay, whose waters sparkled in the now cloudless sunshine like Nature’s eyes turned up to Heaven.
Then there lay stretched out before us, to the right, confused heaps of buildings, with here and there a spire or steeple, looking down upon the herd below; and here and there, again, a cloud of lazy smoke; and in the foreground a forest of ships’ masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags. Crossing from among them to the opposite shore, were steam ferry-boats laden with people, coaches, horses, waggons, baskets, boxes: crossed and recrossed by other ferry-boats: all travelling to and fro: and never idle. Stately among these restless Insects, were two or three large ships, moving with slow majestic pace, as creatures of a prouder kind, disdainful of their puny journeys, and making for the broad sea. Beyond, were shining heights, and islands in the glancing river, and a distance scarcely less blue and bright than the sky it seemed to meet. The city’s hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of wheels, tingled in the listening ear. All of which life and stir, coming across the stirring water, caught new life and animation from its free companionship; and, sympathising with its buoyant spirits, glistened as it seemed in sport upon its surface, and hemmed the vessel round, and plashed the water high about her sides, and, floating her gallantly into the dock, flew off again to welcome other comers, and speed before them to the busy port.
CHAPTER VI NEW YORK
THE beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, but many of its streets have the same characteristics; except that the houses are not quite so fresh-coloured, the sign-boards are not quite so gaudy, the gilded letters not quite so golden, the bricks not quite so red, the stone not quite so white, the blinds and area railings not quite so green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors not quite so bright and twinkling. There are many by-streets, almost as neutral in clean colours, and positive in dirty ones, as by-streets in London; and there is one quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles’s.
The great promenade and thoroughfare, as most people know, is Broadway; a wide and bustling street, which, from the Battery Gardens to its opposite termination in a country road, may be four miles long. Shall we sit down in an upper floor of the Carlton House Hotel (situated in the best part of this main artery of New York), and when we are tired of looking down upon the life below, sally forth arm-in-arm, and mingle with the stream?
Warm weather! The sun strikes upon our heads at this open window, as though its rays were concentrated through a burning-glass; but the day is in its zenith, and the season an unusual one. Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on them, they would hiss and smoke, and smell like half-quenched fires. No stint of omnibuses here! Half-a-dozen have gone by within as many minutes. Plenty of hackney cabs and coaches too; gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages—rather of a clumsy make, and not very different from the public vehicles, but built for the heavy roads beyond the city pavement. Negro coachmen and white; in straw hats, black hats, white hats, glazed caps, fur caps; in coats of drab, black, brown, green, blue, nankeen, striped jean and linen; and there, in that one instance (look while it passes, or it will be too late), in suits of livery. Some southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and swells with Sultan pomp and power. Yonder, where that phaeton with the well-clipped pair of grays has stopped—standing at their heads now—is a Yorkshire groom, who has not been very long in these parts, and looks sorrowfully round for a companion pair of top-boots, which he may traverse the city half a year without meeting. Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen elsewhere, in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings! The young gentlemen are fond, you see, of turning down their shirt-collars and cultivating their whiskers, especially under the chin; but they cannot approach the ladies in their dress or bearing, being, to say the truth, humanity of quite another sort. Byrons of the desk and counter, pass on, and let us see what kind of men those are behind ye: those two labourers in holiday clothes, of whom one carries in his hand a crumpled scrap of paper from which he tries to spell out a hard name, while the other looks about for it on all the doors and windows.
Irishmen both! You might know them, if they were masked, by their long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons, and their drab trousers, which they wear like men well used to working dresses, who are easy in no others. It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and countrywomen of those two labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement! Irishmen both, and sorely puzzled too, to find out what they seek. Let us go down, and help them, for the love of home, and that spirit of liberty which admits of honest service to honest men, and honest work for honest bread, no matter what it be.
That’s well! We have got at the right address at last, though it is written in strange characters truly, and might have been scrawled with the blunt handle of the spade the writer better knows the use of, than a pen. Their way lies yonder, but what business takes them there? They carry savings: to hoard up? No. They are brothers, those men. One crossed the sea alone, and working very hard for one half year, and living harder, saved funds enough to bring the other out. That done, they worked together side by side, contentedly sharing hard labour and hard living for another term, and then their sisters came, and then another brother, and lastly, their old mother. And what now? Why, the poor old crone is restless in a strange land, and yearns to lay her bones, she says, among her people in the old graveyard at home: and so they go to pay her passage back: and God help her and them, and every simple heart, and all who turn to the Jerusalem of their younger days, and have an altar-fire upon the cold hearth of their fathers.
This narrow thoroughfare, baking and blistering in the sun, is Wall Street: the Stock Exchange and Lombard Street of New York. Many a rapid fortune has been made in this street, and many a no less rapid ruin. Some of these very merchants whom you see hanging about here now, have locked up money in their strong-boxes, like the man in the Arabian Nights, and opening them again, have found but withered leaves. Below, here by the water-side, where the bowsprits of ships stretch across the footway, and almost thrust themselves into the windows, lie the noble American vessels which have made their Packet Service the finest in the world. They have brought hither the foreigners who abound in all the streets: not, perhaps, that there are more here, than in other commercial cities; but elsewhere, they have particular haunts, and you must find them out; here, they pervade the town.
We must cross Broadway again; gaining some refreshment from the heat, in the sight of the great blocks of clean ice which are being carried into shops and bar-rooms; and the pine-apples and water-melons profusely displayed for sale. Fine streets of spacious houses here, you see!—Wall Street has furnished and dismantled many of them very often—and here a deep green leafy square. Be sure that is a hospitable house with inmates to be affectionately remembered always, where they have the open door and pretty show of plants within, and where the child with laughing eyes is peeping out of window at the little dog below. You wonder what may be the use of this tall flagstaff in the by-street, with something like Liberty’s head-dress on its top: so do I. But there is a passion for tall flagstaffs hereabout, and you may see its twin brother in five minutes, if you have a mind.
Again across Broadway, and so—passing from the many-coloured crowd and glittering shops—into another long main street, the Bowery. A railroad yonder, see, where two stout horses trot along, drawing a score or two of people and a great wooden ark, with ease. The stores are poorer here; the passengers less gay. Clothes ready-made, and meat ready-cooked, are to be bought in these parts; and the lively whirl of carriages is exchanged for the deep rumble of carts and waggons. These signs which are so plentiful, in shape like river buoys, or small balloons, hoisted by cords to poles, and dangling there, announce, as you may see by looking up, ‘OYSTERS IN EVERY STYLE.’ They tempt the hungry most at night, for then dull candles glimmering inside, illuminate these dainty words, and make the mouths of idlers water, as they read and linger.
What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama!—a famous prison, called The Tombs. Shall we go in?
So. A long, narrow, lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its centre, a bridge, for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these bridges sits a man: dozing or reading, or talking to an idle companion. On each tier, are two opposite rows of small iron doors. They look like furnace-doors, but are cold and black, as though the fires within had all gone out. Some two or three are open, and women, with drooping heads bent down, are talking to the inmates. The whole is lighted by a skylight, but it is fast closed; and from the roof there dangle, limp and drooping, two useless windsails.
A man with keys appears, to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and, in his way, civil and obliging.
‘Are those black doors the cells?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they all full?’
‘Well, they’re pretty nigh full, and that’s a fact, and no two ways about it.’
‘Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely?’
‘Why, we do only put coloured people in ’em. That’s the truth.’
‘When do the prisoners take exercise?’
‘Well, they do without it pretty much.’
‘Do they never walk in the yard?’
‘Considerable seldom.’
‘Sometimes, I suppose?’
‘Well, it’s rare they do. They keep pretty bright without it.’
‘But suppose a man were here for a twelvemonth. I know this is only a prison for criminals who are charged with grave offences, while they are awaiting their trial, or under remand, but the law here affords criminals many means of delay. What with motions for new trials, and in arrest of judgment, and what not, a prisoner might be here for twelve months, I take it, might he not?’
‘Well, I guess he might.’
‘Do you mean to say that in all that time he would never come out at that little iron door, for exercise?’
‘He might walk some, perhaps—not much.’
‘Will you open one of the doors?’
‘All, if you like.’
The fastenings jar and rattle, and one of the doors turns slowly on its hinges. Let us look in. A small bare cell, into which the light enters through a high chink in the wall. There is a rude means of washing, a table, and a bedstead. Upon the latter, sits a man of sixty; reading. He looks up for a moment; gives an impatient dogged shake; and fixes his eyes upon his book again. As we withdraw our heads, the door closes on him, and is fastened as before. This man has murdered his wife, and will probably be hanged.
‘How long has he been here?’
‘A month.’
‘When will he be tried?’
‘Next term.’
‘When is that?’
‘Next month.’
‘In England, if a man be under sentence of death, even he has air and exercise at certain periods of the day.’
‘Possible?’
With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the women’s side: making, as he goes, a kind of iron castanet of the key and the stair-rail!
Each cell door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others shrink away in shame.—For what offence can that lonely child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh! that boy? He is the son of the prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father; and is detained here for safe keeping, until the trial; that’s all.
But it is a dreadful place for the child to pass the long days and nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it not?—What says our conductor?
‘Well, it an’t a very rowdy life, and that’s a fact!’
Again he clinks his metal castanet, and leads us leisurely away. I have a question to ask him as we go.
‘Pray, why do they call this place The Tombs?’
‘Well, it’s the cant name.’
‘I know it is. Why?’
‘Some suicides happened here, when it was first built. I expect it come about from that.’
‘I saw just now, that that man’s clothes were scattered about the floor of his cell. Don’t you oblige the prisoners to be orderly, and put such things away?’
‘Where should they put ’em?’
‘Not on the ground surely. What do you say to hanging them up?’
He stops and looks round to emphasise his answer:
‘Why, I say that’s just it. When they had hooks they would hang themselves, so they’re taken out of every cell, and there’s only the marks left where they used to be!’
The prison-yard in which he pauses now, has been the scene of terrible performances. Into this narrow, grave-like place, men are brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the gibbet on the ground; the rope about his neck; and when the sign is given, a weight at its other end comes running down, and swings him up into the air—a corpse.
The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle, the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five. From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad, the thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them, the prison-wall is interposed as a thick gloomy veil. It is the curtain to his bed of death, his winding-sheet, and grave. From him it shuts out life, and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood in that last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often all-sufficient to sustain. There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no ruffians to uphold a ruffian’s name before. All beyond the pitiless stone wall, is unknown space.
Let us go forth again into the cheerful streets.
Once more in Broadway! Here are the same ladies in bright colours, walking to and fro, in pairs and singly; yonder the very same light blue parasol which passed and repassed the hotel-window twenty times while we were sitting there. We are going to cross here. Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs have just now turned the corner.
Here is a solitary swine lounging homeward by himself. He has only one ear; having parted with the other to vagrant-dogs in the course of his city rambles. But he gets on very well without it; and leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club-men at home. He leaves his lodgings every morning at a certain hour, throws himself upon the town, gets through his day in some manner quite satisfactory to himself, and regularly appears at the door of his own house again at night, like the mysterious master of Gil Blas. He is a free-and-easy, careless, indifferent kind of pig, having a very large acquaintance among other pigs of the same character, whom he rather knows by sight than conversation, as he seldom troubles himself to stop and exchange civilities, but goes grunting down the kennel, turning up the news and small-talk of the city in the shape of cabbage-stalks and offal, and bearing no tails but his own: which is a very short one, for his old enemies, the dogs, have been at that too, and have left him hardly enough to swear by. He is in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for every one makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest give him the wall, if he prefer it. He is a great philosopher, and seldom moved, unless by the dogs before mentioned. Sometimes, indeed, you may see his small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase garnishes a butcher’s door-post, but he grunts out ‘Such is life: all flesh is pork!’ buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage-stalks, at any rate.
They are the city scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would recognise it for a pig’s likeness. They are never attended upon, or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own resources in early life, and become preternaturally knowing in consequence. Every pig knows where he lives, much better than anybody could tell him. At this hour, just as evening is closing in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their way to the last. Occasionally, some youth among them who has over-eaten himself, or has been worried by dogs, trots shrinkingly homeward, like a prodigal son: but this is a rare case: perfect self-possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being their foremost attributes.
The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down the long thoroughfare, dotted with bright jets of gas, it is reminded of Oxford Street, or Piccadilly. Here and there a flight of broad stone cellar-steps appears, and a painted lamp directs you to the Bowling Saloon, or Ten-Pin alley; Ten-Pins being a game of mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an act forbidding Nine-Pins. At other downward flights of steps, are other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster-cellars—pleasant retreats, say I: not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese-plates (or for thy dear sake, heartiest of Greek Professors!), but because of all kinds of caters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the swallowers of oysters alone are not gregarious; but subduing themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not by two hundreds.
But how quiet the streets are! Are there no itinerant bands; no wind or stringed instruments? No, not one. By day, are there no Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurers, Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs? No, not one. Yes, I remember one. One barrel-organ and a dancing-monkey—sportive by nature, but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian school. Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white mouse in a twirling cage.
Are there no amusements? Yes. There is a lecture-room across the way, from which that glare of light proceeds, and there may be evening service for the ladies thrice a week, or oftener. For the young gentlemen, there is the counting-house, the store, the bar-room: the latter, as you may see through these windows, pretty full. Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass! No amusements? What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety of twist, doing, but amusing themselves? What are the fifty newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but amusements? Not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff; dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey.—No amusements!
Let us go on again; and passing this wilderness of an hotel with stores about its base, like some Continental theatre, or the London Opera House shorn of its colonnade, plunge into the Five Points. But it is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two heads of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained officers if you met them in the Great Desert. So true it is, that certain pursuits, wherever carried on, will stamp men with the same character. These two might have been begotten, born, and bred, in Bow Street.
We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of other kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, are rife enough where we are going now.
This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors, have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?
So far, nearly every house is a low tavern; and on the bar-room walls, are coloured prints of Washington, and Queen Victoria of England, and the American Eagle. Among the pigeon-holes that hold the bottles, are pieces of plate-glass and coloured paper, for there is, in some sort, a taste for decoration, even here. And as seamen frequent these haunts, there are maritime pictures by the dozen: of partings between sailors and their lady-loves, portraits of William, of the ballad, and his Black-Eyed Susan; of Will Watch, the Bold Smuggler; of Paul Jones the Pirate, and the like: on which the painted eyes of Queen Victoria, and of Washington to boot, rest in as strange companionship, as on most of the scenes that are enacted in their wondering presence.
What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread?—a miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it, sits a man: his elbows on his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. ‘What ails that man?’ asks the foremost officer. ‘Fever,’ he sullenly replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of a feverish brain, in such a place as this!
Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come. A negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer’s voice—he knows it well—but comforted by his assurance that he has not come on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle. The match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusty rags upon the ground; then dies away and leaves a denser darkness than before, if there can be degrees in such extremes. He stumbles down the stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper with his hand. Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face in some strange mirror.
Mount up these other stairs with no less caution (there are traps and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the roof. Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of sleeping negroes. Pah! They have a charcoal fire within; there is a smell of singeing clothes, or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.
Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep, underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American eagles out of number: ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
Our leader has his hand upon the latch of ‘Almack’s,’ and calls to us from the bottom of the steps; for the assembly-room of the Five Point fashionables is approached by a descent. Shall we go in? It is but a moment.
Heyday! the landlady of Almack’s thrives! A buxom fat mulatto woman, with sparkling eyes, whose head is daintily ornamented with a handkerchief of many colours. Nor is the landlord much behind her in his finery, being attired in a smart blue jacket, like a ship’s steward, with a thick gold ring upon his little finger, and round his neck a gleaming golden watch-guard. How glad he is to see us! What will we please to call for? A dance? It shall be done directly, sir: ‘a regular break-down.’
The corpulent black fiddler, and his friend who plays the tambourine, stamp upon the boarding of the small raised orchestra in which they sit, and play a lively measure. Five or six couple come upon the floor, marshalled by a lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly, and the greatest dancer known. He never leaves off making queer faces, and is the delight of all the rest, who grin from ear to ear incessantly. Among the dancers are two young mulatto girls, with large, black, drooping eyes, and head-gear after the fashion of the hostess, who are as shy, or feign to be, as though they never danced before, and so look down before the visitors, that their partners can see nothing but the long fringed lashes.
But the dance commences. Every gentleman sets as long as he likes to the opposite lady, and the opposite lady to him, and all are so long about it that the sport begins to languish, when suddenly the lively hero dashes in to the rescue. Instantly the fiddler grins, and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the landlady; new confidence in the landlord; new brightness in the very candles.
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!
The air, even in these distempered parts, is fresh after the stifling atmosphere of the houses; and now, as we emerge into a broader street, it blows upon us with a purer breath, and the stars look bright again. Here are The Tombs once more. The city watch-house is a part of the building. It follows naturally on the sights we have just left. Let us see that, and then to bed.
What! do you thrust your common offenders against the police discipline of the town, into such holes as these? Do men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie here all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapours which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench! Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world! Look at them, man—you, who see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see what they are? Do you know how drains are made below the streets, and wherein these human sewers differ, except in being always stagnant?
Well, he don’t know. He has had five-and-twenty young women locked up in this very cell at one time, and you’d hardly realise what handsome faces there were among ’em.
In God’s name! shut the door upon the wretched creature who is in it now, and put its screen before a place, quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the worst old town in Europe.
Are people really left all night, untried, in those black sties?—Every night. The watch is set at seven in the evening. The magistrate opens his court at five in the morning. That is the earliest hour at which the first prisoner can be released; and if an officer appear against him, he is not taken out till nine o’clock or ten.—But if any one among them die in the interval, as one man did, not long ago? Then he is half-eaten by the rats in an hour’s time; as that man was; and there an end.
What is this intolerable tolling of great bells, and crashing of wheels, and shouting in the distance? A fire. And what that deep red light in the opposite direction? Another fire. And what these charred and blackened walls we stand before? A dwelling where a fire has been. It was more than hinted, in an official report, not long ago, that some of these conflagrations were not wholly accidental, and that speculation and enterprise found a field of exertion, even in flames: but be this as it may, there was a fire last night, there are two to-night, and you may lay an even wager there will be at least one, to-morrow. So, carrying that with us for our comfort, let us say, Good night, and climb up-stairs to bed.
One day, during my stay in New York, I paid a visit to the different public institutions on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which. One of them is a Lunatic Asylum. The building is handsome; and is remarkable for a spacious and elegant staircase. The whole structure is not yet finished, but it is already one of considerable size and extent, and is capable of accommodating a very large number of patients.
I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity. The different wards might have been cleaner and better ordered; I saw nothing of that salutary system which had impressed me so favourably elsewhere; and everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror. In the dining-room, a bare, dull, dreary place, with nothing for the eye to rest on but the empty walls, a woman was locked up alone. She was bent, they told me, on committing suicide. If anything could have strengthened her in her resolution, it would certainly have been the insupportable monotony of such an existence.
The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay within the shortest limits, and declined to see that portion of the building in which the refractory and violent were under closer restraint. I have no doubt that the gentleman who presided over this establishment at the time I write of, was competent to manage it, and had done all in his power to promote its usefulness: but will it be believed that the miserable strife of Party feeling is carried even into this sad refuge of afflicted and degraded humanity? Will it be believed that the eyes which are to watch over and control the wanderings of minds on which the most dreadful visitation to which our nature is exposed has fallen, must wear the glasses of some wretched side in Politics? Will it be believed that the governor of such a house as this, is appointed, and deposed, and changed perpetually, as Parties fluctuate and vary, and as their despicable weathercocks are blown this way or that? A hundred times in every week, some new most paltry exhibition of that narrow-minded and injurious Party Spirit, which is the Simoom of America, sickening and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach, was forced upon my notice; but I never turned my back upon it with feelings of such deep disgust and measureless contempt, as when I crossed the threshold of this madhouse.
At a short distance from this building is another called the Alms House, that is to say, the workhouse of New York. This is a large Institution also: lodging, I believe, when I was there, nearly a thousand poor. It was badly ventilated, and badly lighted; was not too clean;—and impressed me, on the whole, very uncomfortably. But it must be remembered that New York, as a great emporium of commerce, and as a place of general resort, not only from all parts of the States, but from most parts of the world, has always a large pauper population to provide for; and labours, therefore, under peculiar difficulties in this respect. Nor must it be forgotten that New York is a large town, and that in all large towns a vast amount of good and evil is intermixed and jumbled up together.
In the same neighbourhood is the Farm, where young orphans are nursed and bred. I did not see it, but I believe it is well conducted; and I can the more easily credit it, from knowing how mindful they usually are, in America, of that beautiful passage in the Litany which remembers all sick persons and young children.
I was taken to these Institutions by water, in a boat belonging to the Island jail, and rowed by a crew of prisoners, who were dressed in a striped uniform of black and buff, in which they looked like faded tigers. They took me, by the same conveyance, to the jail itself.
It is an old prison, and quite a pioneer establishment, on the plan I have already described. I was glad to hear this, for it is unquestionably a very indifferent one. The most is made, however, of the means it possesses, and it is as well regulated as such a place can be.
The women work in covered sheds, erected for that purpose. If I remember right, there are no shops for the men, but be that as it may, the greater part of them labour in certain stone-quarries near at hand. The day being very wet indeed, this labour was suspended, and the prisoners were in their cells. Imagine these cells, some two or three hundred in number, and in every one a man locked up; this one at his door for air, with his hands thrust through the grate; this one in bed (in the middle of the day, remember); and this one flung down in a heap upon the ground, with his head against the bars, like a wild beast. Make the rain pour down, outside, in torrents. Put the everlasting stove in the midst; hot, and suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch’s cauldron. Add a collection of gentle odours, such as would arise from a thousand mildewed umbrellas, wet through, and a thousand buck-baskets, full of half-washed linen—and there is the prison, as it was that day.
The prison for the State at Sing Sing is, on the other hand, a model jail. That, and Auburn, are, I believe, the largest and best examples of the silent system.
In another part of the city, is the Refuge for the Destitute: an Institution whose object is to reclaim youthful offenders, male and female, black and white, without distinction; to teach them useful trades, apprentice them to respectable masters, and make them worthy members of society. Its design, it will be seen, is similar to that at Boston; and it is a no less meritorious and admirable establishment. A suspicion crossed my mind during my inspection of this noble charity, whether the superintendent had quite sufficient knowledge of the world and worldly characters; and whether he did not commit a great mistake in treating some young girls, who were to all intents and purposes, by their years and their past lives, women, as though they were little children; which certainly had a ludicrous effect in my eyes, and, or I am much mistaken, in theirs also. As the Institution, however, is always under a vigilant examination of a body of gentlemen of great intelligence and experience, it cannot fail to be well conducted; and whether I am right or wrong in this slight particular, is unimportant to its deserts and character, which it would be difficult to estimate too highly.
In addition to these establishments, there are in New York, excellent hospitals and schools, literary institutions and libraries; an admirable fire department (as indeed it should be, having constant practice), and charities of every sort and kind. In the suburbs there is a spacious cemetery: unfinished yet, but every day improving. The saddest tomb I saw there was ‘The Strangers’ Grave. Dedicated to the different hotels in this city.’
There are three principal theatres. Two of them, the Park and the Bowery, are large, elegant, and handsome buildings, and are, I grieve to write it, generally deserted. The third, the Olympic, is a tiny show-box for vaudevilles and burlesques. It is singularly well conducted by Mr. Mitchell, a comic actor of great quiet humour and originality, who is well remembered and esteemed by London playgoers. I am happy to report of this deserving gentleman, that his benches are usually well filled, and that his theatre rings with merriment every night. I had almost forgotten a small summer theatre, called Niblo’s, with gardens and open air amusements attached; but I believe it is not exempt from the general depression under which Theatrical Property, or what is humorously called by that name, unfortunately labours.
The country round New York is surpassingly and exquisitely picturesque. The climate, as I have already intimated, is somewhat of the warmest. What it would be, without the sea breezes which come from its beautiful Bay in the evening time, I will not throw myself or my readers into a fever by inquiring.
The tone of the best society in this city, is like that of Boston; here and there, it may be, with a greater infusion of the mercantile spirit, but generally polished and refined, and always most hospitable. The houses and tables are elegant; the hours later and more rakish; and there is, perhaps, a greater spirit of contention in reference to appearances, and the display of wealth and costly living. The ladies are singularly beautiful.
Before I left New York I made arrangements for securing a passage home in the George Washington packet ship, which was advertised to sail in June: that being the month in which I had determined, if prevented by no accident in the course of my ramblings, to leave America.
I never thought that going back to England, returning to all who are dear to me, and to pursuits that have insensibly grown to be a part of my nature, I could have felt so much sorrow as I endured, when I parted at last, on board this ship, with the friends who had accompanied me from this city. I never thought the name of any place, so far away and so lately known, could ever associate itself in my mind with the crowd of affectionate remembrances that now cluster about it. There are those in this city who would brighten, to me, the darkest winter-day that ever glimmered and went out in Lapland; and before whose presence even Home grew dim, when they and I exchanged that painful word which mingles with our every thought and deed; which haunts our cradle-heads in infancy, and closes up the vista of our lives in age.
CHAPTER VII PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON
THE journey from New York to Philadelphia, is made by railroad, and two ferries; and usually occupies between five and six hours. It was a fine evening when we were passengers in the train: and watching the bright sunset from a little window near the door by which we sat, my attention was attracted to a remarkable appearance issuing from the windows of the gentleman’s car immediately in front of us, which I supposed for some time was occasioned by a number of industrious persons inside, ripping open feather-beds, and giving the feathers to the wind. At length it occurred to me that they were only spitting, which was indeed the case; though how any number of passengers which it was possible for that car to contain, could have maintained such a playful and incessant shower of expectoration, I am still at a loss to understand: notwithstanding the experience in all salivatory phenomena which I afterwards acquired.
I made acquaintance, on this journey, with a mild and modest young quaker, who opened the discourse by informing me, in a grave whisper, that his grandfather was the inventor of cold-drawn castor oil. I mention the circumstance here, thinking it probable that this is the first occasion on which the valuable medicine in question was ever used as a conversational aperient.
We reached the city, late that night. Looking out of my chamber-window, before going to bed, I saw, on the opposite side of the way, a handsome building of white marble, which had a mournful ghost-like aspect, dreary to behold. I attributed this to the sombre influence of the night, and on rising in the morning looked out again, expecting to see its steps and portico thronged with groups of people passing in and out. The door was still tight shut, however; the same cold cheerless air prevailed: and the building looked as if the marble statue of Don Guzman could alone have any business to transact within its gloomy walls. I hastened to inquire its name and purpose, and then my surprise vanished. It was the Tomb of many fortunes; the Great Catacomb of investment; the memorable United States Bank.
The stoppage of this bank, with all its ruinous consequences, had cast (as I was told on every side) a gloom on Philadelphia, under the depressing effect of which it yet laboured. It certainly did seem rather dull and out of spirits.
It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street. The collar of my coat appeared to stiffen, and the brim of my hat to expand, beneath its quakery influence. My hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded themselves upon my breast of their own calm accord, and thoughts of taking lodgings in Mark Lane over against the Market Place, and of making a large fortune by speculations in corn, came over me involuntarily.
Philadelphia is most bountifully provided with fresh water, which is showered and jerked about, and turned on, and poured off, everywhere. The Waterworks, which are on a height near the city, are no less ornamental than useful, being tastefully laid out as a public garden, and kept in the best and neatest order. The river is dammed at this point, and forced by its own power into certain high tanks or reservoirs, whence the whole city, to the top stories of the houses, is supplied at a very trifling expense.
There are various public institutions. Among them a most excellent Hospital—a quaker establishment, but not sectarian in the great benefits it confers; a quiet, quaint old Library, named after Franklin; a handsome Exchange and Post Office; and so forth. In connection with the quaker Hospital, there is a picture by West, which is exhibited for the benefit of the funds of the institution. The subject is, our Saviour healing the sick, and it is, perhaps, as favourable a specimen of the master as can be seen anywhere. Whether this be high or low praise, depends upon the reader’s taste.
In the same room, there is a very characteristic and life-like portrait by Mr. Sully, a distinguished American artist.
My stay in Philadelphia was very short, but what I saw of its society, I greatly liked. Treating of its general characteristics, I should be disposed to say that it is more provincial than Boston or New York, and that there is afloat in the fair city, an assumption of taste and criticism, savouring rather of those genteel discussions upon the same themes, in connection with Shakspeare and the Musical Glasses, of which we read in the Vicar of Wakefield. Near the city, is a most splendid unfinished marble structure for the Girard College, founded by a deceased gentleman of that name and of enormous wealth, which, if completed according to the original design, will be perhaps the richest edifice of modern times. But the bequest is involved in legal disputes, and pending them the work has stopped; so that like many other great undertakings in America, even this is rather going to be done one of these days, than doing now.
In the outskirts, stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary: conducted on a plan peculiar to the state of Pennsylvania. The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.
In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.
I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially connected with its management, and passed the day in going from cell to cell, and talking with the inmates. Every facility was afforded me, that the utmost courtesy could suggest. Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view, and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given. The perfect order of the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration of the system, there can be no kind of question.
Between the body of the prison and the outer wall, there is a spacious garden. Entering it, by a wicket in the massive gate, we pursued the path before us to its other termination, and passed into a large chamber, from which seven long passages radiate. On either side of each, is a long, long row of low cell doors, with a certain number over every one. Above, a gallery of cells like those below, except that they have no narrow yard attached (as those in the ground tier have), and are somewhat smaller. The possession of two of these, is supposed to compensate for the absence of so much air and exercise as can be had in the dull strip attached to each of the others, in an hour’s time every day; and therefore every prisoner in this upper story has two cells, adjoining and communicating with, each other.
Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.
His name, and crime, and term of suffering, are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell-door, and in a book of which the governor of the prison has one copy, and the moral instructor another: this is the index of his history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence: and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in which part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.
Every cell has double doors: the outer one of sturdy oak, the other of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed. He has a Bible, and a slate and pencil, and, under certain restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the purpose, and pen and ink and paper. His razor, plate, and can, and basin, hang upon the wall, or shine upon the little shelf. Fresh water is laid on in every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure. During the day, his bedstead turns up against the wall, and leaves more space for him to work in. His loom, or bench, or wheel, is there; and there he labours, sleeps and wakes, and counts the seasons as they change, and grows old.
The first man I saw, was seated at his loom, at work. He had been there six years, and was to remain, I think, three more. He had been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but even after his long imprisonment, denied his guilt, and said he had been hardly dealt by. It was his second offence.
He stopped his work when we went in, took off his spectacles, and answered freely to everything that was said to him, but always with a strange kind of pause first, and in a low, thoughtful voice. He wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commanded. He had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch clock from some disregarded odds and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum. Seeing me interested in this contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it ‘would play music before long.’ He had extracted some colours from the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall. One, of a female, over the door, he called ‘The Lady of the Lake.’
He smiled as I looked at these contrivances to while away the time; but when I looked from them to him, I saw that his lip trembled, and could have counted the beating of his heart. I forget how it came about, but some allusion was made to his having a wife. He shook his head at the word, turned aside, and covered his face with his hands.
‘But you are resigned now!’ said one of the gentlemen after a short pause, during which he had resumed his former manner. He answered with a sigh that seemed quite reckless in its hopelessness, ‘Oh yes, oh yes! I am resigned to it.’ ‘And are a better man, you think?’ ‘Well, I hope so: I’m sure I hope I may be.’ ‘And time goes pretty quickly?’ ‘Time is very long gentlemen, within these four walls!’
He gazed about him—Heaven only knows how wearily!—as he said these words; and in the act of doing so, fell into a strange stare as if he had forgotten something. A moment afterwards he sighed heavily, put on his spectacles, and went about his work again.
In another cell, there was a German, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for larceny, two of which had just expired. With colours procured in the same manner, he had painted every inch of the walls and ceiling quite beautifully. He had laid out the few feet of ground, behind, with exquisite neatness, and had made a little bed in the centre, that looked, by-the-bye, like a grave. The taste and ingenuity he had displayed in everything were most extraordinary; and yet a more dejected, heart-broken, wretched creature, it would be difficult to imagine. I never saw such a picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind. My heart bled for him; and when the tears ran down his cheeks, and he took one of the visitors aside, to ask, with his trembling hands nervously clutching at his coat to detain him, whether there was no hope of his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle was really too painful to witness. I never saw or heard of any kind of misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man.
In a third cell, was a tall, strong black, a burglar, working at his proper trade of making screws and the like. His time was nearly out. He was not only a very dexterous thief, but was notorious for his boldness and hardihood, and for the number of his previous convictions. He entertained us with a long account of his achievements, which he narrated with such infinite relish, that he actually seemed to lick his lips as he told us racy anecdotes of stolen plate, and of old ladies whom he had watched as they sat at windows in silver spectacles (he had plainly had an eye to their metal even from the other side of the street) and had afterwards robbed. This fellow, upon the slightest encouragement, would have mingled with his professional recollections the most detestable cant; but I am very much mistaken if he could have surpassed the unmitigated hypocrisy with which he declared that he blessed the day on which he came into that prison, and that he never would commit another robbery as long as he lived.
There was one man who was allowed, as an indulgence, to keep rabbits. His room having rather a close smell in consequence, they called to him at the door to come out into the passage. He complied of course, and stood shading his haggard face in the unwonted sunlight of the great window, looking as wan and unearthly as if he had been summoned from the grave. He had a white rabbit in his breast; and when the little creature, getting down upon the ground, stole back into the cell, and he, being dismissed, crept timidly after it, I thought it would have been very hard to say in what respect the man was the nobler animal of the two.
There was an English thief, who had been there but a few days out of seven years: a villainous, low-browed, thin-lipped fellow, with a white face; who had as yet no relish for visitors, and who, but for the additional penalty, would have gladly stabbed me with his shoemaker’s knife. There was another German who had entered the jail but yesterday, and who started from his bed when we looked in, and pleaded, in his broken English, very hard for work. There was a poet, who after doing two days’ work in every four-and-twenty hours, one for himself and one for the prison, wrote verses about ships (he was by trade a mariner), and ‘the maddening wine-cup,’ and his friends at home. There were very many of them. Some reddened at the sight of visitors, and some turned very pale. Some two or three had prisoner nurses with them, for they were very sick; and one, a fat old negro whose leg had been taken off within the jail, had for his attendant a classical scholar and an accomplished surgeon, himself a prisoner likewise. Sitting upon the stairs, engaged in some slight work, was a pretty coloured boy. ‘Is there no refuge for young criminals in Philadelphia, then?’ said I. ‘Yes, but only for white children.’ Noble aristocracy in crime!
There was a sailor who had been there upwards of eleven years, and who in a few months’ time would be free. Eleven years of solitary confinement!
‘I am very glad to hear your time is nearly out.’ What does he say? Nothing. Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh upon his fingers, and raise his eyes for an instant, every now and then, to those bare walls which have seen his head turn grey? It is a way he has sometimes.
Does he never look men in the face, and does he always pluck at those hands of his, as though he were bent on parting skin and bone? It is his humour: nothing more.
It is his humour too, to say that he does not look forward to going out; that he is not glad the time is drawing near; that he did look forward to it once, but that was very long ago; that he has lost all care for everything. It is his humour to be a helpless, crushed, and broken man. And, Heaven be his witness that he has his humour thoroughly gratified!
There were three young women in adjoining cells, all convicted at the same time of a conspiracy to rob their prosecutor. In the silence and solitude of their lives they had grown to be quite beautiful. Their looks were very sad, and might have moved the sternest visitor to tears, but not to that kind of sorrow which the contemplation of the men awakens. One was a young girl; not twenty, as I recollect; whose snow-white room was hung with the work of some former prisoner, and upon whose downcast face the sun in all its splendour shone down through the high chink in the wall, where one narrow strip of bright blue sky was visible. She was very penitent and quiet; had come to be resigned, she said (and I believe her); and had a mind at peace. ‘In a word, you are happy here?’ said one of my companions. She struggled—she did struggle very hard—to answer, Yes; but raising her eyes, and meeting that glimpse of freedom overhead, she burst into tears, and said, ‘She tried to be; she uttered no complaint; but it was natural that she should sometimes long to go out of that one cell: she could not help that,’ she sobbed, poor thing!
I went from cell to cell that day; and every face I saw, or word I heard, or incident I noted, is present to my mind in all its painfulness. But let me pass them by, for one, more pleasant, glance of a prison on the same plan which I afterwards saw at Pittsburg.
When I had gone over that, in the same manner, I asked the governor if he had any person in his charge who was shortly going out. He had one, he said, whose time was up next day; but he had only been a prisoner two years.
Two years! I looked back through two years of my own life—out of jail, prosperous, happy, surrounded by blessings, comforts, good fortune—and thought how wide a gap it was, and how long those two years passed in solitary captivity would have been. I have the face of this man, who was going to be released next day, before me now. It is almost more memorable in its happiness than the other faces in their misery. How easy and how natural it was for him to say that the system was a good one; and that the time went ‘pretty quick—considering;’ and that when a man once felt that he had offended the law, and must satisfy it, ‘he got along, somehow:’ and so forth!
‘What did he call you back to say to you, in that strange flutter?’ I asked of my conductor, when he had locked the door and joined me in the passage.
‘Oh! That he was afraid the soles of his boots were not fit for walking, as they were a good deal worn when he came in; and that he would thank me very much to have them mended, ready.’
Those boots had been taken off his feet, and put away with the rest of his clothes, two years before!
I took that opportunity of inquiring how they conducted themselves immediately before going out; adding that I presumed they trembled very much.
‘Well, it’s not so much a trembling,’ was the answer—‘though they do quiver—as a complete derangement of the nervous system. They can’t sign their names to the book; sometimes can’t even hold the pen; look about ’em without appearing to know why, or where they are; and sometimes get up and sit down again, twenty times in a minute. This is when they’re in the office, where they are taken with the hood on, as they were brought in. When they get outside the gate, they stop, and look first one way and then the other; not knowing which to take. Sometimes they stagger as if they were drunk, and sometimes are forced to lean against the fence, they’re so bad:—but they clear off in course of time.’
As I walked among these solitary cells, and looked at the faces of the men within them, I tried to picture to myself the thoughts and feelings natural to their condition. I imagined the hood just taken off, and the scene of their captivity disclosed to them in all its dismal monotony.
At first, the man is stunned. His confinement is a hideous vision; and his old life a reality. He throws himself upon his bed, and lies there abandoned to despair. By degrees the insupportable solitude and barrenness of the place rouses him from this stupor, and when the trap in his grated door is opened, he humbly begs and prays for work. ‘Give me some work to do, or I shall go raving mad!’
He has it; and by fits and starts applies himself to labour; but every now and then there comes upon him a burning sense of the years that must be wasted in that stone coffin, and an agony so piercing in the recollection of those who are hidden from his view and knowledge, that he starts from his seat, and striding up and down the narrow room with both hands clasped on his uplifted head, hears spirits tempting him to beat his brains out on the wall.
Again he falls upon his bed, and lies there, moaning. Suddenly he starts up, wondering whether any other man is near; whether there is another cell like that on either side of him: and listens keenly.
There is no sound, but other prisoners may be near for all that. He remembers to have heard once, when he little thought of coming here himself, that the cells were so constructed that the prisoners could not hear each other, though the officers could hear them. Where is the nearest man—upon the right, or on the left? or is there one in both directions? Where is he sitting now—with his face to the light? or is he walking to and fro? How is he dressed? Has he been here long? Is he much worn away? Is he very white and spectre-like? Does he think of his neighbour too?
Scarcely venturing to breathe, and listening while he thinks, he conjures up a figure with his back towards him, and imagines it moving about in this next cell. He has no idea of the face, but he is certain of the dark form of a stooping man. In the cell upon the other side, he puts another figure, whose face is hidden from him also. Day after day, and often when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he thinks of these two men until he is almost distracted. He never changes them. There they are always as he first imagined them—an old man on the right; a younger man upon the left—whose hidden features torture him to death, and have a mystery that makes him tremble.
The weary days pass on with solemn pace, like mourners at a funeral; and slowly he begins to feel that the white walls of the cell have something dreadful in them: that their colour is horrible: that their smooth surface chills his blood: that there is one hateful corner which torments him. Every morning when he wakes, he hides his head beneath the coverlet, and shudders to see the ghastly ceiling looking down upon him. The blessed light of day itself peeps in, an ugly phantom face, through the unchangeable crevice which is his prison window.
By slow but sure degrees, the terrors of that hateful corner swell until they beset him at all times; invade his rest, make his dreams hideous, and his nights dreadful. At first, he took a strange dislike to it; feeling as though it gave birth in his brain to something of corresponding shape, which ought not to be there, and racked his head with pains. Then he began to fear it, then to dream of it, and of men whispering its name and pointing to it. Then he could not bear to look at it, nor yet to turn his back upon it. Now, it is every night the lurking-place of a ghost: a shadow:—a silent something, horrible to see, but whether bird, or beast, or muffled human shape, he cannot tell.
[Picture: The Solitary Prisoner]
When he is in his cell by day, he fears the little yard without. When he is in the yard, he dreads to re-enter the cell. When night comes, there stands the phantom in the corner. If he have the courage to stand in its place, and drive it out (he had once: being desperate), it broods upon his bed. In the twilight, and always at the same hour, a voice calls to him by name; as the darkness thickens, his Loom begins to live; and even that, his comfort, is a hideous figure, watching him till daybreak.
Again, by slow degrees, these horrible fancies depart from him one by one: returning sometimes, unexpectedly, but at longer intervals, and in less alarming shapes. He has talked upon religious matters with the gentleman who visits him, and has read his Bible, and has written a prayer upon his slate, and hung it up as a kind of protection, and an assurance of Heavenly companionship. He dreams now, sometimes, of his children or his wife, but is sure that they are dead, or have deserted him. He is easily moved to tears; is gentle, submissive, and broken-spirited. Occasionally, the old agony comes back: a very little thing will revive it; even a familiar sound, or the scent of summer flowers in the air; but it does not last long, now: for the world without, has come to be the vision, and this solitary life, the sad reality.
If his term of imprisonment be short—I mean comparatively, for short it cannot be—the last half year is almost worse than all; for then he thinks the prison will take fire and he be burnt in the ruins, or that he is doomed to die within the walls, or that he will be detained on some false charge and sentenced for another term: or that something, no matter what, must happen to prevent his going at large. And this is natural, and impossible to be reasoned against, because, after his long separation from human life, and his great suffering, any event will appear to him more probable in the contemplation, than the being restored to liberty and his fellow-creatures.
If his period of confinement have been very long, the prospect of release bewilders and confuses him. His broken heart may flutter for a moment, when he thinks of the world outside, and what it might have been to him in all those lonely years, but that is all. The cell-door has been closed too long on all its hopes and cares. Better to have hanged him in the beginning than bring him to this pass, and send him forth to mingle with his kind, who are his kind no more.
On the haggard face of every man among these prisoners, the same expression sat. I know not what to liken it to. It had something of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind and deaf, mingled with a kind of horror, as though they had all been secretly terrified. In every little chamber that I entered, and at every grate through which I looked, I seemed to see the same appalling countenance. It lives in my memory, with the fascination of a remarkable picture. Parade before my eyes, a hundred men, with one among them newly released from this solitary suffering, and I would point him out.
The faces of the women, as I have said, it humanises and refines. Whether this be because of their better nature, which is elicited in solitude, or because of their being gentler creatures, of greater patience and longer suffering, I do not know; but so it is. That the punishment is nevertheless, to my thinking, fully as cruel and as wrong in their case, as in that of the men, I need scarcely add.
My firm conviction is that, independent of the mental anguish it occasions—an anguish so acute and so tremendous, that all imagination of it must fall far short of the reality—it wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world. It is my fixed opinion that those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased. There are many instances on record, of men who have chosen, or have been condemned, to lives of perfect solitude, but I scarcely remember one, even among sages of strong and vigorous intellect, where its effect has not become apparent, in some disordered train of thought, or some gloomy hallucination. What monstrous phantoms, bred of despondency and doubt, and born and reared in solitude, have stalked upon the earth, making creation ugly, and darkening the face of Heaven!
Suicides are rare among these prisoners: are almost, indeed, unknown. But no argument in favour of the system, can reasonably be deduced from this circumstance, although it is very often urged. All men who have made diseases of the mind their study, know perfectly well that such extreme depression and despair as will change the whole character, and beat down all its powers of elasticity and self-resistance, may be at work within a man, and yet stop short of self-destruction. This is a common case.
That it makes the senses dull, and by degrees impairs the bodily faculties, I am quite sure. I remarked to those who were with me in this very establishment at Philadelphia, that the criminals who had been there long, were deaf. They, who were in the habit of seeing these men constantly, were perfectly amazed at the idea, which they regarded as groundless and fanciful. And yet the very first prisoner to whom they appealed—one of their own selection confirmed my impression (which was unknown to him) instantly, and said, with a genuine air it was impossible to doubt, that he couldn’t think how it happened, but he was growing very dull of hearing.
That it is a singularly unequal punishment, and affects the worst man least, there is no doubt. In its superior efficiency as a means of reformation, compared with that other code of regulations which allows the prisoners to work in company without communicating together, I have not the smallest faith. All the instances of reformation that were mentioned to me, were of a kind that might have been—and I have no doubt whatever, in my own mind, would have been—equally well brought about by the Silent System. With regard to such men as the negro burglar and the English thief, even the most enthusiastic have scarcely any hope of their conversion.
It seems to me that the objection that nothing wholesome or good has ever had its growth in such unnatural solitude, and that even a dog or any of the more intelligent among beasts, would pine, and mope, and rust away, beneath its influence, would be in itself a sufficient argument against this system. But when we recollect, in addition, how very cruel and severe it is, and that a solitary life is always liable to peculiar and distinct objections of a most deplorable nature, which have arisen here, and call to mind, moreover, that the choice is not between this system, and a bad or ill-considered one, but between it and another which has worked well, and is, in its whole design and practice, excellent; there is surely more than sufficient reason for abandoning a mode of punishment attended by so little hope or promise, and fraught, beyond dispute, with such a host of evils.
As a relief to its contemplation, I will close this chapter with a curious story arising out of the same theme, which was related to me, on the occasion of this visit, by some of the gentlemen concerned.
At one of the periodical meetings of the inspectors of this prison, a working man of Philadelphia presented himself before the Board, and earnestly requested to be placed in solitary confinement. On being asked what motive could possibly prompt him to make this strange demand, he answered that he had an irresistible propensity to get drunk; that he was constantly indulging it, to his great misery and ruin; that he had no power of resistance; that he wished to be put beyond the reach of temptation; and that he could think of no better way than this. It was pointed out to him, in reply, that the prison was for criminals who had been tried and sentenced by the law, and could not be made available for any such fanciful purposes; he was exhorted to abstain from intoxicating drinks, as he surely might if he would; and received other very good advice, with which he retired, exceedingly dissatisfied with the result of his application.
He came again, and again, and again, and was so very earnest and importunate, that at last they took counsel together, and said, ‘He will certainly qualify himself for admission, if we reject him any more. Let us shut him up. He will soon be glad to go away, and then we shall get rid of him.’ So they made him sign a statement which would prevent his ever sustaining an action for false imprisonment, to the effect that his incarceration was voluntary, and of his own seeking; they requested him to take notice that the officer in attendance had orders to release him at any hour of the day or night, when he might knock upon his door for that purpose; but desired him to understand, that once going out, he would not be admitted any more. These conditions agreed upon, and he still remaining in the same mind, he was conducted to the prison, and shut up in one of the cells.
In this cell, the man, who had not the firmness to leave a glass of liquor standing untasted on a table before him—in this cell, in solitary confinement, and working every day at his trade of shoemaking, this man remained nearly two years. His health beginning to fail at the expiration of that time, the surgeon recommended that he should work occasionally in the garden; and as he liked the notion very much, he went about this new occupation with great cheerfulness.
He was digging here, one summer day, very industriously, when the wicket in the outer gate chanced to be left open: showing, beyond, the well-remembered dusty road and sunburnt fields. The way was as free to him as to any man living, but he no sooner raised his head and caught sight of it, all shining in the light, than, with the involuntary instinct of a prisoner, he cast away his spade, scampered off as fast as his legs would carry him, and never once looked back.
CHAPTER VIII WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE. AND THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE
WE left Philadelphia by steamboat, at six o’clock one very cold morning, and turned our faces towards Washington.
In the course of this day’s journey, as on subsequent occasions, we encountered some Englishmen (small farmers, perhaps, or country publicans at home) who were settled in America, and were travelling on their own affairs. Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle one in the public conveyances of the States, these are often the most intolerable and the most insufferable companions. United to every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American travellers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of insolent conceit and cool assumption of superiority, quite monstrous to behold. In the coarse familiarity of their approach, and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which they are in great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon the decent old restraints of home), they surpass any native specimens that came within my range of observation: and I often grew so patriotic when I saw and heard them, that I would cheerfully have submitted to a reasonable fine, if I could have given any other country in the whole world, the honour of claiming them for its children.
As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’ as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.
On board this steamboat, there were two young gentlemen, with shirt-collars reversed as usual, and armed with very big walking-sticks; who planted two seats in the middle of the deck, at a distance of some four paces apart; took out their tobacco-boxes; and sat down opposite each other, to chew. In less than a quarter of an hour’s time, these hopeful youths had shed about them on the clean boards, a copious shower of yellow rain; clearing, by that means, a kind of magic circle, within whose limits no intruders dared to come, and which they never failed to refresh and re-refresh before a spot was dry. This being before breakfast, rather disposed me, I confess, to nausea; but looking attentively at one of the expectorators, I plainly saw that he was young in chewing, and felt inwardly uneasy, himself. A glow of delight came over me at this discovery; and as I marked his face turn paler and paler, and saw the ball of tobacco in his left cheek, quiver with his suppressed agony, while yet he spat, and chewed, and spat again, in emulation of his older friend, I could have fallen on his neck and implored him to go on for hours.
We all sat down to a comfortable breakfast in the cabin below, where there was no more hurry or confusion than at such a meal in England, and where there was certainly greater politeness exhibited than at most of our stage-coach banquets. At about nine o’clock we arrived at the railroad station, and went on by the cars. At noon we turned out again, to cross a wide river in another steamboat; landed at a continuation of the railroad on the opposite shore; and went on by other cars; in which, in the course of the next hour or so, we crossed by wooden bridges, each a mile in length, two creeks, called respectively Great and Little Gunpowder. The water in both was blackened with flights of canvas-backed ducks, which are most delicious eating, and abound hereabouts at that season of the year.
These bridges are of wood, have no parapet, and are only just wide enough for the passage of the trains; which, in the event of the smallest accident, wound inevitably be plunged into the river. They are startling contrivances, and are most agreeable when passed.
We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.
After dinner, we went down to the railroad again, and took our seats in the cars for Washington. Being rather early, those men and boys who happened to have nothing particular to do, and were curious in foreigners, came (according to custom) round the carriage in which I sat; let down all the windows; thrust in their heads and shoulders; hooked themselves on conveniently, by their elbows; and fell to comparing notes on the subject of my personal appearance, with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed figure. I never gained so much uncompromising information with reference to my own nose and eyes, and various impressions wrought by my mouth and chin on different minds, and how my head looks when it is viewed from behind, as on these occasions. Some gentlemen were only satisfied by exercising their sense of touch; and the boys (who are surprisingly precocious in America) were seldom satisfied, even by that, but would return to the charge over and over again. Many a budding president has walked into my room with his cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, and stared at me for two whole hours: occasionally refreshing himself with a tweak of his nose, or a draught from the water-jug; or by walking to the windows and inviting other boys in the street below, to come up and do likewise: crying, ‘Here he is!’ ‘Come on!’ ‘Bring all your brothers!’ with other hospitable entreaties of that nature.
We reached Washington at about half-past six that evening, and had upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and commanding eminence. Arrived at the hotel; I saw no more of the place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.
Breakfast over next morning, I walk about the streets for an hour or two, and, coming home, throw up the window in the front and back, and look out. Here is Washington, fresh in my mind and under my eye.
Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest, preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster; widen it a little; throw in part of St. John’s Wood; put green blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought not to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of everybody’s way the better; call one the Post Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field without the bricks, in all central places where a street may naturally be expected: and that’s Washington.
The hotel in which we live, is a long row of small houses fronting on the street, and opening at the back upon a common yard, in which hangs a great triangle. Whenever a servant is wanted, somebody beats on this triangle from one stroke up to seven, according to the number of the house in which his presence is required; and as all the servants are always being wanted, and none of them ever come, this enlivening engine is in full performance the whole day through. Clothes are drying in the same yard; female slaves, with cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads are running to and fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning up his stomach to the sun, and grunting ‘that’s comfortable!’; and neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which is tingling madly all the time.
I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long, straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. Standing anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flag-staff as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger than a tea-chest. Under the window is a small stand of coaches, whose slave-drivers are sunning themselves on the steps of our door, and talking idly together. The three most obtrusive houses near at hand are the three meanest. On one—a shop, which never has anything in the window, and never has the door open—is painted in large characters, ‘THE CITY LUNCH.’ At another, which looks like a backway to somewhere else, but is an independent building in itself, oysters are procurable in every style. At the third, which is a very, very little tailor’s shop, pants are fixed to order; or in other words, pantaloons are made to measure. And that is our street in Washington.
It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features. One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses gone out of town for ever with their masters. To the admirers of cities it is a Barmecide Feast: a pleasant field for the imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project, with not even a legible inscription to record its departed greatness.
Such as it is, it is likely to remain. It was originally chosen for the seat of Government, as a means of averting the conflicting jealousies and interests of the different States; and very probably, too, as being remote from mobs: a consideration not to be slighted, even in America. It has no trade or commerce of its own: having little or no population beyond the President and his establishment; the members of the legislature who reside there during the session; the Government clerks and officers employed in the various departments; the keepers of the hotels and boarding-houses; and the tradesmen who supply their tables. It is very unhealthy. Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.
The principal features of the Capitol, are, of course, the two houses of Assembly. But there is, besides, in the centre of the building, a fine rotunda, ninety-six feet in diameter, and ninety-six high, whose circular wall is divided into compartments, ornamented by historical pictures. Four of these have for their subjects prominent events in the revolutionary struggle. They were painted by Colonel Trumbull, himself a member of Washington’s staff at the time of their occurrence; from which circumstance they derive a peculiar interest of their own. In this same hall Mr. Greenough’s large statue of Washington has been lately placed. It has great merits of course, but it struck me as being rather strained and violent for its subject. I could wish, however, to have seen it in a better light than it can ever be viewed in, where it stands.
There is a very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol; and from a balcony in front, the bird’s-eye view, of which I have just spoken, may be had, together with a beautiful prospect of the adjacent country. In one of the ornamented portions of the building, there is a figure of Justice; whereunto the Guide Book says, ‘the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the opposite extreme.’ Poor Justice! she has been made to wear much stranger garments in America than those she pines in, in the Capitol. Let us hope that she has changed her dress-maker since they were fashioned, and that the public sentiment of the country did not cut out the clothes she hides her lovely figure in, just now.
The House of Representatives is a beautiful and spacious hall, of semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars. One part of the gallery is appropriated to the ladies, and there they sit in front rows, and come in, and go out, as at a play or concert. The chair is canopied, and raised considerably above the floor of the House; and every member has an easy chair and a writing desk to himself: which is denounced by some people out of doors as a most unfortunate and injudicious arrangement, tending to long sittings and prosaic speeches. It is an elegant chamber to look at, but a singularly bad one for all purposes of hearing. The Senate, which is smaller, is free from this objection, and is exceedingly well adapted to the uses for which it is designed. The sittings, I need hardly add, take place in the day; and the parliamentary forms are modelled on those of the old country.
I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether I had not been very much impressed by the heads of the lawmakers at Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed: and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with indignant consternation by answering ‘No, that I didn’t remember being at all overcome.’ As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this subject in as few words as possible.
In the first place—it may be from some imperfect development of my organ of veneration—I do not remember having ever fainted away, or having even been moved to tears of joyful pride, at sight of any legislative body. I have borne the House of Commons like a man, and have yielded to no weakness, but slumber, in the House of Lords. I have seen elections for borough and county, and have never been impelled (no matter which party won) to damage my hat by throwing it up into the air in triumph, or to crack my voice by shouting forth any reference to our Glorious Constitution, to the noble purity of our independent voters, or, the unimpeachable integrity of our independent members. Having withstood such strong attacks upon my fortitude, it is possible that I may be of a cold and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters; and therefore my impressions of the live pillars of the Capitol at Washington must be received with such grains of allowance as this free confession may seem to demand.
Did I see in this public body an assemblage of men, bound together in the sacred names of Liberty and Freedom, and so asserting the chaste dignity of those twin goddesses, in all their discussions, as to exalt at once the Eternal Principles to which their names are given, and their own character and the character of their countrymen, in the admiring eyes of the whole world?
It was but a week, since an aged, grey-haired man, a lasting honour to the land that gave him birth, who has done good service to his country, as his forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores of years after the worms bred in its corruption, are but so many grains of dust—it was but a week, since this old man had stood for days upon his trial before this very body, charged with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic, which has for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn children. Yes. And publicly exhibited in the same city all the while; gilded, framed and glazed hung up for general admiration; shown to strangers not with shame, but pride; its face not turned towards the wall, itself not taken down and burned; is the Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, which solemnly declares that All Men are created Equal; and are endowed by their Creator with the Inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness!
It was not a month, since this same body had sat calmly by, and heard a man, one of themselves, with oaths which beggars in their drink reject, threaten to cut another’s throat from ear to ear. There he sat, among them; not crushed by the general feeling of the assembly, but as good a man as any.
There was but a week to come, and another of that body, for doing his duty to those who sent him there; for claiming in a Republic the Liberty and Freedom of expressing their sentiments, and making known their prayer; would be tried, found guilty, and have strong censure passed upon him by the rest. His was a grave offence indeed; for years before, he had risen up and said, ‘A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!’ But there are many kinds of hunters engaged in the Pursuit of Happiness, and they go variously armed. It is the Inalienable Right of some among them, to take the field after their Happiness equipped with cat and cartwhip, stocks, and iron collar, and to shout their view halloa! (always in praise of Liberty) to the music of clanking chains and bloody stripes.
Where sat the many legislators of coarse threats; of words and blows such as coalheavers deal upon each other, when they forget their breeding? On every side. Every session had its anecdotes of that kind, and the actors were all there.
Did I recognise in this assembly, a body of men, who, applying themselves in a new world to correct some of the falsehoods and vices of the old, purified the avenues to Public Life, paved the dirty ways to Place and Power, debated and made laws for the Common Good, and had no party but their Country?
I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon’s teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences: such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.
Did I see among them, the intelligence and refinement: the true, honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there, were drops of its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay. It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked. And thus this lowest of all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the farthest from that degradation.
That there are, among the representatives of the people in both Houses, and among all parties, some men of high character and great abilities, I need not say. The foremost among those politicians who are known in Europe, have been already described, and I see no reason to depart from the rule I have laid down for my guidance, of abstaining from all mention of individuals. It will be sufficient to add, that to the most favourable accounts that have been written of them, I more than fully and most heartily subscribe; and that personal intercourse and free communication have bred within me, not the result predicted in the very doubtful proverb, but increased admiration and respect. They are striking men to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Crichtons in varied accomplishments, Indians in fire of eye and gesture, Americans in strong and generous impulse; and they as well represent the honour and wisdom of their country at home, as the distinguished gentleman who is now its Minister at the British Court sustains its highest character abroad.
I visited both houses nearly every day, during my stay in Washington. On my initiatory visit to the House of Representatives, they divided against a decision of the chair; but the chair won. The second time I went, the member who was speaking, being interrupted by a laugh, mimicked it, as one child would in quarrelling with another, and added, ‘that he would make honourable gentlemen opposite, sing out a little more on the other side of their mouths presently.’ But interruptions are rare; the speaker being usually heard in silence. There are more quarrels than with us, and more threatenings than gentlemen are accustomed to exchange in any civilised society of which we have record: but farm-yard imitations have not as yet been imported from the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The feature in oratory which appears to be the most practised, and most relished, is the constant repetition of the same idea or shadow of an idea in fresh words; and the inquiry out of doors is not, ‘What did he say?’ but, ‘How long did he speak?’ These, however, are but enlargements of a principle which prevails elsewhere.
The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.
It is somewhat remarkable too, at first, to say the least, to see so many honourable members with swelled faces; and it is scarcely less remarkable to discover that this appearance is caused by the quantity of tobacco they contrive to stow within the hollow of the cheek. It is strange enough too, to see an honourable gentleman leaning back in his tilted chair with his legs on the desk before him, shaping a convenient ‘plug’ with his penknife, and when it is quite ready for use, shooting the old one from his mouth, as from a pop-gun, and clapping the new one in its place.
I was surprised to observe that even steady old chewers of great experience, are not always good marksmen, which has rather inclined me to doubt that general proficiency with the rifle, of which we have heard so much in England. Several gentlemen called upon me who, in the course of conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces; and one (but he was certainly short-sighted) mistook the closed sash for the open window, at three. On another occasion, when I dined out, and was sitting with two ladies and some gentlemen round a fire before dinner, one of the company fell short of the fireplace, six distinct times. I am disposed to think, however, that this was occasioned by his not aiming at that object; as there was a white marble hearth before the fender, which was more convenient, and may have suited his purpose better.
The Patent Office at Washington, furnishes an extraordinary example of American enterprise and ingenuity; for the immense number of models it contains are the accumulated inventions of only five years; the whole of the previous collection having been destroyed by fire. The elegant structure in which they are arranged is one of design rather than execution, for there is but one side erected out of four, though the works are stopped. The Post Office is a very compact and very beautiful building. In one of the departments, among a collection of rare and curious articles, are deposited the presents which have been made from time to time to the American ambassadors at foreign courts by the various potentates to whom they were the accredited agents of the Republic; gifts which by the law they are not permitted to retain. I confess that I looked upon this as a very painful exhibition, and one by no means flattering to the national standard of honesty and honour. That can scarcely be a high state of moral feeling which imagines a gentleman of repute and station, likely to be corrupted, in the discharge of his duty, by the present of a snuff-box, or a richly-mounted sword, or an Eastern shawl; and surely the Nation who reposes confidence in her appointed servants, is likely to be better served, than she who makes them the subject of such very mean and paltry suspicions.
At George Town, in the suburbs, there is a Jesuit College; delightfully situated, and, so far as I had an opportunity of seeing, well managed. Many persons who are not members of the Romish Church, avail themselves, I believe, of these institutions, and of the advantageous opportunities they afford for the education of their children. The heights of this neighbourhood, above the Potomac River, are very picturesque: and are free, I should conceive, from some of the insalubrities of Washington. The air, at that elevation, was quite cool and refreshing, when in the city it was burning hot.
The President’s mansion is more like an English club-house, both within and without, than any other kind of establishment with which I can compare it. The ornamental ground about it has been laid out in garden walks; they are pretty, and agreeable to the eye; though they have that uncomfortable air of having been made yesterday, which is far from favourable to the display of such beauties.
My first visit to this house was on the morning after my arrival, when I was carried thither by an official gentleman, who was so kind as to charge himself with my presentation to the President.
We entered a large hall, and having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered, walked without further ceremony through the rooms on the ground floor, as divers other gentlemen (mostly with their hats on, and their hands in their pockets) were doing very leisurely. Some of these had ladies with them, to whom they were showing the premises; others were lounging on the chairs and sofas; others, in a perfect state of exhaustion from listlessness, were yawning drearily. The greater portion of this assemblage were rather asserting their supremacy than doing anything else, as they had no particular business there, that anybody knew of. A few were closely eyeing the movables, as if to make quite sure that the President (who was far from popular) had not made away with any of the furniture, or sold the fixtures for his private benefit.
After glancing at these loungers; who were scattered over a pretty drawing-room, opening upon a terrace which commanded a beautiful prospect of the river and the adjacent country; and who were sauntering, too, about a larger state-room called the Eastern Drawing-room; we went up-stairs into another chamber, where were certain visitors, waiting for audiences. At sight of my conductor, a black in plain clothes and yellow slippers who was gliding noiselessly about, and whispering messages in the ears of the more impatient, made a sign of recognition, and glided off to announce him.
We had previously looked into another chamber fitted all round with a great, bare, wooden desk or counter, whereon lay files of newspapers, to which sundry gentlemen were referring. But there were no such means of beguiling the time in this apartment, which was as unpromising and tiresome as any waiting-room in one of our public establishments, or any physician’s dining-room during his hours of consultation at home.
There were some fifteen or twenty persons in the room. One, a tall, wiry, muscular old man, from the west; sunburnt and swarthy; with a brown white hat on his knees, and a giant umbrella resting between his legs; who sat bolt upright in his chair, frowning steadily at the carpet, and twitching the hard lines about his mouth, as if he had made up his mind ‘to fix’ the President on what he had to say, and wouldn’t bate him a grain. Another, a Kentucky farmer, six-feet-six in height, with his hat on, and his hands under his coat-tails, who leaned against the wall and kicked the floor with his heel, as though he had Time’s head under his shoe, and were literally ‘killing’ him. A third, an oval-faced, bilious-looking man, with sleek black hair cropped close, and whiskers and beard shaved down to blue dots, who sucked the head of a thick stick, and from time to time took it out of his mouth, to see how it was getting on. A fourth did nothing but whistle. A fifth did nothing but spit. And indeed all these gentlemen were so very persevering and energetic in this latter particular, and bestowed their favours so abundantly upon the carpet, that I take it for granted the Presidential housemaids have high wages, or, to speak more genteelly, an ample amount of ‘compensation:’ which is the American word for salary, in the case of all public servants.
We had not waited in this room many minutes, before the black messenger returned, and conducted us into another of smaller dimensions, where, at a business-like table covered with papers, sat the President himself. He looked somewhat worn and anxious, and well he might; being at war with everybody—but the expression of his face was mild and pleasant, and his manner was remarkably unaffected, gentlemanly, and agreeable. I thought that in his whole carriage and demeanour, he became his station singularly well.
Being advised that the sensible etiquette of the republican court admitted of a traveller, like myself, declining, without any impropriety, an invitation to dinner, which did not reach me until I had concluded my arrangements for leaving Washington some days before that to which it referred, I only returned to this house once. It was on the occasion of one of those general assemblies which are held on certain nights, between the hours of nine and twelve o’clock, and are called, rather oddly, Levees.
I went, with my wife, at about ten. There was a pretty dense crowd of carriages and people in the court-yard, and so far as I could make out, there were no very clear regulations for the taking up or setting down of company. There were certainly no policemen to soothe startled horses, either by sawing at their bridles or flourishing truncheons in their eyes; and I am ready to make oath that no inoffensive persons were knocked violently on the head, or poked acutely in their backs or stomachs; or brought to a standstill by any such gentle means, and then taken into custody for not moving on. But there was no confusion or disorder. Our carriage reached the porch in its turn, without any blustering, swearing, shouting, backing, or other disturbance: and we dismounted with as much ease and comfort as though we had been escorted by the whole Metropolitan Force from A to Z inclusive.
The suite of rooms on the ground-floor were lighted up, and a military band was playing in the hall. In the smaller drawing-room, the centre of a circle of company, were the President and his daughter-in-law, who acted as the lady of the mansion; and a very interesting, graceful, and accomplished lady too. One gentleman who stood among this group, appeared to take upon himself the functions of a master of the ceremonies. I saw no other officers or attendants, and none were needed.
The great drawing-room, which I have already mentioned, and the other chambers on the ground-floor, were crowded to excess. The company was not, in our sense of the term, select, for it comprehended persons of very many grades and classes; nor was there any great display of costly attire: indeed, some of the costumes may have been, for aught I know, grotesque enough. But the decorum and propriety of behaviour which prevailed, were unbroken by any rude or disagreeable incident; and every man, even among the miscellaneous crowd in the hall who were admitted without any orders or tickets to look on, appeared to feel that he was a part of the Institution, and was responsible for its preserving a becoming character, and appearing to the best advantage.
That these visitors, too, whatever their station, were not without some refinement of taste and appreciation of intellectual gifts, and gratitude to those men who, by the peaceful exercise of great abilities, shed new charms and associations upon the homes of their countrymen, and elevate their character in other lands, was most earnestly testified by their reception of Washington Irving, my dear friend, who had recently been appointed Minister at the court of Spain, and who was among them that night, in his new character, for the first and last time before going abroad. I sincerely believe that in all the madness of American politics, few public men would have been so earnestly, devotedly, and affectionately caressed, as this most charming writer: and I have seldom respected a public assembly more, than I did this eager throng, when I saw them turning with one mind from noisy orators and officers of state, and flocking with a generous and honest impulse round the man of quiet pursuits: proud in his promotion as reflecting back upon their country: and grateful to him with their whole hearts for the store of graceful fancies he had poured out among them. Long may he dispense such treasures with unsparing hand; and long may they remember him as worthily!
The term we had assigned for the duration of our stay in Washington was now at an end, and we were to begin to travel; for the railroad distances we had traversed yet, in journeying among these older towns, are on that great continent looked upon as nothing.
I had at first intended going South—to Charleston. But when I came to consider the length of time which this journey would occupy, and the premature heat of the season, which even at Washington had been often very trying; and weighed moreover, in my own mind, the pain of living in the constant contemplation of slavery, against the more than doubtful chances of my ever seeing it, in the time I had to spare, stripped of the disguises in which it would certainly be dressed, and so adding any item to the host of facts already heaped together on the subject; I began to listen to old whisperings which had often been present to me at home in England, when I little thought of ever being here; and to dream again of cities growing up, like palaces in fairy tales, among the wilds and forests of the west.
The advice I received in most quarters when I began to yield to my desire of travelling towards that point of the compass was, according to custom, sufficiently cheerless: my companion being threatened with more perils, dangers, and discomforts, than I can remember or would catalogue if I could; but of which it will be sufficient to remark that blowings-up in steamboats and breakings-down in coaches were among the least. But, having a western route sketched out for me by the best and kindest authority to which I could have resorted, and putting no great faith in these discouragements, I soon determined on my plan of action.
This was to travel south, only to Richmond in Virginia; and then to turn, and shape our course for the Far West; whither I beseech the reader’s company, in a new chapter.
CHAPTER IX A NIGHT STEAMER ON THE POTOMAC RIVER. VIRGINIA ROAD, AND A BLACK DRIVER. RICHMOND. BALTIMORE. THE HARRISBURG MAIL, AND A GLIMPSE OF THE CITY. A CANAL BOAT
WE were to proceed in the first instance by steamboat; and as it is usual to sleep on board, in consequence of the starting-hour being four o’clock in the morning, we went down to where she lay, at that very uncomfortable time for such expeditions when slippers are most valuable, and a familiar bed, in the perspective of an hour or two, looks uncommonly pleasant.
It is ten o’clock at night: say half-past ten: moonlight, warm, and dull enough. The steamer (not unlike a child’s Noah’s ark in form, with the machinery on the top of the roof) is riding lazily up and down, and bumping clumsily against the wooden pier, as the ripple of the river trifles with its unwieldy carcase. The wharf is some distance from the city. There is nobody down here; and one or two dull lamps upon the steamer’s decks are the only signs of life remaining, when our coach has driven away. As soon as our footsteps are heard upon the planks, a fat negress, particularly favoured by nature in respect of bustle, emerges from some dark stairs, and marshals my wife towards the ladies’ cabin, to which retreat she goes, followed by a mighty bale of cloaks and great-coats. I valiantly resolve not to go to bed at all, but to walk up and down the pier till morning.
I begin my promenade—thinking of all kinds of distant things and persons, and of nothing near—and pace up and down for half-an-hour. Then I go on board again; and getting into the light of one of the lamps, look at my watch and think it must have stopped; and wonder what has become of the faithful secretary whom I brought along with me from Boston. He is supping with our late landlord (a Field Marshal, at least, no doubt) in honour of our departure, and may be two hours longer. I walk again, but it gets duller and duller: the moon goes down: next June seems farther off in the dark, and the echoes of my footsteps make me nervous. It has turned cold too; and walking up and down without my companion in such lonely circumstances, is but poor amusement. So I break my staunch resolution, and think it may be, perhaps, as well to go to bed.
I go on board again; open the door of the gentlemen’s cabin and walk in. Somehow or other—from its being so quiet, I suppose—I have taken it into my head that there is nobody there. To my horror and amazement it is full of sleepers in every stage, shape, attitude, and variety of slumber: in the berths, on the chairs, on the floors, on the tables, and particularly round the stove, my detested enemy. I take another step forward, and slip on the shining face of a black steward, who lies rolled in a blanket on the floor. He jumps up, grins, half in pain and half in hospitality; whispers my own name in my ear; and groping among the sleepers, leads me to my berth. Standing beside it, I count these slumbering passengers, and get past forty. There is no use in going further, so I begin to undress. As the chairs are all occupied, and there is nothing else to put my clothes on, I deposit them upon the ground: not without soiling my hands, for it is in the same condition as the carpets in the Capitol, and from the same cause. Having but partially undressed, I clamber on my shelf, and hold the curtain open for a few minutes while I look round on all my fellow-travellers again. That done, I let it fall on them, and on the world: turn round: and go to sleep.
I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good deal of noise. The day is then just breaking. Everybody wakes at the same time. Some are self-possessed directly, and some are much perplexed to make out where they are until they have rubbed their eyes, and leaning on one elbow, looked about them. Some yawn, some groan, nearly all spit, and a few get up. I am among the risers: for it is easy to feel, without going into the fresh air, that the atmosphere of the cabin is vile in the last degree. I huddle on my clothes, go down into the fore-cabin, get shaved by the barber, and wash myself. The washing and dressing apparatus for the passengers generally, consists of two jack-towels, three small wooden basins, a keg of water and a ladle to serve it out with, six square inches of looking-glass, two ditto ditto of yellow soap, a comb and brush for the head, and nothing for the teeth. Everybody uses the comb and brush, except myself. Everybody stares to see me using my own; and two or three gentlemen are strongly disposed to banter me on my prejudices, but don’t. When I have made my toilet, I go upon the hurricane-deck, and set in for two hours of hard walking up and down. The sun is rising brilliantly; we are passing Mount Vernon, where Washington lies buried; the river is wide and rapid; and its banks are beautiful. All the glory and splendour of the day are coming on, and growing brighter every minute.
At eight o’clock, we breakfast in the cabin where I passed the night, but the windows and doors are all thrown open, and now it is fresh enough. There is no hurry or greediness apparent in the despatch of the meal. It is longer than a travelling breakfast with us; more orderly, and more polite.
Soon after nine o’clock we come to Potomac Creek, where we are to land; and then comes the oddest part of the journey. Seven stage-coaches are preparing to carry us on. Some of them are ready, some of them are not ready. Some of the drivers are blacks, some whites. There are four horses to each coach, and all the horses, harnessed or unharnessed, are there. The passengers are getting out of the steamboat, and into the coaches; the luggage is being transferred in noisy wheelbarrows; the horses are frightened, and impatient to start; the black drivers are chattering to them like so many monkeys; and the white ones whooping like so many drovers: for the main thing to be done in all kinds of hostlering here, is to make as much noise as possible. The coaches are something like the French coaches, but not nearly so good. In lieu of springs, they are hung on bands of the strongest leather. There is very little choice or difference between them; and they may be likened to the car portion of the swings at an English fair, roofed, put upon axle-trees and wheels, and curtained with painted canvas. They are covered with mud from the roof to the wheel-tire, and have never been cleaned since they were first built.
The tickets we have received on board the steamboat are marked No. 1, so we belong to coach No. 1. I throw my coat on the box, and hoist my wife and her maid into the inside. It has only one step, and that being about a yard from the ground, is usually approached by a chair: when there is no chair, ladies trust in Providence. The coach holds nine inside, having a seat across from door to door, where we in England put our legs: so that there is only one feat more difficult in the performance than getting in, and that is, getting out again. There is only one outside passenger, and he sits upon the box. As I am that one, I climb up; and while they are strapping the luggage on the roof, and heaping it into a kind of tray behind, have a good opportunity of looking at the driver.
He is a negro—very black indeed. He is dressed in a coarse pepper-and-salt suit excessively patched and darned (particularly at the knees), grey stockings, enormous unblacked high-low shoes, and very short trousers. He has two odd gloves: one of parti-coloured worsted, and one of leather. He has a very short whip, broken in the middle and bandaged up with string. And yet he wears a low-crowned, broad-brimmed, black hat: faintly shadowing forth a kind of insane imitation of an English coachman! But somebody in authority cries ‘Go ahead!’ as I am making these observations. The mail takes the lead in a four-horse waggon, and all the coaches follow in procession: headed by No. 1.
By the way, whenever an Englishman would cry ‘All right!’ an American cries ‘Go ahead!’ which is somewhat expressive of the national character of the two countries.
The first half-mile of the road is over bridges made of loose planks laid across two parallel poles, which tilt up as the wheels roll over them; and IN the river. The river has a clayey bottom and is full of holes, so that half a horse is constantly disappearing unexpectedly, and can’t be found again for some time.
But we get past even this, and come to the road itself, which is a series of alternate swamps and gravel-pits. A tremendous place is close before us, the black driver rolls his eyes, screws his mouth up very round, and looks straight between the two leaders, as if he were saying to himself, ‘We have done this often before, but now I think we shall have a crash.’ He takes a rein in each hand; jerks and pulls at both; and dances on the splashboard with both feet (keeping his seat, of course) like the late lamented Ducrow on two of his fiery coursers. We come to the spot, sink down in the mire nearly to the coach windows, tilt on one side at an angle of forty-five degrees, and stick there. The insides scream dismally; the coach stops; the horses flounder; all the other six coaches stop; and their four-and-twenty horses flounder likewise: but merely for company, and in sympathy with ours. Then the following circumstances occur.
BLACK DRIVER (to the horses). ‘Hi!’
Nothing happens. Insides scream again.
BLACK DRIVER (to the horses). ‘Ho!’
Horses plunge, and splash the black driver.
GENTLEMAN INSIDE (looking out). ‘Why, what on airth—’
Gentleman receives a variety of splashes and draws his head in again, without finishing his question or waiting for an answer.
BLACK DRIVER (still to the horses). ‘Jiddy! Jiddy!’
Horses pull violently, drag the coach out of the hole, and draw it up a bank; so steep, that the black driver’s legs fly up into the air, and he goes back among the luggage on the roof. But he immediately recovers himself, and cries (still to the horses),
‘Pill!’
No effect. On the contrary, the coach begins to roll back upon No. 2, which rolls back upon No. 3, which rolls back upon No. 4, and so on, until No. 7 is heard to curse and swear, nearly a quarter of a mile behind.
BLACK DRIVER (louder than before). ‘Pill!’
Horses make another struggle to get up the bank, and again the coach rolls backward.
BLACK DRIVER (louder than before). ‘Pe-e-e-ill!’
Horses make a desperate struggle.
BLACK DRIVER (recovering spirits). ‘Hi, Jiddy, Jiddy, Pill!’
Horses make another effort.
BLACK DRIVER (with great vigour). ‘Ally Loo! Hi. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo!’
Horses almost do it.
BLACK DRIVER (with his eyes starting out of his head). ‘Lee, den. Lee, dere. Hi. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo. Lee-e-e-e-e!’
They run up the bank, and go down again on the other side at a fearful pace. It is impossible to stop them, and at the bottom there is a deep hollow, full of water. The coach rolls frightfully. The insides scream. The mud and water fly about us. The black driver dances like a madman. Suddenly we are all right by some extraordinary means, and stop to breathe.
A black friend of the black driver is sitting on a fence. The black driver recognises him by twirling his head round and round like a harlequin, rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, and grinning from ear to ear. He stops short, turns to me, and says:
‘We shall get you through sa, like a fiddle, and hope a please you when we get you through sa. Old ‘ooman at home sa:’ chuckling very much. ‘Outside gentleman sa, he often remember old ‘ooman at home sa,’ grinning again.
‘Ay ay, we’ll take care of the old woman. Don’t be afraid.’
The black driver grins again, but there is another hole, and beyond that, another bank, close before us. So he stops short: cries (to the horses again) ‘Easy. Easy den. Ease. Steady. Hi. Jiddy. Pill. Ally. Loo,’ but never ‘Lee!’ until we are reduced to the very last extremity, and are in the midst of difficulties, extrication from which appears to be all but impossible.
And so we do the ten miles or thereabouts in two hours and a half; breaking no bones, though bruising a great many; and in short getting through the distance, ‘like a fiddle.’
This singular kind of coaching terminates at Fredericksburgh, whence there is a railway to Richmond. The tract of country through which it takes its course was once productive; but the soil has been exhausted by the system of employing a great amount of slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land: and it is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees. Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me.
In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system. The barns and outhouses are mouldering away; the sheds are patched and half roofless; the log cabins (built in Virginia with external chimneys made of clay or wood) are squalid in the last degree. There is no look of decent comfort anywhere. The miserable stations by the railway side, the great wild wood-yards, whence the engine is supplied with fuel; the negro children rolling on the ground before the cabin doors, with dogs and pigs; the biped beasts of burden slinking past: gloom and dejection are upon them all.
In the negro car belonging to the train in which we made this journey, were a mother and her children who had just been purchased; the husband and father being left behind with their old owner. The children cried the whole way, and the mother was misery’s picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe. The black in Sinbad’s Travels with one eye in the middle of his forehead which shone like a burning coal, was nature’s aristocrat compared with this white gentleman.
[Picture: Black and White]
It was between six and seven o’clock in the evening, when we drove to the hotel: in front of which, and on the top of the broad flight of steps leading to the door, two or three citizens were balancing themselves on rocking-chairs, and smoking cigars. We found it a very large and elegant establishment, and were as well entertained as travellers need desire to be. The climate being a thirsty one, there was never, at any hour of the day, a scarcity of loungers in the spacious bar, or a cessation of the mixing of cool liquors: but they were a merrier people here, and had musical instruments playing to them o’ nights, which it was a treat to hear again.
The next day, and the next, we rode and walked about the town, which is delightfully situated on eight hills, overhanging James River; a sparkling stream, studded here and there with bright islands, or brawling over broken rocks. Although it was yet but the middle of March, the weather in this southern temperature was extremely warm; the peech-trees and magnolias were in full bloom; and the trees were green. In a low ground among the hills, is a valley known as ‘Bloody Run,’ from a terrible conflict with the Indians which once occurred there. It is a good place for such a struggle, and, like every other spot I saw associated with any legend of that wild people now so rapidly fading from the earth, interested me very much.
The city is the seat of the local parliament of Virginia; and in its shady legislative halls, some orators were drowsily holding forth to the hot noon day. By dint of constant repetition, however, these constitutional sights had very little more interest for me than so many parochial vestries; and I was glad to exchange this one for a lounge in a well-arranged public library of some ten thousand volumes, and a visit to a tobacco manufactory, where the workmen are all slaves.
I saw in this place the whole process of picking, rolling, pressing, drying, packing in casks, and branding. All the tobacco thus dealt with, was in course of manufacture for chewing; and one would have supposed there was enough in that one storehouse to have filled even the comprehensive jaws of America. In this form, the weed looks like the oil-cake on which we fatten cattle; and even without reference to its consequences, is sufficiently uninviting.
Many of the workmen appeared to be strong men, and it is hardly necessary to add that they were all labouring quietly, then. After two o’clock in the day, they are allowed to sing, a certain number at a time. The hour striking while I was there, some twenty sang a hymn in parts, and sang it by no means ill; pursuing their work meanwhile. A bell rang as I was about to leave, and they all poured forth into a building on the opposite side of the street to dinner. I said several times that I should like to see them at their meal; but as the gentleman to whom I mentioned this desire appeared to be suddenly taken rather deaf, I did not pursue the request. Of their appearance I shall have something to say, presently.
On the following day, I visited a plantation or farm, of about twelve hundred acres, on the opposite bank of the river. Here again, although I went down with the owner of the estate, to ‘the quarter,’ as that part of it in which the slaves live is called, I was not invited to enter into any of their huts. All I saw of them, was, that they were very crazy, wretched cabins, near to which groups of half-naked children basked in the sun, or wallowed on the dusty ground. But I believe that this gentleman is a considerate and excellent master, who inherited his fifty slaves, and is neither a buyer nor a seller of human stock; and I am sure, from my own observation and conviction, that he is a kind-hearted, worthy man.
The planter’s house was an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought Defoe’s description of such places strongly to my recollection. The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and heat without. Before the windows was an open piazza, where, in what they call the hot weather—whatever that may be—they sling hammocks, and drink and doze luxuriously. I do not know how their cool rejections may taste within the hammocks, but, having experience, I can report that, out of them, the mounds of ices and the bowls of mint-julep and sherry-cobbler they make in these latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.
There are two bridges across the river: one belongs to the railroad, and the other, which is a very crazy affair, is the private property of some old lady in the neighbourhood, who levies tolls upon the townspeople. Crossing this bridge, on my way back, I saw a notice painted on the gate, cautioning all persons to drive slowly: under a penalty, if the offender were a white man, of five dollars; if a negro, fifteen stripes.
The same decay and gloom that overhang the way by which it is approached, hover above the town of Richmond. There are pretty villas and cheerful houses in its streets, and Nature smiles upon the country round; but jostling its handsome residences, like slavery itself going hand in hand with many lofty virtues, are deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into ruinous heaps. Hinting gloomily at things below the surface, these, and many other tokens of the same description, force themselves upon the notice, and are remembered with depressing influence, when livelier features are forgotten.
To those who are happily unaccustomed to them, the countenances in the streets and labouring-places, too, are shocking. All men who know that there are laws against instructing slaves, of which the pains and penalties greatly exceed in their amount the fines imposed on those who maim and torture them, must be prepared to find their faces very low in the scale of intellectual expression. But the darkness—not of skin, but mind—which meets the stranger’s eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of all fairer characters traced by Nature’s hand; immeasurably outdo his worst belief. That travelled creation of the great satirist’s brain, who fresh from living among horses, peered from a high casement down upon his own kind with trembling horror, was scarcely more repelled and daunted by the sight, than those who look upon some of these faces for the first time must surely be.
I left the last of them behind me in the person of a wretched drudge, who, after running to and fro all day till midnight, and moping in his stealthy winks of sleep upon the stairs betweenwhiles, was washing the dark passages at four o’clock in the morning; and went upon my way with a grateful heart that I was not doomed to live where slavery was, and had never had my senses blunted to its wrongs and horrors in a slave-rocked cradle.
It had been my intention to proceed by James River and Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore; but one of the steamboats being absent from her station through some accident, and the means of conveyance being consequently rendered uncertain, we returned to Washington by the way we had come (there were two constables on board the steamboat, in pursuit of runaway slaves), and halting there again for one night, went on to Baltimore next afternoon.
The most comfortable of all the hotels of which I had any experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is Barnum’s, in that city: where the English traveller will find curtains to his bed, for the first and probably the last time in America (this is a disinterested remark, for I never use them); and where he will be likely to have enough water for washing himself, which is not at all a common case.
This capital of the state of Maryland is a bustling, busy town, with a great deal of traffic of various kinds, and in particular of water commerce. That portion of the town which it most favours is none of the cleanest, it is true; but the upper part is of a very different character, and has many agreeable streets and public buildings. The Washington Monument, which is a handsome pillar with a statue on its summit; the Medical College; and the Battle Monument in memory of an engagement with the British at North Point; are the most conspicuous among them.
There is a very good prison in this city, and the State Penitentiary is also among its institutions. In this latter establishment there were two curious cases.
One was that of a young man, who had been tried for the murder of his father. The evidence was entirely circumstantial, and was very conflicting and doubtful; nor was it possible to assign any motive which could have tempted him to the commission of so tremendous a crime. He had been tried twice; and on the second occasion the jury felt so much hesitation in convicting him, that they found a verdict of manslaughter, or murder in the second degree; which it could not possibly be, as there had, beyond all doubt, been no quarrel or provocation, and if he were guilty at all, he was unquestionably guilty of murder in its broadest and worst signification.
The remarkable feature in the case was, that if the unfortunate deceased were not really murdered by this own son of his, he must have been murdered by his own brother. The evidence lay in a most remarkable manner, between those two. On all the suspicious points, the dead man’s brother was the witness: all the explanations for the prisoner (some of them extremely plausible) went, by construction and inference, to inculcate him as plotting to fix the guilt upon his nephew. It must have been one of them: and the jury had to decide between two sets of suspicions, almost equally unnatural, unaccountable, and strange.
The other case, was that of a man who once went to a certain distiller’s and stole a copper measure containing a quantity of liquor. He was pursued and taken with the property in his possession, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On coming out of the jail, at the expiration of that term, he went back to the same distiller’s, and stole the same copper measure containing the same quantity of liquor. There was not the slightest reason to suppose that the man wished to return to prison: indeed everything, but the commission of the offence, made directly against that assumption. There are only two ways of accounting for this extraordinary proceeding. One is, that after undergoing so much for this copper measure he conceived he had established a sort of claim and right to it. The other that, by dint of long thinking about, it had become a monomania with him, and had acquired a fascination which he found it impossible to resist; swelling from an Earthly Copper Gallon into an Ethereal Golden Vat.
After remaining here a couple of days I bound myself to a rigid adherence to the plan I had laid down so recently, and resolved to set forward on our western journey without any more delay. Accordingly, having reduced the luggage within the smallest possible compass (by sending back to New York, to be afterwards forwarded to us in Canada, so much of it as was not absolutely wanted); and having procured the necessary credentials to banking-houses on the way; and having moreover looked for two evenings at the setting sun, with as well-defined an idea of the country before us as if we had been going to travel into the very centre of that planet; we left Baltimore by another railway at half-past eight in the morning, and reached the town of York, some sixty miles off, by the early dinner-time of the Hotel which was the starting-place of the four-horse coach, wherein we were to proceed to Harrisburg.
This conveyance, the box of which I was fortunate enough to secure, had come down to meet us at the railroad station, and was as muddy and cumbersome as usual. As more passengers were waiting for us at the inn-door, the coachman observed under his breath, in the usual self-communicative voice, looking the while at his mouldy harness as if it were to that he was addressing himself,
‘I expect we shall want the big coach.’
I could not help wondering within myself what the size of this big coach might be, and how many persons it might be designed to hold; for the vehicle which was too small for our purpose was something larger than two English heavy night coaches, and might have been the twin-brother of a French Diligence. My speculations were speedily set at rest, however, for as soon as we had dined, there came rumbling up the street, shaking its sides like a corpulent giant, a kind of barge on wheels. After much blundering and backing, it stopped at the door: rolling heavily from side to side when its other motion had ceased, as if it had taken cold in its damp stable, and between that, and the having been required in its dropsical old age to move at any faster pace than a walk, were distressed by shortness of wind.
‘If here ain’t the Harrisburg mail at last, and dreadful bright and smart to look at too,’ cried an elderly gentleman in some excitement, ‘darn my mother!’
I don’t know what the sensation of being darned may be, or whether a man’s mother has a keener relish or disrelish of the process than anybody else; but if the endurance of this mysterious ceremony by the old lady in question had depended on the accuracy of her son’s vision in respect to the abstract brightness and smartness of the Harrisburg mail, she would certainly have undergone its infliction. However, they booked twelve people inside; and the luggage (including such trifles as a large rocking-chair, and a good-sized dining-table) being at length made fast upon the roof, we started off in great state.
At the door of another hotel, there was another passenger to be taken up.
‘Any room, sir?’ cries the new passenger to the coachman.
‘Well, there’s room enough,’ replies the coachman, without getting down, or even looking at him.
‘There an’t no room at all, sir,’ bawls a gentleman inside. Which another gentleman (also inside) confirms, by predicting that the attempt to introduce any more passengers ‘won’t fit nohow.’
The new passenger, without any expression of anxiety, looks into the coach, and then looks up at the coachman: ‘Now, how do you mean to fix it?’ says he, after a pause: ‘for I must go.’
The coachman employs himself in twisting the lash of his whip into a knot, and takes no more notice of the question: clearly signifying that it is anybody’s business but his, and that the passengers would do well to fix it, among themselves. In this state of things, matters seem to be approximating to a fix of another kind, when another inside passenger in a corner, who is nearly suffocated, cries faintly, ‘I’ll get out.’
This is no matter of relief or self-congratulation to the driver, for his immovable philosophy is perfectly undisturbed by anything that happens in the coach. Of all things in the world, the coach would seem to be the very last upon his mind. The exchange is made, however, and then the passenger who has given up his seat makes a third upon the box, seating himself in what he calls the middle; that is, with half his person on my legs, and the other half on the driver’s.
‘Go a-head, cap’en,’ cries the colonel, who directs.
‘Gŏ-lāng!’ cries the cap’en to his company, the horses, and away we go.
We took up at a rural bar-room, after we had gone a few miles, an intoxicated gentleman who climbed upon the roof among the luggage, and subsequently slipping off without hurting himself, was seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we had found him. We also parted with more of our freight at different times, so that when we came to change horses, I was again alone outside.
The coachmen always change with the horses, and are usually as dirty as the coach. The first was dressed like a very shabby English baker; the second like a Russian peasant: for he wore a loose purple camlet robe, with a fur collar, tied round his waist with a parti-coloured worsted sash; grey trousers; light blue gloves: and a cap of bearskin. It had by this time come on to rain very heavily, and there was a cold damp mist besides, which penetrated to the skin. I was glad to take advantage of a stoppage and get down to stretch my legs, shake the water off my great-coat, and swallow the usual anti-temperance recipe for keeping out the cold.
When I mounted to my seat again, I observed a new parcel lying on the coach roof, which I took to be a rather large fiddle in a brown bag. In the course of a few miles, however, I discovered that it had a glazed cap at one end and a pair of muddy shoes at the other and further observation demonstrated it to be a small boy in a snuff-coloured coat, with his arms quite pinioned to his sides, by deep forcing into his pockets. He was, I presume, a relative or friend of the coachman’s, as he lay a-top of the luggage with his face towards the rain; and except when a change of position brought his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared to be asleep. At last, on some occasion of our stopping, this thing slowly upreared itself to the height of three feet six, and fixing its eyes on me, observed in piping accents, with a complaisant yawn, half quenched in an obliging air of friendly patronage, ‘Well now, stranger, I guess you find this a’most like an English arternoon, hey?’
The scenery, which had been tame enough at first, was, for the last ten or twelve miles, beautiful. Our road wound through the pleasant valley of the Susquehanna; the river, dotted with innumerable green islands, lay upon our right; and on the left, a steep ascent, craggy with broken rock, and dark with pine trees. The mist, wreathing itself into a hundred fantastic shapes, moved solemnly upon the water; and the gloom of evening gave to all an air of mystery and silence which greatly enhanced its natural interest.
We crossed this river by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered in on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was profoundly dark; perplexed, with great beams, crossing and recrossing it at every possible angle; and through the broad chinks and crevices in the floor, the rapid river gleamed, far down below, like a legion of eyes. We had no lamps; and as the horses stumbled and floundered through this place, towards the distant speck of dying light, it seemed interminable. I really could not at first persuade myself as we rumbled heavily on, filling the bridge with hollow noises, and I held down my head to save it from the rafters above, but that I was in a painful dream; for I have often dreamed of toiling through such places, and as often argued, even at the time, ‘this cannot be reality.’
At length, however, we emerged upon the streets of Harrisburg, whose feeble lights, reflected dismally from the wet ground, did not shine out upon a very cheerful city. We were soon established in a snug hotel, which though smaller and far less splendid than many we put up at, it raised above them all in my remembrance, by having for its landlord the most obliging, considerate, and gentlemanly person I ever had to deal with.
As we were not to proceed upon our journey until the afternoon, I walked out, after breakfast the next morning, to look about me; and was duly shown a model prison on the solitary system, just erected, and as yet without an inmate; the trunk of an old tree to which Harris, the first settler here (afterwards buried under it), was tied by hostile Indians, with his funeral pile about him, when he was saved by the timely appearance of a friendly party on the opposite shore of the river; the local legislature (for there was another of those bodies here again, in full debate); and the other curiosities of the town.
I was very much interested in looking over a number of treaties made from time to time with the poor Indians, signed by the different chiefs at the period of their ratification, and preserved in the office of the Secretary to the Commonwealth. These signatures, traced of course by their own hands, are rough drawings of the creatures or weapons they were called after. Thus, the Great Turtle makes a crooked pen-and-ink outline of a great turtle; the Buffalo sketches a buffalo; the War Hatchet sets a rough image of that weapon for his mark. So with the Arrow, the Fish, the Scalp, the Big Canoe, and all of them.
I could not but think—as I looked at these feeble and tremulous productions of hands which could draw the longest arrow to the head in a stout elk-horn bow, or split a bead or feather with a rifle-ball—of Crabbe’s musings over the Parish Register, and the irregular scratches made with a pen, by men who would plough a lengthy furrow straight from end to end. Nor could I help bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose hands and hearts were set there, in all truth and honesty; and who only learned in course of time from white men how to break their faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds. I wonder, too, how many times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had signed away, he knew not what, until it went and cast him loose upon the new possessors of the land, a savage indeed.
Our host announced, before our early dinner, that some members of the legislative body proposed to do us the honour of calling. He had kindly yielded up to us his wife’s own little parlour, and when I begged that he would show them in, I saw him look with painful apprehension at its pretty carpet; though, being otherwise occupied at the time, the cause of his uneasiness did not occur to me.
It certainly would have been more pleasant to all parties concerned, and would not, I think, have compromised their independence in any material degree, if some of these gentlemen had not only yielded to the prejudice in favour of spittoons, but had abandoned themselves, for the moment, even to the conventional absurdity of pocket-handkerchiefs.
It still continued to rain heavily, and when we went down to the Canal Boat (for that was the mode of conveyance by which we were to proceed) after dinner, the weather was as unpromising and obstinately wet as one would desire to see. Nor was the sight of this canal boat, in which we were to spend three or four days, by any means a cheerful one; as it involved some uneasy speculations concerning the disposal of the passengers at night, and opened a wide field of inquiry touching the other domestic arrangements of the establishment, which was sufficiently disconcerting.
However, there it was—a barge with a little house in it, viewed from the outside; and a caravan at a fair, viewed from within: the gentlemen being accommodated, as the spectators usually are, in one of those locomotive museums of penny wonders; and the ladies being partitioned off by a red curtain, after the manner of the dwarfs and giants in the same establishments, whose private lives are passed in rather close exclusiveness.
We sat here, looking silently at the row of little tables, which extended down both sides of the cabin, and listening to the rain as it dripped and pattered on the boat, and plashed with a dismal merriment in the water, until the arrival of the railway train, for whose final contribution to our stock of passengers, our departure was alone deferred. It brought a great many boxes, which were bumped and tossed upon the roof, almost as painfully as if they had been deposited on one’s own head, without the intervention of a porter’s knot; and several damp gentlemen, whose clothes, on their drawing round the stove, began to steam again. No doubt it would have been a thought more comfortable if the driving rain, which now poured down more soakingly than ever, had admitted of a window being opened, or if our number had been something less than thirty; but there was scarcely time to think as much, when a train of three horses was attached to the tow-rope, the boy upon the leader smacked his whip, the rudder creaked and groaned complainingly, and we had begun our journey.
CHAPTER X SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE CANAL BOAT, ITS DOMESTIC ECONOMY, AND ITS PASSENGERS. JOURNEY TO PITTSBURG ACROSS THE ALLEGHANY MOUNTAINS. PITTSBURG
AS it continued to rain most perseveringly, we all remained below: the damp gentlemen round the stove, gradually becoming mildewed by the action of the fire; and the dry gentlemen lying at full length upon the seats, or slumbering uneasily with their faces on the tables, or walking up and down the cabin, which it was barely possible for a man of the middle height to do, without making bald places on his head by scraping it against the roof. At about six o’clock, all the small tables were put together to form one long table, and everybody sat down to tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages.
‘Will you try,’ said my opposite neighbour, handing me a dish of potatoes, broken up in milk and butter, ‘will you try some of these fixings?’
There are few words which perform such various duties as this word ‘fix.’ It is the Caleb Quotem of the American vocabulary. You call upon a gentleman in a country town, and his help informs you that he is ‘fixing himself’ just now, but will be down directly: by which you are to understand that he is dressing. You inquire, on board a steamboat, of a fellow-passenger, whether breakfast will be ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was last below, they were ‘fixing the tables:’ in other words, laying the cloth. You beg a porter to collect your luggage, and he entreats you not to be uneasy, for he’ll ‘fix it presently:’ and if you complain of indisposition, you are advised to have recourse to Doctor So-and-so, who will ‘fix you’ in no time.
One night, I ordered a bottle of mulled wine at an hotel where I was staying, and waited a long time for it; at length it was put upon the table with an apology from the landlord that he feared it wasn’t ‘fixed properly.’ And I recollect once, at a stage-coach dinner, overhearing a very stern gentleman demand of a waiter who presented him with a plate of underdone roast-beef, ‘whether he called that, fixing God A’mighty’s vittles?’
There is no doubt that the meal, at which the invitation was tendered to me which has occasioned this digression, was disposed of somewhat ravenously; and that the gentlemen thrust the broad-bladed knives and the two-pronged forks further down their throats than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in the hands of a skilful juggler: but no man sat down until the ladies were seated; or omitted any little act of politeness which could contribute to their comfort. Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention.
By the time the meal was over, the rain, which seemed to have worn itself out by coming down so fast, was nearly over too; and it became feasible to go on deck: which was a great relief, notwithstanding its being a very small deck, and being rendered still smaller by the luggage, which was heaped together in the middle under a tarpaulin covering; leaving, on either side, a path so narrow, that it became a science to walk to and fro without tumbling overboard into the canal. It was somewhat embarrassing at first, too, to have to duck nimbly every five minutes whenever the man at the helm cried ‘Bridge!’ and sometimes, when the cry was ‘Low Bridge,’ to lie down nearly flat. But custom familiarises one to anything, and there were so many bridges that it took a very short time to get used to this.
As night came on, and we drew in sight of the first range of hills, which are the outposts of the Alleghany Mountains, the scenery, which had been uninteresting hitherto, became more bold and striking. The wet ground reeked and smoked, after the heavy fall of rain, and the croaking of the frogs (whose noise in these parts is almost incredible) sounded as though a million of fairy teams with bells were travelling through the air, and keeping pace with us. The night was cloudy yet, but moonlight too: and when we crossed the Susquehanna river—over which there is an extraordinary wooden bridge with two galleries, one above the other, so that even there, two boat teams meeting, may pass without confusion—it was wild and grand.
I have mentioned my having been in some uncertainty and doubt, at first, relative to the sleeping arrangements on board this boat. I remained in the same vague state of mind until ten o’clock or thereabouts, when going below, I found suspended on either side of the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning.
I was assisted to this conclusion by seeing some of them gathered round the master of the boat, at one of the tables, drawing lots with all the anxieties and passions of gamesters depicted in their countenances; while others, with small pieces of cardboard in their hands, were groping among the shelves in search of numbers corresponding with those they had drawn. As soon as any gentleman found his number, he took possession of it by immediately undressing himself and crawling into bed. The rapidity with which an agitated gambler subsided into a snoring slumberer, was one of the most singular effects I have ever witnessed. As to the ladies, they were already abed, behind the red curtain, which was carefully drawn and pinned up the centre; though as every cough, or sneeze, or whisper, behind this curtain, was perfectly audible before it, we had still a lively consciousness of their society.
The politeness of the person in authority had secured to me a shelf in a nook near this red curtain, in some degree removed from the great body of sleepers: to which place I retired, with many acknowledgments to him for his attention. I found it, on after-measurement, just the width of an ordinary sheet of Bath post letter-paper; and I was at first in some uncertainty as to the best means of getting into it. But the shelf being a bottom one, I finally determined on lying upon the floor, rolling gently in, stopping immediately I touched the mattress, and remaining for the night with that side uppermost, whatever it might be. Luckily, I came upon my back at exactly the right moment. I was much alarmed on looking upward, to see, by the shape of his half-yard of sacking (which his weight had bent into an exceedingly tight bag), that there was a very heavy gentleman above me, whom the slender cords seemed quite incapable of holding; and I could not help reflecting upon the grief of my wife and family in the event of his coming down in the night. But as I could not have got up again without a severe bodily struggle, which might have alarmed the ladies; and as I had nowhere to go to, even if I had; I shut my eyes upon the danger, and remained there.
One of two remarkable circumstances is indisputably a fact, with reference to that class of society who travel in these boats. Either they carry their restlessness to such a pitch that they never sleep at all; or they expectorate in dreams, which would be a remarkable mingling of the real and ideal. All night long, and every night, on this canal, there was a perfect storm and tempest of spitting; and once my coat, being in the very centre of the hurricane sustained by five gentlemen (which moved vertically, strictly carrying out Reid’s Theory of the Law of Storms), I was fain the next morning to lay it on the deck, and rub it down with fair water before it was in a condition to be worn again.
Between five and six o’clock in the morning we got up, and some of us went on deck, to give them an opportunity of taking the shelves down; while others, the morning being very cold, crowded round the rusty stove, cherishing the newly kindled fire, and filling the grate with those voluntary contributions of which they had been so liberal all night. The washing accommodations were primitive. There was a tin ladle chained to the deck, with which every gentleman who thought it necessary to cleanse himself (many were superior to this weakness), fished the dirty water out of the canal, and poured it into a tin basin, secured in like manner. There was also a jack-towel. And, hanging up before a little looking-glass in the bar, in the immediate vicinity of the bread and cheese and biscuits, were a public comb and hair-brush.
At eight o’clock, the shelves being taken down and put away and the tables joined together, everybody sat down to the tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, all over again. Some were fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on their plates at once. As each gentleman got through his own personal amount of tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, he rose up and walked off. When everybody had done with everything, the fragments were cleared away: and one of the waiters appearing anew in the character of a barber, shaved such of the company as desired to be shaved; while the remainder looked on, or yawned over their newspapers. Dinner was breakfast again, without the tea and coffee; and supper and breakfast were identical.
There was a man on board this boat, with a light fresh-coloured face, and a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, who was the most inquisitive fellow that can possibly be imagined. He never spoke otherwise than interrogatively. He was an embodied inquiry. Sitting down or standing up, still or moving, walking the deck or taking his meals, there he was, with a great note of interrogation in each eye, two in his cocked ears, two more in his turned-up nose and chin, at least half a dozen more about the corners of his mouth, and the largest one of all in his hair, which was brushed pertly off his forehead in a flaxen clump. Every button in his clothes said, ‘Eh? What’s that? Did you speak? Say that again, will you?’ He was always wide awake, like the enchanted bride who drove her husband frantic; always restless; always thirsting for answers; perpetually seeking and never finding. There never was such a curious man.
I wore a fur great-coat at that time, and before we were well clear of the wharf, he questioned me concerning it, and its price, and where I bought it, and when, and what fur it was, and what it weighed, and what it cost. Then he took notice of my watch, and asked me what that cost, and whether it was a French watch, and where I got it, and how I got it, and whether I bought it or had it given me, and how it went, and where the key-hole was, and when I wound it, every night or every morning, and whether I ever forgot to wind it at all, and if I did, what then? Where had I been to last, and where was I going next, and where was I going after that, and had I seen the President, and what did he say, and what did I say, and what did he say when I had said that? Eh? Lor now! do tell!
Finding that nothing would satisfy him, I evaded his questions after the first score or two, and in particular pleaded ignorance respecting the name of the fur whereof the coat was made. I am unable to say whether this was the reason, but that coat fascinated him afterwards; he usually kept close behind me as I walked, and moved as I moved, that he might look at it the better; and he frequently dived into narrow places after me at the risk of his life, that he might have the satisfaction of passing his hand up the back, and rubbing it the wrong way.
We had another odd specimen on board, of a different kind. This was a thin-faced, spare-figured man of middle age and stature, dressed in a dusty drabbish-coloured suit, such as I never saw before. He was perfectly quiet during the first part of the journey: indeed I don’t remember having so much as seen him until he was brought out by circumstances, as great men often are. The conjunction of events which made him famous, happened, briefly, thus.
The canal extends to the foot of the mountain, and there, of course, it stops; the passengers being conveyed across it by land carriage, and taken on afterwards by another canal boat, the counterpart of the first, which awaits them on the other side. There are two canal lines of passage-boats; one is called The Express, and one (a cheaper one) The Pioneer. The Pioneer gets first to the mountain, and waits for the Express people to come up; both sets of passengers being conveyed across it at the same time. We were the Express company; but when we had crossed the mountain, and had come to the second boat, the proprietors took it into their beads to draft all the Pioneers into it likewise, so that we were five-and-forty at least, and the accession of passengers was not at all of that kind which improved the prospect of sleeping at night. Our people grumbled at this, as people do in such cases; but suffered the boat to be towed off with the whole freight aboard nevertheless; and away we went down the canal. At home, I should have protested lustily, but being a foreigner here, I held my peace. Not so this passenger. He cleft a path among the people on deck (we were nearly all on deck), and without addressing anybody whomsoever, soliloquised as follows:
‘This may suit you, this may, but it don’t suit me. This may be all very well with Down Easters, and men of Boston raising, but it won’t suit my figure nohow; and no two ways about that; and so I tell you. Now! I’m from the brown forests of Mississippi, I am, and when the sun shines on me, it does shine—a little. It don’t glimmer where I live, the sun don’t. No. I’m a brown forester, I am. I an’t a Johnny Cake. There are no smooth skins where I live. We’re rough men there. Rather. If Down Easters and men of Boston raising like this, I’m glad of it, but I’m none of that raising nor of that breed. No. This company wants a little fixing, it does. I’m the wrong sort of man for ’em, I am. They won’t like me, they won’t. This is piling of it up, a little too mountainous, this is.’ At the end of every one of these short sentences he turned upon his heel, and walked the other way; checking himself abruptly when he had finished another short sentence, and turning back again.
It is impossible for me to say what terrific meaning was hidden in the words of this brown forester, but I know that the other passengers looked on in a sort of admiring horror, and that presently the boat was put back to the wharf, and as many of the Pioneers as could be coaxed or bullied into going away, were got rid of.
When we started again, some of the boldest spirits on board, made bold to say to the obvious occasion of this improvement in our prospects, ‘Much obliged to you, sir;’ whereunto the brown forester (waving his hand, and still walking up and down as before), replied, ‘No you an’t. You’re none o’ my raising. You may act for yourselves, you may. I have pinted out the way. Down Easters and Johnny Cakes can follow if they please. I an’t a Johnny Cake, I an’t. I am from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am’—and so on, as before. He was unanimously voted one of the tables for his bed at night—there is a great contest for the tables—in consideration for his public services: and he had the warmest corner by the stove throughout the rest of the journey. But I never could find out that he did anything except sit there; nor did I hear him speak again until, in the midst of the bustle and turmoil of getting the luggage ashore in the dark at Pittsburg, I stumbled over him as he sat smoking a cigar on the cabin steps, and heard him muttering to himself, with a short laugh of defiance, ‘I an’t a Johnny Cake,—I an’t. I’m from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am, damme!’ I am inclined to argue from this, that he had never left off saying so; but I could not make an affidavit of that part of the story, if required to do so by my Queen and Country.
As we have not reached Pittsburg yet, however, in the order of our narrative, I may go on to remark that breakfast was perhaps the least desirable meal of the day, as in addition to the many savoury odours arising from the eatables already mentioned, there were whiffs of gin, whiskey, brandy, and rum, from the little bar hard by, and a decided seasoning of stale tobacco. Many of the gentlemen passengers were far from particular in respect of their linen, which was in some cases as yellow as the little rivulets that had trickled from the corners of their mouths in chewing, and dried there. Nor was the atmosphere quite free from zephyr whisperings of the thirty beds which had just been cleared away, and of which we were further and more pressingly reminded by the occasional appearance on the table-cloth of a kind of Game, not mentioned in the Bill of Fare.
And yet despite these oddities—and even they had, for me at least, a humour of their own—there was much in this mode of travelling which I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look back upon with great pleasure. Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o’clock in the morning, from the tainted cabin to the dirty deck; scooping up the icy water, plunging one’s head into it, and drawing it out, all fresh and glowing with the cold; was a good thing. The fast, brisk walk upon the towing-path, between that time and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came gleaming off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when one lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue sky; the gliding on at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills, sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red, burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by noise of wheels or steam, or any other sound than the limpid rippling of the water as the boat went on: all these were pure delights.
Then there were new settlements and detached log-cabins and frame-houses, full of interest for strangers from an old country: cabins with simple ovens, outside, made of clay; and lodgings for the pigs nearly as good as many of the human quarters; broken windows, patched with worn-out hats, old clothes, old boards, fragments of blankets and paper; and home-made dressers standing in the open air without the door, whereon was ranged the household store, not hard to count, of earthen jars and pots. The eye was pained to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat, and seldom to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks and twisted branches steeped in its unwholesome water. It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon great tracts where settlers had been burning down the trees, and where their wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while here and there some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two withered arms, and seemed to call down curses on his foes. Sometimes, at night, the way wound through some lonely gorge, like a mountain pass in Scotland, shining and coldly glittering in the light of the moon, and so closed in by high steep hills all round, that there seemed to be no egress save through the narrower path by which we had come, until one rugged hill-side seemed to open, and shutting out the moonlight as we passed into its gloomy throat, wrapped our new course in shade and darkness.
We had left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived at the foot of the mountain, which is crossed by railroad. There are ten inclined planes; five ascending, and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between, being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveller gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages travelling together; and while proper precautions are taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.
It was very pretty travelling thus, at a rapid pace along the heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing: terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow’s work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind. It was amusing, too, when we had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other moving power than the weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long after us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of green and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for the least surprise. But it stopped short of us in a very business-like manner when we reached the canal: and, before we left the wharf, went panting up this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our arrival for the means of traversing the road by which we had come.
On the Monday evening, furnace fires and clanking hammers on the banks of the canal, warned us that we approached the termination of this part of our journey. After going through another dreamy place—a long aqueduct across the Alleghany River, which was stranger than the bridge at Harrisburg, being a vast, low, wooden chamber full of water—we emerged upon that ugly confusion of backs of buildings and crazy galleries and stairs, which always abuts on water, whether it be river, sea, canal, or ditch: and were at Pittsburg.
Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works. Besides the prison to which I have already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other institutions. It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany River, over which there are two bridges; and the villas of the wealthier citizens sprinkled about the high grounds in the neighbourhood, are pretty enough. We lodged at a most excellent hotel, and were admirably served. As usual it was full of boarders, was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story of the house.
We tarried here three days. Our next point was Cincinnati: and as this was a steamboat journey, and western steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season, it was advisable to collect opinions in reference to the comparative safety of the vessels bound that way, then lying in the river. One called the Messenger was the best recommended. She had been advertised to start positively, every day for a fortnight or so, and had not gone yet, nor did her captain seem to have any very fixed intention on the subject. But this is the custom: for if the law were to bind down a free and independent citizen to keep his word with the public, what would become of the liberty of the subject? Besides, it is in the way of trade. And if passengers be decoyed in the way of trade, and people be inconvenienced in the way of trade, what man, who is a sharp tradesman himself, shall say, ‘We must put a stop to this?’
Impressed by the deep solemnity of the public announcement, I (being then ignorant of these usages) was for hurrying on board in a breathless state, immediately; but receiving private and confidential information that the boat would certainly not start until Friday, April the First, we made ourselves very comfortable in the mean while, and went on board at noon that day.
CHAPTER XI FROM PITTSBURG TO CINCINNATI IN A WESTERN STEAMBOAT. CINCINNATI
THE Messenger was one among a crowd of high-pressure steamboats, clustered together by a wharf-side, which, looked down upon from the rising ground that forms the landing-place, and backed by the lofty bank on the opposite side of the river, appeared no larger than so many floating models. She had some forty passengers on board, exclusive of the poorer persons on the lower deck; and in half an hour, or less, proceeded on her way.
We had, for ourselves, a tiny state-room with two berths in it, opening out of the ladies’ cabin. There was, undoubtedly, something satisfactory in this ‘location,’ inasmuch as it was in the stern, and we had been a great many times very gravely recommended to keep as far aft as possible, ‘because the steamboats generally blew up forward.’ Nor was this an unnecessary caution, as the occurrence and circumstances of more than one such fatality during our stay sufficiently testified. Apart from this source of self-congratulation, it was an unspeakable relief to have any place, no matter how confined, where one could be alone: and as the row of little chambers of which this was one, had each a second glass-door besides that in the ladies’ cabin, which opened on a narrow gallery outside the vessel, where the other passengers seldom came, and where one could sit in peace and gaze upon the shifting prospect, we took possession of our new quarters with much pleasure.
If the native packets I have already described be unlike anything we are in the habit of seeing on water, these western vessels are still more foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.
In the first place, they have no mast, cordage, tackle, rigging, or other such boat-like gear; nor have they anything in their shape at all calculated to remind one of a boat’s head, stem, sides, or keel. Except that they are in the water, and display a couple of paddle-boxes, they might be intended, for anything that appears to the contrary, to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountain top. There is no visible deck, even: nothing but a long, black, ugly roof covered with burnt-out feathery sparks; above which tower two iron chimneys, and a hoarse escape valve, and a glass steerage-house. Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state-rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men: the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water’s edge: and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge’s deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path.
Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood: the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck: under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months’ standing: one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that any journey should be safely made.
Within, there is one long narrow cabin, the whole length of the boat; from which the state-rooms open, on both sides. A small portion of it at the stern is partitioned off for the ladies; and the bar is at the opposite extreme. There is a long table down the centre, and at either end a stove. The washing apparatus is forward, on the deck. It is a little better than on board the canal boat, but not much. In all modes of travelling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of illness is referable to this cause.
We are to be on board the Messenger three days: arriving at Cincinnati (barring accidents) on Monday morning. There are three meals a day. Breakfast at seven, dinner at half-past twelve, supper about six. At each, there are a great many small dishes and plates upon the table, with very little in them; so that although there is every appearance of a mighty ‘spread,’ there is seldom really more than a joint: except for those who fancy slices of beet-root, shreds of dried beef, complicated entanglements of yellow pickle; maize, Indian corn, apple-sauce, and pumpkin.
Some people fancy all these little dainties together (and sweet preserves beside), by way of relish to their roast pig. They are generally those dyspeptic ladies and gentlemen who eat unheard-of quantities of hot corn bread (almost as good for the digestion as a kneaded pin-cushion), for breakfast, and for supper. Those who do not observe this custom, and who help themselves several times instead, usually suck their knives and forks meditatively, until they have decided what to take next: then pull them out of their mouths: put them in the dish; help themselves; and fall to work again. At dinner, there is nothing to drink upon the table, but great jugs full of cold water. Nobody says anything, at any meal, to anybody. All the passengers are very dismal, and seem to have tremendous secrets weighing on their minds. There is no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove, when the meal is over. Every man sits down, dull and languid; swallows his fare as if breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, were necessities of nature never to be coupled with recreation or enjoyment; and having bolted his food in a gloomy silence, bolts himself, in the same state. But for these animal observances, you might suppose the whole male portion of the company to be the melancholy ghosts of departed book-keepers, who had fallen dead at the desk: such is their weary air of business and calculation. Undertakers on duty would be sprightly beside them; and a collation of funeral-baked meats, in comparison with these meals, would be a sparkling festivity.
The people are all alike, too. There is no diversity of character. They travel about on the same errands, say and do the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow in the same dull cheerless round. All down the long table, there is scarcely a man who is in anything different from his neighbour. It is quite a relief to have, sitting opposite, that little girl of fifteen with the loquacious chin: who, to do her justice, acts up to it, and fully identifies nature’s handwriting, for of all the small chatterboxes that ever invaded the repose of drowsy ladies’ cabin, she is the first and foremost. The beautiful girl, who sits a little beyond her—farther down the table there—married the young man with the dark whiskers, who sits beyond her, only last month. They are going to settle in the very Far West, where he has lived four years, but where she has never been. They were both overturned in a stage-coach the other day (a bad omen anywhere else, where overturns are not so common), and his head, which bears the marks of a recent wound, is bound up still. She was hurt too, at the same time, and lay insensible for some days; bright as her eyes are, now.
Further down still, sits a man who is going some miles beyond their place of destination, to ‘improve’ a newly-discovered copper mine. He carries the village—that is to be—with him: a few frame cottages, and an apparatus for smelting the copper. He carries its people too. They are partly American and partly Irish, and herd together on the lower deck; where they amused themselves last evening till the night was pretty far advanced, by alternately firing off pistols and singing hymns.
They, and the very few who have been left at table twenty minutes, rise, and go away. We do so too; and passing through our little state-room, resume our seats in the quiet gallery without.
A fine broad river always, but in some parts much wider than in others: and then there is usually a green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams. Occasionally, we stop for a few minutes, maybe to take in wood, maybe for passengers, at some small town or village (I ought to say city, every place is a city here); but the banks are for the most part deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, hereabouts, are already in leaf and very green. For miles, and miles, and miles, these solitudes are unbroken by any sign of human life or trace of human footstep; nor is anything seen to move about them but the blue jay, whose colour is so bright, and yet so delicate, that it looks like a flying flower. At lengthened intervals a log cabin, with its little space of cleared land about it, nestles under a rising ground, and sends its thread of blue smoke curling up into the sky. It stands in the corner of the poor field of wheat, which is full of great unsightly stumps, like earthy butchers’-blocks. Sometimes the ground is only just now cleared: the felled trees lying yet upon the soil: and the log-house only this morning begun. As we pass this clearing, the settler leans upon his axe or hammer, and looks wistfully at the people from the world. The children creep out of the temporary hut, which is like a gipsy tent upon the ground, and clap their hands and shout. The dog only glances round at us, and then looks up into his master’s face again, as if he were rendered uneasy by any suspension of the common business, and had nothing more to do with pleasurers. And still there is the same, eternal foreground. The river has washed away its banks, and stately trees have fallen down into the stream. Some have been there so long, that they are mere dry, grizzly skeletons. Some have just toppled over, and having earth yet about their roots, are bathing their green heads in the river, and putting forth new shoots and branches. Some are almost sliding down, as you look at them. And some were drowned so long ago, that their bleached arms start out from the middle of the current, and seem to try to grasp the boat, and drag it under water.
Through such a scene as this, the unwieldy machine takes its hoarse, sullen way: venting, at every revolution of the paddles, a loud high-pressure blast; enough, one would think, to waken up the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound yonder: so old, that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck their roots into its earth; and so high, that it is a hill, even among the hills that Nature planted round it. The very river, as though it shared one’s feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence, hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this mound: and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly than in the Big Grave Creek.
All this I see as I sit in the little stern-gallery mentioned just now. Evening slowly steals upon the landscape and changes it before me, when we stop to set some emigrants ashore.
Five men, as many women, and a little girl. All their worldly goods are a bag, a large chest and an old chair: one, old, high-backed, rush-bottomed chair: a solitary settler in itself. They are rowed ashore in the boat, while the vessel stands a little off awaiting its return, the water being shallow. They are landed at the foot of a high bank, on the summit of which are a few log cabins, attainable only by a long winding path. It is growing dusk; but the sun is very red, and shines in the water and on some of the tree-tops, like fire.
The men get out of the boat first; help out the women; take out the bag, the chest, the chair; bid the rowers ‘good-bye;’ and shove the boat off for them. At the first plash of the oars in the water, the oldest woman of the party sits down in the old chair, close to the water’s edge, without speaking a word. None of the others sit down, though the chest is large enough for many seats. They all stand where they landed, as if stricken into stone; and look after the boat. So they remain, quite still and silent: the old woman and her old chair, in the centre the bag and chest upon the shore, without anybody heeding them all eyes fixed upon the boat. It comes alongside, is made fast, the men jump on board, the engine is put in motion, and we go hoarsely on again. There they stand yet, without the motion of a hand. I can see them through my glass, when, in the distance and increasing darkness, they are mere specks to the eye: lingering there still: the old woman in the old chair, and all the rest about her: not stirring in the least degree. And thus I slowly lose them.
The night is dark, and we proceed within the shadow of the wooded bank, which makes it darker. After gliding past the sombre maze of boughs for a long time, we come upon an open space where the tall trees are burning. The shape of every branch and twig is expressed in a deep red glow, and as the light wind stirs and ruffles it, they seem to vegetate in fire. It is such a sight as we read of in legends of enchanted forests: saving that it is sad to see these noble works wasting away so awfully, alone; and to think how many years must come and go before the magic that created them will rear their like upon this ground again. But the time will come; and when, in their changed ashes, the growth of centuries unborn has struck its roots, the restless men of distant ages will repair to these again unpeopled solitudes; and their fellows, in cities far away, that slumber now, perhaps, beneath the rolling sea, will read in language strange to any ears in being now, but very old to them, of primeval forests where the axe was never heard, and where the jungled ground was never trodden by a human foot.
Midnight and sleep blot out these scenes and thoughts: and when the morning shines again, it gilds the house-tops of a lively city, before whose broad paved wharf the boat is moored; with other boats, and flags, and moving wheels, and hum of men around it; as though there were not a solitary or silent rood of ground within the compass of a thousand miles.
Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and foot-ways of bright tile. Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance. The streets are broad and airy, the shops extremely good, the private residences remarkable for their elegance and neatness. There is something of invention and fancy in the varying styles of these latter erections, which, after the dull company of the steamboat, is perfectly delightful, as conveying an assurance that there are such qualities still in existence. The disposition to ornament these pretty villas and render them attractive, leads to the culture of trees and flowers, and the laying out of well-kept gardens, the sight of which, to those who walk along the streets, is inexpressibly refreshing and agreeable. I was quite charmed with the appearance of the town, and its adjoining suburb of Mount Auburn: from which the city, lying in an amphitheatre of hills, forms a picture of remarkable beauty, and is seen to great advantage.
There happened to be a great Temperance Convention held here on the day after our arrival; and as the order of march brought the procession under the windows of the hotel in which we lodged, when they started in the morning, I had a good opportunity of seeing it. It comprised several thousand men; the members of various ‘Washington Auxiliary Temperance Societies;’ and was marshalled by officers on horseback, who cantered briskly up and down the line, with scarves and ribbons of bright colours fluttering out behind them gaily. There were bands of music too, and banners out of number: and it was a fresh, holiday-looking concourse altogether.
I was particularly pleased to see the Irishmen, who formed a distinct society among themselves, and mustered very strong with their green scarves; carrying their national Harp and their Portrait of Father Mathew, high above the people’s heads. They looked as jolly and good-humoured as ever; and, working (here) the hardest for their living and doing any kind of sturdy labour that came in their way, were the most independent fellows there, I thought.
The banners were very well painted, and flaunted down the street famously. There was the smiting of the rock, and the gushing forth of the waters; and there was a temperate man with ‘considerable of a hatchet’ (as the standard-bearer would probably have said), aiming a deadly blow at a serpent which was apparently about to spring upon him from the top of a barrel of spirits. But the chief feature of this part of the show was a huge allegorical device, borne among the ship-carpenters, on one side whereof the steamboat Alcohol was represented bursting her boiler and exploding with a great crash, while upon the other, the good ship Temperance sailed away with a fair wind, to the heart’s content of the captain, crew, and passengers.
After going round the town, the procession repaired to a certain appointed place, where, as the printed programme set forth, it would be received by the children of the different free schools, ‘singing Temperance Songs.’ I was prevented from getting there, in time to hear these Little Warblers, or to report upon this novel kind of vocal entertainment: novel, at least, to me: but I found in a large open space, each society gathered round its own banners, and listening in silent attention to its own orator. The speeches, judging from the little I could hear of them, were certainly adapted to the occasion, as having that degree of relationship to cold water which wet blankets may claim: but the main thing was the conduct and appearance of the audience throughout the day; and that was admirable and full of promise.
Cincinnati is honourably famous for its free schools, of which it has so many that no person’s child among its population can, by possibility, want the means of education, which are extended, upon an average, to four thousand pupils, annually. I was only present in one of these establishments during the hours of instruction. In the boys’ department, which was full of little urchins (varying in their ages, I should say, from six years old to ten or twelve), the master offered to institute an extemporary examination of the pupils in algebra; a proposal, which, as I was by no means confident of my ability to detect mistakes in that science, I declined with some alarm. In the girls’ school, reading was proposed; and as I felt tolerably equal to that art, I expressed my willingness to hear a class. Books were distributed accordingly, and some half-dozen girls relieved each other in reading paragraphs from English History. But it seemed to be a dry compilation, infinitely above their powers; and when they had blundered through three or four dreary passages concerning the Treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to this exalted stave in the Ladder of Learning for the astonishment of a visitor; and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard them exercised in simpler lessons, which they understood.
As in every other place I visited, the judges here were gentlemen of high character and attainments. I was in one of the courts for a few minutes, and found it like those to which I have already referred. A nuisance cause was trying; there were not many spectators; and the witnesses, counsel, and jury, formed a sort of family circle, sufficiently jocose and snug.
The society with which I mingled, was intelligent, courteous, and agreeable. The inhabitants of Cincinnati are proud of their city as one of the most interesting in America: and with good reason: for beautiful and thriving as it is now, and containing, as it does, a population of fifty thousand souls, but two-and-fifty years have passed away since the ground on which it stands (bought at that time for a few dollars) was a wild wood, and its citizens were but a handful of dwellers in scattered log huts upon the river’s shore.
CHAPTER XII FROM CINCINNATI TO LOUISVILLE IN ANOTHER WESTERN STEAMBOAT; AND FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS IN ANOTHER. ST. LOUIS
LEAVING Cincinnati at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, we embarked for Louisville in the Pike steamboat, which, carrying the mails, was a packet of a much better class than that in which we had come from Pittsburg. As this passage does not occupy more than twelve or thirteen hours, we arranged to go ashore that night: not coveting the distinction of sleeping in a state-room, when it was possible to sleep anywhere else.
There chanced to be on board this boat, in addition to the usual dreary crowd of passengers, one Pitchlynn, a chief of the Choctaw tribe of Indians, who sent in his card to me, and with whom I had the pleasure of a long conversation.
He spoke English perfectly well, though he had not begun to learn the language, he told me, until he was a young man grown. He had read many books; and Scott’s poetry appeared to have left a strong impression on his mind: especially the opening of The Lady of the Lake, and the great battle scene in Marmion, in which, no doubt from the congeniality of the subjects to his own pursuits and tastes, he had great interest and delight. He appeared to understand correctly all he had read; and whatever fiction had enlisted his sympathy in its belief, had done so keenly and earnestly. I might almost say fiercely. He was dressed in our ordinary everyday costume, which hung about his fine figure loosely, and with indifferent grace. On my telling him that I regretted not to see him in his own attire, he threw up his right arm, for a moment, as though he were brandishing some heavy weapon, and answered, as he let it fall again, that his race were losing many things besides their dress, and would soon be seen upon the earth no more: but he wore it at home, he added proudly.
He told me that he had been away from his home, west of the Mississippi, seventeen months: and was now returning. He had been chiefly at Washington on some negotiations pending between his Tribe and the Government: which were not settled yet (he said in a melancholy way), and he feared never would be: for what could a few poor Indians do, against such well-skilled men of business as the whites? He had no love for Washington; tired of towns and cities very soon; and longed for the Forest and the Prairie.
I asked him what he thought of Congress? He answered, with a smile, that it wanted dignity, in an Indian’s eyes.
He would very much like, he said, to see England before he died; and spoke with much interest about the great things to be seen there. When I told him of that chamber in the British Museum wherein are preserved household memorials of a race that ceased to be, thousands of years ago, he was very attentive, and it was not hard to see that he had a reference in his mind to the gradual fading away of his own people.
This led us to speak of Mr. Catlin’s gallery, which he praised highly: observing that his own portrait was among the collection, and that all the likenesses were ‘elegant.’ Mr. Cooper, he said, had painted the Red Man well; and so would I, he knew, if I would go home with him and hunt buffaloes, which he was quite anxious I should do. When I told him that supposing I went, I should not be very likely to damage the buffaloes much, he took it as a great joke and laughed heartily.
He was a remarkably handsome man; some years past forty, I should judge; with long black hair, an aquiline nose, broad cheek-bones, a sunburnt complexion, and a very bright, keen, dark, and piercing eye. There were but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said, and their number was decreasing every day. A few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilised, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence. But they were not many; and the rest were as they always had been. He dwelt on this: and said several times that unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilised society.
When we shook hands at parting, I told him he must come to England, as he longed to see the land so much: that I should hope to see him there, one day: and that I could promise him he would be well received and kindly treated. He was evidently pleased by this assurance, though he rejoined with a good-humoured smile and an arch shake of his head, that the English used to be very fond of the Red Men when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for them, since.
He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of Nature’s making, as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat, another kind of being. He sent me a lithographed portrait of himself soon afterwards; very like, though scarcely handsome enough; which I have carefully preserved in memory of our brief acquaintance.
There was nothing very interesting in the scenery of this day’s journey, which brought us at midnight to Louisville. We slept at the Galt House; a splendid hotel; and were as handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghanies.
The city presenting no objects of sufficient interest to detain us on our way, we resolved to proceed next day by another steamboat, the Fulton, and to join it, about noon, at a suburb called Portland, where it would be delayed some time in passing through a canal.
The interval, after breakfast, we devoted to riding through the town, which is regular and cheerful: the streets being laid out at right angles, and planted with young trees. The buildings are smoky and blackened, from the use of bituminous coal, but an Englishman is well used to that appearance, and indisposed to quarrel with it. There did not appear to be much business stirring; and some unfinished buildings and improvements seemed to intimate that the city had been overbuilt in the ardour of ‘going-a-head,’ and was suffering under the re-action consequent upon such feverish forcing of its powers.
On our way to Portland, we passed a ‘Magistrate’s office,’ which amused me, as looking far more like a dame school than any police establishment: for this awful Institution was nothing but a little lazy, good-for-nothing front parlour, open to the street; wherein two or three figures (I presume the magistrate and his myrmidons) were basking in the sunshine, the very effigies of languor and repose. It was a perfect picture of justice retired from business for want of customers; her sword and scales sold off; napping comfortably with her legs upon the table.
Here, as elsewhere in these parts, the road was perfectly alive with pigs of all ages; lying about in every direction, fast asleep.; or grunting along in quest of hidden dainties. I had always a sneaking kindness for these odd animals, and found a constant source of amusement, when all others failed, in watching their proceedings. As we were riding along this morning, I observed a little incident between two youthful pigs, which was so very human as to be inexpressibly comical and grotesque at the time, though I dare say, in telling, it is tame enough.
One young gentleman (a very delicate porker with several straws sticking about his nose, betokening recent investigations in a dung-hill) was walking deliberately on, profoundly thinking, when suddenly his brother, who was lying in a miry hole unseen by him, rose up immediately before his startled eyes, ghostly with damp mud. Never was pig’s whole mass of blood so turned. He started back at least three feet, gazed for a moment, and then shot off as hard as he could go: his excessively little tail vibrating with speed and terror like a distracted pendulum. But before he had gone very far, he began to reason with himself as to the nature of this frightful appearance; and as he reasoned, he relaxed his speed by gradual degrees; until at last he stopped, and faced about. There was his brother, with the mud upon him glazing in the sun, yet staring out of the very same hole, perfectly amazed at his proceedings! He was no sooner assured of this; and he assured himself so carefully that one may almost say he shaded his eyes with his hand to see the better; than he came back at a round trot, pounced upon him, and summarily took off a piece of his tail; as a caution to him to be careful what he was about for the future, and never to play tricks with his family any more.
We found the steamboat in the canal, waiting for the slow process of getting through the lock, and went on board, where we shortly afterwards had a new kind of visitor in the person of a certain Kentucky Giant whose name is Porter, and who is of the moderate height of seven feet eight inches, in his stockings.
There never was a race of people who so completely gave the lie to history as these giants, or whom all the chroniclers have so cruelly libelled. Instead of roaring and ravaging about the world, constantly catering for their cannibal larders, and perpetually going to market in an unlawful manner, they are the meekest people in any man’s acquaintance: rather inclining to milk and vegetable diet, and bearing anything for a quiet life. So decidedly are amiability and mildness their characteristics, that I confess I look upon that youth who distinguished himself by the slaughter of these inoffensive persons, as a false-hearted brigand, who, pretending to philanthropic motives, was secretly influenced only by the wealth stored up within their castles, and the hope of plunder. And I lean the more to this opinion from finding that even the historian of those exploits, with all his partiality for his hero, is fain to admit that the slaughtered monsters in question were of a very innocent and simple turn; extremely guileless and ready of belief; lending a credulous ear to the most improbable tales; suffering themselves to be easily entrapped into pits; and even (as in the case of the Welsh Giant) with an excess of the hospitable politeness of a landlord, ripping themselves open, rather than hint at the possibility of their guests being versed in the vagabond arts of sleight-of-hand and hocus-pocus.
The Kentucky Giant was but another illustration of the truth of this position. He had a weakness in the region of the knees, and a trustfulness in his long face, which appealed even to five-feet nine for encouragement and support. He was only twenty-five years old, he said, and had grown recently, for it had been found necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles. At fifteen he was a short boy, and in those days his English father and his Irish mother had rather snubbed him, as being too small of stature to sustain the credit of the family. He added that his health had not been good, though it was better now; but short people are not wanting who whisper that he drinks too hard.
I understand he drives a hackney-coach, though how he does it, unless he stands on the footboard behind, and lies along the roof upon his chest, with his chin in the box, it would be difficult to comprehend. He brought his gun with him, as a curiosity.
Christened ‘The Little Rifle,’ and displayed outside a shop-window, it would make the fortune of any retail business in Holborn. When he had shown himself and talked a little while, he withdrew with his pocket-instrument, and went bobbing down the cabin, among men of six feet high and upwards, like a light-house walking among lamp-posts.
Within a few minutes afterwards, we were out of the canal, and in the Ohio river again.
The arrangements of the boat were like those of the Messenger, and the passengers were of the same order of people. We fed at the same times, on the same kind of viands, in the same dull manner, and with the same observances. The company appeared to be oppressed by the same tremendous concealments, and had as little capacity of enjoyment or light-heartedness. I never in my life did see such listless, heavy dulness as brooded over these meals: the very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the moment, wretched. Reading and writing on my knee, in our little cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to table; and was as glad to escape from it again, as if it had been a penance or a punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits forming a part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the fountain with Le Sage’s strolling player, and revel in their glad enjoyment: but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his Yahoo’s trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away; to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.
There was some relief in this boat, too, which there had not been in the other, for the captain (a blunt, good-natured fellow) had his handsome wife with him, who was disposed to be lively and agreeable, as were a few other lady-passengers who had their seats about us at the same end of the table. But nothing could have made head against the depressing influence of the general body. There was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere since the world began.
Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly as the time itself.
At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.
But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float upon the water’s top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool, like wounded snakes. The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.
For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide. When the nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the boat, knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be near at hand, and rings a bell beside him, which is the signal for the engine to be stopped: but always in the night this bell has work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders it no easy matter to remain in bed.
The decline of day here was very gorgeous; tingeing the firmament deeply with red and gold, up to the very keystone of the arch above us. As the sun went down behind the bank, the slightest blades of grass upon it seemed to become as distinctly visible as the arteries in the skeleton of a leaf; and when, as it slowly sank, the red and golden bars upon the water grew dimmer, and dimmer yet, as if they were sinking too; and all the glowing colours of departing day paled, inch by inch, before the sombre night; the scene became a thousand times more lonesome and more dreary than before, and all its influences darkened with the sky.
We drank the muddy water of this river while we were upon it. It is considered wholesome by the natives, and is something more opaque than gruel. I have seen water like it at the Filter-shops, but nowhere else.
On the fourth night after leaving Louisville, we reached St. Louis, and here I witnessed the conclusion of an incident, trifling enough in itself, but very pleasant to see, which had interested me during the whole journey.
There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-eyed, and fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long time with her sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St. Louis, in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords desire to be. The baby was born in her mother’s house; and she had not seen her husband (to whom she was now returning), for twelve months: having left him a month or two after their marriage.
[Picture: The Little Wife]
Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope, and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this little woman was: and all day long she wondered whether ‘He’ would be at the wharf; and whether ‘He’ had got her letter; and whether, if she sent the baby ashore by somebody else, ‘He’ would know it, meeting it in the street: which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough, to the young mother. She was such an artless little creature; and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out all this matter clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she; and the captain (who heard all about it from his wife) was wondrous sly, I promise you: inquiring, every time we met at table, as in forgetfulness, whether she expected anybody to meet her at St. Louis, and whether she would want to go ashore the night we reached it (but he supposed she wouldn’t), and cutting many other dry jokes of that nature. There was one little weazen, dried-apple-faced old woman, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands in such circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a lap-dog) old enough to moralize on the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby, now and then, or laughing with the rest, when the little woman called it by its father’s name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him in the joy of her heart.
It was something of a blow to the little woman, that when we were within twenty miles of our destination, it became clearly necessary to put this baby to bed. But she got over it with the same good humour; tied a handkerchief round her head; and came out into the little gallery with the rest. Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by the single ones! and such peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest with!
At last, there were the lights of St. Louis, and here was the wharf, and those were the steps: and the little woman covering her face with her hands, and laughing (or seeming to laugh) more than ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up. I have no doubt that in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped her ears, lest she should hear ‘Him’ asking for her: but I did not see her do it.
Then, a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was not yet made fast, but was wandering about, among the other boats, to find a landing-place: and everybody looked for the husband: and nobody saw him: when, in the midst of us all—Heaven knows how she ever got there—there was the little woman clinging with both arms tight round the neck of a fine, good-looking, sturdy young fellow! and in a moment afterwards, there she was again, actually clapping her little hands for joy, as she dragged him through the small door of her small cabin, to look at the baby as he lay asleep!
We went to a large hotel, called the Planter’s House: built like an English hospital, with long passages and bare walls, and sky-lights above the room-doors for the free circulation of air. There were a great many boarders in it; and as many lights sparkled and glistened from the windows down into the street below, when we drove up, as if it had been illuminated on some occasion of rejoicing. It is an excellent house, and the proprietors have most bountiful notions of providing the creature comforts. Dining alone with my wife in our own room, one day, I counted fourteen dishes on the table at once.
In the old French portion of the town, the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and picturesque: being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries before the windows, approachable by stairs or rather ladders from the street. There are queer little barbers’ shops and drinking-houses too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements with blinking casements, such as may be seen in Flanders. Some of these ancient habitations, with high garret gable-windows perking into the roofs, have a kind of French shrug about them; and being lop-sided with age, appear to hold their heads askew, besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvements.
It is hardly necessary to say, that these consist of wharfs and warehouses, and new buildings in all directions; and of a great many vast plans which are still ‘progressing.’ Already, however, some very good houses, broad streets, and marble-fronted shops, have gone so far ahead as to be in a state of completion; and the town bids fair in a few years to improve considerably: though it is not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with Cincinnati.
The Roman Catholic religion, introduced here by the early French settlers, prevails extensively. Among the public institutions are a Jesuit college; a convent for ‘the Ladies of the Sacred Heart;’ and a large chapel attached to the college, which was in course of erection at the time of my visit, and was intended to be consecrated on the second of December in the next year. The architect of this building, is one of the reverend fathers of the school, and the works proceed under his sole direction. The organ will be sent from Belgium.
In addition to these establishments, there is a Roman Catholic cathedral, dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier; and a hospital, founded by the munificence of a deceased resident, who was a member of that church. It also sends missionaries from hence among the Indian tribes.
The Unitarian church is represented, in this remote place, as in most other parts of America, by a gentleman of great worth and excellence. The poor have good reason to remember and bless it; for it befriends them, and aids the cause of rational education, without any sectarian or selfish views. It is liberal in all its actions; of kind construction; and of wide benevolence.
There are three free-schools already erected, and in full operation in this city. A fourth is building, and will soon be opened.
No man ever admits the unhealthiness of the place he dwells in (unless he is going away from it), and I shall therefore, I have no doubt, be at issue with the inhabitants of St. Louis, in questioning the perfect salubrity of its climate, and in hinting that I think it must rather dispose to fever, in the summer and autumnal seasons. Just adding, that it is very hot, lies among great rivers, and has vast tracts of undrained swampy land around it, I leave the reader to form his own opinion.
As I had a great desire to see a Prairie before turning back from the furthest point of my wanderings; and as some gentlemen of the town had, in their hospitable consideration, an equal desire to gratify me; a day was fixed, before my departure, for an expedition to the Looking-Glass Prairie, which is within thirty miles of the town. Deeming it possible that my readers may not object to know what kind of thing such a gipsy party may be at that distance from home, and among what sort of objects it moves, I will describe the jaunt in another chapter.
CHAPTER XIII A JAUNT TO THE LOOKING-GLASS PRAIRIE AND BACK
I MAY premise that the word Prairie is variously pronounced paraaer, parearer, paroarer. The latter mode of pronunciation is perhaps the most in favour.
We were fourteen in all, and all young men: indeed it is a singular though very natural feature in the society of these distant settlements, that it is mainly composed of adventurous persons in the prime of life, and has very few grey heads among it. There were no ladies: the trip being a fatiguing one: and we were to start at five o’clock in the morning punctually.
I was called at four, that I might be certain of keeping nobody waiting; and having got some bread and milk for breakfast, threw up the window and looked down into the street, expecting to see the whole party busily astir, and great preparations going on below. But as everything was very quiet, and the street presented that hopeless aspect with which five o’clock in the morning is familiar elsewhere, I deemed it as well to go to bed again, and went accordingly.
I woke again at seven o’clock, and by that time the party had assembled, and were gathered round, one light carriage, with a very stout axletree; one something on wheels like an amateur carrier’s cart; one double phaeton of great antiquity and unearthly construction; one gig with a great hole in its back and a broken head; and one rider on horseback who was to go on before. I got into the first coach with three companions; the rest bestowed themselves in the other vehicles; two large baskets were made fast to the lightest; two large stone jars in wicker cases, technically known as demi-johns, were consigned to the ‘least rowdy’ of the party for safe-keeping; and the procession moved off to the ferryboat, in which it was to cross the river bodily, men, horses, carriages, and all, as the manner in these parts is.
We got over the river in due course, and mustered again before a little wooden box on wheels, hove down all aslant in a morass, with ‘MERCHANT TAILOR’ painted in very large letters over the door. Having settled the order of proceeding, and the road to be taken, we started off once more and began to make our way through an ill-favoured Black Hollow, called, less expressively, the American Bottom.
The previous day had been—not to say hot, for the term is weak and lukewarm in its power of conveying an idea of the temperature. The town had been on fire; in a blaze. But at night it had come on to rain in torrents, and all night long it had rained without cessation. We had a pair of very strong horses, but travelled at the rate of little more than a couple of miles an hour, through one unbroken slough of black mud and water. It had no variety but in depth. Now it was only half over the wheels, now it hid the axletree, and now the coach sank down in it almost to the windows. The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping of the frogs, who, with the pigs (a coarse, ugly breed, as unwholesome-looking as though they were the spontaneous growth of the country), had the whole scene to themselves. Here and there we passed a log hut: but the wretched cabins were wide apart and thinly scattered, for though the soil is very rich in this place, few people can exist in such a deadly atmosphere. On either side of the track, if it deserve the name, was the thick ‘bush;’ and everywhere was stagnant, slimy, rotten, filthy water.
As it is the custom in these parts to give a horse a gallon or so of cold water whenever he is in a foam with heat, we halted for that purpose, at a log inn in the wood, far removed from any other residence. It consisted of one room, bare-roofed and bare-walled of course, with a loft above. The ministering priest was a swarthy young savage, in a shirt of cotton print like bed-furniture, and a pair of ragged trousers. There were a couple of young boys, too, nearly naked, lying idle by the well; and they, and he, and the traveller at the inn, turned out to look at us.
The traveller was an old man with a grey gristly beard two inches long, a shaggy moustache of the same hue, and enormous eyebrows; which almost obscured his lazy, semi-drunken glance, as he stood regarding us with folded arms: poising himself alternately upon his toes and heels. On being addressed by one of the party, he drew nearer, and said, rubbing his chin (which scraped under his horny hand like fresh gravel beneath a nailed shoe), that he was from Delaware, and had lately bought a farm ‘down there,’ pointing into one of the marshes where the stunted trees were thickest. He was ‘going,’ he added, to St. Louis, to fetch his family, whom he had left behind; but he seemed in no great hurry to bring on these incumbrances, for when we moved away, he loitered back into the cabin, and was plainly bent on stopping there so long as his money lasted. He was a great politician of course, and explained his opinions at some length to one of our company; but I only remember that he concluded with two sentiments, one of which was, Somebody for ever; and the other, Blast everybody else! which is by no means a bad abstract of the general creed in these matters.
When the horses were swollen out to about twice their natural dimensions (there seems to be an idea here, that this kind of inflation improves their going), we went forward again, through mud and mire, and damp, and festering heat, and brake and bush, attended always by the music of the frogs and pigs, until nearly noon, when we halted at a place called Belleville.
Belleville was a small collection of wooden houses, huddled together in the very heart of the bush and swamp. Many of them had singularly bright doors of red and yellow; for the place had been lately visited by a travelling painter, ‘who got along,’ as I was told, ‘by eating his way.’ The criminal court was sitting, and was at that moment trying some criminals for horse-stealing: with whom it would most likely go hard: for live stock of all kinds being necessarily very much exposed in the woods, is held by the community in rather higher value than human life; and for this reason, juries generally make a point of finding all men indicted for cattle-stealing, guilty, whether or no.
The horses belonging to the bar, the judge, and witnesses, were tied to temporary racks set up roughly in the road; by which is to be understood, a forest path, nearly knee-deep in mud and slime.
There was an hotel in this place, which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half-kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time. The horseman had gone forward to have coffee and some eatables prepared, and they were by this time nearly ready. He had ordered ‘wheat-bread and chicken fixings,’ in preference to ‘corn-bread and common doings.’ The latter kind of rejection includes only pork and bacon. The former comprehends broiled ham, sausages, veal cutlets, steaks, and such other viands of that nature as may be supposed, by a tolerably wide poetical construction, ‘to fix’ a chicken comfortably in the digestive organs of any lady or gentleman.
On one of the door-posts at this inn, was a tin plate, whereon was inscribed in characters of gold, ‘Doctor Crocus;’ and on a sheet of paper, pasted up by the side of this plate, was a written announcement that Dr. Crocus would that evening deliver a lecture on Phrenology for the benefit of the Belleville public; at a charge, for admission, of so much a head.
Straying up-stairs, during the preparation of the chicken fixings, I happened to pass the doctor’s chamber; and as the door stood wide open, and the room was empty, I made bold to peep in.
It was a bare, unfurnished, comfortless room, with an unframed portrait hanging up at the head of the bed; a likeness, I take it, of the Doctor, for the forehead was fully displayed, and great stress was laid by the artist upon its phrenological developments. The bed itself was covered with an old patch-work counterpane. The room was destitute of carpet or of curtain. There was a damp fireplace without any stove, full of wood ashes; a chair, and a very small table; and on the last-named piece of furniture was displayed, in grand array, the doctor’s library, consisting of some half-dozen greasy old books.
Now, it certainly looked about the last apartment on the whole earth out of which any man would be likely to get anything to do him good. But the door, as I have said, stood coaxingly open, and plainly said in conjunction with the chair, the portrait, the table, and the books, ‘Walk in, gentlemen, walk in! Don’t be ill, gentlemen, when you may be well in no time. Doctor Crocus is here, gentlemen, the celebrated Dr. Crocus! Dr. Crocus has come all this way to cure you, gentlemen. If you haven’t heard of Dr. Crocus, it’s your fault, gentlemen, who live a little way out of the world here: not Dr. Crocus’s. Walk in, gentlemen, walk in!’
In the passage below, when I went down-stairs again, was Dr. Crocus himself. A crowd had flocked in from the Court House, and a voice from among them called out to the landlord, ‘Colonel! introduce Doctor Crocus.’
‘Mr. Dickens,’ says the colonel, ‘Doctor Crocus.’
Upon which Doctor Crocus, who is a tall, fine-looking Scotchman, but rather fierce and warlike in appearance for a professor of the peaceful art of healing, bursts out of the concourse with his right arm extended, and his chest thrown out as far as it will possibly come, and says:
‘Your countryman, sir!’
Whereupon Doctor Crocus and I shake hands; and Doctor Crocus looks as if I didn’t by any means realise his expectations, which, in a linen blouse, and a great straw hat, with a green ribbon, and no gloves, and my face and nose profusely ornamented with the stings of mosquitoes and the bites of bugs, it is very likely I did not.
‘Long in these parts, sir?’ says I.
‘Three or four months, sir,’ says the Doctor.
‘Do you think of soon returning to the old country?’ says I.
Doctor Crocus makes no verbal answer, but gives me an imploring look, which says so plainly ‘Will you ask me that again, a little louder, if you please?’ that I repeat the question.
‘Think of soon returning to the old country, sir!’ repeats the Doctor.
‘To the old country, sir,’ I rejoin.
Doctor Crocus looks round upon the crowd to observe the effect he produces, rubs his hands, and says, in a very loud voice:
‘Not yet awhile, sir, not yet. You won’t catch me at that just yet, sir. I am a little too fond of freedom for that, sir. Ha, ha! It’s not so easy for a man to tear himself from a free country such as this is, sir. Ha, ha! No, no! Ha, ha! None of that till one’s obliged to do it, sir. No, no!’
As Doctor Crocus says these latter words, he shakes his head, knowingly, and laughs again. Many of the bystanders shake their heads in concert with the doctor, and laugh too, and look at each other as much as to say, ‘A pretty bright and first-rate sort of chap is Crocus!’ and unless I am very much mistaken, a good many people went to the lecture that night, who never thought about phrenology, or about Doctor Crocus either, in all their lives before.
From Belleville, we went on, through the same desolate kind of waste, and constantly attended, without the interval of a moment, by the same music; until, at three o’clock in the afternoon, we halted once more at a village called Lebanon to inflate the horses again, and give them some corn besides: of which they stood much in need. Pending this ceremony, I walked into the village, where I met a full-sized dwelling-house coming down-hill at a round trot, drawn by a score or more of oxen.
The public-house was so very clean and good a one, that the managers of the jaunt resolved to return to it and put up there for the night, if possible. This course decided on, and the horses being well refreshed, we again pushed forward, and came upon the Prairie at sunset.
It would be difficult to say why, or how—though it was possibly from having heard and read so much about it—but the effect on me was disappointment. Looking towards the setting sun, there lay, stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank; until it met the glowing sky, wherein it seemed to dip: mingling with its rich colours, and mellowing in its distant blue. There it lay, a tranquil sea or lake without water, if such a simile be admissible, with the day going down upon it: a few birds wheeling here and there: and solitude and silence reigning paramount around. But the grass was not yet high; there were bare black patches on the ground; and the few wild flowers that the eye could see, were poor and scanty. Great as the picture was, its very flatness and extent, which left nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest. I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken. It was lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony. I felt that in traversing the Prairies, I could never abandon myself to the scene, forgetful of all else; as I should do instinctively, were the heather underneath my feet, or an iron-bound coast beyond; but should often glance towards the distant and frequently-receding line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed. It is not a scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one, I think (at all events, as I saw it), to remember with much pleasure, or to covet the looking-on again, in after-life.
We encamped near a solitary log-house, for the sake of its water, and dined upon the plain. The baskets contained roast fowls, buffalo’s tongue (an exquisite dainty, by the way), ham, bread, cheese, and butter; biscuits, champagne, sherry; lemons and sugar for punch; and abundance of rough ice. The meal was delicious, and the entertainers were the soul of kindness and good humour. I have often recalled that cheerful party to my pleasant recollection since, and shall not easily forget, in junketings nearer home with friends of older date, my boon companions on the Prairie.
Returning to Lebanon that night, we lay at the little inn at which we had halted in the afternoon. In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind, in England.
Rising at five o’clock next morning, I took a walk about the village: none of the houses were strolling about to-day, but it was early for them yet, perhaps: and then amused myself by lounging in a kind of farm-yard behind the tavern, of which the leading features were, a strange jumble of rough sheds for stables; a rude colonnade, built as a cool place of summer resort; a deep well; a great earthen mound for keeping vegetables in, in winter time; and a pigeon-house, whose little apertures looked, as they do in all pigeon-houses, very much too small for the admission of the plump and swelling-breasted birds who were strutting about it, though they tried to get in never so hard. That interest exhausted, I took a survey of the inn’s two parlours, which were decorated with coloured prints of Washington, and President Madison, and of a white-faced young lady (much speckled by the flies), who held up her gold neck-chain for the admiration of the spectator, and informed all admiring comers that she was ‘Just Seventeen:’ although I should have thought her older. In the best room were two oil portraits of the kit-cat size, representing the landlord and his infant son; both looking as bold as lions, and staring out of the canvas with an intensity that would have been cheap at any price. They were painted, I think, by the artist who had touched up the Belleville doors with red and gold; for I seemed to recognise his style immediately.
After breakfast, we started to return by a different way from that which we had taken yesterday, and coming up at ten o’clock with an encampment of German emigrants carrying their goods in carts, who had made a rousing fire which they were just quitting, stopped there to refresh. And very pleasant the fire was; for, hot though it had been yesterday, it was quite cold to-day, and the wind blew keenly. Looming in the distance, as we rode along, was another of the ancient Indian burial-places, called The Monks’ Mound; in memory of a body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded a desolate convent there, many years ago, when there were no settlers within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the pernicious climate: in which lamentable fatality, few rational people will suppose, perhaps, that society experienced any very severe deprivation.
The track of to-day had the same features as the track of yesterday. There was the swamp, the bush, and the perpetual chorus of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth. Here and there, and frequently too, we encountered a solitary broken-down waggon, full of some new settler’s goods. It was a pitiful sight to see one of these vehicles deep in the mire; the axle-tree broken; the wheel lying idly by its side; the man gone miles away, to look for assistance; the woman seated among their wandering household gods with a baby at her breast, a picture of forlorn, dejected patience; the team of oxen crouching down mournfully in the mud, and breathing forth such clouds of vapour from their mouths and nostrils, that all the damp mist and fog around seemed to have come direct from them.
In due time we mustered once again before the merchant tailor’s, and having done so, crossed over to the city in the ferry-boat: passing, on the way, a spot called Bloody Island, the duelling-ground of St. Louis, and so designated in honour of the last fatal combat fought there, which was with pistols, breast to breast. Both combatants fell dead upon the ground; and possibly some rational people may think of them, as of the gloomy madmen on the Monks’ Mound, that they were no great loss to the community.
CHAPTER XIV RETURN TO CINCINNATI. A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO SANDUSKY. SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE FALLS OF NIAGARA
AS I had a desire to travel through the interior of the state of Ohio, and to ‘strike the lakes,’ as the phrase is, at a small town called Sandusky, to which that route would conduct us on our way to Niagara, we had to return from St. Louis by the way we had come, and to retrace our former track as far as Cincinnati.
The day on which we were to take leave of St. Louis being very fine; and the steamboat, which was to have started I don’t know how early in the morning, postponing, for the third or fourth time, her departure until the afternoon; we rode forward to an old French village on the river, called properly Carondelet, and nicknamed Vide Poche, and arranged that the packet should call for us there.
The place consisted of a few poor cottages, and two or three public-houses; the state of whose larders certainly seemed to justify the second designation of the village, for there was nothing to eat in any of them. At length, however, by going back some half a mile or so, we found a solitary house where ham and coffee were procurable; and there we tarried to wait the advent of the boat, which would come in sight from the green before the door, a long way off.
It was a neat, unpretending village tavern, and we took our repast in a quaint little room with a bed in it, decorated with some old oil paintings, which in their time had probably done duty in a Catholic chapel or monastery. The fare was very good, and served with great cleanliness. The house was kept by a characteristic old couple, with whom we had a long talk, and who were perhaps a very good sample of that kind of people in the West.
The landlord was a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow (not so very old either, for he was but just turned sixty, I should think), who had been out with the militia in the last war with England, and had seen all kinds of service,—except a battle; and he had been very near seeing that, he added: very near. He had all his life been restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change; and was still the son of his old self: for if he had nothing to keep him at home, he said (slightly jerking his hat and his thumb towards the window of the room in which the old lady sat, as we stood talking in front of the house), he would clean up his musket, and be off to Texas to-morrow morning. He was one of the very many descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seem destined from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army: who gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering generation who succeed.
His wife was a domesticated, kind-hearted old soul, who had come with him, ‘from the queen city of the world,’ which, it seemed, was Philadelphia; but had no love for this Western country, and indeed had little reason to bear it any; having seen her children, one by one, die here of fever, in the full prime and beauty of their youth. Her heart was sore, she said, to think of them; and to talk on this theme, even to strangers, in that blighted place, so far from her old home, eased it somewhat, and became a melancholy pleasure.
The boat appearing towards evening, we bade adieu to the poor old lady and her vagrant spouse, and making for the nearest landing-place, were soon on board The Messenger again, in our old cabin, and steaming down the Mississippi.
If the coming up this river, slowly making head against the stream, be an irksome journey, the shooting down it with the turbid current is almost worse; for then the boat, proceeding at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles an hour, has to force its passage through a labyrinth of floating logs, which, in the dark, it is often impossible to see beforehand or avoid. All that night, the bell was never silent for five minutes at a time; and after every ring the vessel reeled again, sometimes beneath a single blow, sometimes beneath a dozen dealt in quick succession, the lightest of which seemed more than enough to beat in her frail keel, as though it had been pie-crust. Looking down upon the filthy river after dark, it seemed to be alive with monsters, as these black masses rolled upon the surface, or came starting up again, head first, when the boat, in ploughing her way among a shoal of such obstructions, drove a few among them for the moment under water. Sometimes the engine stopped during a long interval, and then before her and behind, and gathering close about her on all sides, were so many of these ill-favoured obstacles that she was fairly hemmed in; the centre of a floating island; and was constrained to pause until they parted, somewhere, as dark clouds will do before the wind, and opened by degrees a channel out.
In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there to take in wood, lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held together. It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted ‘Coffee House;’ that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi. But looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of seeing that intolerable river dragging its slimy length and ugly freight abruptly off towards New Orleans; and passing a yellow line which stretched across the current, were again upon the clear Ohio, never, I trust, to see the Mississippi more, saving in troubled dreams and nightmares. Leaving it for the company of its sparkling neighbour, was like the transition from pain to ease, or the awakening from a horrible vision to cheerful realities.
We arrived at Louisville on the fourth night, and gladly availed ourselves of its excellent hotel. Next day we went on in the Ben Franklin, a beautiful mail steamboat, and reached Cincinnati shortly after midnight. Being by this time nearly tired of sleeping upon shelves, we had remained awake to go ashore straightway; and groping a passage across the dark decks of other boats, and among labyrinths of engine-machinery and leaking casks of molasses, we reached the streets, knocked up the porter at the hotel where we had stayed before, and were, to our great joy, safely housed soon afterwards.
We rested but one day at Cincinnati, and then resumed our journey to Sandusky. As it comprised two varieties of stage-coach travelling, which, with those I have already glanced at, comprehend the main characteristics of this mode of transit in America, I will take the reader as our fellow-passenger, and pledge myself to perform the distance with all possible despatch.
Our place of destination in the first instance is Columbus. It is distant about a hundred and twenty miles from Cincinnati, but there is a macadamised road (rare blessing!) the whole way, and the rate of travelling upon it is six miles an hour.
We start at eight o’clock in the morning, in a great mail-coach, whose huge cheeks are so very ruddy and plethoric, that it appears to be troubled with a tendency of blood to the head. Dropsical it certainly is, for it will hold a dozen passengers inside. But, wonderful to add, it is very clean and bright, being nearly new; and rattles through the streets of Cincinnati gaily.
Our way lies through a beautiful country, richly cultivated, and luxuriant in its promise of an abundant harvest. Sometimes we pass a field where the strong bristling stalks of Indian corn look like a crop of walking-sticks, and sometimes an enclosure where the green wheat is springing up among a labyrinth of stumps; the primitive worm-fence is universal, and an ugly thing it is; but the farms are neatly kept, and, save for these differences, one might be travelling just now in Kent.
We often stop to water at a roadside inn, which is always dull and silent. The coachman dismounts and fills his bucket, and holds it to the horses’ heads. There is scarcely ever any one to help him; there are seldom any loungers standing round; and never any stable-company with jokes to crack. Sometimes, when we have changed our team, there is a difficulty in starting again, arising out of the prevalent mode of breaking a young horse: which is to catch him, harness him against his will, and put him in a stage-coach without further notice: but we get on somehow or other, after a great many kicks and a violent struggle; and jog on as before again.
Occasionally, when we stop to change, some two or three half-drunken loafers will come loitering out with their hands in their pockets, or will be seen kicking their heels in rocking-chairs, or lounging on the window-sill, or sitting on a rail within the colonnade: they have not often anything to say though, either to us or to each other, but sit there idly staring at the coach and horses. The landlord of the inn is usually among them, and seems, of all the party, to be the least connected with the business of the house. Indeed he is with reference to the tavern, what the driver is in relation to the coach and passengers: whatever happens in his sphere of action, he is quite indifferent, and perfectly easy in his mind.
The frequent change of coachmen works no change or variety in the coachman’s character. He is always dirty, sullen, and taciturn. If he be capable of smartness of any kind, moral or physical, he has a faculty of concealing it which is truly marvellous. He never speaks to you as you sit beside him on the box, and if you speak to him, he answers (if at all) in monosyllables. He points out nothing on the road, and seldom looks at anything: being, to all appearance, thoroughly weary of it and of existence generally. As to doing the honours of his coach, his business, as I have said, is with the horses. The coach follows because it is attached to them and goes on wheels: not because you are in it. Sometimes, towards the end of a long stage, he suddenly breaks out into a discordant fragment of an election song, but his face never sings along with him: it is only his voice, and not often that.
He always chews and always spits, and never encumbers himself with a pocket-handkerchief. The consequences to the box passenger, especially when the wind blows towards him, are not agreeable.
Whenever the coach stops, and you can hear the voices of the inside passengers; or whenever any bystander addresses them, or any one among them; or they address each other; you will hear one phrase repeated over and over and over again to the most extraordinary extent. It is an ordinary and unpromising phrase enough, being neither more nor less than ‘Yes, sir;’ but it is adapted to every variety of circumstance, and fills up every pause in the conversation. Thus:—
The time is one o’clock at noon. The scene, a place where we are to stay and dine, on this journey. The coach drives up to the door of an inn. The day is warm, and there are several idlers lingering about the tavern, and waiting for the public dinner. Among them, is a stout gentleman in a brown hat, swinging himself to and fro in a rocking-chair on the pavement.
As the coach stops, a gentleman in a straw hat looks out of the window:
STRAW HAT. (To the stout gentleman in the rocking-chair.) I reckon that’s Judge Jefferson, an’t it?
BROWN HAT. (Still swinging; speaking very slowly; and without any emotion whatever.) Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. Warm weather, Judge.
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. There was a snap of cold, last week.
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. Yes, sir.
A pause. They look at each other, very seriously.
STRAW HAT. I calculate you’ll have got through that case of the corporation, Judge, by this time, now?
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. How did the verdict go, sir?
BROWN HAT. For the defendant, sir.
STRAW HAT. (Interrogatively.) Yes, sir?
BROWN HAT. (Affirmatively.) Yes, sir.
BOTH. (Musingly, as each gazes down the street.) Yes, sir.
Another pause. They look at each other again, still more seriously than before.
BROWN HAT. This coach is rather behind its time to-day, I guess.
STRAW HAT. (Doubtingly.) Yes, sir.
BROWN HAT. (Looking at his watch.) Yes, sir; nigh upon two hours.
STRAW HAT. (Raising his eyebrows in very great surprise.) Yes, sir!
BROWN HAT. (Decisively, as he puts up his watch.) Yes, sir.
ALL THE OTHER INSIDE PASSENGERS. (Among themselves.) Yes, sir.
COACHMAN. (In a very surly tone.) No it an’t.
STRAW HAT. (To the coachman.) Well, I don’t know, sir. We were a pretty tall time coming that last fifteen mile. That’s a fact.
The coachman making no reply, and plainly declining to enter into any controversy on a subject so far removed from his sympathies and feelings, another passenger says, ‘Yes, sir;’ and the gentleman in the straw hat in acknowledgment of his courtesy, says ‘Yes, sir,’ to him, in return. The straw hat then inquires of the brown hat, whether that coach in which he (the straw hat) then sits, is not a new one? To which the brown hat again makes answer, ‘Yes, sir.’
STRAW HAT. I thought so. Pretty loud smell of varnish, sir?
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
ALL THE OTHER INSIDE PASSENGERS. Yes, sir.
BROWN HAT. (To the company in general.) Yes, sir.
The conversational powers of the company having been by this time pretty heavily taxed, the straw hat opens the door and gets out; and all the rest alight also. We dine soon afterwards with the boarders in the house, and have nothing to drink but tea and coffee. As they are both very bad and the water is worse, I ask for brandy; but it is a Temperance Hotel, and spirits are not to be had for love or money. This preposterous forcing of unpleasant drinks down the reluctant throats of travellers is not at all uncommon in America, but I never discovered that the scruples of such wincing landlords induced them to preserve any unusually nice balance between the quality of their fare, and their scale of charges: on the contrary, I rather suspected them of diminishing the one and exalting the other, by way of recompense for the loss of their profit on the sale of spirituous liquors. After all, perhaps, the plainest course for persons of such tender consciences, would be, a total abstinence from tavern-keeping.
Dinner over, we get into another vehicle which is ready at the door (for the coach has been changed in the interval), and resume our journey; which continues through the same kind of country until evening, when we come to the town where we are to stop for tea and supper; and having delivered the mail bags at the Post-office, ride through the usual wide street, lined with the usual stores and houses (the drapers always having hung up at their door, by way of sign, a piece of bright red cloth), to the hotel where this meal is prepared. There being many boarders here, we sit down, a large party, and a very melancholy one as usual. But there is a buxom hostess at the head of the table, and opposite, a simple Welsh schoolmaster with his wife and child; who came here, on a speculation of greater promise than performance, to teach the classics: and they are sufficient subjects of interest until the meal is over, and another coach is ready. In it we go on once more, lighted by a bright moon, until midnight; when we stop to change the coach again, and remain for half an hour or so in a miserable room, with a blurred lithograph of Washington over the smoky fire-place, and a mighty jug of cold water on the table: to which refreshment the moody passengers do so apply themselves that they would seem to be, one and all, keen patients of Dr. Sangrado. Among them is a very little boy, who chews tobacco like a very big one; and a droning gentleman, who talks arithmetically and statistically on all subjects, from poetry downwards; and who always speaks in the same key, with exactly the same emphasis, and with very grave deliberation. He came outside just now, and told me how that the uncle of a certain young lady who had been spirited away and married by a certain captain, lived in these parts; and how this uncle was so valiant and ferocious that he shouldn’t wonder if he were to follow the said captain to England, ‘and shoot him down in the street wherever he found him;’ in the feasibility of which strong measure I, being for the moment rather prone to contradiction, from feeling half asleep and very tired, declined to acquiesce: assuring him that if the uncle did resort to it, or gratified any other little whim of the like nature, he would find himself one morning prematurely throttled at the Old Bailey: and that he would do well to make his will before he went, as he would certainly want it before he had been in Britain very long.
On we go, all night, and by-and-by the day begins to break, and presently the first cheerful rays of the warm sun come slanting on us brightly. It sheds its light upon a miserable waste of sodden grass, and dull trees, and squalid huts, whose aspect is forlorn and grievous in the last degree. A very desert in the wood, whose growth of green is dank and noxious like that upon the top of standing water: where poisonous fungus grows in the rare footprint on the oozy ground, and sprouts like witches’ coral, from the crevices in the cabin wall and floor; it is a hideous thing to lie upon the very threshold of a city. But it was purchased years ago, and as the owner cannot be discovered, the State has been unable to reclaim it. So there it remains, in the midst of cultivation and improvement, like ground accursed, and made obscene and rank by some great crime.
We reached Columbus shortly before seven o’clock, and stayed there, to refresh, that day and night: having excellent apartments in a very large unfinished hotel called the Neill House, which were richly fitted with the polished wood of the black walnut, and opened on a handsome portico and stone verandah, like rooms in some Italian mansion. The town is clean and pretty, and of course is ‘going to be’ much larger. It is the seat of the State legislature of Ohio, and lays claim, in consequence, to some consideration and importance.
There being no stage-coach next day, upon the road we wished to take, I hired ‘an extra,’ at a reasonable charge to carry us to Tiffin; a small town from whence there is a railroad to Sandusky. This extra was an ordinary four-horse stage-coach, such as I have described, changing horses and drivers, as the stage-coach would, but was exclusively our own for the journey. To ensure our having horses at the proper stations, and being incommoded by no strangers, the proprietors sent an agent on the box, who was to accompany us the whole way through; and thus attended, and bearing with us, besides, a hamper full of savoury cold meats, and fruit, and wine, we started off again in high spirits, at half-past six o’clock next morning, very much delighted to be by ourselves, and disposed to enjoy even the roughest journey.
It was well for us, that we were in this humour, for the road we went over that day, was certainly enough to have shaken tempers that were not resolutely at Set Fair, down to some inches below Stormy. At one time we were all flung together in a heap at the bottom of the coach, and at another we were crushing our heads against the roof. Now, one side was down deep in the mire, and we were holding on to the other. Now, the coach was lying on the tails of the two wheelers; and now it was rearing up in the air, in a frantic state, with all four horses standing on the top of an insurmountable eminence, looking coolly back at it, as though they would say ‘Unharness us. It can’t be done.’ The drivers on these roads, who certainly get over the ground in a manner which is quite miraculous, so twist and turn the team about in forcing a passage, corkscrew fashion, through the bogs and swamps, that it was quite a common circumstance on looking out of the window, to see the coachman with the ends of a pair of reins in his hands, apparently driving nothing, or playing at horses, and the leaders staring at one unexpectedly from the back of the coach, as if they had some idea of getting up behind. A great portion of the way was over what is called a corduroy road, which is made by throwing trunks of trees into a marsh, and leaving them to settle there. The very slightest of the jolts with which the ponderous carriage fell from log to log, was enough, it seemed, to have dislocated all the bones in the human body. It would be impossible to experience a similar set of sensations, in any other circumstances, unless perhaps in attempting to go up to the top of St. Paul’s in an omnibus. Never, never once, that day, was the coach in any position, attitude, or kind of motion to which we are accustomed in coaches. Never did it make the smallest approach to one’s experience of the proceedings of any sort of vehicle that goes on wheels.
Still, it was a fine day, and the temperature was delicious, and though we had left Summer behind us in the west, and were fast leaving Spring, we were moving towards Niagara and home. We alighted in a pleasant wood towards the middle of the day, dined on a fallen tree, and leaving our best fragments with a cottager, and our worst with the pigs (who swarm in this part of the country like grains of sand on the sea-shore, to the great comfort of our commissariat in Canada), we went forward again, gaily.
As night came on, the track grew narrower and narrower, until at last it so lost itself among the trees, that the driver seemed to find his way by instinct. We had the comfort of knowing, at least, that there was no danger of his falling asleep, for every now and then a wheel would strike against an unseen stump with such a jerk, that he was fain to hold on pretty tight and pretty quick, to keep himself upon the box. Nor was there any reason to dread the least danger from furious driving, inasmuch as over that broken ground the horses had enough to do to walk; as to shying, there was no room for that; and a herd of wild elephants could not have run away in such a wood, with such a coach at their heels. So we stumbled along, quite satisfied.
These stumps of trees are a curious feature in American travelling. The varying illusions they present to the unaccustomed eye as it grows dark, are quite astonishing in their number and reality. Now, there is a Grecian urn erected in the centre of a lonely field; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb; now a very commonplace old gentleman in a white waistcoat, with a thumb thrust into each arm-hole of his coat; now a student poring on a book; now a crouching negro; now, a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man; a hunch-back throwing off his cloak and stepping forth into the light. They were often as entertaining to me as so many glasses in a magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bidding, but seemed to force themselves upon me, whether I would or no; and strange to say, I sometimes recognised in them counterparts of figures once familiar to me in pictures attached to childish books, forgotten long ago.
It soon became too dark, however, even for this amusement, and the trees were so close together that their dry branches rattled against the coach on either side, and obliged us all to keep our heads within. It lightened too, for three whole hours; each flash being very bright, and blue, and long; and as the vivid streaks came darting in among the crowded branches, and the thunder rolled gloomily above the tree tops, one could scarcely help thinking that there were better neighbourhoods at such a time than thick woods afforded.
At length, between ten and eleven o’clock at night, a few feeble lights appeared in the distance, and Upper Sandusky, an Indian village, where we were to stay till morning, lay before us.
They were gone to bed at the log Inn, which was the only house of entertainment in the place, but soon answered to our knocking, and got some tea for us in a sort of kitchen or common room, tapestried with old newspapers, pasted against the wall. The bed-chamber to which my wife and I were shown, was a large, low, ghostly room; with a quantity of withered branches on the hearth, and two doors without any fastening, opposite to each other, both opening on the black night and wild country, and so contrived, that one of them always blew the other open: a novelty in domestic architecture, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which I was somewhat disconcerted to have forced on my attention after getting into bed, as I had a considerable sum in gold for our travelling expenses, in my dressing-case. Some of the luggage, however, piled against the panels, soon settled this difficulty, and my sleep would not have been very much affected that night, I believe, though it had failed to do so.
My Boston friend climbed up to bed, somewhere in the roof, where another guest was already snoring hugely. But being bitten beyond his power of endurance, he turned out again, and fled for shelter to the coach, which was airing itself in front of the house. This was not a very politic step, as it turned out; for the pigs scenting him, and looking upon the coach as a kind of pie with some manner of meat inside, grunted round it so hideously, that he was afraid to come out again, and lay there shivering, till morning. Nor was it possible to warm him, when he did come out, by means of a glass of brandy: for in Indian villages, the legislature, with a very good and wise intention, forbids the sale of spirits by tavern keepers. The precaution, however, is quite inefficacious, for the Indians never fail to procure liquor of a worse kind, at a dearer price, from travelling pedlars.
It is a settlement of the Wyandot Indians who inhabit this place. Among the company at breakfast was a mild old gentleman, who had been for many years employed by the United States Government in conducting negotiations with the Indians, and who had just concluded a treaty with these people by which they bound themselves, in consideration of a certain annual sum, to remove next year to some land provided for them, west of the Mississippi, and a little way beyond St. Louis. He gave me a moving account of their strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular to the burial-places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them. He had witnessed many such removals, and always with pain, though he knew that they departed for their own good. The question whether this tribe should go or stay, had been discussed among them a day or two before, in a hut erected for the purpose, the logs of which still lay upon the ground before the inn. When the speaking was done, the ayes and noes were ranged on opposite sides, and every male adult voted in his turn. The moment the result was known, the minority (a large one) cheerfully yielded to the rest, and withdrew all kind of opposition.
We met some of these poor Indians afterwards, riding on shaggy ponies. They were so like the meaner sort of gipsies, that if I could have seen any of them in England, I should have concluded, as a matter of course, that they belonged to that wandering and restless people.
Leaving this town directly after breakfast, we pushed forward again, over a rather worse road than yesterday, if possible, and arrived about noon at Tiffin, where we parted with the extra. At two o’clock we took the railroad; the travelling on which was very slow, its construction being indifferent, and the ground wet and marshy; and arrived at Sandusky in time to dine that evening. We put up at a comfortable little hotel on the brink of Lake Erie, lay there that night, and had no choice but to wait there next day, until a steamboat bound for Buffalo appeared. The town, which was sluggish and uninteresting enough, was something like the back of an English watering-place, out of the season.
Our host, who was very attentive and anxious to make us comfortable, was a handsome middle-aged man, who had come to this town from New England, in which part of the country he was ‘raised.’ When I say that he constantly walked in and out of the room with his hat on; and stopped to converse in the same free-and-easy state; and lay down on our sofa, and pulled his newspaper out of his pocket, and read it at his ease; I merely mention these traits as characteristic of the country: not at all as being matter of complaint, or as having been disagreeable to me. I should undoubtedly be offended by such proceedings at home, because there they are not the custom, and where they are not, they would be impertinencies; but in America, the only desire of a good-natured fellow of this kind, is to treat his guests hospitably and well; and I had no more right, and I can truly say no more disposition, to measure his conduct by our English rule and standard, than I had to quarrel with him for not being of the exact stature which would qualify him for admission into the Queen’s grenadier guards. As little inclination had I to find fault with a funny old lady who was an upper domestic in this establishment, and who, when she came to wait upon us at any meal, sat herself down comfortably in the most convenient chair, and producing a large pin to pick her teeth with, remained performing that ceremony, and steadfastly regarding us meanwhile with much gravity and composure (now and then pressing us to eat a little more), until it was time to clear away. It was enough for us, that whatever we wished done was done with great civility and readiness, and a desire to oblige, not only here, but everywhere else; and that all our wants were, in general, zealously anticipated.
We were taking an early dinner at this house, on the day after our arrival, which was Sunday, when a steamboat came in sight, and presently touched at the wharf. As she proved to be on her way to Buffalo, we hurried on board with all speed, and soon left Sandusky far behind us.
She was a large vessel of five hundred tons, and handsomely fitted up, though with high-pressure engines; which always conveyed that kind of feeling to me, which I should be likely to experience, I think, if I had lodgings on the first-floor of a powder-mill. She was laden with flour, some casks of which commodity were stored upon the deck. The captain coming up to have a little conversation, and to introduce a friend, seated himself astride of one of these barrels, like a Bacchus of private life; and pulling a great clasp-knife out of his pocket, began to ‘whittle’ it as he talked, by paring thin slices off the edges. And he whittled with such industry and hearty good will, that but for his being called away very soon, it must have disappeared bodily, and left nothing in its place but grist and shavings.
After calling at one or two flat places, with low dams stretching out into the lake, whereon were stumpy lighthouses, like windmills without sails, the whole looking like a Dutch vignette, we came at midnight to Cleveland, where we lay all night, and until nine o’clock next morning.
I entertained quite a curiosity in reference to this place, from having seen at Sandusky a specimen of its literature in the shape of a newspaper, which was very strong indeed upon the subject of Lord Ashburton’s recent arrival at Washington, to adjust the points in dispute between the United States Government and Great Britain: informing its readers that as America had ‘whipped’ England in her infancy, and whipped her again in her youth, so it was clearly necessary that she must whip her once again in her maturity; and pledging its credit to all True Americans, that if Mr. Webster did his duty in the approaching negotiations, and sent the English Lord home again in double quick time, they should, within two years, sing ‘Yankee Doodle in Hyde Park, and Hail Columbia in the scarlet courts of Westminster!’ I found it a pretty town, and had the satisfaction of beholding the outside of the office of the journal from which I have just quoted. I did not enjoy the delight of seeing the wit who indited the paragraph in question, but I have no doubt he is a prodigious man in his way, and held in high repute by a select circle.
There was a gentleman on board, to whom, as I unintentionally learned through the thin partition which divided our state-room from the cabin in which he and his wife conversed together, I was unwittingly the occasion of very great uneasiness. I don’t know why or wherefore, but I appeared to run in his mind perpetually, and to dissatisfy him very much. First of all I heard him say: and the most ludicrous part of the business was, that he said it in my very ear, and could not have communicated more directly with me, if he had leaned upon my shoulder, and whispered me: ‘Boz is on board still, my dear.’ After a considerable pause, he added, complainingly, ‘Boz keeps himself very close;’ which was true enough, for I was not very well, and was lying down, with a book. I thought he had done with me after this, but I was deceived; for a long interval having elapsed, during which I imagine him to have been turning restlessly from side to side, and trying to go to sleep; he broke out again, with ‘I suppose that Boz will be writing a book by-and-by, and putting all our names in it!’ at which imaginary consequence of being on board a boat with Boz, he groaned, and became silent.
We called at the town of Erie, at eight o’clock that night, and lay there an hour. Between five and six next morning, we arrived at Buffalo, where we breakfasted; and being too near the Great Falls to wait patiently anywhere else, we set off by the train, the same morning at nine o’clock, to Niagara.
It was a miserable day; chilly and raw; a damp mist falling; and the trees in that northern region quite bare and wintry. Whenever the train halted, I listened for the roar; and was constantly straining my eyes in the direction where I knew the Falls must be, from seeing the river rolling on towards them; every moment expecting to behold the spray. Within a few minutes of our stopping, not before, I saw two great white clouds rising up slowly and majestically from the depths of the earth. That was all. At length we alighted: and then for the first time, I heard the mighty rush of water, and felt the ground tremble underneath my feet.
The bank is very steep, and was slippery with rain, and half-melted ice. I hardly know how I got down, but I was soon at the bottom, and climbing, with two English officers who were crossing and had joined me, over some broken rocks, deafened by the noise, half-blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. We were at the foot of the American Fall. I could see an immense torrent of water tearing headlong down from some great height, but had no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity.
When we were seated in the little ferry-boat, and were crossing the swollen river immediately before both cataracts, I began to feel what it was: but I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked—Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-green water!—that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.
Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind, tranquillity, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.
Oh, how the strife and trouble of daily life receded from my view, and lessened in the distance, during the ten memorable days we passed on that Enchanted Ground! What voices spoke from out the thundering water; what faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon me from its gleaming depths; what Heavenly promise glistened in those angels’ tears, the drops of many hues, that showered around, and twined themselves about the gorgeous arches which the changing rainbows made!
I never stirred in all that time from the Canadian side, whither I had gone at first. I never crossed the river again; for I knew there were people on the other shore, and in such a place it is natural to shun strange company. To wander to and fro all day, and see the cataracts from all points of view; to stand upon the edge of the great Horse-Shoe Fall, marking the hurried water gathering strength as it approached the verge, yet seeming, too, to pause before it shot into the gulf below; to gaze from the river’s level up at the torrent as it came streaming down; to climb the neighbouring heights and watch it through the trees, and see the wreathing water in the rapids hurrying on to take its fearful plunge; to linger in the shadow of the solemn rocks three miles below; watching the river as, stirred by no visible cause, it heaved and eddied and awoke the echoes, being troubled yet, far down beneath the surface, by its giant leap; to have Niagara before me, lighted by the sun and by the moon, red in the day’s decline, and grey as evening slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, and wake up in the night and hear its ceaseless voice: this was enough.
I think in every quiet season now, still do those waters roll and leap, and roar and tumble, all day long; still are the rainbows spanning them, a hundred feet below. Still, when the sun is on them, do they shine and glow like molten gold. Still, when the day is gloomy, do they fall like snow, or seem to crumble away like the front of a great chalk cliff, or roll down the rock like dense white smoke. But always does the mighty stream appear to die as it comes down, and always from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid: which has haunted this place with the same dread solemnity since Darkness brooded on the deep, and that first flood before the Deluge—Light—came rushing on Creation at the word of God.
CHAPTER XV IN CANADA; TORONTO; KINGSTON; MONTREAL; QUEBEC; ST. JOHN’S. IN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN; LEBANON; THE SHAKER VILLAGE; WEST POINT
I WISH to abstain from instituting any comparison, or drawing any parallel whatever, between the social features of the United States and those of the British Possessions in Canada. For this reason, I shall confine myself to a very brief account of our journeyings in the latter territory.
But before I leave Niagara, I must advert to one disgusting circumstance which can hardly have escaped the observation of any decent traveller who has visited the Falls.
On Table Rock, there is a cottage belonging to a Guide, where little relics of the place are sold, and where visitors register their names in a book kept for the purpose. On the wall of the room in which a great many of these volumes are preserved, the following request is posted: ‘Visitors will please not copy nor extract the remarks and poetical effusions from the registers and albums kept here.’
But for this intimation, I should have let them lie upon the tables on which they were strewn with careful negligence, like books in a drawing-room: being quite satisfied with the stupendous silliness of certain stanzas with an anti-climax at the end of each, which were framed and hung up on the wall. Curious, however, after reading this announcement, to see what kind of morsels were so carefully preserved, I turned a few leaves, and found them scrawled all over with the vilest and the filthiest ribaldry that ever human hogs delighted in.
It is humiliating enough to know that there are among men brutes so obscene and worthless, that they can delight in laying their miserable profanations upon the very steps of Nature’s greatest altar. But that these should be hoarded up for the delight of their fellow-swine, and kept in a public place where any eyes may see them, is a disgrace to the English language in which they are written (though I hope few of these entries have been made by Englishmen), and a reproach to the English side, on which they are preserved.
The quarters of our soldiers at Niagara, are finely and airily situated. Some of them are large detached houses on the plain above the Falls, which were originally designed for hotels; and in the evening time, when the women and children were leaning over the balconies watching the men as they played at ball and other games upon the grass before the door, they often presented a little picture of cheerfulness and animation which made it quite a pleasure to pass that way.
At any garrisoned point where the line of demarcation between one country and another is so very narrow as at Niagara, desertion from the ranks can scarcely fail to be of frequent occurrence: and it may be reasonably supposed that when the soldiers entertain the wildest and maddest hopes of the fortune and independence that await them on the other side, the impulse to play traitor, which such a place suggests to dishonest minds, is not weakened. But it very rarely happens that the men who do desert, are happy or contented afterwards; and many instances have been known in which they have confessed their grievous disappointment, and their earnest desire to return to their old service if they could but be assured of pardon, or lenient treatment. Many of their comrades, notwithstanding, do the like, from time to time; and instances of loss of life in the effort to cross the river with this object, are far from being uncommon. Several men were drowned in the attempt to swim across, not long ago; and one, who had the madness to trust himself upon a table as a raft, was swept down to the whirlpool, where his mangled body eddied round and round some days.
I am inclined to think that the noise of the Falls is very much exaggerated; and this will appear the more probable when the depth of the great basin in which the water is received, is taken into account. At no time during our stay there, was the wind at all high or boisterous, but we never heard them, three miles off, even at the very quiet time of sunset, though we often tried.
Queenston, at which place the steamboats start for Toronto (or I should rather say at which place they call, for their wharf is at Lewiston, on the opposite shore), is situated in a delicious valley, through which the Niagara river, in colour a very deep green, pursues its course. It is approached by a road that takes its winding way among the heights by which the town is sheltered; and seen from this point is extremely beautiful and picturesque. On the most conspicuous of these heights stood a monument erected by the Provincial Legislature in memory of General Brock, who was slain in a battle with the American forces, after having won the victory. Some vagabond, supposed to be a fellow of the name of Lett, who is now, or who lately was, in prison as a felon, blew up this monument two years ago, and it is now a melancholy ruin, with a long fragment of iron railing hanging dejectedly from its top, and waving to and fro like a wild ivy branch or broken vine stem. It is of much higher importance than it may seem, that this statue should be repaired at the public cost, as it ought to have been long ago. Firstly, because it is beneath the dignity of England to allow a memorial raised in honour of one of her defenders, to remain in this condition, on the very spot where he died. Secondly, because the sight of it in its present state, and the recollection of the unpunished outrage which brought it to this pass, is not very likely to soothe down border feelings among English subjects here, or compose their border quarrels and dislikes.
I was standing on the wharf at this place, watching the passengers embarking in a steamboat which preceded that whose coming we awaited, and participating in the anxiety with which a sergeant’s wife was collecting her few goods together—keeping one distracted eye hard upon the porters, who were hurrying them on board, and the other on a hoopless washing-tub for which, as being the most utterly worthless of all her movables, she seemed to entertain particular affection—when three or four soldiers with a recruit came up and went on board.
The recruit was a likely young fellow enough, strongly built and well made, but by no means sober: indeed he had all the air of a man who had been more or less drunk for some days. He carried a small bundle over his shoulder, slung at the end of a walking-stick, and had a short pipe in his mouth. He was as dusty and dirty as recruits usually are, and his shoes betokened that he had travelled on foot some distance, but he was in a very jocose state, and shook hands with this soldier, and clapped that one on the back, and talked and laughed continually, like a roaring idle dog as he was.
The soldiers rather laughed at this blade than with him: seeming to say, as they stood straightening their canes in their hands, and looking coolly at him over their glazed stocks, ‘Go on, my boy, while you may! you’ll know better by-and-by:’ when suddenly the novice, who had been backing towards the gangway in his noisy merriment, fell overboard before their eyes, and splashed heavily down into the river between the vessel and the dock.
I never saw such a good thing as the change that came over these soldiers in an instant. Almost before the man was down, their professional manner, their stiffness and constraint, were gone, and they were filled with the most violent energy. In less time than is required to tell it, they had him out again, feet first, with the tails of his coat flapping over his eyes, everything about him hanging the wrong way, and the water streaming off at every thread in his threadbare dress. But the moment they set him upright and found that he was none the worse, they were soldiers again, looking over their glazed stocks more composedly than ever.
The half-sobered recruit glanced round for a moment, as if his first impulse were to express some gratitude for his preservation, but seeing them with this air of total unconcern, and having his wet pipe presented to him with an oath by the soldier who had been by far the most anxious of the party, he stuck it in his mouth, thrust his hands into his moist pockets, and without even shaking the water off his clothes, walked on board whistling; not to say as if nothing had happened, but as if he had meant to do it, and it had been a perfect success.
Our steamboat came up directly this had left the wharf, and soon bore us to the mouth of the Niagara; where the stars and stripes of America flutter on one side and the Union Jack of England on the other: and so narrow is the space between them that the sentinels in either fort can often hear the watchword of the other country given. Thence we emerged on Lake Ontario, an inland sea; and by half-past six o’clock were at Toronto.
The country round this town being very flat, is bare of scenic interest; but the town itself is full of life and motion, bustle, business, and improvement. The streets are well paved, and lighted with gas; the houses are large and good; the shops excellent. Many of them have a display of goods in their windows, such as may be seen in thriving county towns in England; and there are some which would do no discredit to the metropolis itself. There is a good stone prison here; and there are, besides, a handsome church, a court-house, public offices, many commodious private residences, and a government observatory for noting and recording the magnetic variations. In the College of Upper Canada, which is one of the public establishments of the city, a sound education in every department of polite learning can be had, at a very moderate expense: the annual charge for the instruction of each pupil, not exceeding nine pounds sterling. It has pretty good endowments in the way of land, and is a valuable and useful institution.
The first stone of a new college had been laid but a few days before, by the Governor General. It will be a handsome, spacious edifice, approached by a long avenue, which is already planted and made available as a public walk. The town is well adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons, for the footways in the thoroughfares which lie beyond the principal street, are planked like floors, and kept in very good and clean repair.
It is a matter of deep regret that political differences should have run high in this place, and led to most discreditable and disgraceful results. It is not long since guns were discharged from a window in this town at the successful candidates in an election, and the coachman of one of them was actually shot in the body, though not dangerously wounded. But one man was killed on the same occasion; and from the very window whence he received his death, the very flag which shielded his murderer (not only in the commission of his crime, but from its consequences), was displayed again on the occasion of the public ceremony performed by the Governor General, to which I have just adverted. Of all the colours in the rainbow, there is but one which could be so employed: I need not say that flag was orange.
The time of leaving Toronto for Kingston is noon. By eight o’clock next morning, the traveller is at the end of his journey, which is performed by steamboat upon Lake Ontario, calling at Port Hope and Coburg, the latter a cheerful, thriving little town. Vast quantities of flour form the chief item in the freight of these vessels. We had no fewer than one thousand and eighty barrels on board, between Coburg and Kingston.
The latter place, which is now the seat of government in Canada, is a very poor town, rendered still poorer in the appearance of its market-place by the ravages of a recent fire. Indeed, it may be said of Kingston, that one half of it appears to be burnt down, and the other half not to be built up. The Government House is neither elegant nor commodious, yet it is almost the only house of any importance in the neighbourhood.
There is an admirable jail here, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated, in every respect. The men were employed as shoemakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and stonecutters; and in building a new prison, which was pretty far advanced towards completion. The female prisoners were occupied in needlework. Among them was a beautiful girl of twenty, who had been there nearly three years. She acted as bearer of secret despatches for the self-styled Patriots on Navy Island, during the Canadian Insurrection: sometimes dressing as a girl, and carrying them in her stays; sometimes attiring herself as a boy, and secreting them in the lining of her hat. In the latter character she always rode as a boy would, which was nothing to her, for she could govern any horse that any man could ride, and could drive four-in-hand with the best whip in those parts. Setting forth on one of her patriotic missions, she appropriated to herself the first horse she could lay her hands on; and this offence had brought her where I saw her. She had quite a lovely face, though, as the reader may suppose from this sketch of her history, there was a lurking devil in her bright eye, which looked out pretty sharply from between her prison bars.
There is a bomb-proof fort here of great strength, which occupies a bold position, and is capable, doubtless, of doing good service; though the town is much too close upon the frontier to be long held, I should imagine, for its present purpose in troubled times. There is also a small navy-yard, where a couple of Government steamboats were building, and getting on vigorously.
We left Kingston for Montreal on the tenth of May, at half-past nine in the morning, and proceeded in a steamboat down the St. Lawrence river. The beauty of this noble stream at almost any point, but especially in the commencement of this journey when it winds its way among the thousand Islands, can hardly be imagined. The number and constant successions of these islands, all green and richly wooded; their fluctuating sizes, some so large that for half an hour together one among them will appear as the opposite bank of the river, and some so small that they are mere dimples on its broad bosom; their infinite variety of shapes; and the numberless combinations of beautiful forms which the trees growing on them present: all form a picture fraught with uncommon interest and pleasure.
In the afternoon we shot down some rapids where the river boiled and bubbled strangely, and where the force and headlong violence of the current were tremendous. At seven o’clock we reached Dickenson’s Landing, whence travellers proceed for two or three hours by stage-coach: the navigation of the river being rendered so dangerous and difficult in the interval, by rapids, that steamboats do not make the passage. The number and length of those portages, over which the roads are bad, and the travelling slow, render the way between the towns of Montreal and Kingston, somewhat tedious.
Our course lay over a wide, uninclosed tract of country at a little distance from the river-side, whence the bright warning lights on the dangerous parts of the St. Lawrence shone vividly. The night was dark and raw, and the way dreary enough. It was nearly ten o’clock when we reached the wharf where the next steamboat lay; and went on board, and to bed.
She lay there all night, and started as soon as it was day. The morning was ushered in by a violent thunderstorm, and was very wet, but gradually improved and brightened up. Going on deck after breakfast, I was amazed to see floating down with the stream, a most gigantic raft, with some thirty or forty wooden houses upon it, and at least as many flag-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street. I saw many of these rafts afterwards, but never one so large. All the timber, or ‘lumber,’ as it is called in America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner. When the raft reaches its place of destination, it is broken up; the materials are sold; and the boatmen return for more.
At eight we landed again, and travelled by a stage-coach for four hours through a pleasant and well-cultivated country, perfectly French in every respect: in the appearance of the cottages; the air, language, and dress of the peasantry; the sign-boards on the shops and taverns: and the Virgin’s shrines, and crosses, by the wayside. Nearly every common labourer and boy, though he had no shoes to his feet, wore round his waist a sash of some bright colour: generally red: and the women, who were working in the fields and gardens, and doing all kinds of husbandry, wore, one and all, great flat straw hats with most capacious brims. There were Catholic Priests and Sisters of Charity in the village streets; and images of the Saviour at the corners of cross-roads, and in other public places.
At noon we went on board another steamboat, and reached the village of Lachine, nine miles from Montreal, by three o’clock. There, we left the river, and went on by land.
Montreal is pleasantly situated on the margin of the St. Lawrence, and is backed by some bold heights, about which there are charming rides and drives. The streets are generally narrow and irregular, as in most French towns of any age; but in the more modern parts of the city, they are wide and airy. They display a great variety of very good shops; and both in the town and suburbs there are many excellent private dwellings. The granite quays are remarkable for their beauty, solidity, and extent.
There is a very large Catholic cathedral here, recently erected with two tall spires, of which one is yet unfinished. In the open space in front of this edifice, stands a solitary, grim-looking, square brick tower, which has a quaint and remarkable appearance, and which the wiseacres of the place have consequently determined to pull down immediately. The Government House is very superior to that at Kingston, and the town is full of life and bustle. In one of the suburbs is a plank road—not footpath—five or six miles long, and a famous road it is too. All the rides in the vicinity were made doubly interesting by the bursting out of spring, which is here so rapid, that it is but a day’s leap from barren winter, to the blooming youth of summer.
The steamboats to Quebec perform the journey in the night; that is to say, they leave Montreal at six in the evening, and arrive at Quebec at six next morning. We made this excursion during our stay in Montreal (which exceeded a fortnight), and were charmed by its interest and beauty.
The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America: its giddy heights; its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air; its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn: is at once unique and lasting.
It is a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a traveller can recall. Apart from the realities of this most picturesque city, there are associations clustering about it which would make a desert rich in interest. The dangerous precipice along whose rocky front, Wolfe and his brave companions climbed to glory; the Plains of Abraham, where he received his mortal wound; the fortress so chivalrously defended by Montcalm; and his soldier’s grave, dug for him while yet alive, by the bursting of a shell; are not the least among them, or among the gallant incidents of history. That is a noble Monument too, and worthy of two great nations, which perpetuates the memory of both brave generals, and on which their names are jointly written.
The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of the Old Government House, and from the Citadel, that its surpassing beauty lies. The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of gables, roofs, and chimney tops in the old hilly town immediately at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spiders’ webs against the light, while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy mariners become so many puppets; all this, framed by a sunken window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within, forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures that the eye can rest upon.
In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it) to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger on one of these steamboats, and mingling with the concourse, see and hear them unobserved.
The vessel in which we returned from Quebec to Montreal was crowded with them, and at night they spread their beds between decks (those who had beds, at least), and slept so close and thick about our cabin door, that the passage to and fro was quite blocked up. They were nearly all English; from Gloucestershire the greater part; and had had a long winter-passage out; but it was wonderful to see how clean the children had been kept, and how untiring in their love and self-denial all the poor parents were.
Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is very much harder for the poor to be virtuous than it is for the rich; and the good that is in them, shines the brighter for it. In many a noble mansion lives a man, the best of husbands and of fathers, whose private worth in both capacities is justly lauded to the skies. But bring him here, upon this crowded deck. Strip from his fair young wife her silken dress and jewels, unbind her braided hair, stamp early wrinkles on her brow, pinch her pale cheek with care and much privation, array her faded form in coarsely patched attire, let there be nothing but his love to set her forth or deck her out, and you shall put it to the proof indeed. So change his station in the world, that he shall see in those young things who climb about his knee: not records of his wealth and name: but little wrestlers with him for his daily bread; so many poachers on his scanty meal; so many units to divide his every sum of comfort, and farther to reduce its small amount. In lieu of the endearments of childhood in its sweetest aspect, heap upon him all its pains and wants, its sicknesses and ills, its fretfulness, caprice, and querulous endurance: let its prattle be, not of engaging infant fancies, but of cold, and thirst, and hunger: and if his fatherly affection outlive all this, and he be patient, watchful, tender; careful of his children’s lives, and mindful always of their joys and sorrows; then send him back to Parliament, and Pulpit, and to Quarter Sessions, and when he hears fine talk of the depravity of those who live from hand to mouth, and labour hard to do it, let him speak up, as one who knows, and tell those holders forth that they, by parallel with such a class, should be High Angels in their daily lives, and lay but humble siege to Heaven at last.
Which of us shall say what he would be, if such realities, with small relief or change all through his days, were his! Looking round upon these people: far from home, houseless, indigent, wandering, weary with travel and hard living: and seeing how patiently they nursed and tended their young children: how they consulted ever their wants first, then half supplied their own; what gentle ministers of hope and faith the women were; how the men profited by their example; and how very, very seldom even a moment’s petulance or harsh complaint broke out among them: I felt a stronger love and honour of my kind come glowing on my heart, and wished to God there had been many Atheists in the better part of human nature there, to read this simple lesson in the book of Life.
We left Montreal for New York again, on the thirtieth of May, crossing to La Prairie, on the opposite shore of the St. Lawrence, in a steamboat; we then took the railroad to St. John’s, which is on the brink of Lake Champlain. Our last greeting in Canada was from the English officers in the pleasant barracks at that place (a class of gentlemen who had made every hour of our visit memorable by their hospitality and friendship); and with ‘Rule Britannia’ sounding in our ears, soon left it far behind.
But Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my remembrance. Few Englishmen are prepared to find it what it is. Advancing quietly; old differences settling down, and being fast forgotten; public feeling and private enterprise alike in a sound and wholesome state; nothing of flush or fever in its system, but health and vigour throbbing in its steady pulse: it is full of hope and promise. To me—who had been accustomed to think of it as something left behind in the strides of advancing society, as something neglected and forgotten, slumbering and wasting in its sleep—the demand for labour and the rates of wages; the busy quays of Montreal; the vessels taking in their cargoes, and discharging them; the amount of shipping in the different ports; the commerce, roads, and public works, all made to last; the respectability and character of the public journals; and the amount of rational comfort and happiness which honest industry may earn: were very great surprises. The steamboats on the lakes, in their conveniences, cleanliness, and safety; in the gentlemanly character and bearing of their captains; and in the politeness and perfect comfort of their social regulations; are unsurpassed even by the famous Scotch vessels, deservedly so much esteemed at home. The inns are usually bad; because the custom of boarding at hotels is not so general here as in the States, and the British officers, who form a large portion of the society of every town, live chiefly at the regimental messes: but in every other respect, the traveller in Canada will find as good provision for his comfort as in any place I know.
There is one American boat—the vessel which carried us on Lake Champlain, from St. John’s to Whitehall—which I praise very highly, but no more than it deserves, when I say that it is superior even to that in which we went from Queenston to Toronto, or to that in which we travelled from the latter place to Kingston, or I have no doubt I may add to any other in the world. This steamboat, which is called the Burlington, is a perfectly exquisite achievement of neatness, elegance, and order. The decks are drawing-rooms; the cabins are boudoirs, choicely furnished and adorned with prints, pictures, and musical instruments; every nook and corner in the vessel is a perfect curiosity of graceful comfort and beautiful contrivance. Captain Sherman, her commander, to whose ingenuity and excellent taste these results are solely attributable, has bravely and worthily distinguished himself on more than one trying occasion: not least among them, in having the moral courage to carry British troops, at a time (during the Canadian rebellion) when no other conveyance was open to them. He and his vessel are held in universal respect, both by his own countrymen and ours; and no man ever enjoyed the popular esteem, who, in his sphere of action, won and wore it better than this gentleman.
By means of this floating palace we were soon in the United States again, and called that evening at Burlington; a pretty town, where we lay an hour or so. We reached Whitehall, where we were to disembark, at six next morning; and might have done so earlier, but that these steamboats lie by for some hours in the night, in consequence of the lake becoming very narrow at that part of the journey, and difficult of navigation in the dark. Its width is so contracted at one point, indeed, that they are obliged to warp round by means of a rope.
After breakfasting at Whitehall, we took the stage-coach for Albany: a large and busy town, where we arrived between five and six o’clock that afternoon; after a very hot day’s journey, for we were now in the height of summer again. At seven we started for New York on board a great North River steamboat, which was so crowded with passengers that the upper deck was like the box lobby of a theatre between the pieces, and the lower one like Tottenham Court Road on a Saturday night. But we slept soundly, notwithstanding, and soon after five o’clock next morning reached New York.
Tarrying here, only that day and night, to recruit after our late fatigues, we started off once more upon our last journey in America. We had yet five days to spare before embarking for England, and I had a great desire to see ‘the Shaker Village,’ which is peopled by a religious sect from whom it takes its name.
To this end, we went up the North River again, as far as the town of Hudson, and there hired an extra to carry us to Lebanon, thirty miles distant: and of course another and a different Lebanon from that village where I slept on the night of the Prairie trip.
The country through which the road meandered, was rich and beautiful; the weather very fine; and for many miles the Kaatskill mountains, where Rip Van Winkle and the ghostly Dutchmen played at ninepins one memorable gusty afternoon, towered in the blue distance, like stately clouds. At one point, as we ascended a steep hill, athwart whose base a railroad, yet constructing, took its course, we came upon an Irish colony. With means at hand of building decent cabins, it was wonderful to see how clumsy, rough, and wretched, its hovels were. The best were poor protection from the weather the worst let in the wind and rain through wide breaches in the roofs of sodden grass, and in the walls of mud; some had neither door nor window; some had nearly fallen down, and were imperfectly propped up by stakes and poles; all were ruinous and filthy. Hideously ugly old women and very buxom young ones, pigs, dogs, men, children, babies, pots, kettles, dung-hills, vile refuse, rank straw, and standing water, all wallowing together in an inseparable heap, composed the furniture of every dark and dirty hut.
Between nine and ten o’clock at night, we arrived at Lebanon which is renowned for its warm baths, and for a great hotel, well adapted, I have no doubt, to the gregarious taste of those seekers after health or pleasure who repair here, but inexpressibly comfortless to me. We were shown into an immense apartment, lighted by two dim candles, called the drawing-room: from which there was a descent by a flight of steps, to another vast desert, called the dining-room: our bed-chambers were among certain long rows of little white-washed cells, which opened from either side of a dreary passage; and were so like rooms in a prison that I half expected to be locked up when I went to bed, and listened involuntarily for the turning of the key on the outside. There need be baths somewhere in the neighbourhood, for the other washing arrangements were on as limited a scale as I ever saw, even in America: indeed, these bedrooms were so very bare of even such common luxuries as chairs, that I should say they were not provided with enough of anything, but that I bethink myself of our having been most bountifully bitten all night.
The house is very pleasantly situated, however, and we had a good breakfast. That done, we went to visit our place of destination, which was some two miles off, and the way to which was soon indicated by a finger-post, whereon was painted, ‘To the Shaker Village.’
As we rode along, we passed a party of Shakers, who were at work upon the road; who wore the broadest of all broad-brimmed hats; and were in all visible respects such very wooden men, that I felt about as much sympathy for them, and as much interest in them, as if they had been so many figure-heads of ships. Presently we came to the beginning of the village, and alighting at the door of a house where the Shaker manufactures are sold, and which is the headquarters of the elders, requested permission to see the Shaker worship.
Pending the conveyance of this request to some person in authority, we walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if it broke the grim silence reluctantly, and under protest. Ranged against the wall were six or eight stiff, high-backed chairs, and they partook so strongly of the general grimness that one would much rather have sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to any of them.
Presently, there stalked into this apartment, a grim old Shaker, with eyes as hard, and dull, and cold, as the great round metal buttons on his coat and waistcoat; a sort of calm goblin. Being informed of our desire, he produced a newspaper wherein the body of elders, whereof he was a member, had advertised but a few days before, that in consequence of certain unseemly interruptions which their worship had received from strangers, their chapel was closed to the public for the space of one year.
As nothing was to be urged in opposition to this reasonable arrangement, we requested leave to make some trifling purchases of Shaker goods; which was grimly conceded. We accordingly repaired to a store in the same house and on the opposite side of the passage, where the stock was presided over by something alive in a russet case, which the elder said was a woman; and which I suppose was a woman, though I should not have suspected it.
On the opposite side of the road was their place of worship: a cool, clean edifice of wood, with large windows and green blinds: like a spacious summer-house. As there was no getting into this place, and nothing was to be done but walk up and down, and look at it and the other buildings in the village (which were chiefly of wood, painted a dark red like English barns, and composed of many stories like English factories), I have nothing to communicate to the reader, beyond the scanty results I gleaned the while our purchases were making.
These people are called Shakers from their peculiar form of adoration, which consists of a dance, performed by the men and women of all ages, who arrange themselves for that purpose in opposite parties: the men first divesting themselves of their hats and coats, which they gravely hang against the wall before they begin; and tying a ribbon round their shirt-sleeves, as though they were going to be bled. They accompany themselves with a droning, humming noise, and dance until they are quite exhausted, alternately advancing and retiring in a preposterous sort of trot. The effect is said to be unspeakably absurd: and if I may judge from a print of this ceremony which I have in my possession; and which I am informed by those who have visited the chapel, is perfectly accurate; it must be infinitely grotesque.
They are governed by a woman, and her rule is understood to be absolute, though she has the assistance of a council of elders. She lives, it is said, in strict seclusion, in certain rooms above the chapel, and is never shown to profane eyes. If she at all resemble the lady who presided over the store, it is a great charity to keep her as close as possible, and I cannot too strongly express my perfect concurrence in this benevolent proceeding.
All the possessions and revenues of the settlement are thrown into a common stock, which is managed by the elders. As they have made converts among people who were well to do in the world, and are frugal and thrifty, it is understood that this fund prospers: the more especially as they have made large purchases of land. Nor is this at Lebanon the only Shaker settlement: there are, I think, at least, three others.
They are good farmers, and all their produce is eagerly purchased and highly esteemed. ‘Shaker seeds,’ ‘Shaker herbs,’ and ‘Shaker distilled waters,’ are commonly announced for sale in the shops of towns and cities. They are good breeders of cattle, and are kind and merciful to the brute creation. Consequently, Shaker beasts seldom fail to find a ready market.
They eat and drink together, after the Spartan model, at a great public table. There is no union of the sexes, and every Shaker, male and female, is devoted to a life of celibacy. Rumour has been busy upon this theme, but here again I must refer to the lady of the store, and say, that if many of the sister Shakers resemble her, I treat all such slander as bearing on its face the strongest marks of wild improbability. But that they take as proselytes, persons so young that they cannot know their own minds, and cannot possess much strength of resolution in this or any other respect, I can assert from my own observation of the extreme juvenility of certain youthful Shakers whom I saw at work among the party on the road.
They are said to be good drivers of bargains, but to be honest and just in their transactions, and even in horse-dealing to resist those thievish tendencies which would seem, for some undiscovered reason, to be almost inseparable from that branch of traffic. In all matters they hold their own course quietly, live in their gloomy, silent commonwealth, and show little desire to interfere with other people.
This is well enough, but nevertheless I cannot, I confess, incline towards the Shakers; view them with much favour, or extend towards them any very lenient construction. I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave: that odious spirit which, if it could have had full scope and sway upon the earth, must have blasted and made barren the imaginations of the greatest men, and left them, in their power of raising up enduring images before their fellow-creatures yet unborn, no better than the beasts: that, in these very broad-brimmed hats and very sombre coats—in stiff-necked, solemn-visaged piety, in short, no matter what its garb, whether it have cropped hair as in a Shaker village, or long nails as in a Hindoo temple—I recognise the worst among the enemies of Heaven and Earth, who turn the water at the marriage feasts of this poor world, not into wine, but gall. And if there must be people vowed to crush the harmless fancies and the love of innocent delights and gaieties, which are a part of human nature: as much a part of it as any other love or hope that is our common portion: let them, for me, stand openly revealed among the ribald and licentious; the very idiots know that they are not on the Immortal road, and will despise them, and avoid them readily.
Leaving the Shaker village with a hearty dislike of the old Shakers, and a hearty pity for the young ones: tempered by the strong probability of their running away as they grow older and wiser, which they not uncommonly do: we returned to Lebanon, and so to Hudson, by the way we had come upon the previous day. There, we took the steamboat down the North River towards New York, but stopped, some four hours’ journey short of it, at West Point, where we remained that night, and all next day, and next night too.
In this beautiful place: the fairest among the fair and lovely Highlands of the North River: shut in by deep green heights and ruined forts, and looking down upon the distant town of Newburgh, along a glittering path of sunlit water, with here and there a skiff, whose white sail often bends on some new tack as sudden flaws of wind come down upon her from the gullies in the hills: hemmed in, besides, all round with memories of Washington, and events of the revolutionary war: is the Military School of America.
It could not stand on more appropriate ground, and any ground more beautiful can hardly be. The course of education is severe, but well devised, and manly. Through June, July, and August, the young men encamp upon the spacious plain whereon the college stands; and all the year their military exercises are performed there, daily. The term of study at this institution, which the State requires from all cadets, is four years; but, whether it be from the rigid nature of the discipline, or the national impatience of restraint, or both causes combined, not more than half the number who begin their studies here, ever remain to finish them.
The number of cadets being about equal to that of the members of Congress, one is sent here from every Congressional district: its member influencing the selection. Commissions in the service are distributed on the same principle. The dwellings of the various Professors are beautifully situated; and there is a most excellent hotel for strangers, though it has the two drawbacks of being a total abstinence house (wines and spirits being forbidden to the students), and of serving the public meals at rather uncomfortable hours: to wit, breakfast at seven, dinner at one, and supper at sunset.
The beauty and freshness of this calm retreat, in the very dawn and greenness of summer—it was then the beginning of June—were exquisite indeed. Leaving it upon the sixth, and returning to New York, to embark for England on the succeeding day, I was glad to think that among the last memorable beauties which had glided past us, and softened in the bright perspective, were those whose pictures, traced by no common hand, are fresh in most men’s minds; not easily to grow old, or fade beneath the dust of Time: the Kaatskill Mountains, Sleepy Hollow, and the Tappaan Zee.
CHAPTER XVI THE PASSAGE HOME
I NEVER had so much interest before, and very likely I shall never have so much interest again, in the state of the wind, as on the long-looked-for morning of Tuesday the Seventh of June. Some nautical authority had told me a day or two previous, ‘anything with west in it, will do;’ so when I darted out of bed at daylight, and throwing up the window, was saluted by a lively breeze from the north-west which had sprung up in the night, it came upon me so freshly, rustling with so many happy associations, that I conceived upon the spot a special regard for all airs blowing from that quarter of the compass, which I shall cherish, I dare say, until my own wind has breathed its last frail puff, and withdrawn itself for ever from the mortal calendar.
The pilot had not been slow to take advantage of this favourable weather, and the ship which yesterday had been in such a crowded dock that she might have retired from trade for good and all, for any chance she seemed to have of going to sea, was now full sixteen miles away. A gallant sight she was, when we, fast gaining on her in a steamboat, saw her in the distance riding at anchor: her tall masts pointing up in graceful lines against the sky, and every rope and spar expressed in delicate and thread-like outline: gallant, too, when, we being all aboard, the anchor came up to the sturdy chorus ‘Cheerily men, oh cheerily!’ and she followed proudly in the towing steamboat’s wake: but bravest and most gallant of all, when the tow-rope being cast adrift, the canvas fluttered from her masts, and spreading her white wings she soared away upon her free and solitary course.
In the after cabin we were only fifteen passengers in all, and the greater part were from Canada, where some of us had known each other. The night was rough and squally, so were the next two days, but they flew by quickly, and we were soon as cheerful and snug a party, with an honest, manly-hearted captain at our head, as ever came to the resolution of being mutually agreeable, on land or water.
We breakfasted at eight, lunched at twelve, dined at three, and took our tea at half-past seven. We had abundance of amusements, and dinner was not the least among them: firstly, for its own sake; secondly, because of its extraordinary length: its duration, inclusive of all the long pauses between the courses, being seldom less than two hours and a half; which was a subject of never-failing entertainment. By way of beguiling the tediousness of these banquets, a select association was formed at the lower end of the table, below the mast, to whose distinguished president modesty forbids me to make any further allusion, which, being a very hilarious and jovial institution, was (prejudice apart) in high favour with the rest of the community, and particularly with a black steward, who lived for three weeks in a broad grin at the marvellous humour of these incorporated worthies.
Then, we had chess for those who played it, whist, cribbage, books, backgammon, and shovelboard. In all weathers, fair or foul, calm or windy, we were every one on deck, walking up and down in pairs, lying in the boats, leaning over the side, or chatting in a lazy group together. We had no lack of music, for one played the accordion, another the violin, and another (who usually began at six o’clock A.M.) the key-bugle: the combined effect of which instruments, when they all played different tunes in different parts of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of each other, as they sometimes did (everybody being intensely satisfied with his own performance), was sublimely hideous.
When all these means of entertainment failed, a sail would heave in sight: looming, perhaps, the very spirit of a ship, in the misty distance, or passing us so close that through our glasses we could see the people on her decks, and easily make out her name, and whither she was bound. For hours together we could watch the dolphins and porpoises as they rolled and leaped and dived around the vessel; or those small creatures ever on the wing, the Mother Carey’s chickens, which had borne us company from New York bay, and for a whole fortnight fluttered about the vessel’s stern. For some days we had a dead calm, or very light winds, during which the crew amused themselves with fishing, and hooked an unlucky dolphin, who expired, in all his rainbow colours, on the deck: an event of such importance in our barren calendar, that afterwards we dated from the dolphin, and made the day on which he died, an era.
Besides all this, when we were five or six days out, there began to be much talk of icebergs, of which wandering islands an unusual number had been seen by the vessels that had come into New York a day or two before we left that port, and of whose dangerous neighbourhood we were warned by the sudden coldness of the weather, and the sinking of the mercury in the barometer. While these tokens lasted, a double look-out was kept, and many dismal tales were whispered after dark, of ships that had struck upon the ice and gone down in the night; but the wind obliging us to hold a southward course, we saw none of them, and the weather soon grew bright and warm again.
The observation every day at noon, and the subsequent working of the vessel’s course, was, as may be supposed, a feature in our lives of paramount importance; nor were there wanting (as there never are) sagacious doubters of the captain’s calculations, who, so soon as his back was turned, would, in the absence of compasses, measure the chart with bits of string, and ends of pocket-handkerchiefs, and points of snuffers, and clearly prove him to be wrong by an odd thousand miles or so. It was very edifying to see these unbelievers shake their heads and frown, and hear them hold forth strongly upon navigation: not that they knew anything about it, but that they always mistrusted the captain in calm weather, or when the wind was adverse. Indeed, the mercury itself is not so variable as this class of passengers, whom you will see, when the ship is going nobly through the water, quite pale with admiration, swearing that the captain beats all captains ever known, and even hinting at subscriptions for a piece of plate; and who, next morning, when the breeze has lulled, and all the sails hang useless in the idle air, shake their despondent heads again, and say, with screwed-up lips, they hope that captain is a sailor—but they shrewdly doubt him.
It even became an occupation in the calm, to wonder when the wind would spring up in the favourable quarter, where, it was clearly shown by all the rules and precedents, it ought to have sprung up long ago. The first mate, who whistled for it zealously, was much respected for his perseverance, and was regarded even by the unbelievers as a first-rate sailor. Many gloomy looks would be cast upward through the cabin skylights at the flapping sails while dinner was in progress; and some, growing bold in ruefulness, predicted that we should land about the middle of July. There are always on board ship, a Sanguine One, and a Despondent One. The latter character carried it hollow at this period of the voyage, and triumphed over the Sanguine One at every meal, by inquiring where he supposed the Great Western (which left New York a week after us) was now: and where he supposed the ‘Cunard’ steam-packet was now: and what he thought of sailing vessels, as compared with steamships now: and so beset his life with pestilent attacks of that kind, that he too was obliged to affect despondency, for very peace and quietude.
These were additions to the list of entertaining incidents, but there was still another source of interest. We carried in the steerage nearly a hundred passengers: a little world of poverty: and as we came to know individuals among them by sight, from looking down upon the deck where they took the air in the daytime, and cooked their food, and very often ate it too, we became curious to know their histories, and with what expectations they had gone out to America, and on what errands they were going home, and what their circumstances were. The information we got on these heads from the carpenter, who had charge of these people, was often of the strangest kind. Some of them had been in America but three days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home. Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had hardly rags to cover them; others had no food, and lived upon the charity of the rest: and one man, it was discovered nearly at the end of the voyage, not before—for he kept his secret close, and did not court compassion—had had no sustenance whatever but the bones and scraps of fat he took from the plates used in the after-cabin dinner, when they were put out to be washed.
The whole system of shipping and conveying these unfortunate persons, is one that stands in need of thorough revision. If any class deserve to be protected and assisted by the Government, it is that class who are banished from their native land in search of the bare means of subsistence. All that could be done for these poor people by the great compassion and humanity of the captain and officers was done, but they require much more. The law is bound, at least upon the English side, to see that too many of them are not put on board one ship: and that their accommodations are decent: not demoralising, and profligate. It is bound, too, in common humanity, to declare that no man shall be taken on board without his stock of provisions being previously inspected by some proper officer, and pronounced moderately sufficient for his support upon the voyage. It is bound to provide, or to require that there be provided, a medical attendant; whereas in these ships there are none, though sickness of adults, and deaths of children, on the passage, are matters of the very commonest occurrence. Above all it is the duty of any Government, be it monarchy or republic, to interpose and put an end to that system by which a firm of traders in emigrants purchase of the owners the whole ’tween-decks of a ship, and send on board as many wretched people as they can lay hold of, on any terms they can get, without the smallest reference to the conveniences of the steerage, the number of berths, the slightest separation of the sexes, or anything but their own immediate profit. Nor is even this the worst of the vicious system: for, certain crimping agents of these houses, who have a percentage on all the passengers they inveigle, are constantly travelling about those districts where poverty and discontent are rife, and tempting the credulous into more misery, by holding out monstrous inducements to emigration which can never be realised.
The history of every family we had on board was pretty much the same. After hoarding up, and borrowing, and begging, and selling everything to pay the passage, they had gone out to New York, expecting to find its streets paved with gold; and had found them paved with very hard and very real stones. Enterprise was dull; labourers were not wanted; jobs of work were to be got, but the payment was not. They were coming back, even poorer than they went. One of them was carrying an open letter from a young English artisan, who had been in New York a fortnight, to a friend near Manchester, whom he strongly urged to follow him. One of the officers brought it to me as a curiosity. ‘This is the country, Jem,’ said the writer. ‘I like America. There is no despotism here; that’s the great thing. Employment of all sorts is going a-begging, and wages are capital. You have only to choose a trade, Jem, and be it. I haven’t made choice of one yet, but I shall soon. At present I haven’t quite made up my mind whether to be a carpenter—or a tailor.’
There was yet another kind of passenger, and but one more, who, in the calm and the light winds, was a constant theme of conversation and observation among us. This was an English sailor, a smart, thorough-built, English man-of-war’s-man from his hat to his shoes, who was serving in the American navy, and having got leave of absence was on his way home to see his friends. When he presented himself to take and pay for his passage, it had been suggested to him that being an able seaman he might as well work it and save the money, but this piece of advice he very indignantly rejected: saying, ‘He’d be damned but for once he’d go aboard ship, as a gentleman.’ Accordingly, they took his money, but he no sooner came aboard, than he stowed his kit in the forecastle, arranged to mess with the crew, and the very first time the hands were turned up, went aloft like a cat, before anybody. And all through the passage there he was, first at the braces, outermost on the yards, perpetually lending a hand everywhere, but always with a sober dignity in his manner, and a sober grin on his face, which plainly said, ‘I do it as a gentleman. For my own pleasure, mind you!’
At length and at last, the promised wind came up in right good earnest, and away we went before it, with every stitch of canvas set, slashing through the water nobly. There was a grandeur in the motion of the splendid ship, as overshadowed by her mass of sails, she rode at a furious pace upon the waves, which filled one with an indescribable sense of pride and exultation. As she plunged into a foaming valley, how I loved to see the green waves, bordered deep with white, come rushing on astern, to buoy her upward at their pleasure, and curl about her as she stooped again, but always own her for their haughty mistress still! On, on we flew, with changing lights upon the water, being now in the blessed region of fleecy skies; a bright sun lighting us by day, and a bright moon by night; the vane pointing directly homeward, alike the truthful index to the favouring wind and to our cheerful hearts; until at sunrise, one fair Monday morning—the twenty-seventh of June, I shall not easily forget the day—there lay before us, old Cape Clear, God bless it, showing, in the mist of early morning, like a cloud: the brightest and most welcome cloud, to us, that ever hid the face of Heaven’s fallen sister—Home.
Dim speck as it was in the wide prospect, it made the sunrise a more cheerful sight, and gave to it that sort of human interest which it seems to want at sea. There, as elsewhere, the return of day is inseparable from some sense of renewed hope and gladness; but the light shining on the dreary waste of water, and showing it in all its vast extent of loneliness, presents a solemn spectacle, which even night, veiling it in darkness and uncertainty, does not surpass. The rising of the moon is more in keeping with the solitary ocean; and has an air of melancholy grandeur, which in its soft and gentle influence, seems to comfort while it saddens. I recollect when I was a very young child having a fancy that the reflection of the moon in water was a path to Heaven, trodden by the spirits of good people on their way to God; and this old feeling often came over me again, when I watched it on a tranquil night at sea.
The wind was very light on this same Monday morning, but it was still in the right quarter, and so, by slow degrees, we left Cape Clear behind, and sailed along within sight of the coast of Ireland. And how merry we all were, and how loyal to the George Washington, and how full of mutual congratulations, and how venturesome in predicting the exact hour at which we should arrive at Liverpool, may be easily imagined and readily understood. Also, how heartily we drank the captain’s health that day at dinner; and how restless we became about packing up: and how two or three of the most sanguine spirits rejected the idea of going to bed at all that night as something it was not worth while to do, so near the shore, but went nevertheless, and slept soundly; and how to be so near our journey’s end, was like a pleasant dream, from which one feared to wake.
The friendly breeze freshened again next day, and on we went once more before it gallantly: descrying now and then an English ship going homeward under shortened sail, while we, with every inch of canvas crowded on, dashed gaily past, and left her far behind. Towards evening, the weather turned hazy, with a drizzling rain; and soon became so thick, that we sailed, as it were, in a cloud. Still we swept onward like a phantom ship, and many an eager eye glanced up to where the Look-out on the mast kept watch for Holyhead.
At length his long-expected cry was heard, and at the same moment there shone out from the haze and mist ahead, a gleaming light, which presently was gone, and soon returned, and soon was gone again. Whenever it came back, the eyes of all on board, brightened and sparkled like itself: and there we all stood, watching this revolving light upon the rock at Holyhead, and praising it for its brightness and its friendly warning, and lauding it, in short, above all other signal lights that ever were displayed, until it once more glimmered faintly in the distance, far behind us.
Then, it was time to fire a gun, for a pilot; and almost before its smoke had cleared away, a little boat with a light at her masthead came bearing down upon us, through the darkness, swiftly. And presently, our sails being backed, she ran alongside; and the hoarse pilot, wrapped and muffled in pea-coats and shawls to the very bridge of his weather-ploughed-up nose, stood bodily among us on the deck. And I think if that pilot had wanted to borrow fifty pounds for an indefinite period on no security, we should have engaged to lend it to him, among us, before his boat had dropped astern, or (which is the same thing) before every scrap of news in the paper he brought with him had become the common property of all on board.
We turned in pretty late that night, and turned out pretty early next morning. By six o’clock we clustered on the deck, prepared to go ashore; and looked upon the spires, and roofs, and smoke, of Liverpool. By eight we all sat down in one of its Hotels, to eat and drink together for the last time. And by nine we had shaken hands all round, and broken up our social company for ever.
The country, by the railroad, seemed, as we rattled through it, like a luxuriant garden. The beauty of the fields (so small they looked!), the hedge-rows, and the trees; the pretty cottages, the beds of flowers, the old churchyards, the antique houses, and every well-known object; the exquisite delights of that one journey, crowding in the short compass of a summer’s day, the joy of many years, with the winding up with Home and all that makes it dear; no tongue can tell, or pen of mine describe.
CHAPTER XVII SLAVERY
THE upholders of slavery in America—of the atrocities of which system, I shall not write one word for which I have not had ample proof and warrant—may be divided into three great classes.
The first, are those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle, who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught: dangers which however distant they may be, or howsoever tardy in their coming on, are as certain to fall upon its guilty head, as is the Day of Judgment.
The second, consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards: who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject, and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority, and unassailed by any human power; who, when they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun Alraschid in his angry robe of scarlet.
The third, and not the least numerous or influential, is composed of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, and cannot brook an equal; of that class whose Republicanism means, ‘I will not tolerate a man above me: and of those below, none must approach too near;’ whose pride, in a land where voluntary servitude is shunned as a disgrace, must be ministered to by slaves; and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in negro wrongs.
It has been sometimes urged that, in the unavailing efforts which have been made to advance the cause of Human Freedom in the republic of America (strange cause for history to treat of!), sufficient regard has not been had to the existence of the first class of persons; and it has been contended that they are hardly used, in being confounded with the second. This is, no doubt, the case; noble instances of pecuniary and personal sacrifice have already had their growth among them; and it is much to be regretted that the gulf between them and the advocates of emancipation should have been widened and deepened by any means: the rather, as there are, beyond dispute, among these slave-owners, many kind masters who are tender in the exercise of their unnatural power. Still, it is to be feared that this injustice is inseparable from the state of things with which humanity and truth are called upon to deal. Slavery is not a whit the more endurable because some hearts are to be found which can partially resist its hardening influences; nor can the indignant tide of honest wrath stand still, because in its onward course it overwhelms a few who are comparatively innocent, among a host of guilty.
The ground most commonly taken by these better men among the advocates of slavery, is this: ‘It is a bad system; and for myself I would willingly get rid of it, if I could; most willingly. But it is not so bad, as you in England take it to be. You are deceived by the representations of the emancipationists. The greater part of my slaves are much attached to me. You will say that I do not allow them to be severely treated; but I will put it to you whether you believe that it can be a general practice to treat them inhumanly, when it would impair their value, and would be obviously against the interests of their masters.’
Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder? No. All these are roads to ruin. And why, then, do men tread them? Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind. Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!
But again: this class, together with that last one I have named, the miserable aristocracy spawned of a false republic, lift up their voices and exclaim ‘Public opinion is all-sufficient to prevent such cruelty as you denounce.’ Public opinion! Why, public opinion in the slave States is slavery, is it not? Public opinion, in the slave States, has delivered the slaves over, to the gentle mercies of their masters. Public opinion has made the laws, and denied the slaves legislative protection. Public opinion has knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and shielded the murderer. Public opinion threatens the abolitionist with death, if he venture to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East. Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis; and public opinion has to this day maintained upon the bench that estimable judge who charged the jury, impanelled there to try his murderers, that their most horrid deed was an act of public opinion, and being so, must not be punished by the laws the public sentiment had made. Public opinion hailed this doctrine with a howl of wild applause, and set the prisoners free, to walk the city, men of mark, and influence, and station, as they had been before.
Public opinion! what class of men have an immense preponderance over the rest of the community, in their power of representing public opinion in the legislature? the slave-owners. They send from their twelve States one hundred members, while the fourteen free States, with a free population nearly double, return but a hundred and forty-two. Before whom do the presidential candidates bow down the most humbly, on whom do they fawn the most fondly, and for whose tastes do they cater the most assiduously in their servile protestations? The slave-owners always.
Public opinion! hear the public opinion of the free South, as expressed by its own members in the House of Representatives at Washington. ‘I have a great respect for the chair,’ quoth North Carolina, ‘I have a great respect for the chair as an officer of the house, and a great respect for him personally; nothing but that respect prevents me from rushing to the table and tearing that petition which has just been presented for the abolition of slavery in the district of Columbia, to pieces.’—‘I warn the abolitionists,’ says South Carolina, ‘ignorant, infuriated barbarians as they are, that if chance shall throw any of them into our hands, he may expect a felon’s death.’—‘Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South Carolina,’ cries a third; mild Carolina’s colleague; ‘and if we can catch him, we will try him, and notwithstanding the interference of all the governments on earth, including the Federal government, we will HANG him.’
Public opinion has made this law.—It has declared that in Washington, in that city which takes its name from the father of American liberty, any justice of the peace may bind with fetters any negro passing down the street and thrust him into jail: no offence on the black man’s part is necessary. The justice says, ‘I choose to think this man a runaway:’ and locks him up. Public opinion impowers the man of law when this is done, to advertise the negro in the newspapers, warning his owner to come and claim him, or he will be sold to pay the jail fees. But supposing he is a free black, and has no owner, it may naturally be presumed that he is set at liberty. No: HE IS SOLD TO RECOMPENSE HIS JAILER. This has been done again, and again, and again. He has no means of proving his freedom; has no adviser, messenger, or assistance of any sort or kind; no investigation into his case is made, or inquiry instituted. He, a free man, who may have served for years, and bought his liberty, is thrown into jail on no process, for no crime, and on no pretence of crime: and is sold to pay the jail fees. This seems incredible, even of America, but it is the law.
Public opinion is deferred to, in such cases as the following: which is headed in the newspapers:—
‘Interesting Law-Case.
‘An interesting case is now on trial in the Supreme Court, arising out of the following facts. A gentleman residing in Maryland had allowed an aged pair of his slaves, substantial though not legal freedom for several years. While thus living, a daughter was born to them, who grew up in the same liberty, until she married a free negro, and went with him to reside in Pennsylvania. They had several children, and lived unmolested until the original owner died, when his heir attempted to regain them; but the magistrate before whom they were brought, decided that he had no jurisdiction in the case. The owner seized the woman and her children in the night, and carried them to Maryland.’
‘Cash for negroes,’ ‘cash for negroes,’ ‘cash for negroes,’ is the heading of advertisements in great capitals down the long columns of the crowded journals. Woodcuts of a runaway negro with manacled hands, crouching beneath a bluff pursuer in top boots, who, having caught him, grasps him by the throat, agreeably diversify the pleasant text. The leading article protests against ‘that abominable and hellish doctrine of abolition, which is repugnant alike to every law of God and nature.’ The delicate mamma, who smiles her acquiescence in this sprightly writing as she reads the paper in her cool piazza, quiets her youngest child who clings about her skirts, by promising the boy ‘a whip to beat the little niggers with.’—But the negroes, little and big, are protected by public opinion.
Let us try this public opinion by another test, which is important in three points of view: first, as showing how desperately timid of the public opinion slave-owners are, in their delicate descriptions of fugitive slaves in widely circulated newspapers; secondly, as showing how perfectly contented the slaves are, and how very seldom they run away; thirdly, as exhibiting their entire freedom from scar, or blemish, or any mark of cruel infliction, as their pictures are drawn, not by lying abolitionists, but by their own truthful masters.
The following are a few specimens of the advertisements in the public papers. It is only four years since the oldest among them appeared; and others of the same nature continue to be published every day, in shoals.
‘Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down.’
‘Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on her right leg.’
‘Ran away, the negro Manuel. Much marked with irons.’
‘Ran away, the negress Fanny. Had on an iron band about her neck.’
‘Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar with “De Lampert” engraved on it.’
‘Ran away, the negro Hown. Has a ring of iron on his left foot. Also, Grise, his wife, having a ring and chain on the left leg.’
‘Ran away, a negro boy named James. Said boy was ironed when he left me.’
‘Committed to jail, a man who calls his name John. He has a clog of iron on his right foot which will weigh four or five pounds.’
‘Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myra. Has several marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet.’
‘Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.’
‘Ran away, a negro man named Henry; his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.’
‘One hundred dollars reward, for a negro fellow, Pompey, 40 years old. He is branded on the left jaw.’
‘Committed to jail, a negro man. Has no toes on the left foot.’
‘Ran away, a negro woman named Rachel. Has lost all her toes except the large one.’
‘Ran away, Sam. He was shot a short time since through the hand, and has several shots in his left arm and side.’
‘Ran away, my negro man Dennis. Said negro has been shot in the left arm between the shoulder and elbow, which has paralysed the left hand.’
‘Ran away, my negro man named Simon. He has been shot badly, in his back and right arm.’
‘Ran away, a negro named Arthur. Has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.’
‘Twenty-five dollars reward for my man Isaac. He has a scar on his forehead, caused by a blow; and one on his back, made by a shot from a pistol.’
‘Ran away, a negro girl called Mary. Has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A is branded on her cheek and forehead.’
‘Ran away, negro Ben. Has a scar on his right hand; his thumb and forefinger being injured by being shot last fall. A part of the bone came out. He has also one or two large scars on his back and hips.’
‘Detained at the jail, a mulatto, named Tom. Has a scar on the right cheek, and appears to have been burned with powder on the face.’
‘Ran away, a negro man named Ned. Three of his fingers are drawn into the palm of his hand by a cut. Has a scar on the back of his neck, nearly half round, done by a knife.’
‘Was committed to jail, a negro man. Says his name is Josiah. His back very much scarred by the whip; and branded on the thigh and hips in three or four places, thus (J M). The rim of his right ear has been bit or cut off.’
‘Fifty dollars reward, for my fellow Edward. He has a scar on the corner of his mouth, two cuts on and under his arm, and the letter E on his arm.’
‘Ran away, negro boy Ellie. Has a scar on one of his arms from the bite of a dog.’
‘Ran away, from the plantation of James Surgette, the following negroes: Randal, has one ear cropped; Bob, has lost one eye; Kentucky Tom, has one jaw broken.’
‘Ran away, Anthony. One of his ears cut off, and his left hand cut with an axe.’
‘Fifty dollars reward for the negro Jim Blake. Has a piece cut out of each ear, and the middle finger of the left hand cut off to the second joint.’
‘Ran away, a negro woman named Maria. Has a scar on one side of her cheek, by a cut. Some scars on her back.’
‘Ran away, the Mulatto wench Mary. Has a cut on the left arm, a scar on the left shoulder, and two upper teeth missing.’
I should say, perhaps, in explanation of this latter piece of description, that among the other blessings which public opinion secures to the negroes, is the common practice of violently punching out their teeth. To make them wear iron collars by day and night, and to worry them with dogs, are practices almost too ordinary to deserve mention.
‘Ran away, my man Fountain. Has holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead, has been shot in the hind part of his legs, and is marked on the back with the whip.’
‘Two hundred and fifty dollars reward for my negro man Jim. He is much marked with shot in his right thigh. The shot entered on the outside, halfway between the hip and knee joints.’
‘Brought to jail, John. Left ear cropt.’
‘Taken up, a negro man. Is very much scarred about the face and body, and has the left ear bit off.’
‘Ran away, a black girl, named Mary. Has a scar on her cheek, and the end of one of her toes cut off.’
‘Ran away, my Mulatto woman, Judy. She has had her right arm broke.’
‘Ran away, my negro man, Levi. His left hand has been burnt, and I think the end of his forefinger is off.’
‘Ran away, a negro man, NAMED WASHINGTON. Has lost a part of his middle finger, and the end of his little finger.’
‘Twenty-five dollars reward for my man John. The tip of his nose is bit off.’
‘Twenty-five dollars reward for the negro slave, Sally. Walks as though crippled in the back.’
‘Ran away, Joe Dennis. Has a small notch in one of his ears.’
‘Ran away, negro boy, Jack. Has a small crop out of his left ear.’
‘Ran away, a negro man, named Ivory. Has a small piece cut out of the top of each ear.’
While upon the subject of ears, I may observe that a distinguished abolitionist in New York once received a negro’s ear, which had been cut off close to the head, in a general post letter. It was forwarded by the free and independent gentleman who had caused it to be amputated, with a polite request that he would place the specimen in his ‘collection.’
I could enlarge this catalogue with broken arms, and broken legs, and gashed flesh, and missing teeth, and lacerated backs, and bites of dogs, and brands of red-hot irons innumerable: but as my readers will be sufficiently sickened and repelled already, I will turn to another branch of the subject.
These advertisements, of which a similar collection might be made for every year, and month, and week, and day; and which are coolly read in families as things of course, and as a part of the current news and small-talk; will serve to show how very much the slaves profit by public opinion, and how tender it is in their behalf. But it may be worth while to inquire how the slave-owners, and the class of society to which great numbers of them belong, defer to public opinion in their conduct, not to their slaves but to each other; how they are accustomed to restrain their passions; what their bearing is among themselves; whether they are fierce or gentle; whether their social customs be brutal, sanguinary, and violent, or bear the impress of civilisation and refinement.
That we may have no partial evidence from abolitionists in this inquiry, either, I will once more turn to their own newspapers, and I will confine myself, this time, to a selection from paragraphs which appeared from day to day, during my visit to America, and which refer to occurrences happening while I was there. The italics in these extracts, as in the foregoing, are my own.
These cases did not ALL occur, it will be seen, in territory actually belonging to legalised Slave States, though most, and those the very worst among them did, as their counterparts constantly do; but the position of the scenes of action in reference to places immediately at hand, where slavery is the law; and the strong resemblance between that class of outrages and the rest; lead to the just presumption that the character of the parties concerned was formed in slave districts, and brutalised by slave customs.
‘Horrible Tragedy.
‘By a slip from The Southport Telegraph, Wisconsin, we learn that the Hon. Charles C. P. Arndt, Member of the Council for Brown county, was shot dead on the floor of the Council chamber, by James R. Vinyard, Member from Grant county. The affair grew out of a nomination for Sheriff of Grant county. Mr. E. S. Baker was nominated and supported by Mr. Arndt. This nomination was opposed by Vinyard, who wanted the appointment to vest in his own brother. In the course of debate, the deceased made some statements which Vinyard pronounced false, and made use of violent and insulting language, dealing largely in personalities, to which Mr. A. made no reply. After the adjournment, Mr. A. stepped up to Vinyard, and requested him to retract, which he refused to do, repeating the offensive words. Mr. Arndt then made a blow at Vinyard, who stepped back a pace, drew a pistol, and shot him dead.
‘The issue appears to have been provoked on the part of Vinyard, who was determined at all hazards to defeat the appointment of Baker, and who, himself defeated, turned his ire and revenge upon the unfortunate Arndt.’
‘The Wisconsin Tragedy.
Public indignation runs high in the territory of Wisconsin, in relation to the murder of C. C. P. Arndt, in the Legislative Hall of the Territory. Meetings have been held in different counties of Wisconsin, denouncing the practice of secretly bearing arms in the Legislative chambers of the country. We have seen the account of the expulsion of James R. Vinyard, the perpetrator of the bloody deed, and are amazed to hear, that, after this expulsion by those who saw Vinyard kill Mr. Arndt in the presence of his aged father, who was on a visit to see his son, little dreaming that he was to witness his murder, Judge Dunn has discharged Vinyard on bail. The Miners’ Free Press speaks in terms of merited rebuke at the outrage upon the feelings of the people of Wisconsin. Vinyard was within arm’s length of Mr. Arndt, when he took such deadly aim at him, that he never spoke. Vinyard might at pleasure, being so near, have only wounded him, but he chose to kill him.’
‘Murder.
By a letter in a St. Louis paper of the ‘4th, we notice a terrible outrage at Burlington, Iowa. A Mr. Bridgman having had a difficulty with a citizen of the place, Mr. Ross; a brother-in-law of the latter provided himself with one of Colt’s revolving pistols, met Mr. B. in the street, and discharged the contents of five of the barrels at him: each shot taking effect. Mr. B., though horribly wounded, and dying, returned the fire, and killed Ross on the spot.’
‘Terrible Death of Robert Potter.
‘From the “Caddo Gazette,” of the 12th inst., we learn the frightful death of Colonel Robert Potter… . He was beset in his house by an enemy, named Rose. He sprang from his couch, seized his gun, and, in his night-clothes, rushed from the house. For about two hundred yards his speed seemed to defy his pursuers; but, getting entangled in a thicket, he was captured. Rose told him that he intended to act a generous part, and give him a chance for his life. He then told Potter he might run, and he should not be interrupted till he reached a certain distance. Potter started at the word of command, and before a gun was fired he had reached the lake. His first impulse was to jump in the water and dive for it, which he did. Rose was close behind him, and formed his men on the bank ready to shoot him as he rose. In a few seconds he came up to breathe; and scarce had his head reached the surface of the water when it was completely riddled with the shot of their guns, and he sunk, to rise no more!’
‘Murder in Arkansas.
‘We understand that a severe rencontre came off a few days since in the Seneca Nation, between Mr. Loose, the sub-agent of the mixed band of the Senecas, Quapaw, and Shawnees, and Mr. James Gillespie, of the mercantile firm of Thomas G. Allison and Co., of Maysville, Benton, County Ark, in which the latter was slain with a bowie-knife. Some difficulty had for some time existed between the parties. It is said that Major Gillespie brought on the attack with a cane. A severe conflict ensued, during which two pistols were fired by Gillespie and one by Loose. Loose then stabbed Gillespie with one of those never-failing weapons, a bowie-knife. The death of Major G. is much regretted, as he was a liberal-minded and energetic man. Since the above was in type, we have learned that Major Allison has stated to some of our citizens in town that Mr. Loose gave the first blow. We forbear to give any particulars, as the matter will be the subject of judicial investigation.’
‘Foul Deed.
The steamer Thames, just from Missouri river, brought us a handbill, offering a reward of 500 dollars, for the person who assassinated Lilburn W. Baggs, late Governor of this State, at Independence, on the night of the 6th inst. Governor Baggs, it is stated in a written memorandum, was not dead, but mortally wounded.
‘Since the above was written, we received a note from the clerk of the Thames, giving the following particulars. Gov. Baggs was shot by some villain on Friday, 6th inst., in the evening, while sitting in a room in his own house in Independence. His son, a boy, hearing a report, ran into the room, and found the Governor sitting in his chair, with his jaw fallen down, and his head leaning back; on discovering the injury done to his father, he gave the alarm. Foot tracks were found in the garden below the window, and a pistol picked up supposed to have been overloaded, and thrown from the hand of the scoundrel who fired it. Three buck shots of a heavy load, took effect; one going through his mouth, one into the brain, and another probably in or near the brain; all going into the back part of the neck and head. The Governor was still alive on the morning of the 7th; but no hopes for his recovery by his friends, and but slight hopes from his physicians.
‘A man was suspected, and the Sheriff most probably has possession of him by this time.
‘The pistol was one of a pair stolen some days previous from a baker in Independence, and the legal authorities have the description of the other.’
‘Rencontre.
‘An unfortunate affair took place on Friday evening in Chatres Street, in which one of our most respectable citizens received a dangerous wound, from a poignard, in the abdomen. From the Bee (New Orleans) of yesterday, we learn the following particulars. It appears that an article was published in the French side of the paper on Monday last, containing some strictures on the Artillery Battalion for firing their guns on Sunday morning, in answer to those from the Ontario and Woodbury, and thereby much alarm was caused to the families of those persons who were out all night preserving the peace of the city. Major C. Gally, Commander of the battalion, resenting this, called at the office and demanded the author’s name; that of Mr. P. Arpin was given to him, who was absent at the time. Some angry words then passed with one of the proprietors, and a challenge followed; the friends of both parties tried to arrange the affair, but failed to do so. On Friday evening, about seven o’clock, Major Gally met Mr. P. Arpin in Chatres Street, and accosted him. “Are you Mr. Arpin?”
‘“Yes, sir.”
‘“Then I have to tell you that you are a—” (applying an appropriate epithet).
‘“I shall remind you of your words, sir.”
‘“But I have said I would break my cane on your shoulders.”
‘“I know it, but I have not yet received the blow.”
‘At these words, Major Gally, having a cane in his hands, struck Mr. Arpin across the face, and the latter drew a poignard from his pocket and stabbed Major Gally in the abdomen.
‘Fears are entertained that the wound will be mortal. We understand that Mr. Arpin has given security for his appearance at the Criminal Court to answer the charge.’
‘Affray in Mississippi.
‘On the 27th ult., in an affray near Carthage, Leake county, Mississippi, between James Cottingham and John Wilburn, the latter was shot by the former, and so horribly wounded, that there was no hope of his recovery. On the 2nd instant, there was an affray at Carthage between A. C. Sharkey and George Goff, in which the latter was shot, and thought mortally wounded. Sharkey delivered himself up to the authorities, but changed his mind and escaped!’
‘Personal Encounter.
‘An encounter took place in Sparta, a few days since, between the barkeeper of an hotel, and a man named Bury. It appears that Bury had become somewhat noisy, and that the barkeeper, determined to preserve order, had threatened to shoot Bury, whereupon Bury drew a pistol and shot the barkeeper down. He was not dead at the last accounts, but slight hopes were entertained of his recovery.’
‘Duel.
‘The clerk of the steamboat Tribune informs us that another duel was fought on Tuesday last, by Mr. Robbins, a bank officer in Vicksburg, and Mr. Fall, the editor of the Vicksburg Sentinel. According to the arrangement, the parties had six pistols each, which, after the word “Fire!” they were to discharge as fast as they pleased. Fall fired two pistols without effect. Mr. Robbins’ first shot took effect in Fall’s thigh, who fell, and was unable to continue the combat.’
‘Affray in Clarke County.
‘An unfortunate affray occurred in Clarke county (MO.), near Waterloo, on Tuesday the 19th ult., which originated in settling the partnership concerns of Messrs. M‘Kane and M‘Allister, who had been engaged in the business of distilling, and resulted in the death of the latter, who was shot down by Mr. M‘Kane, because of his attempting to take possession of seven barrels of whiskey, the property of M‘Kane, which had been knocked off to M‘Allister at a sheriff’s sale at one dollar per barrel. M‘Kane immediately fled and at the latest dates had not been taken.
‘This unfortunate affray caused considerable excitement in the neighbourhood, as both the parties were men with large families depending upon them and stood well in the community.’
I will quote but one more paragraph, which, by reason of its monstrous absurdity, may be a relief to these atrocious deeds.
‘Affair of Honour.
‘We have just heard the particulars of a meeting which took place on Six Mile Island, on Tuesday, between two young bloods of our city: Samuel Thurston, aged fifteen, and William Hine, aged thirteen years. They were attended by young gentlemen of the same age. The weapons used on the occasion, were a couple of Dickson’s best rifles; the distance, thirty yards. They took one fire, without any damage being sustained by either party, except the ball of Thurston’s gun passing through the crown of Hine’s hat. Through the intercession of the Board of Honour, the challenge was withdrawn, and the difference amicably adjusted.’
If the reader will picture to himself the kind of Board of Honour which amicably adjusted the difference between these two little boys, who in any other part of the world would have been amicably adjusted on two porters’ backs and soundly flogged with birchen rods, he will be possessed, no doubt, with as strong a sense of its ludicrous character, as that which sets me laughing whenever its image rises up before me.
Now, I appeal to every human mind, imbued with the commonest of common sense, and the commonest of common humanity; to all dispassionate, reasoning creatures, of any shade of opinion; and ask, with these revolting evidences of the state of society which exists in and about the slave districts of America before them, can they have a doubt of the real condition of the slave, or can they for a moment make a compromise between the institution or any of its flagrant, fearful features, and their own just consciences? Will they say of any tale of cruelty and horror, however aggravated in degree, that it is improbable, when they can turn to the public prints, and, running, read such signs as these, laid before them by the men who rule the slaves: in their own acts and under their own hands?
Do we not know that the worst deformity and ugliness of slavery are at once the cause and the effect of the reckless license taken by these freeborn outlaws? Do we not know that the man who has been born and bred among its wrongs; who has seen in his childhood husbands obliged at the word of command to flog their wives; women, indecently compelled to hold up their own garments that men might lay the heavier stripes upon their legs, driven and harried by brutal overseers in their time of travail, and becoming mothers on the field of toil, under the very lash itself; who has read in youth, and seen his virgin sisters read, descriptions of runaway men and women, and their disfigured persons, which could not be published elsewhere, of so much stock upon a farm, or at a show of beasts:—do we not know that that man, whenever his wrath is kindled up, will be a brutal savage? Do we not know that as he is a coward in his domestic life, stalking among his shrinking men and women slaves armed with his heavy whip, so he will be a coward out of doors, and carrying cowards’ weapons hidden in his breast, will shoot men down and stab them when he quarrels? And if our reason did not teach us this and much beyond; if we were such idiots as to close our eyes to that fine mode of training which rears up such men; should we not know that they who among their equals stab and pistol in the legislative halls, and in the counting-house, and on the marketplace, and in all the elsewhere peaceful pursuits of life, must be to their dependants, even though they were free servants, so many merciless and unrelenting tyrants?
What! shall we declaim against the ignorant peasantry of Ireland, and mince the matter when these American taskmasters are in question? Shall we cry shame on the brutality of those who hamstring cattle: and spare the lights of Freedom upon earth who notch the ears of men and women, cut pleasant posies in the shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face, rack their poetic fancies for liveries of mutilation which their slaves shall wear for life and carry to the grave, breaking living limbs as did the soldiery who mocked and slew the Saviour of the world, and set defenceless creatures up for targets! Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practised on each other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of Christian men! Shall we, so long as these things last, exult above the scattered remnants of that race, and triumph in the white enjoyment of their possessions? Rather, for me, restore the forest and the Indian village; in lieu of stars and stripes, let some poor feather flutter in the breeze; replace the streets and squares by wigwams; and though the death-song of a hundred haughty warriors fill the air, it will be music to the shriek of one unhappy slave.
On one theme, which is commonly before our eyes, and in respect of which our national character is changing fast, let the plain Truth be spoken, and let us not, like dastards, beat about the bush by hinting at the Spaniard and the fierce Italian. When knives are drawn by Englishmen in conflict let it be said and known: ‘We owe this change to Republican Slavery. These are the weapons of Freedom. With sharp points and edges such as these, Liberty in America hews and hacks her slaves; or, failing that pursuit, her sons devote them to a better use, and turn them on each other.’
CHAPTER XVIII CONCLUDING REMARKS
THERE are many passages in this book, where I have been at some pains to resist the temptation of troubling my readers with my own deductions and conclusions: preferring that they should judge for themselves, from such premises as I have laid before them. My only object in the outset, was, to carry them with me faithfully wheresoever I went: and that task I have discharged.
But I may be pardoned, if on such a theme as the general character of the American people, and the general character of their social system, as presented to a stranger’s eyes, I desire to express my own opinions in a few words, before I bring these volumes to a close.
They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends. I never was so won upon, as by this class; never yielded up my full confidence and esteem so readily and pleasurably, as to them; never can make again, in half a year, so many friends for whom I seem to entertain the regard of half a life.
These qualities are natural, I implicitly believe, to the whole people. That they are, however, sadly sapped and blighted in their growth among the mass; and that there are influences at work which endanger them still more, and give but little present promise of their healthy restoration; is a truth that ought to be told.
It is an essential part of every national character to pique itself mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its wisdom from their very exaggeration. One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence.
‘You carry,’ says the stranger, ‘this jealousy and distrust into every transaction of public life. By repelling worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates for the suffrage, who, in their very act, disgrace your Institutions and your people’s choice. It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this, because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in your acknowledgments, or he remiss in his deserts. Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed. You will strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence, however fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow a whole caravan of camels, if they be laden with unworthy doubts and mean suspicions. Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the governed, among you?’
The answer is invariably the same: ‘There’s freedom of opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached. That’s how our people come to be suspicious.’
Another prominent feature is the love of ‘smart’ dealing: which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter; though it has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a century. The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its or his observance of the golden rule, ‘Do as you would be done by,’ but are considered with reference to their smartness. I recollect, on both occasions of our passing that ill-fated Cairo on the Mississippi, remarking on the bad effects such gross deceits must have when they exploded, in generating a want of confidence abroad, and discouraging foreign investment: but I was given to understand that this was a very smart scheme by which a deal of money had been made: and that its smartest feature was, that they forgot these things abroad, in a very short time, and speculated again, as freely as ever. The following dialogue I have held a hundred times: ‘Is it not a very disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your Citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he not?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘A convicted liar?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And he is utterly dishonourable, debased, and profligate?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘In the name of wonder, then, what is his merit?’ ‘Well, sir, he is a smart man.’
In like manner, all kinds of deficient and impolitic usages are referred to the national love of trade; though, oddly enough, it would be a weighty charge against a foreigner that he regarded the Americans as a trading people. The love of trade is assigned as a reason for that comfortless custom, so very prevalent in country towns, of married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty public meals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain for ever unprotected ‘For we are a trading people, and don’t care for poetry:’ though we do, by the way, profess to be very proud of our poets: while healthful amusements, cheerful means of recreation, and wholesome fancies, must fade before the stern utilitarian joys of trade.
These three characteristics are strongly presented at every turn, full in the stranger’s view. But, the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.
Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides: but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year, it must and will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.
Among the herd of journals which are published in the States, there are some, the reader scarcely need be told, of character and credit. From personal intercourse with accomplished gentlemen connected with publications of this class, I have derived both pleasure and profit. But the name of these is Few, and of the others Legion; and the influence of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison of the bad.
Among the gentry of America; among the well-informed and moderate: in the learned professions; at the bar and on the bench: there is, as there can be, but one opinion, in reference to the vicious character of these infamous journals. It is sometimes contended—I will not say strangely, for it is natural to seek excuses for such a disgrace—that their influence is not so great as a visitor would suppose. I must be pardoned for saying that there is no warrant for this plea, and that every fact and circumstance tends directly to the opposite conclusion.
When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, without first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from its attacks; when any social confidence is left unbroken by it, or any tie of social decency and honour is held in the least regard; when any man in that free country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, without humble reference to a censorship which, for its rampant ignorance and base dishonesty, he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; when those who most acutely feel its infamy and the reproach it casts upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare to set their heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all men: then, I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their manly senses. But while that Press has its evil eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state, from a president to a postman; while, with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not read at all; so long must its odium be upon the country’s head, and so long must the evil it works, be plainly visible in the Republic.
To those who are accustomed to the leading English journals, or to the respectable journals of the Continent of Europe; to those who are accustomed to anything else in print and paper; it would be impossible, without an amount of extract for which I have neither space nor inclination, to convey an adequate idea of this frightful engine in America. But if any man desire confirmation of my statement on this head, let him repair to any place in this city of London, where scattered numbers of these publications are to be found; and there, let him form his own opinion. {206}
It would be well, there can be no doubt, for the American people as a whole, if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more. It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful. But here, I think the general remonstrance, ‘we are a new country,’ which is so often advanced as an excuse for defects which are quite unjustifiable, as being, of right, only the slow growth of an old one, may be very reasonably urged: and I yet hope to hear of there being some other national amusement in the United States, besides newspaper politics.
They certainly are not a humorous people, and their temperament always impressed me is being of a dull and gloomy character. In shrewdness of remark, and a certain cast-iron quaintness, the Yankees, or people of New England, unquestionably take the lead; as they do in most other evidences of intelligence. But in travelling about, out of the large cities—as I have remarked in former parts of these volumes—I was quite oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business: which was so general and unvarying, that at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me, at the last. Such defects as are perceptible in the national manners, seem, to me, to be referable, in a great degree, to this cause: which has generated a dull, sullen persistence in coarse usages, and rejected the graces of life as undeserving of attention. There is no doubt that Washington, who was always most scrupulous and exact on points of ceremony, perceived the tendency towards this mistake, even in his time, and did his utmost to correct it.
I cannot hold with other writers on these subjects that the prevalence of various forms of dissent in America, is in any way attributable to the non-existence there of an established church: indeed, I think the temper of the people, if it admitted of such an Institution being founded amongst them, would lead them to desert it, as a matter of course, merely because it was established. But, supposing it to exist, I doubt its probable efficacy in summoning the wandering sheep to one great fold, simply because of the immense amount of dissent which prevails at home; and because I do not find in America any one form of religion with which we in Europe, or even in England, are unacquainted. Dissenters resort thither in great numbers, as other people do, simply because it is a land of resort; and great settlements of them are founded, because ground can be purchased, and towns and villages reared, where there were none of the human creation before. But even the Shakers emigrated from England; our country is not unknown to Mr. Joseph Smith, the apostle of Mormonism, or to his benighted disciples; I have beheld religious scenes myself in some of our populous towns which can hardly be surpassed by an American camp-meeting; and I am not aware that any instance of superstitious imposture on the one hand, and superstitious credulity on the other, has had its origin in the United States, which we cannot more than parallel by the precedents of Mrs. Southcote, Mary Tofts the rabbit-breeder, or even Mr. Thorn of Canterbury: which latter case arose, some time after the dark ages had passed away.
The Republican Institutions of America undoubtedly lead the people to assert their self-respect and their equality; but a traveller is bound to bear those Institutions in his mind, and not hastily to resent the near approach of a class of strangers, who, at home, would keep aloof. This characteristic, when it was tinctured with no foolish pride, and stopped short of no honest service, never offended me; and I very seldom, if ever, experienced its rude or unbecoming display. Once or twice it was comically developed, as in the following case; but this was an amusing incident, and not the rule, or near it.
I wanted a pair of boots at a certain town, for I had none to travel in, but those with the memorable cork soles, which were much too hot for the fiery decks of a steamboat. I therefore sent a message to an artist in boots, importing, with my compliments, that I should be happy to see him, if he would do me the polite favour to call. He very kindly returned for answer, that he would ‘look round’ at six o’clock that evening.
I was lying on the sofa, with a book and a wine-glass, at about that time, when the door opened, and a gentleman in a stiff cravat, within a year or two on either side of thirty, entered, in his hat and gloves; walked up to the looking-glass; arranged his hair; took off his gloves; slowly produced a measure from the uttermost depths of his coat-pocket; and requested me, in a languid tone, to ‘unfix’ my straps. I complied, but looked with some curiosity at his hat, which was still upon his head. It might have been that, or it might have been the heat—but he took it off. Then, he sat himself down on a chair opposite to me; rested an arm on each knee; and, leaning forward very much, took from the ground, by a great effort, the specimen of metropolitan workmanship which I had just pulled off: whistling, pleasantly, as he did so. He turned it over and over; surveyed it with a contempt no language can express; and inquired if I wished him to fix me a boot like that? I courteously replied, that provided the boots were large enough, I would leave the rest to him; that if convenient and practicable, I should not object to their bearing some resemblance to the model then before him; but that I would be entirely guided by, and would beg to leave the whole subject to, his judgment and discretion. ‘You an’t partickler, about this scoop in the heel, I suppose then?’ says he: ‘we don’t foller that, here.’ I repeated my last observation. He looked at himself in the glass again; went closer to it to dash a grain or two of dust out of the corner of his eye; and settled his cravat. All this time, my leg and foot were in the air. ‘Nearly ready, sir?’ I inquired. ‘Well, pretty nigh,’ he said; ‘keep steady.’ I kept as steady as I could, both in foot and face; and having by this time got the dust out, and found his pencil-case, he measured me, and made the necessary notes. When he had finished, he fell into his old attitude, and taking up the boot again, mused for some time. ‘And this,’ he said, at last, ‘is an English boot, is it? This is a London boot, eh?’ ‘That, sir,’ I replied, ‘is a London boot.’ He mused over it again, after the manner of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull; nodded his head, as who should say, ‘I pity the Institutions that led to the production of this boot!’; rose; put up his pencil, notes, and paper—glancing at himself in the glass, all the time—put on his hat—drew on his gloves very slowly; and finally walked out. When he had been gone about a minute, the door reopened, and his hat and his head reappeared. He looked round the room, and at the boot again, which was still lying on the floor; appeared thoughtful for a minute; and then said ‘Well, good arternoon.’ ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said I: and that was the end of the interview.
There is but one other head on which I wish to offer a remark; and that has reference to the public health. In so vast a country, where there are thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared, and on every rood of which, vegetable decomposition is annually taking place; where there are so many great rivers, and such opposite varieties of climate; there cannot fail to be a great amount of sickness at certain seasons. But I may venture to say, after conversing with many members of the medical profession in America, that I am not singular in the opinion that much of the disease which does prevail, might be avoided, if a few common precautions were observed. Greater means of personal cleanliness, are indispensable to this end; the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must be changed; the gentler sex must go more wisely clad, and take more healthful exercise; and in the latter clause, the males must be included also. Above all, in public institutions, and throughout the whole of every town and city, the system of ventilation, and drainage, and removal of impurities requires to be thoroughly revised. There is no local Legislature in America which may not study Mr. Chadwick’s excellent Report upon the Sanitary Condition of our Labouring Classes, with immense advantage.
I HAVE now arrived at the close of this book. I have little reason to believe, from certain warnings I have had since I returned to England, that it will be tenderly or favourably received by the American people; and as I have written the Truth in relation to the mass of those who form their judgments and express their opinions, it will be seen that I have no desire to court, by any adventitious means, the popular applause.
It is enough for me, to know, that what I have set down in these pages, cannot cost me a single friend on the other side of the Atlantic, who is, in anything, deserving of the name. For the rest, I put my trust, implicitly, in the spirit in which they have been conceived and penned; and I can bide my time.
I have made no reference to my reception, nor have I suffered it to influence me in what I have written; for, in either case, I should have offered but a sorry acknowledgment, compared with that I bear within my breast, towards those partial readers of my former books, across the Water, who met me with an open hand, and not with one that closed upon an iron muzzle.
THE END
POSTSCRIPT
AT a Public Dinner given to me on Saturday the 18th of April, 1868, in the City of New York, by two hundred representatives of the Press of the United States of America, I made the following observations among others:
‘So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might have been contented with troubling you no further from my present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side,—changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first. And this brings me to a point on which I have, ever since I landed in the United States last November, observed a strict silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, but in reference to which I will, with your good leave, take you into my confidence now. Even the Press, being human, may be sometimes mistaken or misinformed, and I rather think that I have in one or two rare instances observed its information to be not strictly accurate with reference to myself. Indeed, I have, now and again, been more surprised by printed news that I have read of myself, than by any printed news that I have ever read in my present state of existence. Thus, the vigour and perseverance with which I have for some months past been collecting materials for, and hammering away at, a new book on America has much astonished me; seeing that all that time my declaration has been perfectly well known to my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, that no consideration on earth would induce me to write one. But what I have intended, what I have resolved upon (and this is the confidence I seek to place in you) is, on my return to England, in my own person, in my own journal, to bear, for the behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes in this country as I have hinted at to-night. Also, to record that wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America. And this I will do and cause to be done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it as an act of plain justice and honour.’
I said these words with the greatest earnestness that I could lay upon them, and I repeat them in print here with equal earnestness. So long as this book shall last, I hope that they will form a part of it, and will be fairly read as inseparable from my experiences and impressions of America.
CHARLES DICKENS.
May, 1868.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
FOOTNOTES
{1} This Project Gutenberg eText contains just American Notes. Pictures from Italy is also available from Project Gutenberg as a separate eText.—DP.
{206} NOTE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION.—Or let him refer to an able, and perfectly truthful article, in The Foreign Quarterly Review, published in the present month of October; to which my attention has been attracted, since these sheets have been passing through the press. He will find some specimens there, by no means remarkable to any man who has been in America, but sufficiently striking to one who has not.
CHAPTER XVIII Concluding Remarks 202 Postscript 210
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE EMIGRANTS Marcus Stone, R.A. Frontispiece THE SOLITARY PRISONER 90 BLACK AND WHITE 112 THE LITTLE WIFE 144
CAPITOLO XVIII
Considerazioni conclusive 202
Postfazione 210
Elenco delle illustrazioni
Pagina
Emigranti Marcus Stone, R.A. Frontespizio
Il prigioniero solitario 90
In bianco e nero 112
La piccola moglie 144
CHAPTER I GOING AWAY
I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a ‘state-room’ on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for ‘Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,’ was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this was the state-room concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months preceding: that this could by any possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting-house in the city of London: that this room of state, in short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain’s, invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed:—these were truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair slab, or perch, of which there were two within; and looked, without any expression of countenance whatever, at some friends who had come on board with us, and who were crushing their faces into all manner of shapes by endeavouring to squeeze them through the small doorway.
We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming below, which, but that we were the most sanguine people living, might have prepared us for the worst. The imaginative artist to whom I have already made allusion, has depicted in the same great work, a chamber of almost interminable perspective, furnished, as Mr. Robins would say, in a style of more than Eastern splendour, and filled (but not inconveniently so) with groups of ladies and gentlemen, in the very highest state of enjoyment and vivacity. Before descending into the bowels of the ship, we had passed from the deck into a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to the low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather. I had not at that time seen the ideal presentment of this chamber which has since gratified me so much, but I observed that one of our friends who had made the arrangements for our voyage, turned pale on entering, retreated on the friend behind him, smote his forehead involuntarily, and said below his breath, ‘Impossible! it cannot be!’ or words to that effect. He recovered himself however by a great effort, and after a preparatory cough or two, cried, with a ghastly smile which is still before me, looking at the same time round the walls, ‘Ha! the breakfast-room, steward—eh?’ We all foresaw what the answer must be: we knew the agony he suffered. He had often spoken of the saloon; had taken in and lived upon the pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand, at home, that to form a just conception of it, it would be necessary to multiply the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven, and then fall short of the reality. When the man in reply avowed the truth; the blunt, remorseless, naked truth; ‘This is the saloon, sir’—he actually reeled beneath the blow.
In persons who were so soon to part, and interpose between their else daily communication the formidable barrier of many thousand miles of stormy space, and who were for that reason anxious to cast no other cloud, not even the passing shadow of a moment’s disappointment or discomfiture, upon the short interval of happy companionship that yet remained to them—in persons so situated, the natural transition from these first surprises was obviously into peals of hearty laughter, and I can report that I, for one, being still seated upon the slab or perch before mentioned, roared outright until the vessel rang again. Thus, in less than two minutes after coming upon it for the first time, we all by common consent agreed that this state-room was the pleasantest and most facetious and capital contrivance possible; and that to have had it one inch larger, would have been quite a disagreeable and deplorable state of things. And with this; and with showing how,—by very nearly closing the door, and twining in and out like serpents, and by counting the little washing slab as standing-room,—we could manage to insinuate four people into it, all at one time; and entreating each other to observe how very airy it was (in dock), and how there was a beautiful port-hole which could be kept open all day (weather permitting), and how there was quite a large bull’s-eye just over the looking-glass which would render shaving a perfectly easy and delightful process (when the ship didn’t roll too much); we arrived, at last, at the unanimous conclusion that it was rather spacious than otherwise: though I do verily believe that, deducting the two berths, one above the other, than which nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins, it was no bigger than one of those hackney cabriolets which have the door behind, and shoot their fares out, like sacks of coals, upon the pavement.
CAPITOLO I
ALLONTANANDOSI
Non dimenticherò mai quell’espressione di stupore, un quarto seria e tre quarti comica, con cui, la mattina del 3 gennaio 1842, aprii la porta di una “stanza da stato” a bordo della nave a vapore Britannia, lunga milleduecento tonnellate, in viaggio verso Halifax e Boston e incaricata di trasportare la corrispondenza reale.
Che quella stanza da ricevimento fosse stata prenotata appositamente per “Charles Dickens, Esquire, e Lady”, risultava abbastanza chiaro anche al mio intelletto spaventato grazie a un piccolissimo manoscritto che annunciava questo fatto; il manoscritto era fissato su una trapunta piuttosto piatta che copriva un materasso sottile, steso come una benda chirurgica su uno scaffale assai inaccessibile. Ma che quella fosse proprio la stanza da ricevimento nella quale Charles Dickens, Esquire, e Lady avevano tenuto riunioni quotidiane e notturne per almeno quattro mesi prima. Che potesse trattarsi davvero di quella piccola, accogliente stanzetta immaginaria che Charles Dickens, con uno spirito profetico, aveva sempre predetto che avrebbe contenuto almeno un piccolo divano. E che sua moglie, pur conoscendo bene le sue dimensioni limitate, aveva sin dall’inizio affermato che non ci sarebbero stati più di due enormi bauli nascosti in qualche angolo inaccessibile. Che quella stanza, del tutto impraticabile e assurda, avesse anche solo il minimo legame con quelle graziose e incantevoli stanze immaginarie disegnate da un maestro, riprodotte su tavolette litografiche nell’ufficio dell’agente nella città di Londra. Che quella stanza da ricevimento non fosse altro che una piacevole finzione, un scherzo inventato dal capitano per rendere più interessante e divertente la vera stanza da ricevimento che sarebbe stata poi rivelata. Queste erano verità che, in quel momento, semplicemente non riuscivo a comprendere. Mi sedetti su una sorta di panca fatta di crini di cavallo; alcuni amici che erano saliti a bordo con noi cercavano invano di passare attraverso la stretta porta. E io li guardavo, senza mostrare alcuna espressione sul viso.
Prima di scendere nelle profondità della nave, eravamo passati dal ponte in un lungo e stretto ambiente, simile a un gigantesco carro funebre con finestre sui lati; all’estremità superiore c’era una triste stufa, davanti alla quale tre o quattro camerieri si scaldavano le mani; su entrambi i lati, per tutta la sua lunghezza desolata, si estendeva un lungo tavolo, sopra ciascuno dei quali una griglia fissata al soffitto basso era piena di bicchieri da bere e vassoi, un’immagine cupa che alludeva a mari tempestosi e tempo brutto. A quel momento non avevo ancora visto l’immagine ideale di quell’ambiente, che in seguito mi ha deliziato molto; notai però che uno dei nostri amici, colui che aveva organizzato il viaggio, impallidì entrando, indietreggiò verso l’amico dietro di lui, si batté involontariamente la fronte e mormorò: “Impossibile! Non può essere, ” Tuttavia si riprese con grande sforzo; dopo alcuni colpi di tosse preliminari, esclamò con un sorriso orribile, guardando intorno alle pareti: “Ecco la sala da pranzo, cameriere, eh?” Tutti noi sapevamo quale sarebbe stata la risposta: conoscevamo l’agonia che provava. Spesso parlava di quella “sala da pranzo”; si era formato un’idea basata su immagini; ci aveva spesso detto, a casa, che per comprenderne appieno le dimensioni e gli arredi sarebbe stato necessario moltiplicare sette volte la grandezza e l’arredamento di una normale sala da pranzo, eppure ciò non avrebbe comunque reso l’immagine reale. Quando l’uomo rispose con la verità, con quella verità cruda, spietata: “Questa è la sala da pranzo, signore”, lui davvero barcollò sotto il colpo.
In persone che stavano per separarsi così presto, e le cui comunicazioni quotidiane venivano ostacolate da migliaia di chilometri di spazio tempestoso, e che per questo motivo erano ansiose di non gettare alcuna ombra di delusione o sconforto su quel breve periodo di felice compagnia che ancora avevano a disposizione. In persone in queste condizioni, il passaggio naturale da quelle prime sorprese era ovviamente verso scoppi di risate calorose. Posso dire che anch’io, essendo ancora seduto sulla piattaforma menzionata prima, ridevo a crepapelle fino a quando la nave non suonò di nuovo. Così, in meno di due minuti dal momento in cui l’avevamo scoperta per la prima volta, tutti concordammo unanimemente sul fatto che quella cabina fosse il congegno più piacevole, divertente e ingegnoso possibile; e che se fosse stata anche solo un po’ più grande, sarebbe diventata davvero sgradevole e deplorevole. Inoltre, spiegando come – chiudendo quasi del tutto la porta, insinuandoci dentro a spirale come serpenti, e considerando quella piccola piattaforma di lavaggio come spazio per stare in piedi – riuscissimo a far entrare quattro persone contemporaneamente al suo interno; e sottolineando quanto fosse ariosa (quando la nave era in porto), quanto ci fosse una bella finestra che poteva rimanere aperta tutto il giorno (se il tempo lo permetteva), e quanto il piccolo oblò sopra lo specchio rendesse il rasoioaggio un processo perfettamente facile e piacevole (quando la nave non rollava troppo), arrivammo infine alla conclusione unanime che fosse abbastanza spaziosa. Anche se credo sinceramente che, escludendo quelle due cuccette una sopra l’altra – le quali rappresentano sicuramente il modo più piccolo in cui si possa dormire, dopo i letti funebri – non fosse molto più grande di uno di quei calessini con la porta sul retro, che lanciano i passeggeri fuori sul marciapiede come sacchi di carbone.
Having settled this point to the perfect satisfaction of all parties, concerned and unconcerned, we sat down round the fire in the ladies’ cabin—just to try the effect. It was rather dark, certainly; but somebody said, ‘of course it would be light, at sea,’ a proposition to which we all assented; echoing ‘of course, of course;’ though it would be exceedingly difficult to say why we thought so. I remember, too, when we had discovered and exhausted another topic of consolation in the circumstance of this ladies’ cabin adjoining our state-room, and the consequently immense feasibility of sitting there at all times and seasons, and had fallen into a momentary silence, leaning our faces on our hands and looking at the fire, one of our party said, with the solemn air of a man who had made a discovery, ‘What a relish mulled claret will have down here!’ which appeared to strike us all most forcibly; as though there were something spicy and high-flavoured in cabins, which essentially improved that composition, and rendered it quite incapable of perfection anywhere else.
There was a stewardess, too, actively engaged in producing clean sheets and table-cloths from the very entrails of the sofas, and from unexpected lockers, of such artful mechanism, that it made one’s head ache to see them opened one after another, and rendered it quite a distracting circumstance to follow her proceedings, and to find that every nook and corner and individual piece of furniture was something else besides what it pretended to be, and was a mere trap and deception and place of secret stowage, whose ostensible purpose was its least useful one.
God bless that stewardess for her piously fraudulent account of January voyages! God bless her for her clear recollection of the companion passage of last year, when nobody was ill, and everybody dancing from morning to night, and it was ‘a run’ of twelve days, and a piece of the purest frolic, and delight, and jollity! All happiness be with her for her bright face and her pleasant Scotch tongue, which had sounds of old Home in it for my fellow-traveller; and for her predictions of fair winds and fine weather (all wrong, or I shouldn’t be half so fond of her); and for the ten thousand small fragments of genuine womanly tact, by which, without piecing them elaborately together, and patching them up into shape and form and case and pointed application, she nevertheless did plainly show that all young mothers on one side of the Atlantic were near and close at hand to their little children left upon the other; and that what seemed to the uninitiated a serious journey, was, to those who were in the secret, a mere frolic, to be sung about and whistled at! Light be her heart, and gay her merry eyes, for years!
The state-room had grown pretty fast; but by this time it had expanded into something quite bulky, and almost boasted a bay-window to view the sea from. So we went upon deck again in high spirits; and there, everything was in such a state of bustle and active preparation, that the blood quickened its pace, and whirled through one’s veins on that clear frosty morning with involuntary mirthfulness. For every gallant ship was riding slowly up and down, and every little boat was splashing noisily in the water; and knots of people stood upon the wharf, gazing with a kind of ‘dread delight’ on the far-famed fast American steamer; and one party of men were ‘taking in the milk,’ or, in other words, getting the cow on board; and another were filling the icehouses to the very throat with fresh provisions; with butchers’-meat and garden-stuff, pale sucking-pigs, calves’ heads in scores, beef, veal, and pork, and poultry out of all proportion; and others were coiling ropes and busy with oakum yarns; and others were lowering heavy packages into the hold; and the purser’s head was barely visible as it loomed in a state, of exquisite perplexity from the midst of a vast pile of passengers’ luggage; and there seemed to be nothing going on anywhere, or uppermost in the mind of anybody, but preparations for this mighty voyage. This, with the bright cold sun, the bracing air, the crisply-curling water, the thin white crust of morning ice upon the decks which crackled with a sharp and cheerful sound beneath the lightest tread, was irresistible. And when, again upon the shore, we turned and saw from the vessel’s mast her name signalled in flags of joyous colours, and fluttering by their side the beautiful American banner with its stars and stripes,—the long three thousand miles and more, and, longer still, the six whole months of absence, so dwindled and faded, that the ship had gone out and come home again, and it was broad spring already in the Coburg Dock at Liverpool.
I have not inquired among my medical acquaintance, whether Turtle, and cold Punch, with Hock, Champagne, and Claret, and all the slight et cetera usually included in an unlimited order for a good dinner—especially when it is left to the liberal construction of my faultless friend, Mr. Radley, of the Adelphi Hotel—are peculiarly calculated to suffer a sea-change; or whether a plain mutton-chop, and a glass or two of sherry, would be less likely of conversion into foreign and disconcerting material. My own opinion is, that whether one is discreet or indiscreet in these particulars, on the eve of a sea-voyage, is a matter of little consequence; and that, to use a common phrase, ‘it comes to very much the same thing in the end.’ Be this as it may, I know that the dinner of that day was undeniably perfect; that it comprehended all these items, and a great many more; and that we all did ample justice to it. And I know too, that, bating a certain tacit avoidance of any allusion to to-morrow; such as may be supposed to prevail between delicate-minded turnkeys, and a sensitive prisoner who is to be hanged next morning; we got on very well, and, all things considered, were merry enough.
Avendo risolto questa questione con piena soddisfazione di tutte le parti coinvolte e non coinvolte, ci sedemmo intorno al fuoco nella cabina delle signore, solo per verificare l’effetto. Certo, faceva abbastanza buio; ma qualcuno disse: “Certo che sarà luminoso, in mare”, e tutti noi concordammo, ripetendo “certo, certo, ”, anche se sarebbe stato estremamente difficile spiegare il motivo per cui lo pensavamo. Ricordo anche che, dopo aver esaurito un altro argomento di consolazione riguardante la cabina delle signore adiacente alla nostra sala da pranzo, e considerando l’enorme possibilità di sederci lì in qualsiasi momento dell’anno, cademmo in un breve silenzio, appoggiandoci le mani sul viso e guardando il fuoco. Allora uno di noi, con l’aria solenne di chi aveva fatto una scoperta importante, disse: “Che delizioso sarà bere vino rosso caldo qui sotto!”, e questa osservazione ci colpì tutti profondamente, come se nelle cabine ci fosse qualcosa di particolarmente piccante e saporito che migliorasse davvero quella bevanda, rendendola incomparabilmente più gustosa in nessun altro luogo.
C’era anche una hostess che si dedicava attivamente alla produzione di lenzuola pulite e tovaglioli, utilizzando per questo scopo i meccanismi nascosti all’interno dei divani e in armadi apparentemente innocui. Il modo in cui questi dispositivi venivano aperti uno dopo l’altro risultava davvero sconcertante; ogni angolo e ogni pezzo di mobili nascondeva qualcos’altro, diverso da ciò che sembrava essere in superficie: si trattava in realtà di trappole, inganni e luoghi segreti per nascondere oggetti, il cui scopo apparente era in realtà il meno utile possibile.
Che Dio benedica quella hostess per la sua descrizione “pia” ma in realtà fraudolenta dei viaggi di gennaio. Che Dio la benedica anche per la sua chiara memoria del viaggio dello scorso anno: quando nessuno era malato, tutti ballavano dal mattino alla sera, e si trattò di un periodo di dodici giorni pieno di gioia, divertimento e allegria! Che le sia concessa tutta la felicità possibile. Per il suo viso sorridente, per il suo piacevole accento scozzese che ricordava l’antica casa del mio compagno di viaggio; per le sue previsioni riguardo a venti favorevoli e tempo sereno, (che si rivelarono tutte sbagliate, altrimenti non la amerrei così tanto, ) E soprattutto per quei mille piccoli gesti di vera delicatezza femminile: senza bisogno di elaborazioni complesse, lei riusciva comunque a far capire chiaramente che tutte le giovani madri, da un lato dell’Atlantico, erano vicine ai loro bambini lasciati dall’altra parte. E che ciò che agli occhi degli inesperti sembrava un viaggio serio, per coloro che conoscevano il “segreto”, non era altro che una semplice festa, di cui si poteva cantare e suonare! Che il suo cuore rimanga sempre leggero e i suoi occhi sempre gioiosi. Per molti anni ancora!
La cabina di lusso si era ampliata piuttosto rapidamente; ma a quel momento aveva assunto dimensioni davvero imponenti, e addirittura disponeva di una grande finestra che permetteva di ammirare il mare. Così tornammo sul ponte, pieni di entusiasmo; lì tutto era in uno stato di frenetica attività: ogni nave elegante navigava lentamente avanti e indietro, mentre piccole barche si muovevano rumorosamente sull’acqua; gruppi di persone si affollavano sul molo, osservando con grande emozione il famoso veliero americano; alcuni stavano caricando il “latte” a bordo, altri riempivano le celle frigorifere con provviste fresche – carne di manzo, vitello, maiale, pollame in abbondanza – mentre altri ancora intrecciavano corde o lavoravano con i fili di canapa. Il capo del personale di bordo era appena visibile, immerso in mezzo a un enorme mucchio di bagagli dei passeggeri; sembrava che in tutto ciò non ci fosse altro pensiero se non quello delle preparazioni per questa imponente traversata. Tutto questo, unito al sole freddo ma luminoso, all’aria fresca e pungente, alle onde che si increspavano sulla superficie dell’acqua e al sottile strato di ghiaccio bianco sui ponti che scricchiolava sotto i passi leggeri, era davvero irresistibile. E quando, tornati a riva, vedemmo il nome della nave dipinto su bandiere colorate e sventolare accanto alla splendida bandiera americana con le sue stelle e strisce, quelle tremila miglia di viaggio, e i sei mesi interi di assenza, sembravano ormai lontani e irrilevanti; la nave era tornata a casa, e già era iniziata la primavera nel porto di Liverpool.
Non ho chiesto ai miei conoscenti nel campo medico se il “Turtle”, il “Cold Punch”, insieme al “Hock”, allo “Champagne” e al “Claret”, nonché tutti quegli altri ingredienti solitamente inclusi in un pasto elegante – soprattutto quando lasciati alla discrezionale scelta del mio impeccabile amico, il signor Radley dell’Adelphi Hotel – possano causare qualche problema durante una traversata marittima; o se invece un semplice piatto di carne d’agnello e uno o due bicchieri di sherry sarebbero meno propensi a trasformarsi in ingredienti strani e sconcertanti. La mia opinione personale è che, sia che si agisca con discrezione o meno in queste circostanze, alla vigilia di una traversata marittima la cosa abbia poca importanza; e che, per usare un’espressione comune, “alla fine vada più o meno allo stesso risultato”. Comunque sia, so che la cena di quel giorno era indubbiamente perfetta: includeva tutti questi ingredienti, e molti altri ancora; e che noi tutti l’abbiamo apprezzata molto. So anche che, evitando deliberatamente qualsiasi allusione al giorno seguente – come si potrebbe fare tra un addetto alle pulizie dal carattere delicato e un prigioniero sensibile che dovrà essere impiccato il mattino dopo – ci siamo intesi molto bene, e, considerate tutte le circostanze, abbiamo trascorso una serata abbastanza piacevole.
When the morning—the morning—came, and we met at breakfast, it was curious to see how eager we all were to prevent a moment’s pause in the conversation, and how astoundingly gay everybody was: the forced spirits of each member of the little party having as much likeness to his natural mirth, as hot-house peas at five guineas the quart, resemble in flavour the growth of the dews, and air, and rain of Heaven. But as one o’clock, the hour for going aboard, drew near, this volubility dwindled away by little and little, despite the most persevering efforts to the contrary, until at last, the matter being now quite desperate, we threw off all disguise; openly speculated upon where we should be this time to-morrow, this time next day, and so forth; and entrusted a vast number of messages to those who intended returning to town that night, which were to be delivered at home and elsewhere without fail, within the very shortest possible space of time after the arrival of the railway train at Euston Square. And commissions and remembrances do so crowd upon one at such a time, that we were still busied with this employment when we found ourselves fused, as it were, into a dense conglomeration of passengers and passengers’ friends and passengers’ luggage, all jumbled together on the deck of a small steamboat, and panting and snorting off to the packet, which had worked out of dock yesterday afternoon and was now lying at her moorings in the river.
And there she is! all eyes are turned to where she lies, dimly discernible through the gathering fog of the early winter afternoon; every finger is pointed in the same direction; and murmurs of interest and admiration—as ‘How beautiful she looks!’ ‘How trim she is!’—are heard on every side. Even the lazy gentleman with his hat on one side and his hands in his pockets, who has dispensed so much consolation by inquiring with a yawn of another gentleman whether he is ‘going across’—as if it were a ferry—even he condescends to look that way, and nod his head, as who should say, ‘No mistake about that:’ and not even the sage Lord Burleigh in his nod, included half so much as this lazy gentleman of might who has made the passage (as everybody on board has found out already; it’s impossible to say how) thirteen times without a single accident! There is another passenger very much wrapped-up, who has been frowned down by the rest, and morally trampled upon and crushed, for presuming to inquire with a timid interest how long it is since the poor President went down. He is standing close to the lazy gentleman, and says with a faint smile that he believes She is a very strong Ship; to which the lazy gentleman, looking first in his questioner’s eye and then very hard in the wind’s, answers unexpectedly and ominously, that She need be. Upon this the lazy gentleman instantly falls very low in the popular estimation, and the passengers, with looks of defiance, whisper to each other that he is an ass, and an impostor, and clearly don’t know anything at all about it.
But we are made fast alongside the packet, whose huge red funnel is smoking bravely, giving rich promise of serious intentions. Packing-cases, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, and boxes, are already passed from hand to hand, and hauled on board with breathless rapidity. The officers, smartly dressed, are at the gangway handing the passengers up the side, and hurrying the men. In five minutes’ time, the little steamer is utterly deserted, and the packet is beset and over-run by its late freight, who instantly pervade the whole ship, and are to be met with by the dozen in every nook and corner: swarming down below with their own baggage, and stumbling over other people’s; disposing themselves comfortably in wrong cabins, and creating a most horrible confusion by having to turn out again; madly bent upon opening locked doors, and on forcing a passage into all kinds of out-of-the-way places where there is no thoroughfare; sending wild stewards, with elfin hair, to and fro upon the breezy decks on unintelligible errands, impossible of execution: and in short, creating the most extraordinary and bewildering tumult. In the midst of all this, the lazy gentleman, who seems to have no luggage of any kind—not so much as a friend, even—lounges up and down the hurricane deck, coolly puffing a cigar; and, as this unconcerned demeanour again exalts him in the opinion of those who have leisure to observe his proceedings, every time he looks up at the masts, or down at the decks, or over the side, they look there too, as wondering whether he sees anything wrong anywhere, and hoping that, in case he should, he will have the goodness to mention it.
What have we here? The captain’s boat! and yonder the captain himself. Now, by all our hopes and wishes, the very man he ought to be! A well-made, tight-built, dapper little fellow; with a ruddy face, which is a letter of invitation to shake him by both hands at once; and with a clear, blue honest eye, that it does one good to see one’s sparkling image in. ‘Ring the bell!’ ‘Ding, ding, ding!’ the very bell is in a hurry. ‘Now for the shore—who’s for the shore?’—‘These gentlemen, I am sorry to say.’ They are away, and never said, Good b’ye. Ah now they wave it from the little boat. ‘Good b’ye! Good b’ye!’ Three cheers from them; three more from us; three more from them: and they are gone.
To and fro, to and fro, to and fro again a hundred times! This waiting for the latest mail-bags is worse than all. If we could have gone off in the midst of that last burst, we should have started triumphantly: but to lie here, two hours and more in the damp fog, neither staying at home nor going abroad, is letting one gradually down into the very depths of dulness and low spirits. A speck in the mist, at last! That’s something. It is the boat we wait for! That’s more to the purpose. The captain appears on the paddle-box with his speaking trumpet; the officers take their stations; all hands are on the alert; the flagging hopes of the passengers revive; the cooks pause in their savoury work, and look out with faces full of interest. The boat comes alongside; the bags are dragged in anyhow, and flung down for the moment anywhere. Three cheers more: and as the first one rings upon our ears, the vessel throbs like a strong giant that has just received the breath of life; the two great wheels turn fiercely round for the first time; and the noble ship, with wind and tide astern, breaks proudly through the lashed and roaming water.
Quando arrivò la mattina – quella mattina – e ci incontrammo a colazione, fu curioso notare quanto fossimo tutti desiderosi di evitare anche il minimo intervallo nella conversazione, e quanto fossero sorprendentemente allegrambi tutti quanti: l’atteggiamento forzato di ogni membro del piccolo gruppo assomigliava molto alla sua naturale gioia, proprio come i fagioli caldi venduti a cinque ghinee al quarto assomigliano per sapore alle piante che crescono grazie all’umidità, all’aria e alla pioggia del cielo. Ma man mano che si avvicinava l’ora di imbarcarsi – quell’ora – quella vivacità diminuì gradualmente, nonostante i nostri sforzi più tenaci per evitarlo; fino a quando, ormai senza speranza, abbandonammo ogni finzione e iniziammo apertamente a discutere su dove ci saremmo trovati il giorno dopo, e così via. Inoltre affidammo un gran numero di messaggi a coloro che intendevano tornare in città quella sera, affinché venissero consegnati senza fallo nelle rispettive case entro il minor tempo possibile, non appena il treno arrivasse a Euston Square. In momenti del genere, le commissioni e i ricordi si accumulano così rapidamente che eravamo ancora impegnati in queste attività quando ci trovammo tutti ammassati insieme, come un groviglio di passeggeri, amici dei passeggeri e bagagli dei passeggeri, sul ponte di una piccola nave a vapore. E così partimmo, diretti verso il nostro destinazione.
Eccola lì! Tutti gli sguardi sono rivolti verso di lei; si intravede appena nella nebbia densa del tardo pomeriggio invernale. Tutti indicano nella stessa direzione, e si sentono mormori di ammirazione: “Com’è bella! Com’è snella!” Anche il signore pigro, con il cappello storto e le mani in tasca, che fino ad ora non aveva offerto altro conforto se non chiedere con uno sbadiglio a un altro passeggero se stesse “attraversando”, come se si trattasse di una barca, anche lui si degnò di guardare in quella direzione e annuì, come per dire: “Non ci sono dubbi su questo, ” Nemmeno il saggio Lord Burleigh, con il suo cenno d’assenso, mostrava la stessa conoscenza del signore pigro, quel potente uomo che aveva attraversato il fiume, (come tutti a bordo avevano già scoperto; era impossibile capire come, ) tredici volte senza alcun incidente! C’era anche un altro passeggero, molto avvolto in strati di vestiti; gli altri lo ignoravano completamente, lo calpestavano moralmente, perché osava chiedere, con timido interesse, da quanto tempo fosse scomparso il povero Presidente. Stava vicino al signore pigro e disse, con un debole sorriso, che secondo lui lei era una nave molto robusta. Al che il signore pigro, guardando prima negli occhi dell’interlocutore e poi fissando intensamente la direzione in cui si muoveva la “nave”, rispose in modo inaspettato e minaccioso: “Certo che lo è, ” A quel punto, il signore pigro cadde immediatamente nella disapprovazione generale; i passeggeri, con sguardi di disprezzo, sussurravano tra loro che era uno sciocco, un impostore, e chiaramente non sapeva assolutamente nulla al riguardo.
Ma noi siamo legati saldamente al piroscafo merci, il cui enorme imbuto rosso fuma vigorosamente, dando chiaramente segno di intenzioni serie. Casse da imballaggio, borse da viaggio e scatole vengono già passate di mano in mano e caricate a bordo con incredibile rapidità. Gli ufficiali, vestiti con cura, si trovano al corridoio per aiutare i passeggeri a salire a bordo e spingerli ad affrettarsi. In soli cinque minuti, il piccolo piroscafo è completamente deserto, mentre il mercantile viene invaso dalla sua merce in ritardo: persone che si diffondono immediatamente in ogni angolo della nave, inciampando nelle borse altrui, sistemandosi comodamente in cabine sbagliate e creando un caos totale. Nel frattempo, quel signore pigro, che sembra non avere nemmeno un bagaglio, né tantomeno un amico, si aggira tranquillamente sul ponte, fumando la sua sigara con indifferenza. E poiché questo comportamento disinvolto lo fa apparire ancora più interessante agli occhi di chi ha il tempo di osservarlo, ogni volta che alza lo sguardo verso i alberi, verso i ponti o oltre il bordo, tutti seguono il suo sguardo, chiedendosi se abbia notato qualcosa di strano, e sperando che, nel caso ce l’avesse, abbia la gentilezza di farlo notare.
Cosa abbiamo qui? La barca del capitano. E laggiù c’è il capitano stesso. Proprio l’uomo che dovevamo incontrare! Un giovane snello, ben fatto, con un viso rosso che invita subito a stringergli la mano; e occhi chiari, onesti, che fanno bene al cuore quando ci si specchia in loro. “Suonate il campanello!” “Ding, ding, ding, ” Il campanello suona con fretta. “Ora verso riva. Chi va verso riva?” “Purtroppo, questi signori, ” Sono già partiti, senza nemmeno dire addio. Ah, ora ci salutano dalla loro piccola barca, “Addio! Addio!” Tre evvivazioni da parte loro; altre tre da parte nostra. E poi sono spariti.
Avanti e indietro, avanti e indietro, ancora cento volte! Quest’attesa delle ultime buste della posta è davvero insopportabile. Se solo fossimo potuti partire durante quell’ultimo momento, avremmo iniziato il viaggio con successo. Ma stare qui, per più di due ore nella nebbia umida, senza restare a >casa né andare da nessuna parte, significa lasciarsi gradualmente sommergere dalla noia e dal malumore. Finalmente! Una macchia nella nebbia. È la barca che aspettavamo! I passeggeri riprendono speranza; i cuochi interrompono il loro lavoro e guardano fuori con interesse. La barca si avvicina; le borse vengono trascinate a bordo e gettate giù, in qualche angolo. Altri tre evviva! E mentre il primo grido di gioia risuona nelle nostre orecchie, la nave si mette in movimento con forza; i due grandi ruoti iniziano a girare velocemente. E la nobile nave, spinta dal vento e dalla marea, sfida con orgoglio le onde impetuose.
CHAPTER II THE PASSAGE OUT
WE all dined together that day; and a rather formidable party we were: no fewer than eighty-six strong. The vessel being pretty deep in the water, with all her coals on board and so many passengers, and the weather being calm and quiet, there was but little motion; so that before the dinner was half over, even those passengers who were most distrustful of themselves plucked up amazingly; and those who in the morning had returned to the universal question, ‘Are you a good sailor?’ a very decided negative, now either parried the inquiry with the evasive reply, ‘Oh! I suppose I’m no worse than anybody else;’ or, reckless of all moral obligations, answered boldly ‘Yes:’ and with some irritation too, as though they would add, ‘I should like to know what you see in me, sir, particularly, to justify suspicion!’
Notwithstanding this high tone of courage and confidence, I could not but observe that very few remained long over their wine; and that everybody had an unusual love of the open air; and that the favourite and most coveted seats were invariably those nearest to the door. The tea-table, too, was by no means as well attended as the dinner-table; and there was less whist-playing than might have been expected. Still, with the exception of one lady, who had retired with some precipitation at dinner-time, immediately after being assisted to the finest cut of a very yellow boiled leg of mutton with very green capers, there were no invalids as yet; and walking, and smoking, and drinking of brandy-and-water (but always in the open air), went on with unabated spirit, until eleven o’clock or thereabouts, when ‘turning in’—no sailor of seven hours’ experience talks of going to bed—became the order of the night. The perpetual tramp of boot-heels on the decks gave place to a heavy silence, and the whole human freight was stowed away below, excepting a very few stragglers, like myself, who were probably, like me, afraid to go there.
To one unaccustomed to such scenes, this is a very striking time on shipboard. Afterwards, and when its novelty had long worn off, it never ceased to have a peculiar interest and charm for me. The gloom through which the great black mass holds its direct and certain course; the rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; the broad, white, glistening track, that follows in the vessel’s wake; the men on the look-out forward, who would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars; the helmsman at the wheel, with the illuminated card before him, shining, a speck of light amidst the darkness, like something sentient and of Divine intelligence; the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain; the gleaming forth of light from every crevice, nook, and tiny piece of glass about the decks, as though the ship were filled with fire in hiding, ready to burst through any outlet, wild with its resistless power of death and ruin. At first, too, and even when the hour, and all the objects it exalts, have come to be familiar, it is difficult, alone and thoughtful, to hold them to their proper shapes and forms. They change with the wandering fancy; assume the semblance of things left far away; put on the well-remembered aspect of favourite places dearly loved; and even people them with shadows. Streets, houses, rooms; figures so like their usual occupants, that they have startled me by their reality, which far exceeded, as it seemed to me, all power of mine to conjure up the absent; have, many and many a time, at such an hour, grown suddenly out of objects with whose real look, and use, and purpose, I was as well acquainted as with my own two hands.
My own two hands, and feet likewise, being very cold, however, on this particular occasion, I crept below at midnight. It was not exactly comfortable below. It was decidedly close; and it was impossible to be unconscious of the presence of that extraordinary compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold. Two passengers’ wives (one of them my own) lay already in silent agonies on the sofa; and one lady’s maid (my lady’s) was a mere bundle on the floor, execrating her destiny, and pounding her curl-papers among the stray boxes. Everything sloped the wrong way: which in itself was an aggravation scarcely to be borne. I had left the door open, a moment before, in the bosom of a gentle declivity, and, when I turned to shut it, it was on the summit of a lofty eminence. Now every plank and timber creaked, as if the ship were made of wicker-work; and now crackled, like an enormous fire of the driest possible twigs. There was nothing for it but bed; so I went to bed.
It was pretty much the same for the next two days, with a tolerably fair wind and dry weather. I read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what) a good deal; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy-and-water with an unspeakable disgust, and ate hard biscuit perseveringly: not ill, but going to be.
It is the third morning. I am awakened out of my sleep by a dismal shriek from my wife, who demands to know whether there’s any danger. I rouse myself, and look out of bed. The water-jug is plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly I see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head.
Capitolo II
La fuga
Quel giorno tutti abbiamo pranzato insieme; eravamo davvero un gruppo notevole: non meno di ottantasei persone. La nave si trovava piuttosto in profondità nell’acqua, con tutto il carbone a bordo e tanti passeggeri; inoltre, il tempo era calmo e tranquillo, quindi c’era quasi nessun movimento. Prima ancora che il pranzo fosse terminato a metà, anche quei passeggeri che inizialmente erano molto scettici riguardo alle proprie capacità si rilassarono notevolmente. Quelli che la mattina avevano risposto con un deciso “No” alla domanda “Sei un bravo marinaio?”, ora o evitavano di rispondere, dicendo “Oh, immagino di non essere peggiore degli altri”, oppure, senza curarsi delle eventuali conseguenze morali, rispondevano con decisione “Sì”. A volte lo facevano anche con un certo tono irritato, come se volessero aggiungere: “Mi piacerebbe sapere cosa vedete in me, signori, per giustificare tale sospetto!”
Nonostante questo alto livello di coraggio e fiducia in sé, non potei fare a meno di notare che pochissimi rimanevano a lungo attorno ai loro bicchieri di vino; inoltre, tutti mostravano un’insolita passione per l’aria aperta, e i posti preferiti e più ambiti erano sempre quelli più vicini alla porta. Anche il tavolo da tè non era affatto così frequentato quanto quello da cena; inoltre, si giocava meno a carte di quanto ci si sarebbe potuti aspettare. Tuttavia, ad eccezione di una signora che se n’era andata in fretta e furia durante la cena, subito dopo aver ricevuto il pezzo più pregiato di una coscia di montone bollita gialla con capperi verdi, non c’erano ancora persone “inferme”. Camminare, fumare e bere brandy mescolato con acqua continuavano con grande entusiasmo, fino alle undici circa, quando arrivò l’ora di andare a letto. Nessun marinaio con sette ore di esperienza parla mai di andare a dormire in quel momento. Il costante rumore dei tacchi sui ponti lasciò il posto a un profondo silenzio; l’intera compagnia si ritirò sottocoperta, tranne poche persone rimaste indietro, come me, probabilmente perché avevamo paura di andare là dentro.
Per chi non è abituato a tali scene, questo è un momento davvero straordinario a bordo di una nave. Anche dopo che la novità è svanita del tutto, continua ad esercitare su di me un fascino particolare. L’oscurità attraverso cui la grande massa nera segue il suo percorso diretto e inesorabile; l’acqua che scorre impetuosa, chiaramente udibile ma appena visibile; la scia bianca e luminosa lasciata dalla nave; gli uomini di guardia in avanti, a malapena distinguibili contro il cielo notturno, se non per le loro ombre che oscurano decine di stelle brillanti; il timoniere alla ruota, con la carta illuminata davanti a sé, un punto di luce nell’oscurità, come qualcosa di vivente e dotato di intelligenza divina; il sospiro malinconico del vento che soffia tra i blocchi, le corde e le catene; la luce che emerge da ogni fessura, angolo e piccolo pezzo di vetro sui ponti, come se la nave fosse piena di fuoco nascosto, pronto a esplodere attraverso qualsiasi apertura, possente e distruttivo. All’inizio, anche quando l’ora e tutti gli oggetti che essa evoca diventano familiari, è difficile, da soli e in silenzio, riconoscerli nelle loro forme e dimensioni reali. Essi cambiano sotto l’effetto dell’immaginazione; assumono l’aspetto di cose lontane; assumono il volto dei luoghi amati e ricordati con affetto; e a volte sembrano persino popolati da ombre. Strade, case, stanze; figure così simili ai loro abitanti abituali da sorprendermi con la loro realtà, che pareva superare di gran lunga ogni mia capacità di evocare ciò che era assente. Molte volte, in momenti del genere, questi oggetti sembrano trasformarsi improvvisamente in qualcosa di completamente diverso, il cui aspetto, uso e scopo mi sono altrettanto familiari quanto le mie stesse mani.
Le mie stesse mani e i miei piedi erano molto freddi, ma in quell’occasione particolare mi sono infilato sotto a mezzanotte. Non era affatto confortevole là sotto: lo spazio era estremamente ristretto, e era impossibile non percepire quella strana miscela di odori particolari, tipici soltanto delle navi. Un profumo così sottile che sembrava penetrare in ogni poro della pelle. Due mogli di passeggeri (una delle quali era la mia stessa) giacevano già sul divano, in silenzio e soffrendo; la cameriera di una signora era sdraiata a terra, maledicendo il proprio destino e gettando via i propri oggetti tra le scatole sparse ovunque. Tutto era disposto in modo assurdo. Il fatto stesso rappresentava un ulteriore tormento insopportabile. Avevo lasciato la porta aperta poco prima; quando sono tornato per chiuderla, mi sono ritrovato sulla cima di una sorta di altura. Ogni tavola e ogni trave scricchiolavano, come se la nave fosse fatta di canne. Non restava altro da fare che andare a letto. Così l’ho fatto.
Per i successivi due giorni le condizioni furono più o meno le stesse: un vento moderatamente fresco e tempo secco. Ho letto a letto (ma ancora non so di cosa si tratti); sono anche uscito sul ponte per un po’, ho bevuto brandy mescolato con acqua, con un disgusto indescrivibile, e ho continuato a mangiare biscotti duri. Non sto male, ma probabilmente lo sarò presto.
È la terza mattina. Vengo svegliato dal mio sonno da un grido disperato di mia moglie, che insiste per sapere se ci sia qualche pericolo. Mi alzo e guardo fuori dalla finestra: il secchio dell’acqua sobbalza e salta come un vivace delfino; tutti gli oggetti più piccoli galleggiano sull’acqua, tranne le mie scarpe, che sono rimaste impigliate su un borsone da viaggio, al sicuro e asciutte. Come due grandi navi a vapore. All’improvviso le vedo “saltare” in aria. E poi noto lo specchio, fissato al muro, che ora si trova appiccicato al soffitto. Nello stesso momento la porta scompare completamente, e ne appare un’altra nel pavimento. Allora capisco: la stanza è capovolta.
Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she is wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature actually running of its own accord, with broken knees and failing legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling constantly. Before one can so much as wonder, she takes a high leap into the air. Before she has well done that, she takes a deep dive into the water. Before she has gained the surface, she throws a summerset. The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward. And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving, jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking: and going through all these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes altogether: until one feels disposed to roar for mercy.
A steward passes. ‘Steward!’ ‘Sir?’ ‘What is the matter? what do you call this?’ ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir, and a head-wind.’
A head-wind! Imagine a human face upon the vessel’s prow, with fifteen thousand Samsons in one bent upon driving her back, and hitting her exactly between the eyes whenever she attempts to advance an inch. Imagine the ship herself, with every pulse and artery of her huge body swollen and bursting under this maltreatment, sworn to go on or die. Imagine the wind howling, the sea roaring, the rain beating: all in furious array against her. Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds, in fearful sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air. Add to all this, the clattering on deck and down below; the tread of hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the striking of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead, heavy sound of thunder heard within a vault;—and there is the head-wind of that January morning.
I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the ship: such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling down of stewards, the gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far from exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast. I say nothing of them: for although I lay listening to this concert for three or four days, I don’t think I heard it for more than a quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down again, excessively sea-sick.
Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the term: I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen or heard described, though I have no doubt it is very common. I lay there, all the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no sense of weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal indifference, having a kind of lazy joy—of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title—in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may be allowed to illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after the incursion of the rioters into his bar at Chigwell. Nothing would have surprised me. If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of Home, a goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into that little kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and, apologising for being damp through walking in the sea, had handed me a letter directed to myself, in familiar characters, I am certain I should not have felt one atom of astonishment: I should have been perfectly satisfied. If Neptune himself had walked in, with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have looked upon the event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences.
Once—once—I found myself on deck. I don’t know how I got there, or what possessed me to go there, but there I was; and completely dressed too, with a huge pea-coat on, and a pair of boots such as no weak man in his senses could ever have got into. I found myself standing, when a gleam of consciousness came upon me, holding on to something. I don’t know what. I think it was the boatswain: or it may have been the pump: or possibly the cow. I can’t say how long I had been there; whether a day or a minute. I recollect trying to think about something (about anything in the whole wide world, I was not particular) without the smallest effect. I could not even make out which was the sea, and which the sky, for the horizon seemed drunk, and was flying wildly about in all directions. Even in that incapable state, however, I recognised the lazy gentleman standing before me: nautically clad in a suit of shaggy blue, with an oilskin hat. But I was too imbecile, although I knew it to be he, to separate him from his dress; and tried to call him, I remember, Pilot. After another interval of total unconsciousness, I found he had gone, and recognised another figure in its place. It seemed to wave and fluctuate before me as though I saw it reflected in an unsteady looking-glass; but I knew it for the captain; and such was the cheerful influence of his face, that I tried to smile: yes, even then I tried to smile. I saw by his gestures that he addressed me; but it was a long time before I could make out that he remonstrated against my standing up to my knees in water—as I was; of course I don’t know why. I tried to thank him, but couldn’t. I could only point to my boots—or wherever I supposed my boots to be—and say in a plaintive voice, ‘Cork soles:’ at the same time endeavouring, I am told, to sit down in the pool. Finding that I was quite insensible, and for the time a maniac, he humanely conducted me below.
Prima ancora che sia possibile prendere qualsiasi misura compatibile con questa nuova situazione, i diritti relativi alla nave. Prima ancora che si possa dire “Grazie al cielo!”, lei commette di nuovo un errore. Prima ancora che si possa piangere, lei ha già sbagliato; sembra quasi che si muova da sola, con ginocchia rotte e gambe deboli, attraverso ogni genere di ostacolo e pericolo, inciampando continuamente. Prima ancora che si possa anche solo meravigliarsi, lei fa un balzo in aria. Prima ancora di riuscire a mantenere l’equilibrio, si tuffa profondamente nell’acqua. Prima ancora di riemergere, esegue una capriola. Non appena riesce a stare in piedi, corre all’indietro. E così continua, barcollando, lottando, saltando, tuffandosi, sobbalzando, attraverso tutte queste azioni, a volte una dopo l’altra, a volte tutte insieme, fino a quando non si ha voglia di gridare per chiedere pietà.
Un cameriere di bordo passa. “Cameriere!” “Signore?” “Che cos’è questo? Che cosa si può definire così?” “Piuttosto un mare agitato, signore, e un forte vento di poppa.”
Un vento impetuoso! Immaginate un volto umano sulla prua della nave: quindici “Samson” uniti nel tentativo di spingerla indietro, colpendola esattamente tra gli occhi ogni volta che cerca di avanzare anche solo di un pollice. Immaginate la stessa nave, con ogni pulsazione e arteria del suo enorme “corpo” gonfie e sul punto di scoppiare a causa di questo trattamento crudele; una nave giurata a proseguire, o a morire. Immaginate il vento che ulula, il mare che ruggisce, la pioggia che batte con forza: tutto ciò schierato contro di lei in un attacco furioso. Immaginate il cielo scuro e tempestoso, le nuvole che, con compassione per le onde, formano un altro “oceano” nell’aria. Aggiungete a tutto questo il rumore incessante sul ponte e nelle parti sottostanti: i passi affrettati dei marinai, le loro grida rauche, il gorgogliare dell’acqua che entra ed esce dai tubi di scarico. E, di tanto in tanto, il colpo violento delle onde contro le assi della nave, accompagnato dal suono profondo e cupo del tuono. Ecco il vento impetuoso di quella mattina di gennaio.
Non parlo di quei rumori “domestici” che si possono sentire su una nave: il rumore di vetri e stoviglie che si rompono, lo schianto dei servitori che cadono a terra, i movimenti disordinati di barili e decine di bottiglie di birra che rotolano qua e là. E poi, i suoni davvero strani e tutt’altro che piacevoli prodotti nelle varie cabine dai settanta passeggeri troppo malati per alzarsi a colazione. Non ne parlo: perché anche se ho ascoltato questo “concerto” per tre o quattro giorni, credo di averne sentito soltanto un quarto di minuto. Dopo quel breve lasso di tempo, mi sono sdraiato di nuovo, estremamente malato dal mare.
Non soffrivo di mal di mare, inteso nel senso comune del termine; avrei voluto che fosse così, ma in una forma che non ho mai visto né sentito descrivere, anche se non ho alcun >dubbio che sia molto comune. Giacevo lì tutto il giorno, completamente tranquillo e soddisfatto; senza sensazione di stanchezza, senza alcun >desiderio di alzarmi, di migliorare o di prendere aria; senza curiosità, preoccupazioni o rimpianti di alcun tipo. A parte il fatto che, in quell’indifferenza totale, provavo una sorta di gioia pigra, un piacere quasi demoniaco, se si può definire così qualcosa di così letargico. Il fatto che mia moglie fosse troppo malata per parlarmi mi rendeva felice. Se posso usare questo esempio per descrivere il mio stato d’animo, direi che ero esattamente nella stessa condizione del vecchio signor Willet, dopo l’irruzione dei teppisti nel suo bar a Chigwell. Niente mi avrebbe sorpreso. Anche se, in un momento di lucidità, un postino fantasma con un mantello rosso e una campanella fosse entrato nella mia stanza, completamente sveglio a giorno fermo, scusandosi per essere bagnato dopo aver camminato sul mare, e mi avesse consegnato una lettera indirizzata a me, con caratteri familiari, sono certo che non avrei provato la minima sorpresa: sarei stato perfettamente soddisfatto. Anche se Neptune stesso fosse entrato, con un squalo arrosto sul tridente, l’avrei considerato uno degli eventi più comuni della vita quotidiana.
Una volta, una volta mi ritrovai sul ponte. Non so come ci fossi arrivato, né cosa mi avesse spinto ad andarci, ma ero lì, e anche completamente vestito: indossavo un enorme cappotto blu e un paio di stivali che nessun uomo sano di mente sarebbe riuscito a infilarsi. Mi ritrovai in piedi, quando all’improvviso mi tornò un po’ di coscienza. Tenevo qualcosa in mano. Non so cosa fosse. Penso fosse il timoniere, o forse la pompa, o magari una mucca. Non so quanto tempo fossi rimasto lì: un giorno, o un minuto? Ricordo di aver cercato disperatamente di pensare a qualcosa, a qualsiasi cosa al mondo, ma senza alcun risultato. Non riuscivo nemmeno a distinguere dove fosse il mare e dove il cielo. L’orizzonte sembrava “ubriaco” e si muoveva in tutte le direzioni. Comunque, anche in quello stato di incoscienza, riconobbi quel signore pigro e tranquillo che stava davanti a me: indossava abiti da marinaio, blu e ruvidi, con un cappello di gomma. Ma ero troppo stupido, anche se sapevo che era lui, per riuscire a separarlo dai suoi vestiti. Ricordo di aver cercato di chiamarlo “Pilota”. Dopo un altro periodo di totale incoscienza, mi resi conto che se n’era andato, e al suo posto vidi un’altra figura. Sembrava muoversi davanti a me, come se fosse riflessa in uno specchio instabile. Ma riconobbi che era il capitano. E l’espressione felice sul suo viso mi spinse a cercare di sorridere. Sì, anche in quel momento cercai di sorridere. I suoi gesti indicavano chiaramente che stava parlando con me. Ma passò molto tempo prima che riuscissi a capire che si stava lamentando del fatto che fossi in ginocchio nell’acqua. Non so perché. Cercai di ringraziarlo, ma non ci riuscii. Potei solo indicare i miei stivali, o almeno quello che pensavo fossero i miei stivali, e dire con voce lamentosa: “Suole di sughero, ” Nel frattempo, cercavo anche di sedermi nell’acqua. Vedendo che ero completamente privo di sensi, e ormai un pazzo, mi portò gentilmente sottocoperta.
There I remained until I got better: suffering, whenever I was recommended to eat anything, an amount of anguish only second to that which is said to be endured by the apparently drowned, in the process of restoration to life. One gentleman on board had a letter of introduction to me from a mutual friend in London. He sent it below with his card, on the morning of the head-wind; and I was long troubled with the idea that he might be up, and well, and a hundred times a day expecting me to call upon him in the saloon. I imagined him one of those cast-iron images—I will not call them men—who ask, with red faces, and lusty voices, what sea-sickness means, and whether it really is as bad as it is represented to be. This was very torturing indeed; and I don’t think I ever felt such perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard from the ship’s doctor that he had been obliged to put a large mustard poultice on this very gentleman’s stomach. I date my recovery from the receipt of that intelligence.
It was materially assisted though, I have no doubt, by a heavy gale of wind, which came slowly up at sunset, when we were about ten days out, and raged with gradually increasing fury until morning, saving that it lulled for an hour a little before midnight. There was something in the unnatural repose of that hour, and in the after gathering of the storm, so inconceivably awful and tremendous, that its bursting into full violence was almost a relief.
The labouring of the ship in the troubled sea on this night I shall never forget. ‘Will it ever be worse than this?’ was a question I had often heard asked, when everything was sliding and bumping about, and when it certainly did seem difficult to comprehend the possibility of anything afloat being more disturbed, without toppling over and going down. But what the agitation of a steam-vessel is, on a bad winter’s night in the wild Atlantic, it is impossible for the most vivid imagination to conceive. To say that she is flung down on her side in the waves, with her masts dipping into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over on the other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a hundred great guns, and hurls her back—that she stops, and staggers, and shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent throbbing at her heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped on by the angry sea—that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and wind, are all in fierce contention for the mastery—that every plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water in the great ocean its howling voice—is nothing. To say that all is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot convey it. Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage, and passion.
And yet, in the very midst of these terrors, I was placed in a situation so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong a sense of its absurdity as I have now, and could no more help laughing than I can at any other comical incident, happening under circumstances the most favourable to its enjoyment. About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the ladies’ cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a little Scotch lady—who, by the way, had previously sent a message to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might not be struck by lightning. They and the handmaid before mentioned, being in such ecstasies of fear that I scarcely knew what to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumbler full without delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa—a fixture extending entirely across the cabin—where they clung to each other in momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory expressions to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see them all roll slowly down to the other end! And when I staggered to that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their all rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once; and by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished, by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the group, it is necessary to recognise in this disconcerted dodger, an individual very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his hair, last, at Liverpool: and whose only article of dress (linen not included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper.
Of the outrageous antics performed by that ship next morning; which made bed a practical joke, and getting up, by any process short of falling out, an impossibility; I say nothing. But anything like the utter dreariness and desolation that met my eyes when I literally ‘tumbled up’ on deck at noon, I never saw. Ocean and sky were all of one dull, heavy, uniform, lead colour. There was no extent of prospect even over the dreary waste that lay around us, for the sea ran high, and the horizon encompassed us like a large black hoop. Viewed from the air, or some tall bluff on shore, it would have been imposing and stupendous, no doubt; but seen from the wet and rolling decks, it only impressed one giddily and painfully. In the gale of last night the life-boat had been crushed by one blow of the sea like a walnut-shell; and there it hung dangling in the air: a mere faggot of crazy boards. The planking of the paddle-boxes had been torn sheer away. The wheels were exposed and bare; and they whirled and dashed their spray about the decks at random. Chimney, white with crusted salt; topmasts struck; storm-sails set; rigging all knotted, tangled, wet, and drooping: a gloomier picture it would be hard to look upon.
Rimasi lì fino a quando non mi ripresi: soffrivo terribilmente; ogni volta che mi veniva consigliato di mangiare qualcosa, provavo un dolore paragonabile a quello che si dice subiscano le persone apparentemente annegate nel processo di rianimazione. A bordo c’era un signore che aveva per me una lettera di presentazione da parte di un amico comune a Londra; la inviò insieme alla sua carta da visita la mattina in cui mi colpì il mal di mare. Per molto tempo fui tormentato dall’idea che potesse essere già guarito e aspettasse che andassi a trovarlo nel salone. Lo immaginavo come uno di quegli uomini d’acciaio che, con viso rosso e voce tonante, chiedono cosa significhi il mal di mare e se sia davvero così terribile come si dice. Fu davvero una tortura. Ma non ricordo di aver mai provato una soddisfazione e un ringraziamento così profondi quando sentii dal medico della nave che aveva dovuto applicare un impacco di senape sullo stomaco di quel signore. Il mio recupero iniziò proprio in quel momento.
Fu comunque assistito materialmente, ne ho nessun dubbio, da un forte uragano di vento che iniziò lentamente al tramonto, quando eravamo a circa dieci giorni di distanza dalla meta, e continuò a infuriare con intensità crescente fino alla mattina; per fortuna, per un’ora prima di mezzanotte il vento si placò leggermente. C’era qualcosa nella calma innaturale di quell’ora, e nel ritorno improvviso della tempesta, così terribile e devastante da rendere quasi un sollievo il momento in cui scoppiò con tutta la sua violenza.
Il movimento convulso di quella nave nel mare tempestoso, in quella notte, non lo dimenticherò mai. “Potrà mai essere peggio di così?”, era una domanda che sentivo spesso fare quando tutto intorno ondeggiava e si scontrava violentemente; sembrava davvero impossibile immaginare che qualcosa in mare potesse essere ancora più disturbato, senza rischiare di capovolgersi e affondare. Ma quale possa essere l’agitazione di una nave a vapore, in una terribile notte d’inverno nell’Atlantico selvaggio, è qualcosa che nemmeno la più vivida immaginazione riesce a concepire. Dire che viene scagliata di lato dalle onde, con gli alberi sommersi, e poi risale, rotolando dall’altra parte, fino a quando un’ondata potente la colpisce con il fragore di cento cannoni, gettandola indietro, che si ferma, barcolla, trema, come se fosse stordita, per poi ripartire di scatto, come un mostro spinto alla follia, per essere ancora colpita, distrutta e sommersa dal mare furioso, dire che tuoni, fulmini, grandine, pioggia e vento si scontrano con violenza per il dominio su di essa, che ogni tavola della nave emette un gemito, ogni chiodo un grido, e ogni goccia d’acqua nell’oceano un urlo straziante, non è niente. Dire che tutto questo sia grandioso, terribile e orrendo al massimo grado, non è niente. Le parole non possono esprimerlo. I pensieri non possono trasmetterlo. Solo un >sogno può rievocarlo, con tutta la sua furia, il suo odio e la sua passione.
Eppure, proprio in mezzo a tutti questi terrori, mi trovai in una situazione così esilarante da rendermi consapevole della sua assurdità tanto allora quanto ora; non potevo fare a meno di ridere, proprio come rido di qualsiasi altro episodio comico che si verifichi in circostanze particolarmente favorevoli al suo svolgimento. Verso mezzanotte si scatenò una tempesta marina: le onde forzarono i lucernari, sfondarono le porte sopra di noi e si riversarono con violenza nella cabina delle signore, causando un’angoscia indescrivibile a mia moglie e a una giovane donna scozzese che, tra l’altro, aveva precedentemente inviato un messaggio al capitano tramite la cameriera di bordo, chiedendogli, con i suoi complimenti, di far installare immediatamente dei conduttori in acciaio sulla cima di ogni albero e sul camino, affinché la nave non venisse colpita dal fulmine. Le due donne, insieme alla cameriera menzionata, erano così terrorizzate che non sapevo proprio cosa fare con loro; allora mi venne in mente di offrire loro qualcosa di ristoratore. Non mi venne in mente nulla di meglio del brandy mescolato con acqua calda, quindi ne preparai subito un bicchiere. Essendo impossibile stare in piedi o seduti senza appoggiarsi a qualcosa, le feci sistemare tutte insieme in un angolo del lungo divano che occupava l’intera cabina; vi si aggrappavano l’una all’altra, aspettandosi da un momento all’altro di essere sommerse. Quando mi avvicinai con il bicchiere, per darlo loro mentre pronunciavo parole di conforto, rimasi sbalordito nel vedere che rotolavano tutte verso l’estremità opposta del divano! Quando raggiunsi quell’angolo e tesi di nuovo il bicchiere, le mie buone intenzioni furono nuovamente vanificate dallo scatto improvviso della nave. Continuai a cercare di raggiungerle su quel divano per almeno un quarto d’ora, senza riuscirci nemmeno una volta; quando finalmente ci riuscii, il brandy mescolato con acqua era ormai ridotto a soltanto un cucchiaino. Per completare il quadro, devo aggiungere che quella persona “disorientata” non era altri che un individuo molto pallido a causa del mal di mare; si era rasato la barba e si era pettinato i capelli l’ultima volta a Liverpool. L’unico indumento che indossava (esclusi i vestiti di tela) era un paio di pantaloni da marina, una giacca blu che in passato aveva attirato l’ammirazione delle persone sul Tamigi a Richmond. Niente calze. E solo uno scarpone.
Di tutte le assurde buffonate compiute da quella nave la mattina seguente – che trasformavano il letto in uno scherzo macabro e rendevano impossibile alzarsi, a meno di cadere fuori dalla nave – non dirò nulla. Ma niente può paragonarsi alla desolazione e al terrore che mi colpirono quando, letteralmente, “caddi” sul ponte alle mezzogiorno. Oceano e cielo erano di un unico colore grigio, pesante e uniforme. Non c’era alcuna prospettiva davanti a noi: il mare era alto e l’orizzonte ci circondava come un grande cerchio nero. Visto dall’alto, o da qualche scogliera sulla riva, avrebbe sicuramente suscitato ammirazione; ma visto dai ponti bagnati e agitati dal vento, provocava solo vertigini e dolore. Nella tempesta della scorsa notte, il canotto di salvataggio era stato distrutto da un colpo del mare, trasformandosi in un mucchio di assi spezzati; i teloni delle imbarcazioni erano stati strappati via, le ruote esposte e prive di protezione giravano vorticosamente, spruzzando acqua dappertutto. Il fumo dei comignoli era bianco per la salina accumulata; gli alberi spezzati, le vele strappate dal vento. Un quadro ancora più cupo e spaventoso di quanto si possa immaginare.
I was now comfortably established by courtesy in the ladies’ cabin, where, besides ourselves, there were only four other passengers. First, the little Scotch lady before mentioned, on her way to join her husband at New York, who had settled there three years before. Secondly and thirdly, an honest young Yorkshireman, connected with some American house; domiciled in that same city, and carrying thither his beautiful young wife to whom he had been married but a fortnight, and who was the fairest specimen of a comely English country girl I have ever seen. Fourthly, fifthly, and lastly, another couple: newly married too, if one might judge from the endearments they frequently interchanged: of whom I know no more than that they were rather a mysterious, run-away kind of couple; that the lady had great personal attractions also; and that the gentleman carried more guns with him than Robinson Crusoe, wore a shooting-coat, and had two great dogs on board. On further consideration, I remember that he tried hot roast pig and bottled ale as a cure for sea-sickness; and that he took these remedies (usually in bed) day after day, with astonishing perseverance. I may add, for the information of the curious, that they decidedly failed.
The weather continuing obstinately and almost unprecedentedly bad, we usually straggled into this cabin, more or less faint and miserable, about an hour before noon, and lay down on the sofas to recover; during which interval, the captain would look in to communicate the state of the wind, the moral certainty of its changing to-morrow (the weather is always going to improve to-morrow, at sea), the vessel’s rate of sailing, and so forth. Observations there were none to tell us of, for there was no sun to take them by. But a description of one day will serve for all the rest. Here it is.
The captain being gone, we compose ourselves to read, if the place be light enough; and if not, we doze and talk alternately. At one, a bell rings, and the stewardess comes down with a steaming dish of baked potatoes, and another of roasted apples; and plates of pig’s face, cold ham, salt beef; or perhaps a smoking mess of rare hot collops. We fall to upon these dainties; eat as much as we can (we have great appetites now); and are as long as possible about it. If the fire will burn (it will sometimes) we are pretty cheerful. If it won’t, we all remark to each other that it’s very cold, rub our hands, cover ourselves with coats and cloaks, and lie down again to doze, talk, and read (provided as aforesaid), until dinner-time. At five, another bell rings, and the stewardess reappears with another dish of potatoes—boiled this time—and store of hot meat of various kinds: not forgetting the roast pig, to be taken medicinally. We sit down at table again (rather more cheerfully than before); prolong the meal with a rather mouldy dessert of apples, grapes, and oranges; and drink our wine and brandy-and-water. The bottles and glasses are still upon the table, and the oranges and so forth are rolling about according to their fancy and the ship’s way, when the doctor comes down, by special nightly invitation, to join our evening rubber: immediately on whose arrival we make a party at whist, and as it is a rough night and the cards will not lie on the cloth, we put the tricks in our pockets as we take them. At whist we remain with exemplary gravity (deducting a short time for tea and toast) until eleven o’clock, or thereabouts; when the captain comes down again, in a sou’-wester hat tied under his chin, and a pilot-coat: making the ground wet where he stands. By this time the card-playing is over, and the bottles and glasses are again upon the table; and after an hour’s pleasant conversation about the ship, the passengers, and things in general, the captain (who never goes to bed, and is never out of humour) turns up his coat collar for the deck again; shakes hands all round; and goes laughing out into the weather as merrily as to a birthday party.
As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity. This passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk), nobody knows. The head engineer has distinctly said that there never was such times—meaning weather—and four good hands are ill, and have given in, dead beat. Several berths are full of water, and all the cabins are leaky. The ship’s cook, secretly swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played upon by the fire-engine until quite sober. All the stewards have fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with plasters in various places. The baker is ill, and so is the pastry-cook. A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly bilious) it is death to him to look at. News! A dozen murders on shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea.
Divided between our rubber and such topics as these, we were running (as we thought) into Halifax Harbour, on the fifteenth night, with little wind and a bright moon—indeed, we had made the Light at its outer entrance, and put the pilot in charge—when suddenly the ship struck upon a bank of mud. An immediate rush on deck took place of course; the sides were crowded in an instant; and for a few minutes we were in as lively a state of confusion as the greatest lover of disorder would desire to see. The passengers, and guns, and water-casks, and other heavy matters, being all huddled together aft, however, to lighten her in the head, she was soon got off; and after some driving on towards an uncomfortable line of objects (whose vicinity had been announced very early in the disaster by a loud cry of ‘Breakers a-head!’) and much backing of paddles, and heaving of the lead into a constantly decreasing depth of water, we dropped anchor in a strange outlandish-looking nook which nobody on board could recognise, although there was land all about us, and so close that we could plainly see the waving branches of the trees.
Ora mi trovavo comodamente sistemato, per gentile concessione, nella cabina delle signore; lì, oltre a noi, c’erano soltanto altri quattro passeggeri. Primo, la piccola signora scozzese menzionata in precedenza, che si stava recando da suo marito a New York, dove lui si era stabilito tre anni prima. In secondo e terzo luogo, un onesto giovane dello Yorkshire, impiegato presso una qualche azienda americana; risiedeva nella stessa città e aveva portato con sé la sua bellissima moglie, con cui si era sposato soltanto due settimane prima; lei rappresentava senz’altro il prototipo della graziosa ragazza di campagna inglese che abbia mai visto. Quarto, quinto e ultimo, un altro giovane coppia: anch’essi appena sposati, a giudicare dai gesti d’affetto che si scambiavano spesso; non so nulla di più su di loro, se non che sembravano una coppia piuttosto misteriosa e, “in fuga”; che la signora possedeva grandi attrattive personali, e che il signore portava con sé più armi del Robinson Crusoe stesso: indossava un cappotto da cacciatore e aveva due enormi >cani a bordo. Ricordo inoltre che provò a mangiare maiale arrosto caldo e birra in bottiglia come rimedi contro il mal di mare. E continuò a seguirli giorno dopo giorno, con incredibile perseveranza. Per coloro che fossero curiosi di saperne di più, posso aggiungere che questi metodi fallirono decisamente.
Il tempo continuava ostinatamente e quasi senza precedenti ad essere cattivo; di solito arrivavamo in questa cabina, più o meno svenuti e in condizioni misere, circa un’ora prima di mezzogiorno, e ci sdraiavamo sui divani per riprenderci. Nel frattempo, il capitano veniva a darci informazioni sullo stato del >vento, sulla probabilità che cambiato fosse il giorno dopo (sul mare il tempo migliora sempre il giorno seguente), sulla velocità di navigazione della nave, e così via. Non c’erano osservazioni da fare, poiché non c’era il sole a cui far riferimento. Ma una descrizione di un solo giorno basterà per tutti gli altri. Ecco qua.
Il capitano essendo assente, ci mettiamo a leggere, se il posto è abbastanza illuminato; altrimenti, alterniamo sonnellini e chiacchiere. A un certo punto suona una campanella, e l’assistente di volo arriva con un piatto fumante di patate arrosto e un altro di mele cotte; inoltre, ci servono piatti di carne di maiale, prosciutto freddo, manzo salato, o forse una porzione di carne cruda ancora calda. Ci gettiamo su queste delizie, mangiamo quanto possiamo (adesso abbiamo davvero molto appetito) e ne godiamo il più a lungo possibile. Se il focolare continua a bruciare (a volte succede), siamo abbastanza felici; altrimenti, tutti commentiamo quanto faccia freddo, ci strofiniamo le mani, ci copriamo con cappotti e coperte, e ci sdraiamo di nuovo per sonnecchiare, chiacchierare e leggere, fino all’ora di cena. Alle cinque suona un’altra campanella, e l’assistente di volo ritorna con un altro piatto di patate – questa volta bollite – e una varietà di carne calda; non manca nemmeno il maiale arrosto, da consumare come “medicina”. Ci sediamo di nuovo a tavola (un po’ più allegramente del prima), prolungando la cena con un dolce piuttosto ammuffito fatto di mele, uva e arance; beviamo vino e brandy. Le bottiglie e i bicchieri rimangono ancora sul tavolo, e le arance rotolano qua e là a seconda della loro volontà e del movimento della nave. A quel punto arriva il dottore, invitato appositamente per la serata; non appena arriva, iniziamo a giocare a carte. Poiché è una notte fredda e le carte non vogliono stare ferme sul tavolo, le mettiamo direttamente nelle tasche mentre le prendiamo. Giociamo con estrema serietà (tranne per un breve intervallo dedicato al tè e ai toast) fino alle undici circa; poi il capitano scende di nuovo, con un cappello da ovest legato sotto il mento e un soprabito da pilota, lasciando delle macchie d’acqua dove si ferma. A questo punto la partita a carte è finita; le bottiglie e i bicchieri tornano sul tavolo, e dopo un’ora di piacevoli conversazioni sulla nave, sui passeggeri e su varie altre cose, il capitano (che non va mai a letto e non perde mai l’umore) si rialza in piedi, si sistema il colletto del soprabito e torna sul ponte. Si saluta con tutti e se ne va ridendo, felice come se fosse a una festa di compleanno.
Per quanto riguarda le notizie quotidiane, non manca certo di questo “prodotto”. Si dice che questo passeggero abbia perso quattordici libbre ieri al ristorante del “Vingt-et-un”; inoltre, beve una bottiglia di champagne ogni giorno. E nessuno sa come riesca a farlo, essendo soltanto un impiegato. Il capo ingegnere ha dichiarato apertamente che non si erano mai visti tempi del genere. Il tempo è cattivo, e quattro bravi operai hanno rinunciato al lavoro, completamente esausti. Diverse cuccette sono piene d’acqua, e tutte le cabine perdono. Il cuoco della nave, che beveva di nascosto whisky danneggiato, è stato trovato ubriaco. E il macchinista lo ha fatto lavorare fino a quando non si è completamente ripreso. Tutti gli steward sono caduti giù per le scale durante i pasti, e ora se ne vanno in giro con cerotti su varie parti del corpo. Il panettiere è malato, così come il pasticcere. È stato chiamato un nuovo uomo, terribilmente malato, per sostituire l’ultimo addetto. E lo hanno sistemato in una piccola cabina sul ponte, facendogli preparare pasta per torte. Lui protesta: essendo molto bilioso, guardare solo quella pasta gli sembra la “morte”. Notizie! Anche una dozzina di omicidi sulla terraferma non avrebbero lo stesso interesse di questi piccoli incidenti in mare.
Divisi tra argomenti legati alla gomma e altre questioni del genere, quella quindicesima notte ci stavamo dirigendo verso il porto di Halifax, con poco >vento e una luna luminosa. Infatti, avevamo già raggiunto l’ingresso esterno del porto e affidato la guida della nave al pilota; quando all’improvviso la >nave inciampò in un banco di fango. Subito tutti si affollarono sul ponte; per qualche minuto regnò il caos più totale. I passeggeri, le armi, i barili d’acqua e altri oggetti pesanti furono ammassati nella parte posteriore della nave per alleggerirla; dopo aver continuato a procedere verso una zona piena di ostacoli (la cui presenza era stata annunciata in anticipo da un grido di “Scogli davanti!”), dopo molte manovre con le pale e dopo aver cercato invano di aumentare la profondità dell’acqua, gettammo l’ancora in una baia dall’aspetto stranissimo. Nessuno a bordo riusciva a riconoscerla, nonostante ci fosse terra dappertutto, così vicina da permetterci di vedere chiaramente i rami degli alberi che ondeggiavano al vento.
It was strange enough, in the silence of midnight, and the dead stillness that seemed to be created by the sudden and unexpected stoppage of the engine which had been clanking and blasting in our ears incessantly for so many days, to watch the look of blank astonishment expressed in every face: beginning with the officers, tracing it through all the passengers, and descending to the very stokers and furnacemen, who emerged from below, one by one, and clustered together in a smoky group about the hatchway of the engine-room, comparing notes in whispers. After throwing up a few rockets and firing signal guns in the hope of being hailed from the land, or at least of seeing a light—but without any other sight or sound presenting itself—it was determined to send a boat on shore. It was amusing to observe how very kind some of the passengers were, in volunteering to go ashore in this same boat: for the general good, of course: not by any means because they thought the ship in an unsafe position, or contemplated the possibility of her heeling over in case the tide were running out. Nor was it less amusing to remark how desperately unpopular the poor pilot became in one short minute. He had had his passage out from Liverpool, and during the whole voyage had been quite a notorious character, as a teller of anecdotes and cracker of jokes. Yet here were the very men who had laughed the loudest at his jests, now flourishing their fists in his face, loading him with imprecations, and defying him to his teeth as a villain!
The boat soon shoved off, with a lantern and sundry blue lights on board; and in less than an hour returned; the officer in command bringing with him a tolerably tall young tree, which he had plucked up by the roots, to satisfy certain distrustful passengers whose minds misgave them that they were to be imposed upon and shipwrecked, and who would on no other terms believe that he had been ashore, or had done anything but fraudulently row a little way into the mist, specially to deceive them and compass their deaths. Our captain had foreseen from the first that we must be in a place called the Eastern passage; and so we were. It was about the last place in the world in which we had any business or reason to be, but a sudden fog, and some error on the pilot’s part, were the cause. We were surrounded by banks, and rocks, and shoals of all kinds, but had happily drifted, it seemed, upon the only safe speck that was to be found thereabouts. Eased by this report, and by the assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in at three o’clock in the morning.
I was dressing about half-past nine next day, when the noise above hurried me on deck. When I had left it overnight, it was dark, foggy, and damp, and there were bleak hills all round us. Now, we were gliding down a smooth, broad stream, at the rate of eleven miles an hour: our colours flying gaily; our crew rigged out in their smartest clothes; our officers in uniform again; the sun shining as on a brilliant April day in England; the land stretched out on either side, streaked with light patches of snow; white wooden houses; people at their doors; telegraphs working; flags hoisted; wharfs appearing; ships; quays crowded with people; distant noises; shouts; men and boys running down steep places towards the pier: all more bright and gay and fresh to our unused eyes than words can paint them. We came to a wharf, paved with uplifted faces; got alongside, and were made fast, after some shouting and straining of cables; darted, a score of us along the gangway, almost as soon as it was thrust out to meet us, and before it had reached the ship—and leaped upon the firm glad earth again!
I suppose this Halifax would have appeared an Elysium, though it had been a curiosity of ugly dulness. But I carried away with me a most pleasant impression of the town and its inhabitants, and have preserved it to this hour. Nor was it without regret that I came home, without having found an opportunity of returning thither, and once more shaking hands with the friends I made that day.
It happened to be the opening of the Legislative Council and General Assembly, at which ceremonial the forms observed on the commencement of a new Session of Parliament in England were so closely copied, and so gravely presented on a small scale, that it was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope. The governor, as her Majesty’s representative, delivered what may be called the Speech from the Throne. He said what he had to say manfully and well. The military band outside the building struck up “God save the Queen” with great vigour before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted; the in’s rubbed their hands; the out’s shook their heads; the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the Opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly withdrew from the bar to say a great deal among themselves and do a little: and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home upon the like occasions.
The town is built on the side of a hill, the highest point being commanded by a strong fortress, not yet quite finished. Several streets of good breadth and appearance extend from its summit to the water-side, and are intersected by cross streets running parallel with the river. The houses are chiefly of wood. The market is abundantly supplied; and provisions are exceedingly cheap. The weather being unusually mild at that time for the season of the year, there was no sleighing: but there were plenty of those vehicles in yards and by-places, and some of them, from the gorgeous quality of their decorations, might have ‘gone on’ without alteration as triumphal cars in a melodrama at Astley’s. The day was uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful; the whole aspect of the town cheerful, thriving, and industrious.
Era abbastanza strano, nel silenzio di mezzanotte, e nella mortale quiete che sembrava essere stata creata dall’improvvisa e inaspettata cessazione del motore che aveva rimbombato incessantemente nelle nostre orecchie per tanti giorni, osservare l’espressione di totale stupore dipinta su tutti i volti: a partire dagli ufficiali, proseguendo tra tutti i passeggeri, fino ai stessi addetti alle caldaie e ai fornelli, che uscivano uno dopo l’altro dal sottocoperta e si raggruppavano intorno alla botola della sala macchine, scambiandosi commenti a bassa voce. Dopo aver lanciato alcuni razzi e sparato colpi di cannone segnalatore nella >speranza di essere visti o sentiti dalla riva, ma senza che apparisse alcun segno né suono, si decise di inviare una barca a terra. Era divertente osservare quanto alcuni passeggeri fossero disposti ad andare a riva con quella stessa barca: certo, per il bene comune, e assolutamente non perché ritenevano che la >nave si trovasse in una posizione pericolosa, né perché temessero che potesse capovolgersi se la marea fosse diminuita. Altrettanto divertente era notare quanto rapidamente quel povero pilota diventasse impopolare. Aveva ottenuto il proprio passaggio da Liverpool e, durante l’intero viaggio, era stato considerato una figura piuttosto nota per le sue storie e i suoi scherzi. Eppure ora coloro che avevano riso più forte alle sue battute erano gli stessi che gli mostravano il pugno in faccia, lo insultavano e lo definivano un malvagio!
La barca partì presto, con una lanterna e varie luci blu a bordo; in meno di un’ora tornò indietro: l’ufficiale al comando portava con sé un giovane albero abbastanza alto, che aveva strappato dalla radice, per placare alcuni passeggeri diffidenti i quali temevano di essere ingannati o di naufragare. Questi passeggeri non avrebbero creduto nemmeno che l’ufficiale fosse stato a terra, né che avesse fatto altro se non navigare fraudolentemente nella nebbia, apposta per ingannarli e causarne la morte. Il nostro capitano aveva previsto fin dall’inizio che ci saremmo trovati in un luogo chiamato “Eastern Passage”; ed effettivamente era così. Era l’ultimo posto al mondo dove avremmo dovuto trovarci. Ma una improvvisa nebbia e un errore da parte del pilota ne furono la causa. Eravamo circondati da rive, rocce e scogli di ogni tipo; fortunatamente, sembrava che fossimo finiti sull’unica zona sicura in quella zona. Rassicurati da queste notizie, e avendo verificato che la marea era passata il punto più basso della sua fase, attraccammo alle tre di mattina.
Il giorno dopo, verso le nove e mezza, mentre mi stavo vestendo, il rumore proveniente dall’alto mi spinse ad affrettarmi sul ponte. La notte precedente, quando l’avevo lasciato, era buio, nebbioso e umido; intorno a noi si estendevano colline desolate. Ora, stavamo scivolando lungo un corso d’acqua liscio e ampio, a una velocità di undici miglia all’ora: i nostri colori brillavano al sole; l’equipaggio indossava i vestiti più eleganti; gli ufficiali erano di nuovo in uniforme; il sole splendeva come in un luminoso giorno d’aprile in Inghilterra; la terra si estendeva su entrambi i lati, striata da chiazze di neve; c’erano case di legno bianche, persone alle loro porte, telegrafi in funzione, bandiere sventolate, moli che apparivano uno dopo l’altro, navi. I moli erano affollati di gente; si udivano rumori in lontananza, grida. Uomini e ragazzi correvano giù per le pendici ripide verso il molo. Tutto questo era più vivido, allegro e fresco ai nostri occhi ancora inesperti di tali scene, di quanto le parole possano descriverlo. Arrivammo a un molo lastricato di volti sorridenti; ci ormeggiammo dopo alcuni momenti di confusione e sforzi con i cavi. Una ventina di noi corremmo lungo il passaggio pedonale, quasi non appena fu esteso per accoglierci. E finalmente, tornammo sulla terraferma, su quel terreno solido e gioioso!
Suppongo che questo Halifax sarebbe potuto sembrare un Elysio, sebbene fosse una curiosità di brutta e monotona bellezza. Tuttavia, ho portato con me un’impressione molto piacevole della città e dei suoi abitanti, e l’ho conservata fino ad oggi. Non è stato senza rimpianto che sono tornato a casa, senza aver trovato l’opportunità di tornarvi e stringere nuovamente la mano agli amici che avevo conosciuto quel giorno.
Si trattava dell’apertura del Consiglio Legislativo e dell’Assemblea Generale; le cerimonie osservate all’inizio di una nuova sessione parlamentare in Inghilterra furono riprodotte con estrema precisione, ma su scala ridotta, al punto che sembrava di guardare a Westminster attraverso l’estremità sbagliata di un telescopio. Il governatore, in qualità di rappresentante della Sua Maestà, tenne quella che si potrebbe definire un’“allocuzione dal trono”. Disse ciò che aveva da dire con coraggio e bene. La banda militare all’esterno dell’edificio intonò con grande vigore “Dio salvi la Regina” prima ancora che Sua Eccellenza finisse di parlare; la gente gridava, i presenti si strofinavano le mani, quelli in disaccordo scuotevano la testa; il partito del Governo affermò che non si era mai sentita un’allocuzione così buona; l’Opposizione dichiarò invece che non ne esisteva una così cattiva; il Presidente e i membri dell’Assemblea si ritirarono dal podio per discutere animatamente tra loro. In breve, tutto andò avanti, e sembrava destinato ad andare avanti proprio come succede in casa in occasioni simili.
La città è costruita sul versante di una collina; il punto più alto è presidiato da una fortezza ancora incompleta. Diverse strade, ampie e ben tenute, si estendono dalla sua cima verso la riva dell’acqua; queste vengono intersecate da strade perpendicolari che corrono in parallelo con l’fiume. Le case sono per lo più di legno. Il mercato è ben fornito e i generi alimentari sono estremamente economici. Poiché il tempo era insolitamente mite, per quella stagione dell’anno, non c’era bisogno di slitte; tuttavia, in molti cortili si trovavano numerosi veicoli del genere, e alcuni di essi, per la magnificenza delle loro decorazioni, avrebbero potuto essere utilizzati senza modifiche come carri trionfali in un melodramma all’Astley’s. La giornata era particolarmente bella: l’aria fresca e salutare; l’intera città appariva allegra, prospera e laboriosa.
We lay there seven hours, to deliver and exchange the mails. At length, having collected all our bags and all our passengers (including two or three choice spirits, who, having indulged too freely in oysters and champagne, were found lying insensible on their backs in unfrequented streets), the engines were again put in motion, and we stood off for Boston.
Encountering squally weather again in the Bay of Fundy, we tumbled and rolled about as usual all that night and all next day. On the next afternoon, that is to say, on Saturday, the twenty-second of January, an American pilot-boat came alongside, and soon afterwards the Britannia steam-packet, from Liverpool, eighteen days out, was telegraphed at Boston.
The indescribable interest with which I strained my eyes, as the first patches of American soil peeped like molehills from the green sea, and followed them, as they swelled, by slow and almost imperceptible degrees, into a continuous line of coast, can hardly be exaggerated. A sharp keen wind blew dead against us; a hard frost prevailed on shore; and the cold was most severe. Yet the air was so intensely clear, and dry, and bright, that the temperature was not only endurable, but delicious.
How I remained on deck, staring about me, until we came alongside the dock, and how, though I had had as many eyes as Argus, I should have had them all wide open, and all employed on new objects—are topics which I will not prolong this chapter to discuss. Neither will I more than hint at my foreigner-like mistake in supposing that a party of most active persons, who scrambled on board at the peril of their lives as we approached the wharf, were newsmen, answering to that industrious class at home; whereas, despite the leathern wallets of news slung about the necks of some, and the broad sheets in the hands of all, they were Editors, who boarded ships in person (as one gentleman in a worsted comforter informed me), ‘because they liked the excitement of it.’ Suffice it in this place to say, that one of these invaders, with a ready courtesy for which I thank him here most gratefully, went on before to order rooms at the hotel; and that when I followed, as I soon did, I found myself rolling through the long passages with an involuntary imitation of the gait of Mr. T. P. Cooke, in a new nautical melodrama.
‘Dinner, if you please,’ said I to the waiter.
‘When?’ said the waiter.
‘As quick as possible,’ said I.
‘Right away?’ said the waiter.
After a moment’s hesitation, I answered ‘No,’ at hazard.
‘Not right away?’ cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start.
I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, ‘No; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much.’
At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, ‘Directly.’
‘Well! and that’s a fact!’ said the waiter, looking helplessly at me: ‘Right away.’
I saw now that ‘Right away’ and ‘Directly’ were one and the same thing. So I reversed my previous answer, and sat down to dinner in ten minutes afterwards; and a capital dinner it was.
The hotel (a very excellent one) is called the Tremont House. It has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe.
Rimanemmo lì per sette ore, a consegnare e scambiare la posta. Alla fine, dopo aver raccolto tutte le nostre borse e tutti i passeggeri (inclusi due o tre individui particolarmente vivaci che, essendosi abbandonati troppo liberamente agli ostriche e allo champagne, si trovavano privi di sensi sdraiati per strada in luoghi poco frequentati), i motori furono rimessi in funzione e partimmo verso Boston.
Incontrando di nuovo condizioni meteorologiche avverse nella Baia di Fundy, quella notte e per tutto il giorno successivo ci trovammo a rotolare e sobbalzare come al solito. Il pomeriggio seguente, cioè il sabato ventiduesimo gennaio, una barca a vapore americana si avvicinò a noi; poco dopo arrivò anche la nave a vapore Britannia, proveniente da Liverpool e in viaggio da diciotto giorni.
L’indescrivibile interesse con cui fissavo lo sguardo, mentre le prime porzioni di terra americana emergevano lentamente dal “mare verde” come piccole colline, e poi si estendevano gradualmente in una linea continua di costa, è difficile da esagerare. Un vento freddo e pungente soffiava contro di noi; sulla riva dominava una dura brina; il freddo era estremamente intenso. Eppure l’aria era così limpida, secca e luminosa che la temperatura non solo era sopportabile, ma addirittura piacevole.
Come rimasi sul ponte, guardandomi intorno, fino a quando non attraccammo al molo; e come, anche se avessi avuto gli occhi di Argo, li avrei voluti tenere tutti aperti, fissandoli su nuovi oggetti. Sono argomenti che non tratterò più in questo capitolo. Non farò nemmeno cenno all’errore che ho commesso, da straniero qual ero, nel pensare che quel gruppo di persone così attive, che si arrampicarono a bordo rischiando la vita mentre ci avvicinavamo al molo, fossero giornalisti, appartenenti a quella categoria laboriosa che esiste a casa loro; in realtà, nonostante alcuni portassero borse di cuoio piene di notizie e tutti avessero grandi fogli di carta in mano, erano editori che salivano personalmente sulle navi (come mi disse un gentiluomo con un piumone di lana ruvida), “perché amavano l’emozione che tutto ciò comportava”. Basta dire che uno di questi “invasori”, con una cortesia davvero encomiabile, andò subito ad prenotare delle stanze in hotel; e quando lo seguii poco dopo, mi ritrovai a camminare lungo i corridoi, imitando involontariamente il passo del signor T. P. Cooke, all’interno di un nuovo “melodramma marittimo”.
“Cena, per favore,” dissi al cameriere.
“Quando?”, chiese il cameriere.
“Il più velocemente possibile,” dissi.
“Subito?” disse il cameriere.
Dopo un attimo di esitazione, risposi “No”, a rischio di sbagliare.
“Non subito?” esclamò il cameriere, con un tono di sorpresa tale da farmi sobbalzare.
Lo guardai con esitazione e risposi: “No; preferirei tenerlo in questa stanza privata. Mi piace molto.”
In quel momento, pensai davvero che il cameriere dovesse essere impazzito: credo che avrebbe fatto esattamente così, se non fosse stato per l’intervento di un altro uomo che gli sussurrò all’orecchio: “Direttamente.”
“Beh! E questa è un’affermazione!” disse il cameriere, guardandomi con aria impotente. “Subito.”
Ora ho capito che “Subito” e “Direttamente” significano la stessa cosa. Quindi ho rettificato la mia risposta precedente e sono andato a cena dieci minuti dopo. E è stata davvero una cena deliziosa.
L’hotel (un hotel davvero eccellente) si chiama Tremont House. Ha così tante gallerie, colonne, piazze e passaggi che non riesco a ricordarli tutti, né il lettore riuscirebbe a crederci.
CHAPTER III BOSTON
In all the public establishments of America, the utmost courtesy prevails. Most of our Departments are susceptible of considerable improvement in this respect, but the Custom-house above all others would do well to take example from the United States and render itself somewhat less odious and offensive to foreigners. The servile rapacity of the French officials is sufficiently contemptible; but there is a surly boorish incivility about our men, alike disgusting to all persons who fall into their hands, and discreditable to the nation that keeps such ill-conditioned curs snarling about its gates.
When I landed in America, I could not help being strongly impressed with the contrast their Custom-house presented, and the attention, politeness and good humour with which its officers discharged their duty.
As we did not land at Boston, in consequence of some detention at the wharf, until after dark, I received my first impressions of the city in walking down to the Custom-house on the morning after our arrival, which was Sunday. I am afraid to say, by the way, how many offers of pews and seats in church for that morning were made to us, by formal note of invitation, before we had half finished our first dinner in America, but if I may be allowed to make a moderate guess, without going into nicer calculation, I should say that at least as many sittings were proffered us, as would have accommodated a score or two of grown-up families. The number of creeds and forms of religion to which the pleasure of our company was requested, was in very fair proportion.
Not being able, in the absence of any change of clothes, to go to church that day, we were compelled to decline these kindnesses, one and all; and I was reluctantly obliged to forego the delight of hearing Dr. Channing, who happened to preach that morning for the first time in a very long interval. I mention the name of this distinguished and accomplished man (with whom I soon afterwards had the pleasure of becoming personally acquainted), that I may have the gratification of recording my humble tribute of admiration and respect for his high abilities and character; and for the bold philanthropy with which he has ever opposed himself to that most hideous blot and foul disgrace—Slavery.
To return to Boston. When I got into the streets upon this Sunday morning, the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay: the signboards were painted in such gaudy colours; the gilded letters were so very golden; the bricks were so very red, the stone was so very white, the blinds and area railings were so very green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors so marvellously bright and twinkling; and all so slight and unsubstantial in appearance—that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime. It rarely happens in the business streets that a tradesman, if I may venture to call anybody a tradesman, where everybody is a merchant, resides above his store; so that many occupations are often carried on in one house, and the whole front is covered with boards and inscriptions. As I walked along, I kept glancing up at these boards, confidently expecting to see a few of them change into something; and I never turned a corner suddenly without looking out for the clown and pantaloon, who, I had no doubt, were hiding in a doorway or behind some pillar close at hand. As to Harlequin and Columbine, I discovered immediately that they lodged (they are always looking after lodgings in a pantomime) at a very small clockmaker’s one story high, near the hotel; which, in addition to various symbols and devices, almost covering the whole front, had a great dial hanging out—to be jumped through, of course.
The suburbs are, if possible, even more unsubstantial-looking than the city. The white wooden houses (so white that it makes one wink to look at them), with their green jalousie blinds, are so sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a child’s toy, and crammed into a little box.
The city is a beautiful one, and cannot fail, I should imagine, to impress all strangers very favourably. The private dwelling-houses are, for the most part, large and elegant; the shops extremely good; and the public buildings handsome. The State House is built upon the summit of a hill, which rises gradually at first, and afterwards by a steep ascent, almost from the water’s edge. In front is a green enclosure, called the Common. The site is beautiful: and from the top there is a charming panoramic view of the whole town and neighbourhood. In addition to a variety of commodious offices, it contains two handsome chambers; in one the House of Representatives of the State hold their meetings: in the other, the Senate. Such proceedings as I saw here, were conducted with perfect gravity and decorum; and were certainly calculated to inspire attention and respect.
There is no doubt that much of the intellectual refinement and superiority of Boston, is referable to the quiet influence of the University of Cambridge, which is within three or four miles of the city. The resident professors at that university are gentlemen of learning and varied attainments; and are, without one exception that I can call to mind, men who would shed a grace upon, and do honour to, any society in the civilised world. Many of the resident gentry in Boston and its neighbourhood, and I think I am not mistaken in adding, a large majority of those who are attached to the liberal professions there, have been educated at this same school. Whatever the defects of American universities may be, they disseminate no prejudices; rear no bigots; dig up the buried ashes of no old superstitions; never interpose between the people and their improvement; exclude no man because of his religious opinions; above all, in their whole course of study and instruction, recognise a world, and a broad one too, lying beyond the college walls.
CAPITOLO III
BOSTON
in tutti gli istituti pubblici dell’America, prevale la massima cortesia. La maggior parte dei nostri uffici potrebbe migliorare notevolmente in questo senso, ma soprattutto l’Ufficio Doganale dovrebbe prendere esempio dagli Stati Uniti e rendersi un po’ meno odioso e offensivo per gli stranieri. La rapacità servile degli ufficiali francesi è già sufficientemente spregevole; ma anche i nostri funzionari mostrano una maleducazione rozza e scortese, che disgusta chiunque cada nelle loro mani e disonora la nazione che permette a simili individui di aggirarsi intorno alle sue porte.
Quando sono atterrato in America, non ho potuto fare a meno di rimanere profondamente colpito dal contrasto che presentava il loro ufficio doganale, nonché dall’attenzione, dalla cortesia e dal buon umorismo con cui i suoi funzionari svolgevano il loro dovere.
Poiché non siamo atterrati a Boston a causa di alcuni ritardi al molo, fino a dopo il tramonto non ho potuto fare le mie prime impressioni della città. La mattina seguente il nostro arrivo, che era una domenica, sono andato a piedi verso l’Ufficio Doganale per visitarlo. Devo dire, con rammarico, quante offerte di posti in chiesa ci sono state fatte quella mattina, attraverso inviti ufficiali. Prima ancora che finissimo la prima cena in America! Se posso fare una stima approssimativa, senza calcoli troppo dettagliati, direi che ci sono stati offerti almeno altrettanti posti quanti sarebbero bastati per accogliere due o tre famiglie adulte. Inoltre, il numero di credi e forme religiose per cui ci è stata chiesta la nostra compagnia era davvero considerevole.
Non potendo, in assenza di abiti da cambiare, andare in chiesa quel giorno, fummo costretti a rifiutare tutte queste offerte di gentilezza; e io fui costretto, con riluttanza, a rinunciare al piacere di ascoltare il dottor Channing, che quella mattina predicava per la prima volta dopo molto tempo. Menziono il nome di questo distinto e eccezionale uomo (con cui in seguito ebbi il piacere di entrare personalmente in contatto), affinché possa esprimere la mia umile ammirazione e rispetto per le sue elevate capacità e il suo carattere; nonché per la coraggiosa filantropia con cui si è sempre opposto a quella orribile macchia e vergogna che è la schiavitù.
Tornare a Boston. Quando quella mattina di domenica uscii in strada, l’aria era così limpida, le case così luminose e vivaci: i cartelli erano dipinti con colori sgargianti; le lettere dorate sembravano davvero dorate; i mattoni erano rossi, la pietra bianca, le persiane e le ringhiere verdi; i pomelli e le targhe sulle porte delle case brillavano in modo meraviglioso. Tutto aveva un aspetto così leggero e irreale che ogni strada della città sembrava davvero una scena di una pantomima. Nelle strade commerciali è raro che un commerciante, se posso chiamarlo così, visto che ormai tutti sono mercanti, abiti sopra il proprio negozio; quindi molte attività vengono svolte nello stesso edificio, e l’intero fronte è coperto di cartelli e scritte. Mentre camminavo, continuavo a guardare su quei cartelli, aspettandomi che da un momento all’altro cambiasero forma. E non giravo mai un angolo senza cercare con lo sguardo il pagliaccio o la pantalone rosso, che sicuramente si nascondevano in qualche porta o dietro qualche colonna nelle vicinanze. Per quanto riguarda Arlecchino e Colombina, scoprii subito che alloggiavano (in una pantomima sono sempre loro a occuparsi degli alloggi) in un piccolo negozio di orologi, al piano terra, vicino all’hotel; il negozio, oltre ad avere vari simboli e decorazioni che coprivano quasi tutto il fronte, aveva anche un grande quadrante che spuntava fuori, da cui, naturalmente, si poteva saltare dentro.
I sobborghi, se possibile, hanno un aspetto ancora più effimero rispetto alla >città. Le case di legno bianco (così bianche da far socchiudere gli occhi al loro vedere), con le loro persiane verdi, sono disseminate in ogni direzione, senza sembrare affatto radicate nel terreno; e le piccole chiese e cappelle sono così ordinate, luminose e verniciate con cura che quasi credevo che l’intero insieme potesse essere smontato pezzo per pezzo, come un giocattolo di >bambino, e messo in una scatolina.
La >città è davvero bellissima, e sicuramente impressionerà molto favorevolmente tutti gli stranieri. Le abitazioni private sono, per lo più, grandi ed eleganti; i negozi estremamente buoni; e gli edifici pubblici molto belli. La Casa di Stato è costruita sulla cima di una collina che inizia dolcemente e poi sale ripidamente, quasi fino al bordo dell’acqua. Davanti ad essa si trova un recinto verde chiamato “Common”. Il sito è incantevole: dalla cima si gode di una vista panoramica meravigliosa su tutta la città e i dintorni. Oltre a vari uffici comodi, l’edificio ospita due sale molto belle; in una vi tengono le riunioni la Camera dei Rappresentanti dello Stato, nell’altra il Senato. Le procedure che ho visto qui si svolgevano con perfetta serietà e decoro; sicuramente erano destinate ad ispirare attenzione e rispetto.
Non c’è alcun >dubbio che gran parte della raffinatezza intellettuale e della superiorità di Boston sia dovuta all’influenza silenziosa dell’Università di Cambridge, situata a soli tre o quattro miglia dalla città. I professori residenti in quella università sono gentiluomini eruditi e di diverso livello di competenza; senza alcuna eccezione, sono persone che potrebbero donare grazia e onore a qualsiasi società nel mondo civile. Molti dei nobili residenti a Boston e nelle sue vicinanze, e credo di non sbagliarmi se aggiungo anche la stragrande maggioranza di coloro che si dedicano alle professioni liberali in quella zona, sono stati educati presso questa stessa università. Qualunque siano i difetti delle università americane, esse non diffondono pregiudizi, non coltivano bigottismo, non riportano in vita antiche superstizioni, non ostacolano il progresso delle persone, non escludono nessuno a causa delle sue opinioni religiose; soprattutto, nel corso di tutto il loro insegnamento, riconoscono l’esistenza di un mondo, anzi di un mondo molto ampio, al di là dei muri dell’università stessa.
It was a source of inexpressible pleasure to me to observe the almost imperceptible, but not less certain effect, wrought by this institution among the small community of Boston; and to note at every turn the humanising tastes and desires it has engendered; the affectionate friendships to which it has given rise; the amount of vanity and prejudice it has dispelled. The golden calf they worship at Boston is a pigmy compared with the giant effigies set up in other parts of that vast counting-house which lies beyond the Atlantic; and the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amidst a whole Pantheon of better gods.
Above all, I sincerely believe that the public institutions and charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect, as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them. I never in my life was more affected by the contemplation of happiness, under circumstances of privation and bereavement, than in my visits to these establishments.
It is a great and pleasant feature of all such institutions in America, that they are either supported by the State or assisted by the State; or (in the event of their not needing its helping hand) that they act in concert with it, and are emphatically the people’s. I cannot but think, with a view to the principle and its tendency to elevate or depress the character of the industrious classes, that a Public Charity is immeasurably better than a Private Foundation, no matter how munificently the latter may be endowed. In our own country, where it has not, until within these later days, been a very popular fashion with governments to display any extraordinary regard for the great mass of the people or to recognise their existence as improvable creatures, private charities, unexampled in the history of the earth, have arisen, to do an incalculable amount of good among the destitute and afflicted. But the government of the country, having neither act nor part in them, is not in the receipt of any portion of the gratitude they inspire; and, offering very little shelter or relief beyond that which is to be found in the workhouse and the jail, has come, not unnaturally, to be looked upon by the poor rather as a stern master, quick to correct and punish, than a kind protector, merciful and vigilant in their hour of need.
The maxim that out of evil cometh good, is strongly illustrated by these establishments at home; as the records of the Prerogative Office in Doctors’ Commons can abundantly prove. Some immensely rich old gentleman or lady, surrounded by needy relatives, makes, upon a low average, a will a-week. The old gentleman or lady, never very remarkable in the best of times for good temper, is full of aches and pains from head to foot; full of fancies and caprices; full of spleen, distrust, suspicion, and dislike. To cancel old wills, and invent new ones, is at last the sole business of such a testator’s existence; and relations and friends (some of whom have been bred up distinctly to inherit a large share of the property, and have been, from their cradles, specially disqualified from devoting themselves to any useful pursuit, on that account) are so often and so unexpectedly and summarily cut off, and reinstated, and cut off again, that the whole family, down to the remotest cousin, is kept in a perpetual fever. At length it becomes plain that the old lady or gentleman has not long to live; and the plainer this becomes, the more clearly the old lady or gentleman perceives that everybody is in a conspiracy against their poor old dying relative; wherefore the old lady or gentleman makes another last will—positively the last this time—conceals the same in a china teapot, and expires next day. Then it turns out, that the whole of the real and personal estate is divided between half-a-dozen charities; and that the dead and gone testator has in pure spite helped to do a great deal of good, at the cost of an immense amount of evil passion and misery.
The Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, at Boston, is superintended by a body of trustees who make an annual report to the corporation. The indigent blind of that state are admitted gratuitously. Those from the adjoining state of Connecticut, or from the states of Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire, are admitted by a warrant from the state to which they respectively belong; or, failing that, must find security among their friends, for the payment of about twenty pounds English for their first year’s board and instruction, and ten for the second. ‘After the first year,’ say the trustees, ‘an account current will be opened with each pupil; he will be charged with the actual cost of his board, which will not exceed two dollars per week;’ a trifle more than eight shillings English; ‘and he will be credited with the amount paid for him by the state, or by his friends; also with his earnings over and above the cost of the stock which he uses; so that all his earnings over one dollar per week will be his own. By the third year it will be known whether his earnings will more than pay the actual cost of his board; if they should, he will have it at his option to remain and receive his earnings, or not. Those who prove unable to earn their own livelihood will not be retained; as it is not desirable to convert the establishment into an alms-house, or to retain any but working bees in the hive. Those who by physical or mental imbecility are disqualified from work, are thereby disqualified from being members of an industrious community; and they can be better provided for in establishments fitted for the infirm.’
I went to see this place one very fine winter morning: an Italian sky above, and the air so clear and bright on every side, that even my eyes, which are none of the best, could follow the minute lines and scraps of tracery in distant buildings. Like most other public institutions in America, of the same class, it stands a mile or two without the town, in a cheerful healthy spot; and is an airy, spacious, handsome edifice. It is built upon a height, commanding the harbour. When I paused for a moment at the door, and marked how fresh and free the whole scene was—what sparkling bubbles glanced upon the waves, and welled up every moment to the surface, as though the world below, like that above, were radiant with the bright day, and gushing over in its fulness of light: when I gazed from sail to sail away upon a ship at sea, a tiny speck of shining white, the only cloud upon the still, deep, distant blue—and, turning, saw a blind boy with his sightless face addressed that way, as though he too had some sense within him of the glorious distance: I felt a kind of sorrow that the place should be so very light, and a strange wish that for his sake it were darker. It was but momentary, of course, and a mere fancy, but I felt it keenly for all that.
Per me fu una fonte di indescrivibile piacere osservare l’effetto quasi impercettibile, ma tuttavia certo, che questa istituzione aveva su quella piccola comunità di Boston; notavo in ogni momento i gusti e i desideri umanizzanti che essa generava, le amicizie affettuose che suscitava, nonché la quantità di vanità e pregiudizi che contribuiva a dissipare. Il “vitello d’oro” che vengono adorati a Boston è un nanetto rispetto alle gigantesche statue erette in altre parti di quella vasta “casa del conto” che si estende al di là dell’Atlantico; e il potente dollaro, nel confronto, appare qualcosa di relativamente insignificante, all’interno di un intero pantheon di divinità più vere e nobili.
Soprattutto, credo sinceramente che le istituzioni pubbliche e le organizzazioni di beneficenza di questa capitale del Massachusetts siano il più possibile perfette, nella misura in cui la saggezza, la benevolenza e l’umanità possano renderle tali. Nella mia vita, non sono mai stato così colpito dalla visione della felicità, in circostanze di povertà e dolore, come durante le mie visite a queste istituzioni.
È una caratteristica grande e piacevole di tutte queste istituzioni in America il fatto che siano sostenute o aiutate dallo Stato; oppure, nel caso in cui non abbiano bisogno del suo aiuto, agiscano in armonia con esso e siano chiaramente a servizio del popolo. Non posso fare a meno di pensare che, considerando il principio su cui si basano queste istituzioni e la loro capacità di elevare o abbassare il livello delle classi lavoratrici, una carità pubblica sia di gran lunga migliore di una fondazione privata, per quanto questa possa essere generosamente finanziata. Nel nostro paese, dove fino a tempi recenti non era affatto comune che i governi mostrassero particolare attenzione verso la grande maggioranza della popolazione o riconoscessero la loro esistenza come quella di esseri umani bisognosi di aiuto, sono sorte fondazioni private, senza precedenti nella storia del mondo, che hanno compiuto un lavoro inestimabile a beneficio dei poveri e dei sofferenti. Tuttavia, il governo del paese, non essendo coinvolto in alcun modo nell’attività di queste istituzioni e non ricevendo alcuna parte della gratitudine che esse suscitano, e offrendo ben poco sostegno o aiuto oltre a quello fornito dagli ospizi e dalle prigioni, è inevitabilmente considerato dai poveri più come un padrone severo, pronto a correggere e punire, che come un protettore gentile e premuroso nei momenti di difficoltà.
Il detto secondo cui dal male può nascere il bene è ampiamente dimostrato da queste pratiche familiari; come possono confermare abbondantemente i registri dell’Ufficio dei Diritti Speciali presso la Camera dei Medici. Un anziano signore o signora estremamente ricco, circondato da parenti in difficoltà, redige, in media, un testamento ogni settimana. Questo anziano, che nemmeno nei migliori momenti era noto per il suo buon carattere, soffre di mille dolori e malanni; è pieno di capricci e diffidenza verso tutti. Annullare i vecchi testamenti e ne redigere di nuovi diventa l’unica attività della sua vita; parenti e amici – alcuni dei quali sono stati cresciuti con l’intento di ereditare una grande parte del patrimonio e, per questo motivo, fin da piccoli sono stati esclusi da qualsiasi attività utile – vengono spesso e inaspettatamente privati della loro eredità, per poi riceverla di nuovo e subito dopo perderla nuovamente. L’intera famiglia, fino all’ultimo cugino, vive quindi in uno stato costante di agitazione e incertezza. Alla fine diventa evidente che l’anziano non vivrà a lungo; e più ciò diventa chiaro, più lui percepisce chiaramente che tutti sono congiurati contro di lui. Allora redige un ultimo testamento – davvero l’ultimo di quella volta – lo nasconde in una teiera di porcellana e muore il giorno dopo. A quel punto si scopre che tutto il patrimonio reale viene diviso tra mezza dozzina di organizzazioni benefiche; e che l’anziano defunto, in realtà, ha contribuito a compiere del bene, a scapito di un’enorme quantità di odio, rancore e sofferenza altrui.
L’Instituto Perkins e l’Asilo per Ciechi del Massachusetts, situati a Boston, sono sotto la supervisione di un organo di amministratori fiduciari che presentano un rapporto annuale alla società responsabile della loro gestione. I ciechi indigenti dello stato vengono accettati gratuitamente; quelli provenienti dallo stato confinante del Connecticut, o dagli stati del Maine, Vermont o New Hampshire, vengono ammessi su autorizzazione del rispettivo stato di origine; in caso contrario, devono trovare dei sostenitori che si impegnino a pagare circa venti sterline inglesi per il primo anno di vitto e istruzione, e dieci sterline per il secondo anno. “Dopo il primo anno”, dichiarano gli amministratori fiduciari, “viene aperto un conto corrente per ogni studente; a lui viene addebitato esattamente il costo del suo vitto, che non supera le due sterline a settimana, cioè poco più di otto scellini inglesi; al contempo gli vengono accreditati gli importi pagati dallo stato o dai suoi sostenitori, nonché i guadagni che superano il costo delle risorse utilizzate; in questo modo, tutti i suoi guadagni superiori a una sterlina a settimana rimangono a sua disposizione. Al terzo anno si saprà se i suoi guadagni saranno sufficienti a coprire le spese del suo vitto; in tal caso, potrà decidere se rimanere e continuare a ricevere tali guadagni o meno. Coloro che si dimostrano incapaci di provvedersi da soli non verranno mantenuti nell’istituto, poiché non è desiderabile trasformarlo in un ospizio di beneficenza, né conservarvi individui che non siano in grado di lavorare. Coloro che, a causa di disabilità fisiche o mentali, sono impossibilitati a lavorare, non sono idonei a far parte di una comunità produttiva; per loro esistono strutture più adatte alle persone bisognose”.
Andai a vedere questo posto una bellissima mattina d’inverno: il cielo era italiano, l’aria così chiara e luminosa da ogni parte che anche i miei occhi, per quanto non dei migliori, riuscivano a distinguere le sottili linee e i dettagli delle costruzioni lontane. Come la maggior parte delle altre istituzioni pubbliche dello stesso tipo in America, si trova a un miglio o due di distanza dal centro della città, in un luogo allegro e salutare; è un edificio spazioso, luminoso e bellissimo. È costruito su un’altura che domina il porto. Quando mi fermai davanti alla porta e notai quanto fosse fresca e aperta tutta quella scena – quei piccoli schizzi di luce sulle onde che continuavano a emergere, come se anche il mondo sottostante fosse illuminato dalla stessa intensa luce del cielo – quando osservai le navi in mare, un puntino bianco luminoso l’unica macchia su quel blu profondo e tranquillo, e poi vidi un ragazzo non vedente che guardava proprio in quella direzione, come se anche lui percepisse quella meravigliosa distanza. Provai una sorta di tristezza nel pensare che quel luogo fosse così luminoso, e un desiderio strano: che, per amor suo, fosse più scuro. Naturalmente fu solo un momento, una semplice fantasia, ma la provai profondamente.
The children were at their daily tasks in different rooms, except a few who were already dismissed, and were at play. Here, as in many institutions, no uniform is worn; and I was very glad of it, for two reasons. Firstly, because I am sure that nothing but senseless custom and want of thought would reconcile us to the liveries and badges we are so fond of at home. Secondly, because the absence of these things presents each child to the visitor in his or her own proper character, with its individuality unimpaired; not lost in a dull, ugly, monotonous repetition of the same unmeaning garb: which is really an important consideration. The wisdom of encouraging a little harmless pride in personal appearance even among the blind, or the whimsical absurdity of considering charity and leather breeches inseparable companions, as we do, requires no comment.
Good order, cleanliness, and comfort, pervaded every corner of the building. The various classes, who were gathered round their teachers, answered the questions put to them with readiness and intelligence, and in a spirit of cheerful contest for precedence which pleased me very much. Those who were at play, were gleesome and noisy as other children. More spiritual and affectionate friendships appeared to exist among them, than would be found among other young persons suffering under no deprivation; but this I expected and was prepared to find. It is a part of the great scheme of Heaven’s merciful consideration for the afflicted.
In a portion of the building, set apart for that purpose, are work-shops for blind persons whose education is finished, and who have acquired a trade, but who cannot pursue it in an ordinary manufactory because of their deprivation. Several people were at work here; making brushes, mattresses, and so forth; and the cheerfulness, industry, and good order discernible in every other part of the building, extended to this department also.
On the ringing of a bell, the pupils all repaired, without any guide or leader, to a spacious music-hall, where they took their seats in an orchestra erected for that purpose, and listened with manifest delight to a voluntary on the organ, played by one of themselves. At its conclusion, the performer, a boy of nineteen or twenty, gave place to a girl; and to her accompaniment they all sang a hymn, and afterwards a sort of chorus. It was very sad to look upon and hear them, happy though their condition unquestionably was; and I saw that one blind girl, who (being for the time deprived of the use of her limbs, by illness) sat close beside me with her face towards them, wept silently the while she listened.
It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts; observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask he wears. Allowing for one shade of anxious expression which is never absent from their countenances, and the like of which we may readily detect in our own faces if we try to feel our way in the dark, every idea, as it rises within them, is expressed with the lightning’s speed and nature’s truth. If the company at a rout, or drawing-room at court, could only for one time be as unconscious of the eyes upon them as blind men and women are, what secrets would come out, and what a worker of hypocrisy this sight, the loss of which we so much pity, would appear to be!
The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room, before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell; and nearly so of taste: before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection, inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense—the sense of touch. There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened.
Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside her; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon.—From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.
Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound round her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.
She was seated in a little enclosure, made by school-desks and forms, writing her daily journal. But soon finishing this pursuit, she engaged in an animated conversation with a teacher who sat beside her. This was a favourite mistress with the poor pupil. If she could see the face of her fair instructress, she would not love her less, I am sure.
I have extracted a few disjointed fragments of her history, from an account, written by that one man who has made her what she is. It is a very beautiful and touching narrative; and I wish I could present it entire.
Her name is Laura Bridgman. ‘She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829. She is described as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance: and life was held by the feeblest tenure: but when a year and a half old, she seemed to rally; the dangerous symptoms subsided; and at twenty months old, she was perfectly well.
I bambini erano impegnati nelle loro attività quotidiane in stanze diverse; solo alcuni, che avevano già terminato i compiti, stavano giocando. Qui, come in molte altre istituzioni, non si indossa alcun uniforme, e ne fui molto felice per due motivi. Primo, perché sono certo che soltanto abitudini insensate e mancanza di riflessione potrebbero farci accettare quegli abiti e quei simboli che amiamo tanto a >casa. Secondo, perché l’assenza di queste cose permette a ogni >bambino di mostrarsi al visitatore per ciò che realmente è, con la propria individualità intatta; non perduta in una ripetizione noiosa, brutta e monotona dello stesso abbigliamento insignificante. Questo rappresenta davvero un aspetto importante da considerare. La saggezza di incoraggiare, anche tra i bambini non vedenti, un po’ di orgoglio per il proprio aspetto personale, o l’assurdità capricciosa di considerare la carità e i pantaloni di pelle come compagni inseparabili, come invece facciamo noi, non richiede certo commenti.
Un buon ordine, pulizia e comfort permeavano ogni angolo dell’edificio. Le varie classi, riunite intorno ai loro insegnanti, rispondevano alle domande poste con prontezza e intelligenza, e in un spirito di vivace competizione che mi piacque molto. Quelli che giocavano erano allegri e rumorosi come tutti gli altri bambini. Sembrava esistere tra loro un legame più profondo e affettuoso di quanto si possa trovare tra altri giovani che non soffrono alcuna privazione; ma questo me l’aspettavo e ero preparato a trovarlo. È infatti parte del grande disegno della misericordia divina nei confronti dei sofferenti.
In una parte dell’edificio destinata a tale scopo, si trovano laboratori per persone non vedenti le quali hanno completato la loro istruzione e acquisito un mestiere, ma che non possono esercitarlo in una normale fabbrica a causa delle loro condizioni particolari. Alcune persone stavano lavorando lì: realizzavano pennelli, materassi e altro ancora; e la gioia, l’impegno e la buona organizzazione che si riscontrano in tutte le altre parti dell’edificio si estendevano anche a questo reparto.
Al suono di una campanella, tutti gli studenti si recarono, senza alcun guida o leader, in un vasto auditorium dove presero posto nell’orchestra allestita appositamente per l’occasione. Ascoltarono con evidente piacere un brano eseguito all’organo da uno di loro. Alla fine dell’esibizione, il musicista – un ragazzo di diciannove o vent’anni – lasciò il posto a una ragazza; sotto la sua accompagnamento cantarono tutti un ’inno e successivamente una sorta di >canto corale. Era molto commovente vederli e ascoltarli, nonostante la loro condizione fosse indubbiamente felice; notai in particolare una ragazza cieca che, essendo temporaneamente priva dell’uso delle membra a causa di una malattia, sedeva accanto a me con il viso rivolto verso di loro e piangeva in silenzio mentre ascoltava.
È strano osservare i volti dei ciechi e vedere quanto siano liberi da qualsiasi tentativo di nascondere ciò che passa nei loro pensieri; si potrebbe persino notare come una persona con gli occhi arrossisca al solo pensiero della maschera che indossa. A parte quella leggera espressione di ansia che mai manca sui loro volti, e simili segni che possiamo facilmente riconoscere anche sul nostro proprio viso quando cerchiamo di orientarci al buio, ogni idea, non appena nasce nella loro mente, viene espressa con la velocità del fulmine e con la veridicità della natura stessa. Se le persone in una fuga o in un salotto di corte potessero, anche solo per un momento, essere completamente ignare degli sguardi altrui, come lo sono i ciechi, quali segreti venirebbero alla luce. E che strumento efficace della ipocrisia sarebbe questa capacità, la cui perdita ci suscita tanto rammarico!
Mi venne in mente questa idea mentre mi sedevo in un’altra stanza, di fronte a una ragazza: cieca, sorda, muta; priva dell’olfatto e quasi anche del gusto. Una giovane bellissima creatura, dotata di tutte le facoltà umane, con la >speranza e la capacità di essere buona e piena di affetto. Tutto racchiuso dentro il suo delicato corpo, ma con un solo senso esterno: il tatto. Ecco lì, davanti a me; come se fosse rinchiusa in una cella di marmo, impermeabile a qualsiasi raggio di luce o particella di suono. Con la sua povera mano bianca che spuntava da una fessura nel muro, chiamando aiuto da parte di un uomo buono. Affinché un’‘anima immortale potesse essere risvegliata.
Molto prima che la vedessi, l’aiuto era già arrivato. Il suo viso brillava di intelligenza e felicità; i suoi capelli, intrecciati con le sue stesse mani, erano raccolti attorno al capo, il cui intelletto e sviluppo si riflettevano chiaramente nel suo profilo aggraziato e nella sua fronte larga e aperta; il suo abito, preparato da lei stessa, era un esempio di ordine e semplicità; il lavoro a maglia che aveva realizzato giaceva accanto a lei; il suo quaderno di scrittura era sul tavolo su cui si appoggiava. — Dalle rovine dolorose di una tale perdita, era lentamente emersa questa creatura gentile, tenera, ingenua e grata.
Come le altre detenute di quella casa, anche lei aveva una striscia verde legata intorno alle palpebre. Una bambola che aveva vestito giaceva a terra vicino a lei; la presi in mano e vidi che aveva fatto un fiocco verde, proprio come quello che indossava lei stessa, e lo aveva fissato intorno agli occhi della bambola.
Era seduta in un piccolo angolo creato da banchi scolastici e quaderni, mentre scriveva il suo diario quotidiano. Ma appena finito questo compito, iniziò a conversare animatamente con un’insegnante che sedeva accanto a lei. Questa insegnante era molto amata da quella povera studentessa. Se solo potesse vedere il viso della sua gentile maestra, sono sicura che l’amore per lei non diminuirebbe affatto.
Ho estratto alcuni frammenti sparsi della sua storia, tratti da un resoconto scritto da quell’uomo che l’ha fatta diventare ciò che è oggi. È una narrazione molto bella e commovente; vorrei poterla presentare nella sua interezza.
Si chiama Laura Bridgman. È nata a Hanover, nel New Hampshire, il ventunesimo dicembre 1829. Si descriveva come un bambino molto vivace e carino, con occhi di un blu intenso. Tuttavia, fino all’età di un anno e mezzo era così debole e fragile che i suoi genitori temevano davvero di non riuscire a crescerla. Soffriva di gravi crisi che sembravano distruggere il suo corpo, al punto da mettere in pericolo la sua vita. Ma all’età di un anno e mezzo sembrò riprendersi: i sintomi pericolosi scomparvero e, a venti mesi, era completamente guarita.
‘Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly developed themselves; and during the four months of health which she enjoyed, she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother’s account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence.
‘But suddenly she sickened again; her disease raged with great violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, suppurated, and their contents were discharged. But though sight and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child’s sufferings were not ended. The fever raged during seven weeks; for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room; it was a year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted.
‘It was not until four years of age that the poor child’s bodily health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of life and the world.
‘But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the silence of the tomb were around her: no mother’s smile called forth her answering smile, no father’s voice taught her to imitate his sounds:—they, brothers and sisters, were but forms of matter which resisted her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house, save in warmth, and in the power of locomotion; and not even in these respects from the dog and the cat.
‘But the immortal spirit which had been implanted within her could not die, nor be maimed nor mutilated; and though most of its avenues of communication with the world were cut off, it began to manifest itself through the others. As soon as she could walk, she began to explore the room, and then the house; she became familiar with the form, density, weight, and heat, of every article she could lay her hands upon. She followed her mother, and felt her hands and arms, as she was occupied about the house; and her disposition to imitate, led her to repeat everything herself. She even learned to sew a little, and to knit.’
The reader will scarcely need to be told, however, that the opportunities of communicating with her, were very, very limited; and that the moral effects of her wretched state soon began to appear. Those who cannot be enlightened by reason, can only be controlled by force; and this, coupled with her great privations, must soon have reduced her to a worse condition than that of the beasts that perish, but for timely and unhoped-for aid.
‘At this time, I was so fortunate as to hear of the child, and immediately hastened to Hanover to see her. I found her with a well-formed figure; a strongly-marked, nervous-sanguine temperament; a large and beautifully-shaped head; and the whole system in healthy action. The parents were easily induced to consent to her coming to Boston, and on the 4th of October, 1837, they brought her to the Institution.
‘For a while, she was much bewildered; and after waiting about two weeks, until she became acquainted with her new locality, and somewhat familiar with the inmates, the attempt was made to give her knowledge of arbitrary signs, by which she could interchange thoughts with others.
‘There was one of two ways to be adopted: either to go on to build up a language of signs on the basis of the natural language which she had already commenced herself, or to teach her the purely arbitrary language in common use: that is, to give her a sign for every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters by combination of which she might express her idea of the existence, and the mode and condition of existence, of any thing. The former would have been easy, but very ineffectual; the latter seemed very difficult, but, if accomplished, very effectual. I determined therefore to try the latter.
‘The first experiments were made by taking articles in common use, such as knives, forks, spoons, keys, &c., and pasting upon them labels with their names printed in raised letters. These she felt very carefully, and soon, of course, distinguished that the crooked lines spoon, differed as much from the crooked lines key, as the spoon differed from the key in form.
‘Then small detached labels, with the same words printed upon them, were put into her hands; and she soon observed that they were similar to the ones pasted on the articles.’ She showed her perception of this similarity by laying the label key upon the key, and the label spoon upon the spoon. She was encouraged here by the natural sign of approbation, patting on the head.
‘The same process was then repeated with all the articles which she could handle; and she very easily learned to place the proper labels upon them. It was evident, however, that the only intellectual exercise was that of imitation and memory. She recollected that the label book was placed upon a book, and she repeated the process first from imitation, next from memory, with only the motive of love of approbation, but apparently without the intellectual perception of any relation between the things.
‘After a while, instead of labels, the individual letters were given to her on detached bits of paper: they were arranged side by side so as to spell book, key, &c.; then they were mixed up in a heap and a sign was made for her to arrange them herself so as to express the words book, key, &c.; and she did so.
‘Hitherto, the process had been mechanical, and the success about as great as teaching a very knowing dog a variety of tricks. The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated everything her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her: her intellect began to work: she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make up a sign of anything that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot: it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome; and that henceforward nothing but patient and persevering, but plain and straightforward, efforts were to be used.
“Allora i suoi poteri mentali, fino ad allora sviluppatisi lentamente, iniziarono a crescere rapidamente; e durante quei quattro mesi di salute che trascorse, sembra (tenendo conto delle descrizioni di una madre affettuosa) che abbia dimostrato un notevole grado di intelligenza.”
‘Ma improvvisamente si ammalò di nuovo; la sua malattia imperversò con grande violenza per cinque settimane, durante le quali i suoi occhi e le sue orecchie si infiammarono, suppurarono e ne fuoriuscì il contenuto. Ma anche se la vista e l’udito le furono persi per sempre, le sofferenze di quella povera bambina non finirono. La febbre continuò ad attaccarla per altre sette settimane; per cinque mesi rimase a letto in una stanza buia; ci volle un anno prima che potesse camminare da sola, e due anni prima che potesse stare seduta tutto il giorno. Si notò allora che il suo senso dell’olfatto era quasi completamente distrutto; di conseguenza, anche il suo gusto era molto attenuato.’
Solo all’età di quattro anni la salute fisica della povera bambina sembrò riprendersi, e poté iniziare il suo percorso di apprendistato nella vita e nel mondo.
“Ma che situazione terribile la sua! L’oscurità e il silenzio della tomba la circondavano: nessun sorriso di madre le faceva rispondere con un sorriso, nessuna voce di padre le insegnava a imitare i suoi suoni. I suoi fratelli e sorelle non erano altro che forme di materia che resistevano al suo tocco; non differivano in nulla dagli oggetti presenti nella casa, se non per il calore e la capacità di muoversi. E nemmeno in questi aspetti erano diversi dal cane o dal gatto.”
‘Ma lo spirito immortale che era stato insediato in lei non poteva morire, né essere ferito o mutilato; e sebbene la maggior parte dei suoi canali di comunicazione con il mondo fossero stati interrotti, iniziò a manifestarsi attraverso quelli rimasti. Non appena fu in grado di camminare, cominciò ad esplorare la stanza, e poi tutta la casa; imparò a conoscere la forma, la densità, il peso e il calore di ogni oggetto che riusciva a toccare. Seguiva sua madre e percepiva le sue mani e i suoi bracci mentre svolgeva le varie attività in casa; la sua tendenza ad imitare la spinse a ripetere tutto ciò che faceva lei. Imparò persino a cucire un po’ e a fare il punto.’
Tuttavia, al lettore non sarà certo necessario spiegare che le opportunità di comunicare con lei erano molto, molto limitate; e che gli effetti negativi della sua misera condizione iniziarono presto a manifestarsi. Coloro che non possono essere illuminati dalla ragione possono essere controllati soltanto con la forza; e questo, unito alle sue gravi privazioni, deve averla rapidamente ridotta a una condizione ancora peggiore di quella degli animali che periscono, se non fosse stato per un aiuto tempestivo e inaspettato.
‘In quel momento, fui molto fortunata ad apprendere dell’esistenza di quella bambina e mi affrettai immediatamente a Hannover per vederla. La trovai con una corporatura ben proporzionata; un temperamento nervoso e sanguigno; una testa grande e di bell’aspetto; e tutto il suo organismo in perfette condizioni di salute. I genitori acconsentirono facilmente che venisse a Boston, e il 4 ottobre 1837 la portarono all’Istituto.’
Per un po’ rimase molto confusa; dopo aver aspettato circa due settimane, fino a quando non si fu abituata al suo nuovo ambiente e iniziò a conoscere meglio le persone che vi vivevano, si provò a insegnarle dei segni convenzionali attraverso i quali potesse scambiare pensieri con gli altri.
Esistevano due modi per farla adottare: o continuare a sviluppare un linguaggio di segni basato sulla lingua naturale che lei aveva già iniziato a utilizzare, oppure insegnarle il linguaggio puramente arbitrario comunemente in uso, cioè fornirle un segno per ogni singola cosa, o farle acquisire la conoscenza delle lettere attraverso le quali potesse esprimere l’idea dell’esistenza, nonché del modo e delle condizioni di tale esistenza. Il primo metodo sarebbe stato semplice, ma molto inefficace; il secondo sembrava molto difficile, ma, se riuscito, molto efficace. Pertanto, decisi di provare il secondo.
“I primi esperimenti furono condotti utilizzando oggetti di uso comune, come coltelli, forchette, cucchiai, chiavi, ecc., e attaccandovi etichette con i loro nomi stampati in caratteri rialzati. Lei li esaminava con grande attenzione e, naturalmente, presto si rese conto che le linee curve presenti su ‘cucchiaio’ erano molto diverse da quelle presenti su ‘chiave’, proprio come la forma stessa del cucchiaio differiva da quella della chiave.”
Poi le furono date delle piccole etichette separate, su cui erano stampate le stesse parole; presto si rese conto che assomigliavano a quelle attaccate agli oggetti. Per dimostrare di aver notato questa somiglianza, mise l’etichetta “chiave” accanto alla chiave e l’etichetta “cucchiaio” accanto al cucchiaio. In questo momento fu incoraggiata dal segno naturale di approvazione: le diedero una pacca sulla testa.
Lo stesso processo fu poi ripetuto con tutti gli oggetti che lei era in grado di gestire; imparò molto facilmente a posizionarvi le etichette corrette. Tuttavia, era evidente che l’unico tipo di attività intellettuale che svolgeva fosse quello dell’imitazione e della memoria. Ricordava che l’etichetta “libro” veniva posta su un libro, e ripeteva il processo prima attraverso l’imitazione, poi attraverso la memoria, motivata soltanto dall’desiderio di essere approvata, ma apparentemente senza alcuna percezione intellettuale del rapporto che esisteva tra quelle cose.
Dopo un po’, invece di etichette, le singole lettere le venivano date su pezzi di carta separati; queste venivano disposte una accanto all’altra in modo da formare le parole “libro”, “chiave”, ecc.; poi venivano mescolate insieme e le veniva dato un segnale per che lei stessa le sistemasse in modo corretto, al fine di comporre nuovamente le parole desiderate; ed ella lo faceva.
Fino ad allora, il processo era stato meccanico, e il successo ottenuto era più o meno paragonabile a quello di insegnare a un cane molto intelligente una serie di trucchi. La povera bambina aveva ascoltato in silenzio, meravigliata, e imitava pazientemente tutto ciò che la sua insegnante faceva; ma ora la .verità iniziò a diventare chiara davanti ai suoi occhi: il suo intelletto cominciò a funzionare. Capì che esisteva un modo per creare da sola dei segni che rappresentassero ciò che aveva nella mente e mostrarli ad altri esseri umani. All’improvviso, il suo volto si illuminò di un’espressione umana: non era più un cane né un pappagallo. Era uno spirito immortale, desideroso di stabilire un nuovo legame con altri spiriti! Riuscii quasi a individuare esattamente il momento in cui questa .verità le divenne chiara e illuminò il suo volto; vidi che l’ostacolo principale era stato superato. E che, da quel momento in poi, sarebbero stati necessari soltanto sforzi pazienti e costanti, semplici e diretti.
‘The result thus far, is quickly related, and easily conceived; but not so was the process; for many weeks of apparently unprofitable labour were passed before it was effected.
‘When it was said above that a sign was made, it was intended to say, that the action was performed by her teacher, she feeling his hands, and then imitating the motion.
‘The next step was to procure a set of metal types, with the different letters of the alphabet cast upon their ends; also a board, in which were square holes, into which holes she could set the types; so that the letters on their ends could alone be felt above the surface.
‘Then, on any article being handed to her, for instance, a pencil, or a watch, she would select the component letters, and arrange them on her board, and read them with apparent pleasure.
‘She was exercised for several weeks in this way, until her vocabulary became extensive; and then the important step was taken of teaching her how to represent the different letters by the position of her fingers, instead of the cumbrous apparatus of the board and types. She accomplished this speedily and easily, for her intellect had begun to work in aid of her teacher, and her progress was rapid.
‘This was the period, about three months after she had commenced, that the first report of her case was made, in which it was stated that “she has just learned the manual alphabet, as used by the deaf mutes, and it is a subject of delight and wonder to see how rapidly, correctly, and eagerly, she goes on with her labours. Her teacher gives her a new object, for instance, a pencil, first lets her examine it, and get an idea of its use, then teaches her how to spell it by making the signs for the letters with her own fingers: the child grasps her hand, and feels her fingers, as the different letters are formed; she turns her head a little on one side like a person listening closely; her lips are apart; she seems scarcely to breathe; and her countenance, at first anxious, gradually changes to a smile, as she comprehends the lesson. She then holds up her tiny fingers, and spells the word in the manual alphabet; next, she takes her types and arranges her letters; and last, to make sure that she is right, she takes the whole of the types composing the word, and places them upon or in contact with the pencil, or whatever the object may be.”
‘The whole of the succeeding year was passed in gratifying her eager inquiries for the names of every object which she could possibly handle; in exercising her in the use of the manual alphabet; in extending in every possible way her knowledge of the physical relations of things; and in proper care of her health.
‘At the end of the year a report of her case was made, from which the following is an extract.
‘“It has been ascertained beyond the possibility of doubt, that she cannot see a ray of light, cannot hear the least sound, and never exercises her sense of smell, if she have any. Thus her mind dwells in darkness and stillness, as profound as that of a closed tomb at midnight. Of beautiful sights, and sweet sounds, and pleasant odours, she has no conception; nevertheless, she seems as happy and playful as a bird or a lamb; and the employment of her intellectual faculties, or the acquirement of a new idea, gives her a vivid pleasure, which is plainly marked in her expressive features. She never seems to repine, but has all the buoyancy and gaiety of childhood. She is fond of fun and frolic, and when playing with the rest of the children, her shrill laugh sounds loudest of the group.
‘“When left alone, she seems very happy if she have her knitting or sewing, and will busy herself for hours; if she have no occupation, she evidently amuses herself by imaginary dialogues, or by recalling past impressions; she counts with her fingers, or spells out names of things which she has recently learned, in the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes. In this lonely self-communion she seems to reason, reflect, and argue; if she spell a word wrong with the fingers of her right hand, she instantly strikes it with her left, as her teacher does, in sign of disapprobation; if right, then she pats herself upon the head, and looks pleased. She sometimes purposely spells a word wrong with the left hand, looks roguish for a moment and laughs, and then with the right hand strikes the left, as if to correct it.
‘“During the year she has attained great dexterity in the use of the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes; and she spells out the words and sentences which she knows, so fast and so deftly, that only those accustomed to this language can follow with the eye the rapid motions of her fingers.
‘“But wonderful as is the rapidity with which she writes her thoughts upon the air, still more so is the ease and accuracy with which she reads the words thus written by another; grasping their hands in hers, and following every movement of their fingers, as letter after letter conveys their meaning to her mind. It is in this way that she converses with her blind playmates, and nothing can more forcibly show the power of mind in forcing matter to its purpose than a meeting between them. For if great talent and skill are necessary for two pantomimes to paint their thoughts and feelings by the movements of the body, and the expression of the countenance, how much greater the difficulty when darkness shrouds them both, and the one can hear no sound.
‘“When Laura is walking through a passage-way, with her hands spread before her, she knows instantly every one she meets, and passes them with a sign of recognition: but if it be a girl of her own age, and especially if it be one of her favourites, there is instantly a bright smile of recognition, a twining of arms, a grasping of hands, and a swift telegraphing upon the tiny fingers; whose rapid evolutions convey the thoughts and feelings from the outposts of one mind to those of the other. There are questions and answers, exchanges of joy or sorrow, there are kissings and partings, just as between little children with all their senses.”
“Il risultato ottenuto finora è facilmente comprensibile e legato a processi rapidi; ma lo stesso non si può dire per il processo stesso: furono necessarie molte settimane di lavoro apparentemente infruttuoso prima che venisse raggiunto l’obiettivo.”
Quando si è detto sopra che fu fatto un segno, ciò intendeva indicare che l’azione fu eseguita dal suo insegnante: lei sentì le sue mani e poi imitò quel movimento.
Il passo successivo fu procurarsi un insieme di caratteri metallici, sui quali erano incastredate le diverse lettere dell’alfabeto; inoltre, si acquistò anche una tavola dotata di fori quadrati, nei quali questi caratteri potevano essere inseriti, in modo che le lettere fossero percepite solamente attraverso la superficie della tavola.
Allora, ogni volta che le veniva dato un oggetto – ad esempio una penna o un orologio – lei selezionava le lettere che lo componevano, le disporreva sulla sua lavagna e le leggeva con evidente piacere.
Fu sottoposta a questo tipo di esercizi per diverse settimane, fino a quando il suo vocabolario non divenne molto ampio; poi fu compiuto l’importante passo di insegnarle come rappresentare le diverse lettere utilizzando la posizione delle sue dita, invece dell’ingombrante strumentazione costituita da lavagna e caratteri tipografici. Riuscì a imparare questo con rapidità ed facilità, poiché il suo intelletto aveva iniziato ad aiutare l’insegnante, permettendole di progredire molto velocemente.
“Fu in questo periodo, circa tre mesi dopo l’inizio dei suoi studi, che fu presentato il primo rapporto sul suo caso. Vi si affermava che ‘aveva appena imparato l’alfabeto manuale utilizzato dai sordomuti, e era davvero meraviglioso vedere con quanta rapidità, precisione e entusiasmo proseguisse i suoi esercizi. La sua insegnante le forniva un nuovo oggetto, ad esempio una matita; prima le permetteva di esaminarlo per farsi un’idea del suo utilizzo, poi le insegnava a scriverne la parola utilizzando i segni delle lettere con le proprie dita. La bambina afferrava la sua mano e sentiva le sue dita mentre formavano le diverse lettere; girava leggermente la testa da un lato, come se ascoltasse attentamente; le labbra erano dischiuse, sembrava quasi non respirare. Il suo viso, inizialmente ansioso, si trasformava gradualmente in un sorriso man mano che comprendeva il concetto. Poi sollevava le sue piccole dita e scriveva la parola nell’alfabeto manuale; successivamente prendeva i caratteri tipografici e li disporreva nella giusta sequenza; infine, per verificare di aver fatto correttamente, prendeva tutti i caratteri che componevano la parola e li posizionava sopra o a contatto con la matita, o qualsiasi altro oggetto fosse utilizzato’.”
L’intero anno successivo fu trascorso soddisfacendo le sue curiose domande riguardo ai nomi di ogni oggetto che potesse manipolare; insegnandole l’uso dell’alfabeto manuale; ampliando in tutti i modi possibili la sua conoscenza delle relazioni fisiche tra le cose; e prendendosi cura adeguatamente della sua salute.
Alla fine dell’anno fu redatto un rapporto sul suo caso; di seguito ne è riportato un estratto.
“È stato accertato al di là di ogni possibilità di >dubbio che lei non riesce a vedere nemmeno un raggio di luce, non può sentire il minimo suono e probabilmente non possiede nemmeno il senso dell’olfatto. Pertanto la sua mente vive nell’oscurità e nel silenzio, profondi come quelli di una tomba chiusa a mezzanotte. Non ha alcuna concezione di bellezze, suoni dolci o odori piacevoli; tuttavia appare felice e giocosa quanto un uccello o un _agnello. L’utilizzo delle sue facoltà intellettive o l’acquisizione di nuove idee le procurano un piacere vivido, che si riflette chiaramente nei suoi tratti espressivi. Non sembra mai lamentarsi e possiede tutta la spensieratezza e la gioia tipiche dell’infanzia. Le piacciono i giochi e le risate; quando gioca con gli altri bambini, il suo riso acuto risuona più forte di tutti.”
“Quando rimane sola, sembra molto felice quando si dedica al lavoro a maglia o al cucito, e si occupa per ore intere; se non ha nulla da fare, evidentemente si diverte con dialoghi immaginari o ricordando impressioni del passato; conta con le dita o pronuncia i nomi delle cose che ha appena imparato, utilizzando l’alfabeto manuale dei sordomuti. In questa solitaria auto-communione, sembra ragionare, riflettere e discutere; se sbaglia a pronunciare una parola con le dita della mano destra, la corregge immediatamente con quelle della sinistra, proprio come fa il suo insegnante, come segno di disapprovazione; se invece ha ragione, si dà una pacca sulla testa e sembra soddisfatta. A volte, per scherzo, sbaglia apposta a pronunciare una parola con la mano sinistra, ride per un momento in modo malizioso, e poi corregge l’errore con la destra.”
“Durante l’anno ha acquisito grande abilità nell’uso dell’alfabeto manuale dei sordomuti; riesce a scrivere le parole e le frasi che conosce in modo così veloce e agile, che solo coloro abituati a questo linguaggio possono seguire con lo sguardo i rapidi movimenti delle sue dita.”
“Ma sebbene sia meravigliosa la velocità con cui scrive i propri pensieri ‘sul vento’, ancora più sorprendente è l’agilità e l’accuratezza con cui legge le parole scritte da altri; afferra le loro mani tra le proprie e segue ogni movimento delle loro dita, mentre lettera dopo lettera quelle parole le vengono trasmesse nella mente. È in questo modo che conversa con i suoi compagni di gioco non vedenti, e nulla dimostra più chiaramente il potere della mente nel far sì che la materia serva ai propri scopi di un incontro tra loro. Infatti, se già sono necessari grande talento e abilità affinché due persone possano esprimere i propri pensieri e sentimenti attraverso i movimenti del corpo e l’espressione del volto, quanto maggiore diventa la difficoltà quando entrambi sono avvolti nell’oscurità e uno di loro non può sentire alcun suono.”
“Quando Laura attraversa un corridoio, con le mani aperte davanti a sé, riconosce immediatamente tutte le persone che incontra e le saluta con un gesto di riconoscimento; ma se si tratta di una ragazza della sua stessa età, soprattutto se è una delle sue preferite, scoppia subito un sorriso radioso, si abbracciano, si stringono le mani e iniziano a comunicare rapidamente attraverso dei segnali fatti con le dita; questi gesti veloci trasmettono i pensieri e i sentimenti da una mente all’altra. Ci sono domande e risposte, scambi di gioia o tristezza, baci e addii, proprio come tra bambini piccoli che utilizzano tutti i loro sensi per comunicare.”
‘During this year, and six months after she had left home, her mother came to visit her, and the scene of their meeting was an interesting one.
‘The mother stood some time, gazing with overflowing eyes upon her unfortunate child, who, all unconscious of her presence, was playing about the room. Presently Laura ran against her, and at once began feeling her hands, examining her dress, and trying to find out if she knew her; but not succeeding in this, she turned away as from a stranger, and the poor woman could not conceal the pang she felt, at finding that her beloved child did not know her.
‘She then gave Laura a string of beads which she used to wear at home, which were recognised by the child at once, who, with much joy, put them around her neck, and sought me eagerly to say she understood the string was from her home.
‘The mother now sought to caress her, but poor Laura repelled her, preferring to be with her acquaintances.
‘Another article from home was now given her, and she began to look much interested; she examined the stranger much closer, and gave me to understand that she knew she came from Hanover; she even endured her caresses, but would leave her with indifference at the slightest signal. The distress of the mother was now painful to behold; for, although she had feared that she should not be recognised, the painful reality of being treated with cold indifference by a darling child, was too much for woman’s nature to bear.
‘After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague idea seemed to flit across Laura’s mind, that this could not be a stranger; she therefore felt her hands very eagerly, while her countenance assumed an expression of intense interest; she became very pale; and then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt and anxiety, and never were contending emotions more strongly painted upon the human face: at this moment of painful uncertainty, the mother drew her close to her side, and kissed her fondly, when at once the truth flashed upon the child, and all mistrust and anxiety disappeared from her face, as with an expression of exceeding joy she eagerly nestled to the bosom of her parent, and yielded herself to her fond embraces.
‘After this, the beads were all unheeded; the playthings which were offered to her were utterly disregarded; her playmates, for whom but a moment before she gladly left the stranger, now vainly strove to pull her from her mother; and though she yielded her usual instantaneous obedience to my signal to follow me, it was evidently with painful reluctance. She clung close to me, as if bewildered and fearful; and when, after a moment, I took her to her mother, she sprang to her arms, and clung to her with eager joy.
‘The subsequent parting between them, showed alike the affection, the intelligence, and the resolution of the child.
‘Laura accompanied her mother to the door, clinging close to her all the way, until they arrived at the threshold, where she paused, and felt around, to ascertain who was near her. Perceiving the matron, of whom she is very fond, she grasped her with one hand, holding on convulsively to her mother with the other; and thus she stood for a moment: then she dropped her mother’s hand; put her handkerchief to her eyes; and turning round, clung sobbing to the matron; while her mother departed, with emotions as deep as those of her child.
‘It has been remarked in former reports, that she can distinguish different degrees of intellect in others, and that she soon regarded, almost with contempt, a new-comer, when, after a few days, she discovered her weakness of mind. This unamiable part of her character has been more strongly developed during the past year.
‘She chooses for her friends and companions, those children who are intelligent, and can talk best with her; and she evidently dislikes to be with those who are deficient in intellect, unless, indeed, she can make them serve her purposes, which she is evidently inclined to do. She takes advantage of them, and makes them wait upon her, in a manner that she knows she could not exact of others; and in various ways shows her Saxon blood.
‘She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried too far, or she becomes jealous. She wants to have her share, which, if not the lion’s, is the greater part; and if she does not get it, she says, “My mother will love me.”
‘Her tendency to imitation is so strong, that it leads her to actions which must be entirely incomprehensible to her, and which can give her no other pleasure than the gratification of an internal faculty. She has been known to sit for half an hour, holding a book before her sightless eyes, and moving her lips, as she has observed seeing people do when reading.
‘She one day pretended that her doll was sick; and went through all the motions of tending it, and giving it medicine; she then put it carefully to bed, and placed a bottle of hot water to its feet, laughing all the time most heartily. When I came home, she insisted upon my going to see it, and feel its pulse; and when I told her to put a blister on its back, she seemed to enjoy it amazingly, and almost screamed with delight.
‘Her social feelings, and her affections, are very strong; and when she is sitting at work, or at her studies, by the side of one of her little friends, she will break off from her task every few moments, to hug and kiss them with an earnestness and warmth that is touching to behold.
‘When left alone, she occupies and apparently amuses herself, and seems quite contented; and so strong seems to be the natural tendency of thought to put on the garb of language, that she often soliloquizes in the finger language, slow and tedious as it is. But it is only when alone, that she is quiet: for if she becomes sensible of the presence of any one near her, she is restless until she can sit close beside them, hold their hand, and converse with them by signs.
“Durante quest’anno, sei mesi dopo che se n’era andata da >casa, sua madre venne a trovarla, e la scena del loro incontro fu davvero interessante.”
La madre rimase lì per un po’, guardando con occhi pieni di lacrime il suo sfortunato bambino, che, ignaro della sua presenza, giocava nella stanza. Poco dopo Laura le corse incontro; iniziò immediatamente a esaminare le sue mani, a controllare il suo vestito, cercando di capire se la riconoscesse. Ma non riuscendoci, si allontanò come se fosse una sconosciuta. La povera donna non poté nascondere il dolore che provava nel constatare che il suo adorato bambino non la riconosceva.
Lei allora diede a Laura una collana di perle che lei indossava a >casa; la collana fu riconosciuta immediatamente dal >bambino, il quale, con grande gioia, se la mise al collo e venne subito da me per dirmi che capiva che quella collana proveniva dalla sua >casa.
“La madre cercò di accarezzarla, ma povera Laura la respinse, preferendo stare con le sue conoscenti.”
Le fu dato un altro articolo proveniente da >casa, e sembrò molto interessata; esaminò attentamente quella sconosciuta e mi fece capire che sapeva che proveniva da Hannover; addirittura sopportò le sue carezze, ma se ne andava con indifferenza al minimo segnale. La sofferenza della madre era davvero insopportabile da vedere: poiché, sebbene temesse di non essere riconosciuta, la dolorosa realtà di essere trattata con fredda indifferenza da una cara >bambina era troppo per la natura femminile.
Dopo un po’, quando la madre la prese di nuovo tra le braccia, a Laura sembrò balenare nella mente l’idea vaga che quella persona non potesse essere uno sconosciuto; perciò esaminò con grande attenzione le sue mani, mentre il suo volto assumeva un’espressione di intenso interesse. Diventò molto pallida, poi improvvisamente rossa; la >speranza sembrava lottare contro la >dubbio e l’ansia. Mai prima d’allora emozioni così contrastanti erano state così evidenti sul volto umano. In quel momento di dolorosa incertezza, la madre la strinse a sé e la baciò con affetto; all’istante, la verità le fu rivelata, e ogni sospetto e ansia scomparvero dal suo viso. Con un’espressione di immensa gioia, si rifugiò tra le braccia della sua madre, abbandonandosi alle sue tenere carezze.
Dopo questo, le perle furono completamente ignorate; i giocattoli che le venivano offerti furono del tutto trascurati; i suoi compagni di gioco, per i quali poco prima aveva lasciato volentieri lo sconosciuto, ora cercavano invano di attirarla lontano da sua madre; e sebbene obbedisse immediatamente al mio segnale di seguirmi, era evidente che lo facesse con grande riluttanza. Si aggrappava a me stretta, come se fosse confusa e spaventata; e quando, dopo un po’, la portai da sua madre, lei si gettò tra le sue braccia, abbracciandola con gioia intensa.
La successiva separazione tra loro dimostrò ancora una volta l’affetto, l’intelligenza e la determinazione di quel bambino.
“Laura accompagnò sua madre fino alla porta, tenendosi stretta a lei per tutto il cammino, fino a quando non raggiunsero la soglia. Lì si fermò e guardò intorno per verificare chi ci fosse nelle vicinanze. Vedendo la governante, di cui le era molto affezionata, le prese una mano con una delle sue e continuò a stringere forte quella di sua madre con l’altra; rimase così per un momento, poi lasciò andare la mano di sua madre, si coprì gli occhi con il fazzoletto e, girandosi, si abbracciò singhiozzando alla governante; mentre sua madre se ne andava, provando emozioni altrettanto profonde quelle della sua bambina.”
“È stato osservato in precedenti relazioni che lei è in grado di distinguere diversi gradi di intelligenza negli altri; inoltre, dopo pochi giorni, considerava quasi con disprezzo chiunque arrivasse nuovo, quando scopriva la loro debolezza mentale. Questo aspetto poco gradevole del suo carattere si è ulteriormente accentuato nell’ultimo anno.”
“Scelge per i suoi amici e compagni quei bambini che sono intelligenti e che riescono a conversare meglio con lei; evidentemente non le piace stare in compagnia di coloro che mancano di intelligenza, a meno che non possa sfruttarli ai propri fini, cosa che sembra essere propensa a fare. Sfrutta loro a proprio vantaggio, li fa servirla in modi che sa bene di non poter pretendere dagli altri; e in vari modi mostra il suo sangue sassone.”
Le piace che gli altri bambini siano notati e accarezzati dagli insegnanti e da coloro che rispetta; ma questo non deve essere esagerato, altrimenti diventa gelosa. Vuole avere la sua parte, che, se non è quella del “leone”, è comunque la più grande; e se non la ottiene, dice: “Mia madre mi amerà”.
La sua tendenza all’imitazione è così forte che la spinge ad compiere azioni che devono essere del tutto incomprensibili per lei, e le procurano solo il piacere di soddisfare una facoltà interiore. È stato notato che possa stare seduta per mezz’ora, tenendo un libro davanti ai suoi occhi ciechi e muovendo le labbra, imitando ciò che vede fare alle persone quando leggono.
Un giorno fece finta che la sua bambola fosse malata; si comportò come se dovesse curarla e darle le medicine, poi la mise con cura a letto e posizionò accanto a lei una bottiglia d’acqua calda, ridendo tutto il tempo allegramente. Quando tornai a casa, insistette affinché andassi a controllare come stava e le misurassi il polso; quando le dissi di farle un impacco sul dorso, sembrò divertirsi moltissimo e quasi gridò per la gioia.
I suoi sentimenti sociali e le sue affezioni sono molto forti; e quando è seduta a lavorare o a studiare, accanto a uno dei suoi piccoli amici, interrompe spesso il suo compito per abbracciarli e baciarli con una sincerità e un calore davvero commoventi.
‘Quando rimane sola, si occupa e, a quanto pare, si diverte da sola, sembrando davvero molto contenta; ed è così forte la tendenza naturale del pensiero a manifestarsi attraverso il linguaggio, che spesso si intrattiene in soliloqui utilizzando il linguaggio dei segni, per quanto lento e noioso possa essere. Ma è solo quando è sola che rimane tranquilla: perché se si rende conto della presenza di qualcuno nelle vicinanze, diventa inquieta finché non riesce a sedersi accanto a loro, prendere loro la mano e comunicare con loro attraverso i segni.’
‘In her intellectual character it is pleasing to observe an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and a quick perception of the relations of things. In her moral character, it is beautiful to behold her continual gladness, her keen enjoyment of existence, her expansive love, her unhesitating confidence, her sympathy with suffering, her conscientiousness, truthfulness, and hopefulness.’
Such are a few fragments from the simple but most interesting and instructive history of Laura Bridgman. The name of her great benefactor and friend, who writes it, is Dr. Howe. There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who, after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference.
A further account has been published by Dr. Howe, since the report from which I have just quoted. It describes her rapid mental growth and improvement during twelve months more, and brings her little history down to the end of last year. It is very remarkable, that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep. And it has been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and confused manner on her fingers: just as we should murmur and mutter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances.
I turned over the leaves of her Diary, and found it written in a fair legible square hand, and expressed in terms which were quite intelligible without any explanation. On my saying that I should like to see her write again, the teacher who sat beside her, bade her, in their language, sign her name upon a slip of paper, twice or thrice. In doing so, I observed that she kept her left hand always touching, and following up, her right, in which, of course, she held the pen. No line was indicated by any contrivance, but she wrote straight and freely.
She had, until now, been quite unconscious of the presence of visitors; but, having her hand placed in that of the gentleman who accompanied me, she immediately expressed his name upon her teacher’s palm. Indeed her sense of touch is now so exquisite, that having been acquainted with a person once, she can recognise him or her after almost any interval. This gentleman had been in her company, I believe, but very seldom, and certainly had not seen her for many months. My hand she rejected at once, as she does that of any man who is a stranger to her. But she retained my wife’s with evident pleasure, kissed her, and examined her dress with a girl’s curiosity and interest.
She was merry and cheerful, and showed much innocent playfulness in her intercourse with her teacher. Her delight on recognising a favourite playfellow and companion—herself a blind girl—who silently, and with an equal enjoyment of the coming surprise, took a seat beside her, was beautiful to witness. It elicited from her at first, as other slight circumstances did twice or thrice during my visit, an uncouth noise which was rather painful to hear. But of her teacher touching her lips, she immediately desisted, and embraced her laughingly and affectionately.
I had previously been into another chamber, where a number of blind boys were swinging, and climbing, and engaged in various sports. They all clamoured, as we entered, to the assistant-master, who accompanied us, ‘Look at me, Mr. Hart! Please, Mr. Hart, look at me!’ evincing, I thought, even in this, an anxiety peculiar to their condition, that their little feats of agility should be seen. Among them was a small laughing fellow, who stood aloof, entertaining himself with a gymnastic exercise for bringing the arms and chest into play; which he enjoyed mightily; especially when, in thrusting out his right arm, he brought it into contact with another boy. Like Laura Bridgman, this young child was deaf, and dumb, and blind.
Dr. Howe’s account of this pupil’s first instruction is so very striking, and so intimately connected with Laura herself, that I cannot refrain from a short extract. I may premise that the poor boy’s name is Oliver Caswell; that he is thirteen years of age; and that he was in full possession of all his faculties, until three years and four months old. He was then attacked by scarlet fever; in four weeks became deaf; in a few weeks more, blind; in six months, dumb. He showed his anxious sense of this last deprivation, by often feeling the lips of other persons when they were talking, and then putting his hand upon his own, as if to assure himself that he had them in the right position.
‘His thirst for knowledge,’ says Dr. Howe, ‘proclaimed itself as soon as he entered the house, by his eager examination of everything he could feel or smell in his new location. For instance, treading upon the register of a furnace, he instantly stooped down, and began to feel it, and soon discovered the way in which the upper plate moved upon the lower one; but this was not enough for him, so lying down upon his face, he applied his tongue first to one, then to the other, and seemed to discover that they were of different kinds of metal.
‘His signs were expressive: and the strictly natural language, laughing, crying, sighing, kissing, embracing, &c., was perfect.
‘Some of the analogical signs which (guided by his faculty of imitation) he had contrived, were comprehensible; such as the waving motion of his hand for the motion of a boat, the circular one for a wheel, &c.
‘The first object was to break up the use of these signs and to substitute for them the use of purely arbitrary ones.
‘Profiting by the experience I had gained in the other cases, I omitted several steps of the process before employed, and commenced at once with the finger language. Taking, therefore, several articles having short names, such as key, cup, mug, &c., and with Laura for an auxiliary, I sat down, and taking his hand, placed it upon one of them, and then with my own, made the letters key. He felt my hands eagerly with both of his, and on my repeating the process, he evidently tried to imitate the motions of my fingers. In a few minutes he contrived to feel the motions of my fingers with one hand, and holding out the other he tried to imitate them, laughing most heartily when he succeeded. Laura was by, interested even to agitation; and the two presented a singular sight: her face was flushed and anxious, and her fingers twining in among ours so closely as to follow every motion, but so slightly as not to embarrass them; while Oliver stood attentive, his head a little aside, his face turned up, his left hand grasping mine, and his right held out: at every motion of my fingers his countenance betokened keen attention; there was an expression of anxiety as he tried to imitate the motions; then a smile came stealing out as he thought he could do so, and spread into a joyous laugh the moment he succeeded, and felt me pat his head, and Laura clap him heartily upon the back, and jump up and down in her joy.
Nel suo carattere intellettuale, è piacevole osservare una sete insaziabile di conoscenza e una rapida capacità di comprendere le relazioni tra le cose. Nel suo carattere morale, è bello notare la sua costante felicità, il suo profondo godimento dell’esistenza, il suo amore generoso, la sua fiducia senza riserve, la sua compassione per chi soffre, la sua coscienziosità, la sua onestà e la sua speranza.
Ecco alcuni frammenti di quella semplice, ma al contempo molto interessante e istruttiva storia di Laura Bridgman. Il nome del suo grande benefattore e amico, che ne ha scritto, è il dottor Howe. Non credo ci siano molte persone che, dopo aver letto questi passaggi, possano ancora ascoltare quel nome con indifferenza.
Un ulteriore resoconto è stato pubblicato dal dottor Howe, successivamente al rapporto che ho appena citato. Descrive la sua rapida crescita mentale e i progressi che ha fatto nei dodici mesi successivi, portando così la sua breve storia fino alla fine dello scorso anno. È davvero notevole: proprio come noi sogniamo a parole e intratteniamo conversazioni immaginarie, parlando sia per noi stessi che per quelle “ombre” che ci appaiono nelle visioni della notte, anche lei, non avendo parole a disposizione, utilizza l’alfabeto fatto di dita durante il [sogno. Inoltre, è stato accertato che quando il suo sonno viene interrotto e disturbato da >sogni intensi, esprime i propri pensieri in modo irregolare e confuso attraverso i movimenti delle dita: proprio come noi potremmo mormorarli in modo indistinto, nelle stesse circostanze.
Ho sfogliato le pagine del suo Diario e ho notato che era scritto con una grafia chiara e regolare, in termini facilmente comprensibili senza alcuna spiegazione aggiuntiva. Quando ho detto di voler vedere come scrivesse ancora, l’insegnante seduta accanto a lei le ha chiesto, nella loro lingua, di firmare il proprio nome su un foglietto di carta, due o tre volte. Mentre lo faceva, ho osservato che teneva sempre la mano sinistra a contatto con quella destra, nella quale naturalmente impugnava la penna. Non c’era alcun sistema particolare per guidare la sua scrittura; scriveva dritta e senza difficoltà.
Fino ad ora, lei non si era affatto resa conto della presenza dei visitatori; ma, dopo aver messo la sua mano in quella del signore che mi accompagnava, immediatamente pronunciò il suo nome sul palmo della mia moglie. Infatti, il suo senso del tatto è ormai così acuto che, una volta conosciuta una persona, riesce a riconoscerla dopo quasi qualsiasi intervallo di tempo. Credo che questo signore fosse già stato in sua compagnia in passato, ma molto di rado; sicuramente non la vedeva da molti mesi. Rifiutò immediatamente la mia mano, come fa con qualsiasi uomo le sia sconosciuto. Ma tenne quella di mia moglie con evidente piacere, la baciò e esaminò il suo abito con la curiosità e l’interesse tipici di una ragazza.
Era allegra e spensierata, e mostrava una grande innocente vivacità nel suo rapporto con l’insegnante. La sua gioia nel riconoscere un compagno di giochi e di compagnia preferito – lei stessa una ragazza non vedente – che, in silenzio e con lo stesso piacere, si sedeva accanto a lei aspettando la sorpresa, era davvero bella da vedere. All’inizio, come altre piccole circostanze avevano fatto due o tre volte durante la mia visita, emise un suono rozzo che risultava piuttosto sgradevole da ascoltare. Ma non appena l’insegnante le toccò le labbra, smise immediatamente e abbracciò l’insegnante ridendo e con affetto.
In precedenza ero entrato in un’altra stanza, dove numerosi ragazzi non vedenti si dondolavano, scalavano e praticavano vari sport. Non appena entrammo, tutti gridarono all’assistente del maestro che ci accompagnava: “Guardatemi, signor Hart! Per favore, guardatemi!” Sembrava che, anche in questo contesto, provassero un’ansia tipica della loro condizione: volevano assolutamente che i loro piccoli gesti di agilità venissero visti. Tra di loro c’era un bambino che rideva sempre; stava da parte e si divertiva a eseguire esercizi ginnici che coinvolgevano braccia e torace. Gli piaceva molto farlo, soprattutto quando, spingendo in avanti il braccio destro, lo faceva entrare in contatto con un altro ragazzo. Come Laura Bridgman, anche questo giovane bambino era sordo, muto e cieco.
Il resoconto del dottor Howe riguardo alle prime lezioni di questo allievo è così straordinario e strettamente legato alla stessa Laura, che non posso fare a meno di citarne brevemente alcuni passaggi. Posso anticipare che il nome di questo povero ragazzo sia Oliver Caswell; abbia tredici anni; e che fino all’età di tre anni e quattro mesi possedesse tutte le sue facoltà mentali. A quel punto fu colpito dal morbillo scarlatto: in quattro settimane divenne sordo, in altre poche settimane cieco, e dopo sei mesi anche muto. Manifestava un profondo senso di angoscia per questa ultima perdita; spesso toccava le labbra delle persone mentre parlavano, poi si metteva la mano sulle proprie, come per assicurarsi che fossero nella posizione corretta.
“La sua sete di conoscenza,” dice il dottor Howe, “si manifestò non appena entrò in quella casa: esaminava con grande curiosità tutto ciò che poteva toccare o annusare nel suo nuovo ambiente. Ad esempio, avendo calpestato il registro di un forno, si chinò immediatamente per esaminarlo e presto scoprì il modo in cui la lastra superiore si muoveva su quella inferiore; ma questo non gli bastò: si sdraiò a pancia in giù e provò prima con la lingua una lastra e poi l’altra, scoprendo che erano fatte di metalli diversi.”
I suoi gesti erano espressivi; il linguaggio strettamente naturale – ridere, piangere, sospirare, baciare, abbracciare, ecc. – era perfetto.
Alcuni dei segni analogici che aveva inventato, guidato dalla sua capacità di imitazione, erano comprensibili; ad esempio, il movimento ondulatorio della mano per rappresentare il movimento di una barca, o il movimento circolare per indicare una Ruota, e così via.
Il primo obiettivo era quello di interrompere l’uso di questi segni e sostituirli con altri puramente arbitrari.
“Avvalendomi dell’esperienza acquisita in altri casi, ometti diversi passaggi del procedimento che utilizzavo prima e iniziai subito con la lingua dei segni. Presi quindi alcuni oggetti il cui nome era breve – come chiave, tazza, mug, ecc. – e con l’aiuto di Laura mi misi a sedere; presi la sua mano e la posizionai su uno di quegli oggetti, poi con la mia mano feci i segni delle lettere ‘chiave’. Lui osservò attentamente le mie mani con entrambe le sue, e quando ripetei il processo, cercò chiaramente di imitare i movimenti delle mie dita. Dopo pochi minuti riuscì a percepire i movimenti delle mie dita con una mano, mentre con l’altra cercava di imitarli; rideva molto felice ogni volta che ci riusciva. Laura era presente e mostrava un grande interesse; i due insieme formavano una scena davvero strana: il suo viso era arrossato e ansioso, le sue dita si intrecciavano alle nostre seguendo ogni movimento, ma con estrema delicatezza per non intralciarci; mentre Oliver stava attento, con la testa leggermente inclinata, il viso rivolto verso l’alto, la mano sinistra stretta alla mia e la destra tesa in avanti: a ogni movimento delle mie dita il suo volto esprimeva grande attenzione; mostrava ansia quando cercava di imitarli, poi un sorriso appariva sul suo viso quando riusciva nel suo intento, e scoppiava in una risata felice non appena ci riusciva, sentendo me dargli una pacca sulla testa e Laura battergli affettuosamente la schiena, saltando su e giù per la gioia.”
‘He learned more than a half-dozen letters in half an hour, and seemed delighted with his success, at least in gaining approbation. His attention then began to flag, and I commenced playing with him. It was evident that in all this he had merely been imitating the motions of my fingers, and placing his hand upon the key, cup, &c., as part of the process, without any perception of the relation between the sign and the object.
‘When he was tired with play I took him back to the table, and he was quite ready to begin again his process of imitation. He soon learned to make the letters for key, pen, pin; and by having the object repeatedly placed in his hand, he at last perceived the relation I wished to establish between them. This was evident, because, when I made the letters pin, or pen, or cup, he would select the article.
‘The perception of this relation was not accompanied by that radiant flash of intelligence, and that glow of joy, which marked the delightful moment when Laura first perceived it. I then placed all the articles on the table, and going away a little distance with the children, placed Oliver’s fingers in the positions to spell key, on which Laura went and brought the article: the little fellow seemed much amused by this, and looked very attentive and smiling. I then caused him to make the letters bread, and in an instant Laura went and brought him a piece: he smelled at it; put it to his lips; cocked up his head with a most knowing look; seemed to reflect a moment; and then laughed outright, as much as to say, “Aha! I understand now how something may be made out of this.”
‘It was now clear that he had the capacity and inclination to learn, that he was a proper subject for instruction, and needed only persevering attention. I therefore put him in the hands of an intelligent teacher, nothing doubting of his rapid progress.’
Well may this gentleman call that a delightful moment, in which some distant promise of her present state first gleamed upon the darkened mind of Laura Bridgman. Throughout his life, the recollection of that moment will be to him a source of pure, unfading happiness; nor will it shine less brightly on the evening of his days of Noble Usefulness.
The affection which exists between these two—the master and the pupil—is as far removed from all ordinary care and regard, as the circumstances in which it has had its growth, are apart from the common occurrences of life. He is occupied now, in devising means of imparting to her, higher knowledge; and of conveying to her some adequate idea of the Great Creator of that universe in which, dark and silent and scentless though it be to her, she has such deep delight and glad enjoyment.
Ye who have eyes and see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind! Self-elected saints with gloomy brows, this sightless, earless, voiceless child may teach you lessons you will do well to follow. Let that poor hand of hers lie gently on your hearts; for there may be something in its healing touch akin to that of the Great Master whose precepts you misconstrue, whose lessons you pervert, of whose charity and sympathy with all the world, not one among you in his daily practice knows as much as many of the worst among those fallen sinners, to whom you are liberal in nothing but the preachment of perdition!
As I rose to quit the room, a pretty little child of one of the attendants came running in to greet its father. For the moment, a child with eyes, among the sightless crowd, impressed me almost as painfully as the blind boy in the porch had done, two hours ago. Ah! how much brighter and more deeply blue, glowing and rich though it had been before, was the scene without, contrasting with the darkness of so many youthful lives within!
At SOUTH BOSTON, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered together. One of these, is the State Hospital for the insane; admirably conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical, and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper Asylum at Hanwell. ‘Evince a desire to show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people,’ said the resident physician, as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a Juryman on a Commission of Lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall, with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand. Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and when the weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a matter of course, among a throng of mad-women, black and white, were the physician’s wife and another lady, with a couple of children. These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to perceive at a glance that even their presence there, had a highly beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.
Leaning her head against the chimney-piece, with a great assumption of dignity and refinement of manner, sat an elderly female, in as many scraps of finery as Madge Wildfire herself. Her head in particular was so strewn with scraps of gauze and cotton and bits of paper, and had so many queer odds and ends stuck all about it, that it looked like a bird’s-nest. She was radiant with imaginary jewels; wore a rich pair of undoubted gold spectacles; and gracefully dropped upon her lap, as we approached, a very old greasy newspaper, in which I dare say she had been reading an account of her own presentation at some Foreign Court.
Imparò più di mezza dozzina di lettere in mezz’ora, e sembrava molto soddisfatto del proprio successo, almeno nel ricevere approvazione. Poi la sua attenzione iniziò a declinare, così cominciai a giocare con lui. Era evidente che, in tutto ciò, stesse semplicemente imitando i movimenti delle mie dita e posizionava la propria mano sui tasti, sulle lettere, ecc., come parte di quel processo, senza però comprendere affatto il rapporto tra quei segni e gli oggetti reali.
“Quando si stancava di giocare, lo riportavo al tavolo e lui era subito pronto a ricominciare il suo processo di imitazione. Presto imparò a formare le lettere per ‘chiave’, ‘penna’, ‘pin’; e, avendo l’oggetto ripetutamente messo nella sua mano, alla fine comprese la relazione che volevo stabilire tra di essi. Questo fu evidente, perché quando formavo le lettere ‘pin’, ‘pen’ o ‘coppa’, lui selezionava sempre l’articolo corrispondente.”
La percezione di questo rapporto non fu accompagnata da quel bagliore intelligenziale né da quella luce di gioia che avevano caratterizzato il momento meraviglioso in cui Laura lo comprese per la prima volta. Allora misi tutti gli articoli sul tavolo e, allontanandomi un po’ con i bambini, posizionai le dita di Oliver nelle posizioni giuste per scrivere la parola “key”; Laura andò subito a prendere l’articolo corrispondente. Il piccolo sembrava molto divertito e appariva molto attento e sorridente. Poi gli feci scrivere la parola “bread”, e in un istante Laura gli portò un pezzo di pane: lui lo annusò, se lo avvicinò alle labbra, alzò la testa con un’espressione molto compresa. Sembrò riflettere per un momento, poi scoppiò a ridere, come per dire: “Ahah! Ora capisco come si possano creare delle cose partendo da queste lettere.”
Ora era chiaro che aveva la capacità e la predisposizione ad imparare; era davvero un soggetto adatto all’insegnamento e gli serviva soltanto un’attenzione costante. Per questo motivo lo affidai a un insegnante competente, senza alcun dubbio sul suo rapido progresso.
Che questo gentiluomo possa considerare quel momento delizioso: fu allora che, per la prima volta, nella mente oscura di Laura Bridgman emerse una vaga promessa riguardo al suo futuro stato. Per tutta la sua vita, il ricordo di quel momento sarà per lui una fonte di pura e duratura felicità; non perderà mai il suo splendore nemmeno negli ultimi anni della sua esistenza, dedicata a opere nobili e utili.
L’affetto che esiste tra questi due – il maestro e la discepola – è ben lontano da ogni tipo di cura o attenzione ordinaria; le circostanze in cui esso è nato sono anch’esse diverse dalle normali esperienze della vita quotidiana. Attualmente, lui si dedica a trovare modi per trasmetterle conoscenze più profonde e per farle comprendere, almeno in parte, il Grande Creatore di quell’universo che, per lei, è oscuro, silenzioso e privo di odori, ma che le procura una gioia così profonda e intensa.
Voi che avete occhi e non vedete, orecchie e non udite; voi che siete come gli ipocriti dai volti tristi, che vi deformate il viso per far credere agli uomini che digiuniate. Imparate una gioia sana e una serena contentezza da coloro che sono sordi, muti e ciechi! Voi, santi autoproclamati con fronti cupi. Questo bambino cieco, sordo e muto può insegnarvi lezioni che sarebbe bene seguire. Lasciate che quella povera mano sua si posi dolcemente sui vostri cuori: forse nel suo tocco curativo c’è qualcosa di simile a quello del Grande Maestro, i cui precetti fraintendete, le cui lezioni distorgete. La sua carità e compassione verso tutto il mondo. Nessuno di voi, nella sua pratica quotidiana, ne conosce quanto molti tra quei peccatori caduti; eppure voi non esitate a predicare loro la rovina!
Mentre mi alzavo per lasciare la stanza, una graziosa piccola >bambina di uno degli assistenti corse dentro per salutare suo padre. In quel momento, quella bambina, con i suoi occhi, in mezzo a quella folla di non vedenti, mi colpì profondamente, proprio come aveva fatto il ragazzo cieco sul portico due ore prima. Ah! Quanto più luminosa e intensamente blu era ora la scena, rispetto alla oscurità di tante giovani vite che vi si trovavano dentro.
A SOUTH BOSTON, come viene chiamata questa zona, in un ambiente perfettamente adatto allo scopo, si trovano riunite diverse istituzioni di beneficenza. Una di queste è l’Ospedale Statale per i malati di mente; gestito in modo eccellente secondo quei principi illuminati di conciliazione e gentilezza che, vent’anni fa, sarebbero stati considerati eretici, e che sono stati applicati con grande successo anche nel nostro ospedale per i poveri a Hanwell. “Dimostrate di voler mostrare fiducia, anche nelle persone malate di mente”, disse il medico residente mentre camminavamo lungo le gallerie, con i suoi pazienti che ci circondavano liberamente. Coloro che negano o dubitano della saggezza di questo principio, dopo averne visto gli effetti, se ancora esistono persone del genere, posso solo dire di sperare di non essere mai chiamato a far parte di una commissione per l’indagine sulla follia le cui vittime siano proprio queste persone; perché, basandomi soltanto su tali prove, sarei sicuramente convinto che abbiano perso la ragione.
Ogni reparto di questa istituzione ha la forma di una lunga galleria o sala, con le camere dei pazienti che si aprono su entrambi i lati. Lì lavorano, leggono, giocano a scacchi e ad altri giochi; e quando il tempo non permette loro di fare esercizio all’aperto, trascorrono la giornata insieme. In una di queste stanze, sedute tranquillamente e come se fosse del tutto naturale, tra una folla di donne pazze, sia nere che bianche, c’erano la moglie del medico e un’altra signora, insieme a due bambini. Queste signore erano eleganti e attraenti; e non era difficile notare, a prima vista, che anche la loro presenza aveva un effetto estremamente benefico sui pazienti che le circondavano.
Appoggiata alla mensola del camino, con un’aria di grande dignità e raffinatezza nel comportamento, sedeva una donna anziana, vestita con gli stracci di abiti eleganti che appartenevano probabilmente a Madge Wildfire stessa. In particolare, la sua testa era coperta da pezzi di garza, cotone e carta; intorno ad essa erano attaccati vari oggetti strani, tanto che sembrava un nido d’uccello. Era adornata con “gioielli” immaginari; indossava un paio di occhiali dorati autentici; e, mentre ci avvicinavamo, lasciò cadere con grazia sulle sue ginocchia un vecchio giornale untuoso. Nel quale, oserei dire, stava leggendo una descrizione della sua presentazione in qualche Corte Straniera.
I have been thus particular in describing her, because she will serve to exemplify the physician’s manner of acquiring and retaining the confidence of his patients.
‘This,’ he said aloud, taking me by the hand, and advancing to the fantastic figure with great politeness—not raising her suspicions by the slightest look or whisper, or any kind of aside, to me: ‘This lady is the hostess of this mansion, sir. It belongs to her. Nobody else has anything whatever to do with it. It is a large establishment, as you see, and requires a great number of attendants. She lives, you observe, in the very first style. She is kind enough to receive my visits, and to permit my wife and family to reside here; for which it is hardly necessary to say, we are much indebted to her. She is exceedingly courteous, you perceive,’ on this hint she bowed condescendingly, ‘and will permit me to have the pleasure of introducing you: a gentleman from England, Ma’am: newly arrived from England, after a very tempestuous passage: Mr. Dickens,—the lady of the house!’
We exchanged the most dignified salutations with profound gravity and respect, and so went on. The rest of the madwomen seemed to understand the joke perfectly (not only in this case, but in all the others, except their own), and be highly amused by it. The nature of their several kinds of insanity was made known to me in the same way, and we left each of them in high good humour. Not only is a thorough confidence established, by those means, between the physician and patient, in respect of the nature and extent of their hallucinations, but it is easy to understand that opportunities are afforded for seizing any moment of reason, to startle them by placing their own delusion before them in its most incongruous and ridiculous light.
Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman, whose manner of dealing with his charges, I have just described. At every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured since the creation of the world.
In the labour department, every patient is as freely trusted with the tools of his trade as if he were a sane man. In the garden, and on the farm, they work with spades, rakes, and hoes. For amusement, they walk, run, fish, paint, read, and ride out to take the air in carriages provided for the purpose. They have among themselves a sewing society to make clothes for the poor, which holds meetings, passes resolutions, never comes to fisty-cuffs or bowie-knives as sane assemblies have been known to do elsewhere; and conducts all its proceedings with the greatest decorum. The irritability, which would otherwise be expended on their own flesh, clothes, and furniture, is dissipated in these pursuits. They are cheerful, tranquil, and healthy.
Once a week they have a ball, in which the Doctor and his family, with all the nurses and attendants, take an active part. Dances and marches are performed alternately, to the enlivening strains of a piano; and now and then some gentleman or lady (whose proficiency has been previously ascertained) obliges the company with a song: nor does it ever degenerate, at a tender crisis, into a screech or howl; wherein, I must confess, I should have thought the danger lay. At an early hour they all meet together for these festive purposes; at eight o’clock refreshments are served; and at nine they separate.
Immense politeness and good breeding are observed throughout. They all take their tone from the Doctor; and he moves a very Chesterfield among the company. Like other assemblies, these entertainments afford a fruitful topic of conversation among the ladies for some days; and the gentlemen are so anxious to shine on these occasions, that they have been sometimes found ‘practising their steps’ in private, to cut a more distinguished figure in the dance.
It is obvious that one great feature of this system, is the inculcation and encouragement, even among such unhappy persons, of a decent self-respect. Something of the same spirit pervades all the Institutions at South Boston.
There is the House of Industry. In that branch of it, which is devoted to the reception of old or otherwise helpless paupers, these words are painted on the walls: ‘WORTHY OF NOTICE. SELF-GOVERNMENT, QUIETUDE, AND PEACE, ARE BLESSINGS.’ It is not assumed and taken for granted that being there they must be evil-disposed and wicked people, before whose vicious eyes it is necessary to flourish threats and harsh restraints. They are met at the very threshold with this mild appeal. All within-doors is very plain and simple, as it ought to be, but arranged with a view to peace and comfort. It costs no more than any other plan of arrangement, but it speaks an amount of consideration for those who are reduced to seek a shelter there, which puts them at once upon their gratitude and good behaviour. Instead of being parcelled out in great, long, rambling wards, where a certain amount of weazen life may mope, and pine, and shiver, all day long, the building is divided into separate rooms, each with its share of light and air. In these, the better kind of paupers live. They have a motive for exertion and becoming pride, in the desire to make these little chambers comfortable and decent.
I do not remember one but it was clean and neat, and had its plant or two upon the window-sill, or row of crockery upon the shelf, or small display of coloured prints upon the whitewashed wall, or, perhaps, its wooden clock behind the door.
Ho descritto con tanta cura questa donna perché rappresenta un esempio perfetto del modo in cui un medico può guadagnarsi e mantenere la fiducia dei propri pazienti.
“Questa,” disse ad alta voce, prendendomi per mano e avvicinandosi con grande cortesia alla figura fantastica; senza suscitare in lei il minimo sospetto con alcun sguardo, sussurro o commento privato: “Questa signora è la padrona di questa dimora, signore. Appartiene a lei; nessun altro ha alcuna responsabilità al riguardo. È un’istituzione molto grande, come potete vedere, e richiede un gran numero di domestici. Come notate, vive nel massimo lusso. Ha la gentilezza di ricevermi e permette anche a mia moglie e alla mia famiglia di risiedere qui; per questo motivo possiamo dire di essere molto in debito con lei. È estremamente cortese, come potete vedere, ” A queste parole fece un inchino condiscendente e continuò: “E mi permetterà il piacere di presentarvi: un gentiluomo inglese, signora. Appena arrivato dall’Inghilterra, dopo un viaggio molto travagliato. Il signor Dickens, la padrona di questa casa!”
Ci scambiammo i saluti più dignitosi con profonda gravità e rispetto, e così proseguì la situazione. Le altre donne pazze sembravano capire perfettamente la battuta (non solo in questo caso, ma in tutti gli altri, tranne nei loro propri), e ne erano molto divertite. La natura dei loro diversi tipi di follia mi fu spiegata nello stesso modo, e lasciammo ognuna di loro in ottimo umore. Non solo si instaura così una completa fiducia tra medico e paziente riguardo alla natura e all’entità delle loro allucinazioni, ma diventa anche facile cogliere qualsiasi momento opportuno per sorprenderle, presentando loro le proprie illusioni nella luce più assurda e ridicola possibile.
Ogni paziente in questo manicomio si siede a tavola ogni giorno con coltello e forchetta; al centro di loro c’è il signore il cui modo di trattare i suoi “pazienti” è quello che ho appena descritto. A ogni pasto, soltanto l’influenza morale impedisce ai più violenti tra loro di tagliare la gola agli altri; tuttavia, l’efficacia di tale influenza è assolutamente certa. E si può dire che essa rappresenti un mezzo efficace di contenimento, se non addirittura di guarigione. Cento volte più efficace, insomma, di tutti quegli strumenti di coercizione – cinture strette, catene e manette – che ignoranza, pregiudizio e crudeltà hanno inventato sin dalla creazione del mondo.
Nel dipartimento del lavoro, a ogni paziente vengono affidati liberamente gli strumenti del suo mestiere, come se fosse una persona sana di mente. Nel giardino e in fattoria, lavorano con zappe, rastrelli e vanghe. Per divertimento, camminano, corrono, pescano, dipingono, leggono e vanno a fare aria in carrozze appositamente predisposte per questo scopo. Hanno anche un’associazione di cucito che realizza abiti per i poveri: tengono riunioni, approvano risoluzioni, ma non arrivano mai alle risse o all’uso di armi come avviene in altre associazioni; conducono tutte le loro attività con la massima decorum. L’irritabilità che altrimenti si riverserebbe su di loro stessi, sui loro vestiti e sulle loro cose, viene dissipata in queste attività. Sono allegri, tranquilli e sani.
Una volta alla settimana organizzano una festa, alla quale il Dottore e la sua famiglia, insieme a tutte le infermiere e gli assistenti, partecipano attivamente. Si alternano danze e marce, suonate dalle note vivaci di un pianoforte; di tanto in tanto qualche signore o signora (la cui abilità musicale è stata precedentemente verificata) delizia tutti con una canzone. E mai, nemmeno nelle situazioni più delicate, la festa degenera in urla o grida. Devo ammettere che proprio in questo avrei temuto il pericolo. Si riuniscono tutti molto presto per questi momenti di gioia; alle otto viene servito il rinfresco e alle nove si separano.
Si osserva ovunque una grande cortesia e buone maniere. Tutti adottano lo stesso tono di conversazione del Dottore; e lui si comporta in modo davvero tipico di un gentiluomo dello stile Chesterfield in mezzo alla compagnia. Come in altre occasioni simili, questi intrattenimenti offrono alle signore argomenti di conversazione per diversi giorni; i gentiluomini, desiderosi ardentemente di distinguersi in queste circostanze, a volte si esercitano in privato per eseguire meglio le loro danze e apparire ancora più eleganti durante le feste.
È evidente che una delle principali caratteristiche di questo sistema sia l’insegnamento e il sostegno, anche verso persone sfortunate, affinché sviluppino un certo senso di rispetto di sé dignitoso. Uno spirito simile permea tutte le istituzioni del South Boston.
Esiste la >Casa dell’Industria. In quella sua sezione dedicata all’accoglienza dei poveri anziani o di quelli in altri modi indifesi, sulle pareti sono dipinte queste parole: “MERITANO ATTENZIONE. L’autogoverno, la tranquillità e la pace sono benedizioni.” Non si presuppone né si dà per scontato che coloro che vi soggiornano debbano essere persone malvagie o cattive; quindi non è necessario minacciarli o imporre loro restrizioni severe. Appena entrati, vengono accolti con questo messaggio gentile. L’interno della casa è molto semplice e sobrio, proprio come dovrebbe essere, ma arredato in modo da favorire la pace e il comfort. Non costa più di qualsiasi altro tipo di sistemazione, ma dimostra una notevole considerazione per coloro che sono costretti a cercare rifugio lì; questo li spinge immediatamente ad essere grati e a comportarsi bene. Invece di essere divisi in grandi stanze lunghe e disordinate, dove le persone potrebbero passare tutto il giorno in uno stato di tristezza e disagio, l’edificio è suddiviso in stanze separate, ognuna con la sua giusta quantità di luce e aria. In queste stanze vivono i poveri più meritevoli; hanno motivo di sforzarsi e di provare orgoglio nel cercare di rendere questi piccoli spazi confortevoli e dignitosi.
Non ricordo niente in particolare, ma l’ambiente era pulito e ordinato: c’era una o due piante sul davanzale della finestra, una fila di stoviglie sugli scaffali, piccoli quadri colorati appesi al muro intonacato, e forse anche un orologio di legno dietro la porta.
The orphans and young children are in an adjoining building separate from this, but a part of the same Institution. Some are such little creatures, that the stairs are of Lilliputian measurement, fitted to their tiny strides. The same consideration for their years and weakness is expressed in their very seats, which are perfect curiosities, and look like articles of furniture for a pauper doll’s-house. I can imagine the glee of our Poor Law Commissioners at the notion of these seats having arms and backs; but small spines being of older date than their occupation of the Board-room at Somerset House, I thought even this provision very merciful and kind.
Here again, I was greatly pleased with the inscriptions on the wall, which were scraps of plain morality, easily remembered and understood: such as ‘Love one another’—‘God remembers the smallest creature in his creation:’ and straightforward advice of that nature. The books and tasks of these smallest of scholars, were adapted, in the same judicious manner, to their childish powers. When we had examined these lessons, four morsels of girls (of whom one was blind) sang a little song, about the merry month of May, which I thought (being extremely dismal) would have suited an English November better. That done, we went to see their sleeping-rooms on the floor above, in which the arrangements were no less excellent and gentle than those we had seen below. And after observing that the teachers were of a class and character well suited to the spirit of the place, I took leave of the infants with a lighter heart than ever I have taken leave of pauper infants yet.
Connected with the House of Industry, there is also an Hospital, which was in the best order, and had, I am glad to say, many beds unoccupied. It had one fault, however, which is common to all American interiors: the presence of the eternal, accursed, suffocating, red-hot demon of a stove, whose breath would blight the purest air under Heaven.
There are two establishments for boys in this same neighbourhood. One is called the Boylston school, and is an asylum for neglected and indigent boys who have committed no crime, but who in the ordinary course of things would very soon be purged of that distinction if they were not taken from the hungry streets and sent here. The other is a House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders. They are both under the same roof, but the two classes of boys never come in contact.
The Boylston boys, as may be readily supposed, have very much the advantage of the others in point of personal appearance. They were in their school-room when I came upon them, and answered correctly, without book, such questions as where was England; how far was it; what was its population; its capital city; its form of government; and so forth. They sang a song too, about a farmer sowing his seed: with corresponding action at such parts as ‘’tis thus he sows,’ ‘he turns him round,’ ‘he claps his hands;’ which gave it greater interest for them, and accustomed them to act together, in an orderly manner. They appeared exceedingly well-taught, and not better taught than fed; for a more chubby-looking full-waistcoated set of boys, I never saw.
The juvenile offenders had not such pleasant faces by a great deal, and in this establishment there were many boys of colour. I saw them first at their work (basket-making, and the manufacture of palm-leaf hats), afterwards in their school, where they sang a chorus in praise of Liberty: an odd, and, one would think, rather aggravating, theme for prisoners. These boys are divided into four classes, each denoted by a numeral, worn on a badge upon the arm. On the arrival of a new-comer, he is put into the fourth or lowest class, and left, by good behaviour, to work his way up into the first. The design and object of this Institution is to reclaim the youthful criminal by firm but kind and judicious treatment; to make his prison a place of purification and improvement, not of demoralisation and corruption; to impress upon him that there is but one path, and that one sober industry, which can ever lead him to happiness; to teach him how it may be trodden, if his footsteps have never yet been led that way; and to lure him back to it if they have strayed: in a word, to snatch him from destruction, and restore him to society a penitent and useful member. The importance of such an establishment, in every point of view, and with reference to every consideration of humanity and social policy, requires no comment.
One other establishment closes the catalogue. It is the House of Correction for the State, in which silence is strictly maintained, but where the prisoners have the comfort and mental relief of seeing each other, and of working together. This is the improved system of Prison Discipline which we have imported into England, and which has been in successful operation among us for some years past.
America, as a new and not over-populated country, has in all her prisons, the one great advantage, of being enabled to find useful and profitable work for the inmates; whereas, with us, the prejudice against prison labour is naturally very strong, and almost insurmountable, when honest men who have not offended against the laws are frequently doomed to seek employment in vain. Even in the United States, the principle of bringing convict labour and free labour into a competition which must obviously be to the disadvantage of the latter, has already found many opponents, whose number is not likely to diminish with access of years.
For this very reason though, our best prisons would seem at the first glance to be better conducted than those of America. The treadmill is conducted with little or no noise; five hundred men may pick oakum in the same room, without a sound; and both kinds of labour admit of such keen and vigilant superintendence, as will render even a word of personal communication amongst the prisoners almost impossible. On the other hand, the noise of the loom, the forge, the carpenter’s hammer, or the stonemason’s saw, greatly favour those opportunities of intercourse—hurried and brief no doubt, but opportunities still—which these several kinds of work, by rendering it necessary for men to be employed very near to each other, and often side by side, without any barrier or partition between them, in their very nature present. A visitor, too, requires to reason and reflect a little, before the sight of a number of men engaged in ordinary labour, such as he is accustomed to out of doors, will impress him half as strongly as the contemplation of the same persons in the same place and garb would, if they were occupied in some task, marked and degraded everywhere as belonging only to felons in jails. In an American state prison or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade myself that I was really in a jail: a place of ignominious punishment and endurance. And to this hour I very much question whether the humane boast that it is not like one, has its root in the true wisdom or philosophy of the matter.
Gli orfani e i bambini piccoli si trovano in un edificio adiacente, separato da questo, ma facente parte della stessa istituzione. Alcuni di loro sono così piccoli che le scale sono progettate su misura per le loro minuscole falcate. Lo stesso riguardo verso la loro giovane età e debolezza si rispecchia anche nei loro sedili, veri e propri oggetti curiosi che sembrano arredi per la casa di una bambola povera. Posso immaginare l’ilarità dei nostri commissari incaricati delle leggi sull’assistenza ai poveri all’idea che questi sedili abbiano bracci e schienali. Ma poiché le piccole spine umane esistevano già molto prima che questi commissari iniziassero a lavorare nell’ufficio di Somerset House, ho ritenuto anche questa soluzione particolarmente misericordiosa e gentile.
Ancora una volta, fui molto soddisfatto delle iscrizioni presenti sulle pareti: erano frammenti di semplici insegnamenti morali, facilmente memorabili e comprensibili; tipo “Amatevi l’un l’altro” o “Dio ricorda anche la creatura più piccola della sua creazione”, nonché consigli diretti tratti dalla natura stessa. I libri e i compiti di questi giovani studenti venivano adattati, con lo stesso criterio sagace, alle loro capacità infantili. Dopo aver esaminato queste lezioni, quattro bambine (una delle quali era cieca) cantarono una piccola canzone sul gioioso mese di maggio, che, a mio parere (essendo estremamente malinconica), sarebbe stata più adatta a un novembre inglese. Una volta terminato questo, andammo a vedere le loro camere da letto al piano di sopra: anche lì gli arredi erano altrettanto eleganti e curati di quelli che avevamo visto sotto. E dopo aver notato che gli insegnanti appartenevano a una classe sociale e avevano un carattere perfettamente adatti allo spirito di quel luogo, mi congedai dai bambini con un cuore più leggero di quanto mai mi fossi congedato da altri bambini poveri.
Connesso alla Casa dell’Industria, c’era anche un ospedale che, per fortuna, era in ottimo stato e aveva molti letti liberi. Tuttavia, presentava lo stesso difetto tipico di tutti gli interni americani: la presenza di quel maledetto, soffocante e rovente demonio del camino, il cui fumo avvelenava l’aria più pura che ci fosse sotto il cielo.
In questo stesso quartiere ci sono due istituti per ragazzi. Uno si chiama Boylston School ed è un rifugio per ragazzi trascurati e indigenti che non hanno commesso alcun crimine, ma che altrimenti, nella normale evoluzione delle cose, verrebbero molto presto tirati fuori dalle strade dove soffrono la fame e mandati qui. L’altro è un Istituto di riformazione per minori delinquenti. Entrambi si trovano sotto lo stesso tetto, ma i due gruppi di ragazzi non entrano mai in contatto tra loro.
I ragazzi della famiglia Boylston, come si può facilmente immaginare, hanno un grande vantaggio sugli altri in termini di aspetto personale. Li trovai nella loro aula e risposero correttamente, senza consultare libri, a domande del tipo: “Dove si trova l’Inghilterra? A che distanza è? Quanti abitanti ha? Qual è la sua capitale? Qual è il suo sistema di governo?” Cantarono anche una canzone su un contadino che semina i suoi semi; durante le parti in cui si dicevano frasi come “Ecco così che semina”, “Lo gira”, “Batte le mani”, loro eseguivano le azioni descritte, il che rendeva la canzone ancora più interessante per loro e li abituava ad agire insieme in modo ordinato. Sembravano davvero molto ben educati. E non credo che ci fossero ragazzi più paffuti di loro, tutti vestiti con giacchetti a vita piena.
I giovani delinquenti non avevano affatto volti così piacevoli; in quell’istituto c’erano molti ragazzi di colore. Li vidi per la prima volta al lavoro (nel fabbricato di cesti e nella produzione di cappelli di foglie di palma), poi a scuola, dove cantavano un inno in lode della Libertà: un argomento strano, e forse anche piuttosto offensivo, per dei prigionieri. Questi ragazzi erano divisi in quattro classi, ognuna contrassegnata da un numero che veniva indossato su una medaglia al braccio. Al arrivo di un nuovo arrivato, veniva inserito nella quarta e ultima classe; se si comportava bene, aveva la possibilità di salire fino alla prima. Lo scopo principale di quest’istituto era rieducare i giovani delinquenti attraverso un trattamento deciso ma gentile e sagace; rendere il loro carcere un luogo di purificazione e miglioramento, anziché di demoralizzazione e corruzione; far loro comprendere che esiste un solo percorso possibile, un’unica attività onesta che possa portarli alla felicità; insegnargli come seguirlo, nel caso in cui i loro passi non avessero mai preso quella direzione; e riportarli su quel sentiero se si fossero allontanati da esso. In breve: salvare quei giovani dalla distruzione e restituirli alla società come membri pentiti e utili. L’importanza di un simile istituto, sotto ogni punto di vista e tenendo conto di tutte le considerazioni legate all’umanità e alla politica sociale, non richiede alcun commento.
Un altro istituto chiude il proprio catalogo. Si tratta della Casa di Correzione dello Stato, dove il silenzio viene rigorosamente mantenuto; tuttavia i detenuti godono del conforto e del sollievo psicologico derivanti dal potersi vedere a vicenda e dal lavorare insieme. Questo è il sistema migliorato di disciplina carceraria che abbiamo introdotto in Inghilterra e che funziona con successo da alcuni anni ormai.
America, essendo un paese nuovo e non sovrapopolato, possiede in tutte le sue prigioni il grande vantaggio di poter offrire ai detenuti lavori utili e redditizi; mentre da noi l’ostacolo legato all’utilizzo del lavoro carcerario è naturalmente molto forte e quasi insormontabile, soprattutto quando uomini onesti che non hanno violato le leggi sono spesso costretti a cercare invano un impiego. Anche negli Stati Uniti il principio di mettere in concorrenza il lavoro dei detenuti con quello dei lavoratori liberi – una concorrenza che ovviamente danneggia questi ultimi – ha già trovato molti oppositori, e il loro numero probabilmente non diminuirà con il passare degli anni.
Proprio per questo motivo, a prima vista, le nostre migliori prigioni sembrerebbero essere gestite meglio di quelle dell’America. Il funzionamento delle macchine è quasi silenzioso; cinquecento uomini possono lavorare nella stessa stanza senza produrre alcun rumore; inoltre, entrambi i tipi di lavoro permettono un controllo estremamente attento e vigile, rendendo quasi impossibile qualsiasi forma di comunicazione personale tra i prigionieri. D’altra parte, il rumore delle macchine da tessere, dei forni, dei martelli dei carpentieri o delle seghe dei muratori favorisce, sebbene in modo rapido e fugace, tali occasioni di contatto: questi lavori, infatti, costringono le persone a stare molto vicine l’una all’altra, spesso fianco a fianco, senza alcuna barriera o separazione. Anche un visitatore, del resto, dovrebbe riflettere bene prima di rendersi conto che uomini impegnati in lavori ordinari, come quelli a cui è abituato fuori dalla prigione, non appaiono affatto diversi da quando svolgono compiti considerati degradanti e riservati ai criminali. In uno stato americano, all’inizio mi è risultato difficile credere di essere davvero in una prigione, un luogo di punizione ignominiosa e sofferenza. E ancora oggi mi chiedo se la presunta “umanità” di queste strutture si basi davvero sulla vera saggezza o filosofia riguardo a tale argomento.
I hope I may not be misunderstood on this subject, for it is one in which I take a strong and deep interest. I incline as little to the sickly feeling which makes every canting lie or maudlin speech of a notorious criminal a subject of newspaper report and general sympathy, as I do to those good old customs of the good old times which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third King George, in respect of her criminal code and her prison regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries on the earth. If I thought it would do any good to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or that their wonderful escapes were effected by the prison-turnkeys who, in those admirable days, had always been felons themselves, and were, to the last, their bosom-friends and pot-companions. At the same time I know, as all men do or should, that the subject of Prison Discipline is one of the highest importance to any community; and that in her sweeping reform and bright example to other countries on this head, America has shown great wisdom, great benevolence, and exalted policy. In contrasting her system with that which we have modelled upon it, I merely seek to show that with all its drawbacks, ours has some advantages of its own.
The House of Correction which has led to these remarks, is not walled, like other prisons, but is palisaded round about with tall rough stakes, something after the manner of an enclosure for keeping elephants in, as we see it represented in Eastern prints and pictures. The prisoners wear a parti-coloured dress; and those who are sentenced to hard labour, work at nail-making, or stone-cutting. When I was there, the latter class of labourers were employed upon the stone for a new custom-house in course of erection at Boston. They appeared to shape it skilfully and with expedition, though there were very few among them (if any) who had not acquired the art within the prison gates.
The women, all in one large room, were employed in making light clothing, for New Orleans and the Southern States. They did their work in silence like the men; and like them were over-looked by the person contracting for their labour, or by some agent of his appointment. In addition to this, they are every moment liable to be visited by the prison officers appointed for that purpose.
The arrangements for cooking, washing of clothes, and so forth, are much upon the plan of those I have seen at home. Their mode of bestowing the prisoners at night (which is of general adoption) differs from ours, and is both simple and effective. In the centre of a lofty area, lighted by windows in the four walls, are five tiers of cells, one above the other; each tier having before it a light iron gallery, attainable by stairs of the same construction and material: excepting the lower one, which is on the ground. Behind these, back to back with them and facing the opposite wall, are five corresponding rows of cells, accessible by similar means: so that supposing the prisoners locked up in their cells, an officer stationed on the ground, with his back to the wall, has half their number under his eye at once; the remaining half being equally under the observation of another officer on the opposite side; and all in one great apartment. Unless this watch be corrupted or sleeping on his post, it is impossible for a man to escape; for even in the event of his forcing the iron door of his cell without noise (which is exceedingly improbable), the moment he appears outside, and steps into that one of the five galleries on which it is situated, he must be plainly and fully visible to the officer below. Each of these cells holds a small truckle bed, in which one prisoner sleeps; never more. It is small, of course; and the door being not solid, but grated, and without blind or curtain, the prisoner within is at all times exposed to the observation and inspection of any guard who may pass along that tier at any hour or minute of the night. Every day, the prisoners receive their dinner, singly, through a trap in the kitchen wall; and each man carries his to his sleeping cell to eat it, where he is locked up, alone, for that purpose, one hour. The whole of this arrangement struck me as being admirable; and I hope that the next new prison we erect in England may be built on this plan.
I was given to understand that in this prison no swords or fire-arms, or even cudgels, are kept; nor is it probable that, so long as its present excellent management continues, any weapon, offensive or defensive, will ever be required within its bounds.
Such are the Institutions at South Boston! In all of them, the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to, as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong Heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand. I have described them at some length; firstly, because their worth demanded it; and secondly, because I mean to take them for a model, and to content myself with saying of others we may come to, whose design and purpose are the same, that in this or that respect they practically fail, or differ.
I wish by this account of them, imperfect in its execution, but in its just intention, honest, I could hope to convey to my readers one-hundredth part of the gratification, the sights I have described, afforded me.
Spero di non essere frainteso su questo argomento, poiché mi interessa profondamente. Non condivido affatto quella morbosa tendenza che trasforma ogni menzogna o discorso sentimentale pronunciato da un criminale notorio in oggetto di articoli sui giornali e di compassione generale; allo stesso modo, non apprezzo quelle vecchie usanze del passato che, anche durante il regno del Terzo Re Giorgio, rendevano l’Inghilterra, per quanto riguarda il codice penale e le norme carcerarie, uno dei paesi più spietati e barbari della terra. Se pensassi che ciò potesse essere di qualche utilità per la generazione futura, darei volentieri il mio consenso alla riesumazione delle ossa di qualsiasi gentiluomo ladro di strada (più “gentile” fosse, più felicemente lo farei) e alla loro esposizione, pezzo dopo pezzo, su cartelli stradali, cancelli o forche, purché ciò potesse ritenersi un modo appropriato per tale scopo. Sono profondamente convinto che questi individui fossero delinquenti completamente inutili e corrotti; che le leggi e le prigioni li abbia resi ancora più inclini al male, o che le loro straordinarie evasioni siano state possibili grazie ai secondini delle carceri, i quali, in quei tempi, erano spesso essi stessi criminali e fino alla fine rimasero loro amici intimi e compagni di bevute. Allo stesso tempo, so bene che la disciplina carceraria rappresenta un aspetto di estrema importanza per qualsiasi comunità; e che l’America abbia dimostrato grande saggezza, bontà e lungimiranza nel riformare il sistema penitenziario e offrire un esempio positivo ad altri paesi in questo campo. Confrontando il nostro sistema con quello americano, intendo semplicemente sottolineare che, nonostante i suoi difetti, anche il nostro possiede dei vantaggi propri.
La casa di correzione che ha dato origine a queste osservazioni non è circondata da mura, come altre prigioni, ma è delimitata da alte staccionate di legno ruvido, simile in qualche modo a un recinto utilizzato per tenere gli elefanti, così come viene raffigurato nelle incisioni e nei dipinti orientali. I prigionieri indossano abiti dai colori vari; quelli condannati a lavori forzati si dedicano alla produzione di chiodi o al taglio della pietra. Quando vi sono stato, questi ultimi erano impegnati nella lavorazione della pietra per la costruzione di una nuova casa di culto in corso di realizzazione a Boston. Sembravano eseguire il loro lavoro con abilità e rapidità, anche se pochi di loro (se ce n’erano) avevano acquisito queste competenze al di fuori delle mura della prigione.
Le donne, riunite in una grande stanza, erano impegnate nella produzione di abiti leggeri per New Orleans e gli Stati del Sud. Lavoravano in silenzio, proprio come gli uomini; e, proprio come loro, venivano sorvegliate dalla persona che aveva contratto il lavoro con loro o da un suo incaricato. Inoltre, erano costantemente esposte al rischio di essere visitate dagli agenti della prigione incaricati di tale compito.
Gli accordi per cucinare, lavare i vestiti e simili sono molto simili a quelli che ho visto nelle case di casa. Il modo in cui vengono sistemati i prigionieri di notte (pratica comune) è diverso dal nostro ed è sia semplice che efficace. Al centro di un’ampia area, illuminata da finestre presenti su tutti e quattro i muri, si trovano cinque livelli di celle, uno sopra l’altro; ogni livello è dotato di una leggera galleria in ferro, accessibile tramite scale dello stesso tipo e materiale, ad eccezione del livello più basso che si trova a terra. Dietro queste celle, una di fronte all’altra e rivolte verso il muro opposto, ci sono altre cinque file di celle, accessibili in modo simile; quindi, se i prigionieri fossero rinchiusi nelle loro celle, un ufficiale posizionato a terra, con le spalle al muro, potrebbe vedere contemporaneamente metà di loro; l’altra metà sarebbe ugualmente sotto la sorveglianza di un altro ufficiale sul lato opposto, e tutto ciò all’interno dello stesso grande ambiente. A meno che questo ufficiale non sia corrotto o si addormenti sul suo posto di guardia, è impossibile per un prigioniero fuggire; infatti, anche nel caso in cui riuscisse ad aprire silenziosamente la porta della sua cella in ferro (cosa estremamente improbabile), non appena uscisse e si trovasse su una delle cinque gallerie adiacenti, sarebbe immediatamente visibile all’ufficiale di sotto. Ogni cella è dotata di un piccolo letto a soppalco, nel quale dorme un solo prigioniero; nient’altro. Il letto è naturalmente molto piccolo e la porta non è solida, ma costituita da una griglia, senza tende o paraventi; quindi il prigioniero all’interno è esposto in ogni momento alla vista e all’ispezione di qualsiasi guardia che possa passare lungo quella galleria, in qualsiasi ora della notte. Ogni giorno i prigionieri ricevono la cena uno per uno attraverso una fessura nel muro della cucina; ognuno porta il proprio pasto nella cella dove dorme, dove viene rinchiuso da solo per un’ora allo scopo di mangiare. L’intero sistema mi è sembrato davvero eccellente e spero che anche la prossima nuova prigione che costruiremo in Inghilterra sia realizzata secondo questo modello.
Mi è stato detto che in questa prigione non vengono conservate spade né armi da fuoco, né nemmeno mazze; inoltre, sembra improbabile che, finché continuerà l’attuale ottimo sistema di gestione, vi sia mai bisogno di alcuna arma, offensiva o difensiva, all’interno delle sue mura.
Ecco quali sono le istituzioni del South Boston! In tutte esse, i cittadini sfortunati o degenerati dello Stato vengono accuratamente istruiti sui loro doveri verso Dio e gli uomini; sono circondati da tutti i mezzi ragionevoli di conforto e felicità che la loro condizione permetta; vengono considerati, come membri della grande famiglia umana, indipendentemente dalle loro sofferenze, povertà o cadute; sono governati dal cuore forte, e non dalla mano forte (sebbene infinitamente più debole). Le ho descritte in dettaglio: innanzitutto perché il loro valore lo richiedeva; e in secondo luogo perché intendo prendere queste istituzioni come modello, e accontentarmi di affermare che altre istituzioni, le quali hanno lo stesso scopo e intento, in questo o quell’aspetto falliscono praticamente o differiscono da esse.
Spero che, nonostante questa descrizione di loro sia imperfetta nella sua esecuzione, ma sincera nelle sue intenzioni, riesca comunque a trasmettere ai miei lettori anche solo un centesimo della soddisfazione e delle emozioni che le scene che ho descritto hanno suscitato in me.
To an Englishman, accustomed to the paraphernalia of Westminster Hall, an American Court of Law is as odd a sight as, I suppose, an English Court of Law would be to an American. Except in the Supreme Court at Washington (where the judges wear a plain black robe), there is no such thing as a wig or gown connected with the administration of justice. The gentlemen of the bar being barristers and attorneys too (for there is no division of those functions as in England) are no more removed from their clients than attorneys in our Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors are, from theirs. The jury are quite at home, and make themselves as comfortable as circumstances will permit. The witness is so little elevated above, or put aloof from, the crowd in the court, that a stranger entering during a pause in the proceedings would find it difficult to pick him out from the rest. And if it chanced to be a criminal trial, his eyes, in nine cases out of ten, would wander to the dock in search of the prisoner, in vain; for that gentleman would most likely be lounging among the most distinguished ornaments of the legal profession, whispering suggestions in his counsel’s ear, or making a toothpick out of an old quill with his penknife.
I could not but notice these differences, when I visited the courts at Boston. I was much surprised at first, too, to observe that the counsel who interrogated the witness under examination at the time, did so sitting. But seeing that he was also occupied in writing down the answers, and remembering that he was alone and had no ‘junior,’ I quickly consoled myself with the reflection that law was not quite so expensive an article here, as at home; and that the absence of sundry formalities which we regard as indispensable, had doubtless a very favourable influence upon the bill of costs.
In every Court, ample and commodious provision is made for the accommodation of the citizens. This is the case all through America. In every Public Institution, the right of the people to attend, and to have an interest in the proceedings, is most fully and distinctly recognised. There are no grim door-keepers to dole out their tardy civility by the sixpenny-worth; nor is there, I sincerely believe, any insolence of office of any kind. Nothing national is exhibited for money; and no public officer is a showman. We have begun of late years to imitate this good example. I hope we shall continue to do so; and that in the fulness of time, even deans and chapters may be converted.
In the civil court an action was trying, for damages sustained in some accident upon a railway. The witnesses had been examined, and counsel was addressing the jury. The learned gentleman (like a few of his English brethren) was desperately long-winded, and had a remarkable capacity of saying the same thing over and over again. His great theme was ‘Warren the ěn_gine_ driver,’ whom he pressed into the service of every sentence he uttered. I listened to him for about a quarter of an hour; and, coming out of court at the expiration of that time, without the faintest ray of enlightenment as to the merits of the case, felt as if I were at home again.
In the prisoner’s cell, waiting to be examined by the magistrate on a charge of theft, was a boy. This lad, instead of being committed to a common jail, would be sent to the asylum at South Boston, and there taught a trade; and in the course of time he would be bound apprentice to some respectable master. Thus, his detection in this offence, instead of being the prelude to a life of infamy and a miserable death, would lead, there was a reasonable hope, to his being reclaimed from vice, and becoming a worthy member of society.
I am by no means a wholesale admirer of our legal solemnities, many of which impress me as being exceedingly ludicrous. Strange as it may seem too, there is undoubtedly a degree of protection in the wig and gown—a dismissal of individual responsibility in dressing for the part—which encourages that insolent bearing and language, and that gross perversion of the office of a pleader for The Truth, so frequent in our courts of law. Still, I cannot help doubting whether America, in her desire to shake off the absurdities and abuses of the old system, may not have gone too far into the opposite extreme; and whether it is not desirable, especially in the small community of a city like this, where each man knows the other, to surround the administration of justice with some artificial barriers against the ‘Hail fellow, well met’ deportment of everyday life. All the aid it can have in the very high character and ability of the Bench, not only here but elsewhere, it has, and well deserves to have; but it may need something more: not to impress the thoughtful and the well-informed, but the ignorant and heedless; a class which includes some prisoners and many witnesses. These institutions were established, no doubt, upon the principle that those who had so large a share in making the laws, would certainly respect them. But experience has proved this hope to be fallacious; for no men know better than the judges of America, that on the occasion of any great popular excitement the law is powerless, and cannot, for the time, assert its own supremacy.
The tone of society in Boston is one of perfect politeness, courtesy, and good breeding. The ladies are unquestionably very beautiful—in face: but there I am compelled to stop. Their education is much as with us; neither better nor worse. I had heard some very marvellous stories in this respect; but not believing them, was not disappointed. Blue ladies there are, in Boston; but like philosophers of that colour and sex in most other latitudes, they rather desire to be thought superior than to be so. Evangelical ladies there are, likewise, whose attachment to the forms of religion, and horror of theatrical entertainments, are most exemplary. Ladies who have a passion for attending lectures are to be found among all classes and all conditions. In the kind of provincial life which prevails in cities such as this, the Pulpit has great influence. The peculiar province of the Pulpit in New England (always excepting the Unitarian Ministry) would appear to be the denouncement of all innocent and rational amusements. The church, the chapel, and the lecture-room, are the only means of excitement excepted; and to the church, the chapel, and the lecture-room, the ladies resort in crowds.
Per un inglese abituato alle formalità di Westminster Hall, un tribunale americano appare altrettanto strano di quanto, suppongo, un tribunale inglese lo sarebbe per un americano. Ad eccezione della Corte Suprema di Washington (dove i giudici indossano toga nera semplice), non esistono parrucche o abiti specifici per l’esercizio della giustizia. Gli avvocati, essendo sia procuratori che avvocati specializzati (poiché in America non c’è una distinzione netta tra queste funzioni come in Inghilterra), non sono più separati dai loro clienti di quanto lo siano gli avvocati presso i nostri tribunali per il risanamento dei debitori insolventi. La giuria si sente a proprio agio, nel limite delle circostanze possibili; il testimone non è affatto distinto dal resto della folla presente in aula, tanto che un estraneo che entrasse durante una pausa del processo avrebbe difficoltà a riconoscerlo. E se si trattasse di un processo penale, nelle nove casi su dieci i suoi occhi si dirigerebbero verso la gabbia dei detenuti, invano: quel “gentiluomo” molto probabilmente si troverebbe tra le figure più distinte della comunità legale, sussurrando consigli all’orecchio del proprio avvocato o preparando una punta di matita con un coltello da tasca.
Non potevo fare a meno di notare queste differenze quando visitai i tribunali di Boston. All’inizio fui anche molto sorpreso nel vedere che l’avvocato che interrogava il testimone lo faceva mentre era seduto; tuttavia, considerando che era anche impegnato a trascrivere le risposte e ricordando che lavorava da solo senza alcun assistente, mi consolai subito pensando che qui il diritto non fosse certo così costoso come nel mio paese; inoltre, l’assenza di molte formalità che noi riteniamo indispensabili doveva sicuramente avere un effetto positivo sulle spese legali.
In ogni Cortile, vengono prese tutte le misure necessarie per garantire un alloggio adeguato ai cittadini. Questo vale in tutta l’America. In ogni istituzione pubblica, il diritto del popolo di partecipare e di interessarsi alle attività che vi si svolgono viene riconosciuto in modo pieno e chiaro. Non ci sono guardie severe che distribuiscano un sorriso superficiale in cambio di pochi penny; né, credo sinceramente, alcuna forma di arroganza da parte delle autorità. Niente viene esposto al pubblico a scopo di lucro; nessun funzionario pubblico agisce come un “intrattenitore”. Negli ultimi anni abbiamo iniziato ad imitare questo buon esempio. Spero che continueremo a farlo; e che, con il passare del tempo, anche i decani e gli altri dirigenti possano cambiare atteggiamento.
Nel tribunale civile si stava discutendo una causa relativa ai danni subiti in un incidente avvenuto su una ferrovia. Gli testimoni erano stati interrogati e gli avvocati stavano rivolgendosi alla giuria. Quell’illustre signore (come alcuni dei suoi colleghi inglesi) era estremamente prolisso nel suo discorso e possedeva la straordinaria capacità di ripetere sempre le stesse cose. Il tema principale del suo intervento era “Warren, il macchinista”, che egli utilizzava in ogni frase che pronunciava. L’ho ascoltato per circa un quarto d’ora; e uscendo dal tribunale, alla fine di quel lasso di tempo, senza aver ottenuto la minima informazione riguardo ai meriti della causa, mi sono sentito come se fossi tornato a casa.
Nella cella del prigioniero, in attesa di essere esaminato dal magistrato con l’accusa di furto, c’era un ragazzo. Questo giovane, invece di essere rinchiuso in una prigione comune, sarebbe stato inviato all’ospedale psichiatrico di South Boston, dove avrebbe imparato un mestiere; col tempo, sarebbe diventato apprendista di qualche rispettabile maestro. Così, la sua scoperta in questo reato, invece di essere il preludio a una vita di disonore e a una morte miserabile, avrebbe potuto portare, c’era una ragionevole speranza, al suo riscatto dal vizio e alla sua integrazione nella società come membro degno.
Non sono affatto un grande ammiratore delle nostre formalità legali, molte delle quali mi sembrano estremamente ridicole. Per quanto possa sembrare strano, c’è indubbiamente un certo grado di protezione nel portare toga e parrucca: l’assunzione di una responsabilità individuale ridotta quando ci si veste per svolgere quel ruolo incoraggia comportamenti insolenti e un linguaggio offensivo, nonché una grave distorsione del compito di chi rappresenta la verità nei tribunali. Tuttavia, non posso fare a meno di dubitare che l’America, nel suo desiderio di eliminare le assurdità e gli abusi del vecchio sistema, non abbia forse esagerato andando nell’estremo opposto; e che non sia auspicabile, soprattutto in una piccola comunità come questa, dove tutti si conoscono, circondare l’amministrazione della giustizia con alcune barriere artificiali contro i comportamenti informali e scortesi della vita quotidiana. Tutto il sostegno che queste formalità possano offrire, grazie al alto livello di professionalità dei giudici, non solo qui ma anche altrove, è senz’altro apprezzabile; tuttavia potrebbe essere necessario qualcosa in più: non tanto per impressionare coloro che pensano con lucidità o sono ben informati, quanto piuttosto gli ignoranti e i negligenti – una categoria che include alcuni detenuti e molti testimoni. Queste istituzioni furono certamente create sulla base del principio che coloro che hanno avuto un ruolo fondamentale nella stesura delle leggi le rispetterebbero sicuramente; ma l’esperienza ha dimostrato che questa speranza è illusoria: nessuno conosce meglio dei giudici americani quanto sia inefficace la legge in momenti di grande agitazione popolare, e quanto essa non possa, in tali circostanze, affermare la propria supremazia.
Lo spirito della società a Boston è caratterizzato da perfetta cortesia, educazione e buone maniere. Le signore sono senza dubbio molto belle, nel loro aspetto esteriore; ma qui devo fermarmi. La loro educazione è più o meno simile alla nostra: né migliore né peggiore. Avevo sentito alcune storie davvero straordinarie in questo senso, ma non credendole, non sono rimasto deluso. A Boston ci sono signore di colore; tuttavia, proprio come i filosofi dello stesso sesso e colore in altre regioni, preferiscono essere considerate superiori piuttosto che esserlo davvero. Ci sono anche signore evangeliche, la cui devozione verso le forme religiose e il loro orrore per gli spettacoli teatrali sono esemplari. Si trovano donne appassionate di partecipare a conferenze in tutte le classi sociali e in ogni condizione economica. Nella vita provinciale che prevale in città come questa, l’ pulpito ha una grande influenza. Il ruolo specifico dell’ pulpito nel New England (ad eccezione del ministero unitariano) sembra essere quello di denunciare ogni forma di divertimento innocente e razionale. La chiesa, la cappella e la sala conferenze sono gli unici mezzi di intrattenimento disponibili; e le signore vi affollano in gran numero.
Wherever religion is resorted to, as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous; and they who enlarge with the greatest pertinacity on the difficulty of getting into heaven, will be considered by all true believers certain of going there: though it would be hard to say by what process of reasoning this conclusion is arrived at. It is so at home, and it is so abroad. With regard to the other means of excitement, the Lecture, it has at least the merit of being always new. One lecture treads so quickly on the heels of another, that none are remembered; and the course of this month may be safely repeated next, with its charm of novelty unbroken, and its interest unabated.
The fruits of the earth have their growth in corruption. Out of the rottenness of these things, there has sprung up in Boston a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.
The only preacher I heard in Boston was Mr. Taylor, who addresses himself peculiarly to seamen, and who was once a mariner himself. I found his chapel down among the shipping, in one of the narrow, old, water-side streets, with a gay blue flag waving freely from its roof. In the gallery opposite to the pulpit were a little choir of male and female singers, a violoncello, and a violin. The preacher already sat in the pulpit, which was raised on pillars, and ornamented behind him with painted drapery of a lively and somewhat theatrical appearance. He looked a weather-beaten hard-featured man, of about six or eight and fifty; with deep lines graven as it were into his face, dark hair, and a stern, keen eye. Yet the general character of his countenance was pleasant and agreeable. The service commenced with a hymn, to which succeeded an extemporary prayer. It had the fault of frequent repetition, incidental to all such prayers; but it was plain and comprehensive in its doctrines, and breathed a tone of general sympathy and charity, which is not so commonly a characteristic of this form of address to the Deity as it might be. That done he opened his discourse, taking for his text a passage from the Song of Solomon, laid upon the desk before the commencement of the service by some unknown member of the congregation: ‘Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning on the arm of her beloved!’
He handled his text in all kinds of ways, and twisted it into all manner of shapes; but always ingeniously, and with a rude eloquence, well adapted to the comprehension of his hearers. Indeed if I be not mistaken, he studied their sympathies and understandings much more than the display of his own powers. His imagery was all drawn from the sea, and from the incidents of a seaman’s life; and was often remarkably good. He spoke to them of ‘that glorious man, Lord Nelson,’ and of Collingwood; and drew nothing in, as the saying is, by the head and shoulders, but brought it to bear upon his purpose, naturally, and with a sharp mind to its effect. Sometimes, when much excited with his subject, he had an odd way—compounded of John Bunyan, and Balfour of Burley—of taking his great quarto Bible under his arm and pacing up and down the pulpit with it; looking steadily down, meantime, into the midst of the congregation. Thus, when he applied his text to the first assemblage of his hearers, and pictured the wonder of the church at their presumption in forming a congregation among themselves, he stopped short with his Bible under his arm in the manner I have described, and pursued his discourse after this manner:
‘Who are these—who are they—who are these fellows? where do they come from? Where are they going to?—Come from! What’s the answer?’—leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with his right hand: ‘From below!’—starting back again, and looking at the sailors before him: ‘From below, my brethren. From under the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one. That’s where you came from!’—a walk up and down the pulpit: ‘and where are you going’—stopping abruptly: ‘where are you going? Aloft!’—very softly, and pointing upward: ‘Aloft!’—louder: ‘aloft!’—louder still: ‘That’s where you are going—with a fair wind,—all taut and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory, where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’—Another walk: ‘That’s where you’re going to, my friends. That’s it. That’s the place. That’s the port. That’s the haven. It’s a blessed harbour—still water there, in all changes of the winds and tides; no driving ashore upon the rocks, or slipping your cables and running out to sea, there: Peace—Peace—Peace—all peace!’—Another walk, and patting the Bible under his left arm: ‘What! These fellows are coming from the wilderness, are they? Yes. From the dreary, blighted wilderness of Iniquity, whose only crop is Death. But do they lean upon anything—do they lean upon nothing, these poor seamen?’—Three raps upon the Bible: ‘Oh yes.—Yes.—They lean upon the arm of their Beloved’—three more raps: ‘upon the arm of their Beloved’—three more, and a walk: ‘Pilot, guiding-star, and compass, all in one, to all hands—here it is’—three more: ‘Here it is. They can do their seaman’s duty manfully, and be easy in their minds in the utmost peril and danger, with this’—two more: ‘They can come, even these poor fellows can come, from the wilderness leaning on the arm of their Beloved, and go up—up—up!’—raising his hand higher, and higher, at every repetition of the word, so that he stood with it at last stretched above his head, regarding them in a strange, rapt manner, and pressing the book triumphantly to his breast, until he gradually subsided into some other portion of his discourse.
Ovunque la religione venga ricercata come una bevanda inebriante o come mezzo per fuggire dalla noia monotona della vita quotidiana, coloro che ne sono i ministri e che aggiungono elementi estremi al suo messaggio saranno sicuramente quelli che riusciranno a compiacere maggiormente le persone. Coloro che spargono il più grande quantitativo di zolfo sul Sentiero Eterno, e che calpestano con la massima crudeltà i fiori e le foglie che crescono lungo il cammino, saranno considerati i più giusti; e coloro che insistono con particolare ostinazione sull’immensità delle difficoltà per raggiungere il cielo verranno ritenuti da tutti i veri credenti certamente destinati ad arrivarci, anche se è difficile capire su quale base logica si arrivi a questa conclusione. È così in patria, e lo stesso vale all’estero. Per quanto riguarda gli altri mezzi di eccitazione, le lezioni hanno almeno il merito di essere sempre nuove: una lezione segue rapidamente l’altra, tanto che nessuna viene ricordata; e il contenuto di questa lezione può essere tranquillamente ripetuto il mese successivo, mantenendo intatto il suo fascino della novità e il suo interesse per gli ascoltatori.
I frutti della terra crescono attraverso il processo di decomposizione; proprio dalla corruzione di queste cose è nata a Boston una setta di filosofi conosciuti come Trascendentalisti. Quando ho chiesto cosa significasse questo nome, mi è stato spiegato che ciò che era incomprensibile doveva necessariamente essere considerato “trascendentale”. Non trovando molto conforto in questa spiegazione, ho continuato le mie ricerche e ho scoperto che i Trascendentalisti sono seguaci di mio amico il signor Carlyle, o meglio, di un suo discepolo, il signor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Quest’ultimo ha scritto un volume di saggi in cui, tra molte idee vaghe e fantasiose (perdonatemi se lo dico), ce ne sono molte altre vere, virili, oneste e coraggiose. Il Trascendentalismo presenta occasionalmente delle stranezze (che scuola non ne ha?), ma nonostante ciò possiede qualità positive: tra queste, un profondo disgusto per le banalità retoriche e la capacità di individuarle in tutte le loro infinite manifestazioni. Quindi, se fossi un bostoniano, credo che diventerei un Trascendentalista.
L’unico predicatore che ho ascoltato a Boston era il signor Taylor, il quale si rivolgeva in modo particolare ai marinai e lui stesso era stato un tempo marinaio. Ho trovato la sua chiesa in mezzo alle navi, in una di quelle strette e vecchie strade lungo il fiume; dalla sua cupola sventolava liberamente una vivace bandiera blu. Nella galleria di fronte all’altare c’era un piccolo coro composto da uomini e donne, oltre a un violoncello e un violino. Il predicatore era già seduto sull’altare, eretto su pilastri e decorato dietro di sé con drappi dipinti dal colore vivace e piuttosto teatrale. Sembrava un uomo segnato dalle intemperie, dall’aspetto robusto; aveva circa sessantotto anni, profonde rughe sul viso, capelli scuri e uno sguardo severo e acuto. Tuttavia, l’espressione generale del suo volto era piacevole e gradevole. La funzione iniziò con un >Inno, seguito da una >Prega improvvisata. Quest’ultima presentava il difetto della ripetizione frequente, tipico di tutte le preghiere del genere; tuttavia i suoi insegnamenti erano chiari e completi, e trasmettevano un tono di compassione e carità che non è così comune in questo tipo di espressione verso Dio. Dopo aver terminato la preghiera, iniziò il suo discorso, prendendo come testo un passaggio dal >Canto dei Cantici di Salomone, messo sul tavolo davanti all’altare da qualche membro sconosciuto della congregazione: “Chi è questa che viene dal deserto, appoggiandosi al braccio del suo amato?”
Affrontava il proprio testo in mille modi diversi, distorcendolo in forme svariate; ma sempre in modo ingegnoso e con un’eloquenza schietta e efficace, ben adatta alla comprensione degli ascoltatori. Se non mi sbaglio, prestava molta più attenzione alle loro sensibilità e capacità di comprendere che all’esibizione delle proprie doti. Le sue immagini derivavano tutte dal mare e dagli avvenimenti della vita di un marinaio; spesso erano davvero notevoli. Parlava loro di “quell’uomo glorioso, Lord Nelson”, e di Collingwood; non si limitava a citare passaggi in modo superficiale, ma li utilizzava con naturalezza e intelligenza al fine di raggiungere il proprio scopo. A volte, quando era particolarmente ispirato dal tema che trattava, aveva un modo strano di esprimersi: prendeva il proprio grande libro della Bibbia sotto il braccio e camminava avanti e indietro sul pulpito mentre parlava, fissando lo sguardo dritto negli ascoltatori. Così, quando applicò questo metodo al suo primo incontro con gli ascoltatori, descrivendo la “meraviglia” della chiesa per il loro ardire nel formare una comunità tra di loro, si fermò proprio in quel modo, con il libro della Bibbia sotto il braccio, e proseguì il proprio discorso seguendo questa tecnica.
“Chi sono questi, chi sono questi ragazzi? Da dove vengono? Dove stanno andando?. Da sotto!”, disse sporgendosi dal pulpito e indicando verso il basso con la mano destra; poi si ritirò indietro e guardò i marinai davanti a sé: “Da sotto, fratelli miei. Da sotto le botole del peccato, chiuse sopra di voi dal male. È da lì che venite!” Camminò avanti e indietro sul pulpito: “E dove state andando?”, si fermò improvvisamente: “Dove state andando? In alto!”, disse molto dolcemente, indicando verso l’alto; poi più forte: “In alto!”, ancora più forte: “È lì che state andando. Con un bel vento, tutti tesi e pronti, diretti verso il Cielo nella sua gloria. Là non ci sono tempeste né cattivo tempo. I malvagi smettono di tormentare, e i stanchi trovano riposo.” Camminò ancora avanti: “È lì che state andando, miei amici. È proprio lì. Quel posto. Quel rifugio. Un porto benedetto. Acqua tranquilla, nonostante i cambiamenti dei venti e delle maree. Nessun pericolo di incagliarsi sulle rocce, nessun rischio di perdere gli ormeggi e finire in mare. Pace. Pace. Pace, ” Poi, accarezzando la Bibbia sotto il braccio sinistro, continuò: “Ma questi poveri marinai. Da dove vengono? Sì. Dalla desolata landa del peccato, dove l’unica coltura che cresce è la Morte. Ma si appoggiano a qualcosa. O forse non si appoggiano a nulla?” Batte tre volte sulla Bibbia: “Oh sì. Si appoggiano al braccio del loro Amato, ” Altre tre battute: “Al braccio del loro Amato, ” Poi continuò: “Pilota, stella guida e bussola. Tutto in uno. Ecco qui, ” Altre tre battute: “Ecco qui. Con questo, possono svolgere coraggiosamente il loro dovere di marinai, e rimanere sereni anche nel pericolo più grande. Anche questi poveri ragazzi possono venire dalla landa del peccato, appoggiandosi al braccio del loro Amato. E salire. Salire. In alto!” Alzò la mano sempre di più, fino a tenerla sopra la testa, guardandoli con uno sguardo strano e rapito, e stringendo la Bibbia al petto con trionfo. Poi gradualmente tornò al resto del suo discorso.
I have cited this, rather as an instance of the preacher’s eccentricities than his merits, though taken in connection with his look and manner, and the character of his audience, even this was striking. It is possible, however, that my favourable impression of him may have been greatly influenced and strengthened, firstly, by his impressing upon his hearers that the true observance of religion was not inconsistent with a cheerful deportment and an exact discharge of the duties of their station, which, indeed, it scrupulously required of them; and secondly, by his cautioning them not to set up any monopoly in Paradise and its mercies. I never heard these two points so wisely touched (if indeed I have ever heard them touched at all), by any preacher of that kind before.
Having passed the time I spent in Boston, in making myself acquainted with these things, in settling the course I should take in my future travels, and in mixing constantly with its society, I am not aware that I have any occasion to prolong this chapter. Such of its social customs as I have not mentioned, however, may be told in a very few words.
The usual dinner-hour is two o’clock. A dinner party takes place at five; and at an evening party, they seldom sup later than eleven; so that it goes hard but one gets home, even from a rout, by midnight. I never could find out any difference between a party at Boston and a party in London, saving that at the former place all assemblies are held at more rational hours; that the conversation may possibly be a little louder and more cheerful; and a guest is usually expected to ascend to the very top of the house to take his cloak off; that he is certain to see, at every dinner, an unusual amount of poultry on the table; and at every supper, at least two mighty bowls of hot stewed oysters, in any one of which a half-grown Duke of Clarence might be smothered easily.
There are two theatres in Boston, of good size and construction, but sadly in want of patronage. The few ladies who resort to them, sit, as of right, in the front rows of the boxes.
The bar is a large room with a stone floor, and there people stand and smoke, and lounge about, all the evening: dropping in and out as the humour takes them. There too the stranger is initiated into the mysteries of Gin-sling, Cock-tail, Sangaree, Mint Julep, Sherry-cobbler, Timber Doodle, and other rare drinks. The house is full of boarders, both married and single, many of whom sleep upon the premises, and contract by the week for their board and lodging: the charge for which diminishes as they go nearer the sky to roost. A public table is laid in a very handsome hall for breakfast, and for dinner, and for supper. The party sitting down together to these meals will vary in number from one to two hundred: sometimes more. The advent of each of these epochs in the day is proclaimed by an awful gong, which shakes the very window-frames as it reverberates through the house, and horribly disturbs nervous foreigners. There is an ordinary for ladies, and an ordinary for gentlemen.
In our private room the cloth could not, for any earthly consideration, have been laid for dinner without a huge glass dish of cranberries in the middle of the table; and breakfast would have been no breakfast unless the principal dish were a deformed beef-steak with a great flat bone in the centre, swimming in hot butter, and sprinkled with the very blackest of all possible pepper. Our bedroom was spacious and airy, but (like every bedroom on this side of the Atlantic) very bare of furniture, having no curtains to the French bedstead or to the window. It had one unusual luxury, however, in the shape of a wardrobe of painted wood, something smaller than an English watch-box; or if this comparison should be insufficient to convey a just idea of its dimensions, they may be estimated from the fact of my having lived for fourteen days and nights in the firm belief that it was a shower-bath.
Ho citato questo esempio piuttosto come un esempio delle eccentricità del predicatore che dei suoi meriti, anche se, considerando il suo aspetto e il modo in cui si comportava, nonché il carattere del suo pubblico, anche questo aspetto risultava notevole. Tuttavia, è possibile che la mia impressione positiva su di lui sia stata fortemente influenzata e rafforzata, innanzitutto dal fatto che egli faceva capire ai suoi ascoltatori che il vero rispetto della religione non era in contraddizione con un comportamento allegro e con l’adempimento scrupoloso dei propri doveri, requisiti che, in effetti, la religione richiedeva loro; in secondo luogo, dal fatto che li esortava a non cercare di monopolizzare il Paradiso e le sue grazie. Non ho mai sentito questi due aspetti trattati con tanta saggezza (se mai sono stati affrontati del tutto) da alcun predicatore di quel genere prima d’ora.
Dopo aver trascorso il tempo a Boston, imparando a conoscere queste cose, decidendo la direzione che avrei dovuto prendere nei miei viaggi futuri e frequentando costantemente la sua società, non credo di avere motivo per prolungare questo resoconto. Tuttavia, alcune delle sue usanze sociali che non ho menzionato possono essere descritte in poche parole.
L’ora solita per la cena è le due di ore. Un banchetto serale si svolge alle cinque; mentre in una festa pomeridiana raramente si cena dopo le undici; quindi, anche se ci si tratta di una festa lunga, è difficile non tornare a >casa entro mezzanotte. Non sono mai riuscito a notare alcuna differenza tra una festa a Boston e una a Londra, ad eccezione del fatto che a Boston tutte le riunioni si svolgono in orari più “razionali”; che la conversazione può essere un po’ più rumorosa e allegra; e che di solito si aspetta che gli ospiti salgano fino al piano più alto della casa per togliersi il cappotto. Inoltre, a ogni cena si trovano sul tavolo grandi quantità di pollame; mentre a ogni cena serale ci sono almeno due enormi ciotole di ostriche stufate, ognuna delle quali potrebbe facilmente contenere un Duca di Clarence in via di crescita.
Ci sono due teatri a Boston, di buone dimensioni e costruzione, ma purtroppo mancano di pubblico. Le poche signore che vi vanno, si siedono, come se fosse loro diritto, nelle prime file delle poltrone.
Il bar è una grande stanza con pavimento in pietra; lì le persone stanno in piedi, fumano e si rilassano per tutta la sera, entrando ed uscendo a seconda dell’umore del momento. Anche lì lo straniero viene introdotto ai misteri del Gin-sling, del Cock-tail, del Sangaree, del Mint Julep, dello Sherry-cobbler, del Timber Doodle e di altri drink rari. La locanda è piena di ospiti, sia sposati che single; molti di loro dormono lì stesso e pagano per il vitto e l’alloggio a settimana, con la tariffa che diminuisce man mano che si avvicinano alla fine del soggiorno. In un bellissimo salone è allestito un tavolo pubblico dove si servono colazioni, pranzi e cene. Il numero delle persone che partecipano a questi pasti varia da uno a duecento, a volte di più. L’arrivo di ogni momento della giornata viene annunciato da un terribile gong che fa tremare persino le cornici delle finestre e disturba profondamente gli stranieri nervosi. Ci sono sale riservati alle signore e altri riservati ai signori.
Nella nostra stanza privata, per nessuna ragione al mondo, il tavolo avrebbe potuto essere preparato per la cena senza un enorme piatto di vetro pieno di mirtilli rossi al centro; e la colazione non sarebbe stata davvero una colazione se il piatto principale non fosse stato un bistecco di manzo deformato, con un grosso osso piatto nel mezzo, immerso in burro caldo e cosparso con il pepe più nero possibile. La nostra camera da letto era spaziosa e ariosa, ma (come tutte le camere da letto su questo lato dell’Atlantico) molto scarsamente arredata: non aveva tende né sul letto francese né sulla finestra. Tuttavia, possedeva un lusso insolito: un armadio di legno dipinto, più piccolo di una scatola da orologi inglese; e se questa descrizione dovesse risultare insufficiente per far capire le sue dimensioni, si possono fare delle stime osservando il fatto che ho vissuto lì per quattordici giorni e notti, convinto fermamente che si trattasse di una doccia.
CHAPTER IV AN AMERICAN RAILROAD. LOWELL AND ITS FACTORY SYSTEM
BEFORE leaving Boston, I devoted one day to an excursion to Lowell. I assign a separate chapter to this visit; not because I am about to describe it at any great length, but because I remember it as a thing by itself, and am desirous that my readers should do the same.
I made acquaintance with an American railroad, on this occasion, for the first time. As these works are pretty much alike all through the States, their general characteristics are easily described.
There are no first and second class carriages as with us; but there is a gentleman’s car and a ladies’ car: the main distinction between which is that in the first, everybody smokes; and in the second, nobody does. As a black man never travels with a white one, there is also a negro car; which is a great, blundering, clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in, from the kingdom of Brobdingnag. There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell.
The cars are like shabby omnibuses, but larger: holding thirty, forty, fifty, people. The seats, instead of stretching from end to end, are placed crosswise. Each seat holds two persons. There is a long row of them on each side of the caravan, a narrow passage up the middle, and a door at both ends. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal; which is for the most part red-hot. It is insufferably close; and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may happen to look at, like the ghost of smoke.
In the ladies’ car, there are a great many gentlemen who have ladies with them. There are also a great many ladies who have nobody with them: for any lady may travel alone, from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere. The conductor or check-taker, or guard, or whatever he may be, wears no uniform. He walks up and down the car, and in and out of it, as his fancy dictates; leans against the door with his hands in his pockets and stares at you, if you chance to be a stranger; or enters into conversation with the passengers about him. A great many newspapers are pulled out, and a few of them are read. Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy. If you are an Englishman, he expects that that railroad is pretty much like an English railroad. If you say ‘No,’ he says ‘Yes?’ (interrogatively), and asks in what respect they differ. You enumerate the heads of difference, one by one, and he says ‘Yes?’ (still interrogatively) to each. Then he guesses that you don’t travel faster in England; and on your replying that you do, says ‘Yes?’ again (still interrogatively), and it is quite evident, don’t believe it. After a long pause he remarks, partly to you, and partly to the knob on the top of his stick, that ‘Yankees are reckoned to be considerable of a go-ahead people too;’ upon which you say ‘Yes,’ and then he says ‘Yes’ again (affirmatively this time); and upon your looking out of window, tells you that behind that hill, and some three miles from the next station, there is a clever town in a smart lo-ca-tion, where he expects you have concluded to stop. Your answer in the negative naturally leads to more questions in reference to your intended route (always pronounced rout); and wherever you are going, you invariably learn that you can’t get there without immense difficulty and danger, and that all the great sights are somewhere else.
If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger’s seat, the gentleman who accompanies her gives him notice of the fact, and he immediately vacates it with great politeness. Politics are much discussed, so are banks, so is cotton. Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high: the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins; which is an unspeakable comfort to all strong politicians and true lovers of their country: that is to say, to ninety-nine men and boys out of every ninety-nine and a quarter.
Except when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive. When there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours, many mere logs half hidden in the swamp, others mouldered away to spongy chips. The very soil of the earth is made up of minute fragments such as these; each pool of stagnant water has its crust of vegetable rottenness; on every side there are the boughs, and trunks, and stumps of trees, in every possible stage of decay, decomposition, and neglect. Now you emerge for a few brief minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New England church and school-house; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the stumps, the logs, the stagnant water—all so like the last that you seem to have been transported back again by magic.
The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road, where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted ‘WHEN THE BELL RINGS, LOOK OUT FOR THE LOCOMOTIVE.’ On it whirls headlong, dives through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road. There—with mechanics working at their trades, and people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, and pigs burrowing, and unaccustomed horses plunging and rearing, close to the very rails—there—on, on, on—tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.
CAPITOLO IV
UNA FERROVIA AMERICANA: LOWELL E IL SUO SISTEMA DI FABBRICHE
Prima di lasciare Boston, dedicai un giorno a un viaggio a Lowell. Ho riservato un capitolo separato a questa visita; non perché intenda descriverla in modo dettagliato, ma perché la ricordo come un’esperienza significativa e desidero che anche i miei lettori la considerino tale.
In questa occasione, feci la conoscenza per la prima volta con un’impresa ferroviaria americana. Poiché queste opere sono sostanzialmente simili in tutto il Paese, è facile descriverne le caratteristiche generali.
Non ci sono vagoni di prima e seconda classe come da noi; ma ci sono un vagone per gentiluomini e uno per signore: la principale differenza tra i due è che nel primo tutti fumano, mentre nel secondo nessuno lo fa. Poiché un uomo di colore non viaggia mai con uno bianco, esiste anche un vagone riservato ai neri; si tratta di un enorme, goffo e scomodo veicolo, simile a quello in cui Gulliver salpò dal regno di Brobdingnag. Durante il viaggio ci sono molte scosse, molto rumore, poche finestre, e poi c’è la locomotiva, i suoi strilli e il suo campanello.
Questi veicoli assomigliano a vecchi autobus, ma più grandi: possono trasportare trenta, quaranta, cinquanta persone. I sedili, invece di essere disposti da un’estremità all’altra del veicolo, sono posizionati in modo trasversale; ogni sedile ospita due persone. Su entrambi i lati del convoglio ci sono file lunghe di questi sedili, un passaggio stretto al centro e porte su entrambe le estremità. Al centro del veicolo c’è solitamente un forno alimentato con carbone o antracite; quest’ultimo è per lo più incandescente. L’ambiente all’interno del veicolo è insopportabilmente caldo e afoso; si può vedere l’aria calda ondeggiare tra sé stessi e qualsiasi altro oggetto si guardi, come se fosse un “fantasma” di fumo.
Nel vagone riservato alle signore ci sono molti gentiluomini accompagnati dalle loro mogli; ci sono anche molte signore che viaggiano da sole: qualsiasi donna può infatti spostarsi da un capo all’altro degli Stati Uniti in totale autonomia, senza mai rischiare di ricevere un trattamento scortese o negligente. Il conducente, il controllore o chiunque altro abbia quel ruolo non indossa alcuna uniforme; va avanti e indietro nel vagone a piacimento, si appoggia alla porta con le mani in tasca e ti fissa se sei uno sconosciuto, oppure inizia a chiacchierare con i passeggeri intorno a lui. Molte persone tirano fuori i giornali e ne leggono alcuni; tutti parlano con te o con chiunque altro gli venga in mente. Se sei inglese, si aspetta che le ferrovie americane siano più o meno come quelle inglesi. Se dici di no, lui chiede “Sì?”, e vuole sapere in cosa differiscano. Tu elenchi i motivi delle differenze, e lui risponde sempre “Sì?”. Poi immagina che in Inghilterra non si viaggi più velocemente. E quando gli dici di sì, risponde ancora “Sì?”, anche se è ovvio che non sia così. Dopo un lungo silenzio, commenta che i “Yankees” sono considerati una gente molto intraprendente. Tu confermi, e lui dice “Sì” per la prima volta in modo affermativo. Quando guardi fuori dal finestrino, ti dice che dietro quella collina, a circa tre miglia dalla prossima stazione, c’è una bella città dove probabilmente deciderai di fermarti. La tua risposta negativa naturalmente porta a altre domande riguardo al tuo itinerario. Ovunque tu vada, scopri sempre che non è possibile raggiungere la destinazione senza grandi difficoltà e pericoli. E che tutte le attrazioni più interessanti si trovano da qualche altra parte.
Se una signora desidera occupare il posto di un passeggero maschile, l’uomo che la accompagna le fa notare questo fatto e lui immediatamente lo lascia libero con grande cortesia. Si discute molto di politica, così come di banche e cotone. Le persone tranquille evitano di affrontare l’argomento della Presidenza, poiché ci saranno nuove elezioni tra tre anni e mezzo, e gli animi sono molto divisi in base alle fazioni politiche: la caratteristica principale di questo sistema costituzionale è che, non appena finiscono le polemiche delle ultime elezioni, iniziano immediatamente quelle delle prossime; il che rappresenta un grande conforto per tutti i politici decisi e veri amanti del loro paese, cioè, per novantanove uomini su novantanove e mezzo.
Tranne quando un ramo di una strada si unisce a quella principale, raramente ci sono più di un binario; quindi la strada è molto stretta, e la vista, nei punti in cui c’è una profonda gola, non è affatto ampia. Quando invece non ci sono gole, il paesaggio è sempre lo stesso: miglia e miglia di alberi stenti; alcuni abbattuti dall’ascia, altri rovinati dal vento, alcuni semiabbattuti e appoggiati ai vicini, molti semplicemente tronchi seminascosti nella palude, altri ormai ridotti a pezzi marci. Anche il terreno è composto da frammenti minuscoli del genere; ogni pozzanghera stagnante presenta uno strato di marciume vegetale; ovunque ci sono rami, tronchi e ceppi d’albero, in tutti i possibili stadi di decomposizione, putrefazione e abbandono. A un certo punto si emerge per pochi brevi minuti in una zona aperta, dove brillano laghi o stagni luminosi, larghi quanto molti fiumi inglesi, ma così piccoli da non avere nemmeno un nome; poi si intravedono rapidamente città lontane, con le loro case bianche e pulite, le piazze fresche, la chiesa tipica del New England e le scuole. Ma quasi prima che si riesca a osservarle bene, arriva di nuovo lo stesso scenario cupo: alberi stenti, ceppi, tronchi, acqua stagnante. Tutto così simile alla volta precedente, da far pensare di essere stati trasportati indietro con la magia.
Il treno si ferma nelle stazioni tra i boschi, dove l’assoluta improbabilità che qualcuno abbia motivo di scendere è pari soltanto alla speranza apparentemente disperata che qualcuno possa salire a bordo. Si precipita attraverso la strada senza cancelli, poliziotti né segnali: solo un arco di legno grezzo su cui è scritto “Quando suona la campanella, fate attenzione alla locomotiva”. Viene avanti a tutta velocità, si infila di nuovo tra gli alberi, riemerge nella luce, sobbalza sui ponti fragili, rimbomba sul terreno accidentato, passa sotto un ponte di legno che per un attimo oscura la strada come se chiudesse gli occhi. Poi prosegue a caso, in disordine totale, lungo la strada. Lì – con i meccanici al lavoro, le persone che si affacciano dalle finestre, i ragazzi che giocano con gli aquiloni e le biglie, gli uomini che fumano, le donne che chiacchierano, i bambini che strisciano per terra, i maiali che scavano nel terreno, i cavalli inesperti che si impennano. Lì – il drago folle della locomotiva e il suo treno di vagoni proseguono la loro corsa, spruzzando ovunque scintille ardenti dal fuoco che brucia dentro di loro; stridendo, sibilando, urlando, ansimando. Fino a quando, finalmente, quel mostro assetato si ferma sotto un riparo per bere. E le persone si radunano intorno, e tu hai di nuovo il tempo di respirare.
I was met at the station at Lowell by a gentleman intimately connected with the management of the factories there; and gladly putting myself under his guidance, drove off at once to that quarter of the town in which the works, the object of my visit, were situated. Although only just of age—for if my recollection serve me, it has been a manufacturing town barely one-and-twenty years—Lowell is a large, populous, thriving place. Those indications of its youth which first attract the eye, give it a quaintness and oddity of character which, to a visitor from the old country, is amusing enough. It was a very dirty winter’s day, and nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud, which in some parts was almost knee-deep, and might have been deposited there, on the subsiding of the waters after the Deluge. In one place, there was a new wooden church, which, having no steeple, and being yet unpainted, looked like an enormous packing-case without any direction upon it. In another there was a large hotel, whose walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it had exactly the appearance of being built with cards. I was careful not to draw my breath as we passed, and trembled when I saw a workman come out upon the roof, lest with one thoughtless stamp of his foot he should crush the structure beneath him, and bring it rattling down. The very river that moves the machinery in the mills (for they are all worked by water power), seems to acquire a new character from the fresh buildings of bright red brick and painted wood among which it takes its course; and to be as light-headed, thoughtless, and brisk a young river, in its murmurings and tumblings, as one would desire to see. One would swear that every ‘Bakery,’ ‘Grocery,’ and ‘Bookbindery,’ and other kind of store, took its shutters down for the first time, and started in business yesterday. The golden pestles and mortars fixed as signs upon the sun-blind frames outside the Druggists’, appear to have been just turned out of the United States’ Mint; and when I saw a baby of some week or ten days old in a woman’s arms at a street corner, I found myself unconsciously wondering where it came from: never supposing for an instant that it could have been born in such a young town as that.
There are several factories in Lowell, each of which belongs to what we should term a Company of Proprietors, but what they call in America a Corporation. I went over several of these; such as a woollen factory, a carpet factory, and a cotton factory: examined them in every part; and saw them in their ordinary working aspect, with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary everyday proceedings. I may add that I am well acquainted with our manufacturing towns in England, and have visited many mills in Manchester and elsewhere in the same manner.
I happened to arrive at the first factory just as the dinner hour was over, and the girls were returning to their work; indeed the stairs of the mill were thronged with them as I ascended. They were all well dressed, but not to my thinking above their condition; for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful of their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated with such little trinkets as come within the compass of their means. Supposing it confined within reasonable limits, I would always encourage this kind of pride, as a worthy element of self-respect, in any person I employed; and should no more be deterred from doing so, because some wretched female referred her fall to a love of dress, than I would allow my construction of the real intent and meaning of the Sabbath to be influenced by any warning to the well-disposed, founded on his backslidings on that particular day, which might emanate from the rather doubtful authority of a murderer in Newgate.
These girls, as I have said, were all well dressed: and that phrase necessarily includes extreme cleanliness. They had serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks, and shawls; and were not above clogs and pattens. Moreover, there were places in the mill in which they could deposit these things without injury; and there were conveniences for washing. They were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment of young women: not of degraded brutes of burden. If I had seen in one of those mills (but I did not, though I looked for something of this kind with a sharp eye), the most lisping, mincing, affected, and ridiculous young creature that my imagination could suggest, I should have thought of the careless, moping, slatternly, degraded, dull reverse (I have seen that), and should have been still well pleased to look upon her.
The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of. Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance: no doubt there were. But I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power.
They reside in various boarding-houses near at hand. The owners of the mills are particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the possession of these houses, whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thorough inquiry. Any complaint that is made against them, by the boarders, or by any one else, is fully investigated; and if good ground of complaint be shown to exist against them, they are removed, and their occupation is handed over to some more deserving person. There are a few children employed in these factories, but not many. The laws of the State forbid their working more than nine months in the year, and require that they be educated during the other three. For this purpose there are schools in Lowell; and there are churches and chapels of various persuasions, in which the young women may observe that form of worship in which they have been educated.
Fui accolto alla stazione di Lowell da un gentiluomo strettamente legato alla direzione delle fabbriche locali; e, con piacere, mi affidai alla sua guida per recarmi immediatamente nella zona della città dove si trovavano le imprese che avevo intenzione di visitare. Sebbene Lowell fosse appena diventata una città industriale – se la mia memoria non m’inganna, ha soltanto vent’anni di storia – era già un luogo grande, popoloso e in via di sviluppo. Quei segni della sua giovinezza che colpivano immediatamente l’occhio le conferivano un carattere particolare e curioso, che per un visitatore proveniente dall’Inghilterra risultava davvero divertente. Era una giornata molto fredda d’inverno; nulla nella città sembrava vecchio, tranne il fango, che in alcune zone raggiungeva quasi le ginocchia. Forse era stato depositato dopo l’alluvione di qualche anno prima. In un luogo c’era una nuova chiesa di legno: senza campanile e ancora non dipinta, sembrava un enorme scatolone privo di qualsiasi indicazione esterna. In un altro punto c’era un grande hotel il cui tetto, con i suoi muri sottili e fragili, dava l’impressione di essere stato costruito interamente con carte. Mentre vi passavamo, facevo attenzione a non respirare forte; tremavo anche quando vedevo un operaio salire sul tetto, temendo che un suo passo incauto potesse far crollare l’intera struttura. Anche il fiume stesso, che azionava le macchine delle fabbriche (tutte alimentate ad energia idraulica), sembrava assumere un carattere diverso attraverso i nuovi edifici in mattoni rossi e legno dipinto lungo il suo corso. Era davvero un fiume “leggero”, spensierato e vivace, nel suo mormorio e nelle sue onde. Si sarebbe potuto giurare che ogni negozio – panetteria, alimentari, libreria, – avesse appena chiuso per la prima volta e avesse iniziato a operare il giorno prima. I pestelli e i mortaio dorati, fissati come insegne sui telai delle vetrine dei farmacisti, sembravano appena usciti dalla Zecca degli Stati Uniti. E quando vidi un bambino di poche settimane tra le braccia di una donna all’angolo di una strada, non potei fare a meno di chiedermi da dove fosse venuto. Non avrei mai pensato che potesse essere nato in una città così giovane.
Ci sono diverse fabbriche a Lowell; ognuna di esse appartiene a ciò che noi dovremmo definire una “Società di Proprietari”, ma che in America viene chiamata “Corporazione”. Ne ho visitate alcune: una fabbrica di lana, una fabbrica di tappeti e una fabbrica di cotone. Le ho esaminate in ogni dettaglio, osservandole nel loro normale funzionamento quotidiano, senza alcuna preparazione particolare o deviazione dalle loro abitudini abituali. Devo aggiungere che conosco molto bene le nostre città manifatturiere in Inghilterra e ho visitato molte fabbriche a Manchester e in altri luoghi nello stesso modo.
Sfortunatamente arrivai alla prima fabbrica proprio quando l’ora di cena era finita e le ragazze stavano tornando al lavoro; infatti, mentre salivo le scale della fabbrica, erano tutte affollate lì. Erano tutte ben vestite, ma non più di quanto ci si potesse aspettare considerando la loro condizione sociale; anzi, mi piace vedere che anche le classi socialmente più umili prestino attenzione al proprio abbigliamento e all’aspetto esteriore, e che, se lo desiderano, si adornino con piccoli oggetti accessibili alle loro possibilità. Se ciò avviene entro limiti ragionevoli, incoraggerei sempre questo tipo di orgoglio come elemento prezioso dell’autostima in chiunque io assumessi; e non mi fermerei mai dal farlo solo perché qualche donna si attribuisce la propria rovina all’amore per l’abbigliamento, così come non permetterei che la mia interpretazione del vero significato del Sabato fosse influenzata da avvertimenti provenienti da persone di cattivo carattere, basati su quanto queste hanno fatto in quel particolare giorno, anche se tali avvertimenti provenissero dall’autorità piuttosto dubbia di un assassino rinchiuso a Newgate.
Queste ragazze, come ho detto, erano tutte ben vestite; e questa espressione include necessariamente anche un’estrema pulizia. Indossavano cappelli pratici, bei mantelli caldi e sciarpe; non disdegnavano nemmeno scarponi chiodati o stivali di feltro. Inoltre, nel mulino c’erano posti dove potevano riporre queste cose senza rischiare di danneggiarle, e c’erano anche strutture adatte per lavarsi. Sembravano tutte in buona salute, molte addirittura in modo notevole, e si comportavano come giovani donne perbene, non come creature degradate e rozze. Se avessi visto, in uno di quei mulini (ma non l’ho fatto, anche se ho cercato attentamente), la creatura più effeminata, affettata e ridicola che la mia immaginazione potesse concepire, avrei pensato a quella figura trasandata, degradata e squallida. Eppure sarei stato comunque molto contento di vederla.
Le stanze in cui lavoravano erano altrettanto ben ordinate quanto loro stesse. In alcune finestre c’erano piante verdi, coltivate apposta per ombreggiare il vetro; in tutte, c’era tanto aria fresca, pulizia e comfort quanta la natura stessa di quel lavoro potesse permettere. Tra un numero così elevato di donne, molte delle quali erano appena entrate nell’età adulta, si poteva ragionevolmente supporre che alcune avessero un aspetto delicato e fragile. Ma dichiaro solennemente che, tra tutta la folla che vidi quel giorno nelle diverse fabbriche, non ricordo né riesco a distinguere un solo volto giovane che mi abbia lasciato una impressione negativa; nessuna ragazza per cui, considerando necessario che guadagnasse il proprio pane quotidiano con il lavoro delle proprie mani, avrei voluto che lasciasse quegli ambienti, se ne avessi avuta la possibilità.
Residono in diverse pensioni situate nelle vicinanze. I proprietari delle fabbriche sono particolarmente attenti a impedire che persone di dubbia reputazione entrino in possesso di queste strutture; qualsiasi lamentele presentata da loro, dai residenti o da altre persone viene attentamente indagata. Se vengono trovati motivi validi per tali lamentele, le persone coinvolte vengono allontanate e il loro incarico affidato a qualcuno più meritevole. In queste fabbriche lavorano pochi bambini; le leggi dello Stato vietano loro di lavorare per più di nove mesi all’anno e impongono che ricevano un’educazione durante i restanti tre mesi. A tale scopo, a Lowell esistono scuole, nonché chiese e cappelle di varie confessioni religiose, dove le giovani donne possono praticare la forma di culto con cui sono state educate.
At some distance from the factories, and on the highest and pleasantest ground in the neighbourhood, stands their hospital, or boarding-house for the sick: it is the best house in those parts, and was built by an eminent merchant for his own residence. Like that institution at Boston, which I have before described, it is not parcelled out into wards, but is divided into convenient chambers, each of which has all the comforts of a very comfortable home. The principal medical attendant resides under the same roof; and were the patients members of his own family, they could not be better cared for, or attended with greater gentleness and consideration. The weekly charge in this establishment for each female patient is three dollars, or twelve shillings English; but no girl employed by any of the corporations is ever excluded for want of the means of payment. That they do not very often want the means, may be gathered from the fact, that in July, 1841, no fewer than nine hundred and seventy-eight of these girls were depositors in the Lowell Savings Bank: the amount of whose joint savings was estimated at one hundred thousand dollars, or twenty thousand English pounds.
I am now going to state three facts, which will startle a large class of readers on this side of the Atlantic, very much.
Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses. Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries. Thirdly, they have got up among themselves a periodical called THE LOWELL OFFERING, ‘A repository of original articles, written exclusively by females actively employed in the mills,’—which is duly printed, published, and sold; and whereof I brought away from Lowell four hundred good solid pages, which I have read from beginning to end.
The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim, with one voice, ‘How very preposterous!’ On my deferentially inquiring why, they will answer, ‘These things are above their station.’ In reply to that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.
It is their station to work. And they do work. They labour in these mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably work, and pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to indulge in such amusements, on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in England have not formed our ideas of the ‘station’ of working people, from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us by their novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right or wrong.
For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanising and laudable. I know no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolise the means of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to do so.
Of the merits of the Lowell Offering as a literary production, I will only observe, putting entirely out of sight the fact of the articles having been written by these girls after the arduous labours of the day, that it will compare advantageously with a great many English Annuals. It is pleasant to find that many of its Tales are of the Mills and of those who work in them; that they inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence. A strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air; and though a circulating library is a favourable school for the study of such topics, it has very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life. Some persons might object to the papers being signed occasionally with rather fine names, but this is an American fashion. One of the provinces of the state legislature of Massachusetts is to alter ugly names into pretty ones, as the children improve upon the tastes of their parents. These changes costing little or nothing, scores of Mary Annes are solemnly converted into Bevelinas every session.
It is said that on the occasion of a visit from General Jackson or General Harrison to this town (I forget which, but it is not to the purpose), he walked through three miles and a half of these young ladies all dressed out with parasols and silk stockings. But as I am not aware that any worse consequence ensued, than a sudden looking-up of all the parasols and silk stockings in the market; and perhaps the bankruptcy of some speculative New Englander who bought them all up at any price, in expectation of a demand that never came; I set no great store by the circumstance.
In this brief account of Lowell, and inadequate expression of the gratification it yielded me, and cannot fail to afford to any foreigner to whom the condition of such people at home is a subject of interest and anxious speculation, I have carefully abstained from drawing a comparison between these factories and those of our own land. Many of the circumstances whose strong influence has been at work for years in our manufacturing towns have not arisen here; and there is no manufacturing population in Lowell, so to speak: for these girls (often the daughters of small farmers) come from other States, remain a few years in the mills, and then go home for good.
The contrast would be a strong one, for it would be between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow. I abstain from it, because I deem it just to do so. But I only the more earnestly adjure all those whose eyes may rest on these pages, to pause and reflect upon the difference between this town and those great haunts of desperate misery: to call to mind, if they can in the midst of party strife and squabble, the efforts that must be made to purge them of their suffering and danger: and last, and foremost, to remember how the precious Time is rushing by.
I returned at night by the same railroad and in the same kind of car. One of the passengers being exceedingly anxious to expound at great length to my companion (not to me, of course) the true principles on which books of travel in America should be written by Englishmen, I feigned to fall asleep. But glancing all the way out at window from the corners of my eyes, I found abundance of entertainment for the rest of the ride in watching the effects of the wood fire, which had been invisible in the morning but were now brought out in full relief by the darkness: for we were travelling in a whirlwind of bright sparks, which showered about us like a storm of fiery snow.
A una certa distanza dalle fabbriche, sul terreno più elevato e piacevole della zona, sorge il loro ospedale, ovvero la casa di riposo per i malati: è la migliore struttura del genere in quelle parti ed è stata costruita da un rinomato commerciante per uso personale. Proprio come quell’istituto a Boston che ho descritto in precedenza, non è diviso in reparti, ma in stanze comode e confortevoli, ognuna delle quali dispone di tutti i comfort di una vera e propria casa. Il principale medico addetto si trova sotto lo stesso tetto; se i pazienti fossero membri della sua stessa famiglia, non potrebbero ricevere cure migliori, né essere assistiti con maggiore gentilezza e attenzione. La retta settimanale in questo istituto per ogni paziente donna è di tre dollari, ovvero dodici scellini inglesi; tuttavia nessuna ragazza impiegata da alcuna delle corporazioni viene mai esclusa a causa della mancanza dei mezzi per pagare. Il fatto che spesso non si verifichi questa situazione può essere dimostrato dal dato che, nel luglio 1841, ben novecentosettantotto di queste ragazze erano depositarie presso la Banca di Risparmio di Lowell; l’importo totale dei loro risparmi era stimato in centomila dollari, ovvero ventimila sterline inglesi.
Ora dirò tre fatti che sorprenderanno notevolmente molti lettori da questa parte dell’Atlantico.
Innanzitutto, in molte di queste pensioni esiste un piano di partecipazione azionaria. In secondo luogo, quasi tutte queste giovani signore iscrivono alle biblioteche circolanti. Terzo, hanno creato tra loro una rivista chiamata “THE LOWELL OFFERING”, “Un archivio di articoli originali scritti esclusivamente da donne impiegate attivamente nelle fabbriche”; questa rivista viene stampata, pubblicata e venduta regolarmente. Io ne ho portato via quattrocento pagine ben stampate da Lowell e le ho lette dall’inizio alla fine.
La vasta categoria di lettori, sorpresi da questi fatti, esclamerà all’unisono: “Che assurdità!” Se chiedessi con rispetto il motivo di tale reazione, mi risponderebbero: “Queste cose sono al di sopra del loro rango.” A questa obiezione, vorrei chiedere quale sia esattamente il loro rango.
È proprio loro compito lavorare. E infatti lavorano davvero: impiegano in media dodici ore al giorno in queste fabbriche, il che è senza dubbio lavoro, anzi un lavoro piuttosto intenso. Forse è davvero al di sopra delle loro possibilità indulgere in simili divertimenti, in qualsiasi modo essi siano. Siamo davvero sicuri che, in Inghilterra, le nostre idee riguardo al “ruolo” delle persone lavoratrici derivino dal fatto che ci abituiamo a considerarle così come sono, e non come potrebbero essere? Penso che, se esaminiamo i nostri stessi sentimenti, scopriremo che pianoforti, biblioteche circolanti, persino iniziative del genere ci sorprendono per la loro novità, e non perché riguardino questioni astratte di giusto o sbagliato.
Per quanto mi riguarda, non conosco alcuna condizione sociale in cui l’occupazione di oggi, svolta con gioia, e l’aspettativa dell’occupazione di domani, vista con ottimismo, possano rivelarsi meno umanizzanti o meno lodevoli. Non conosco alcuna condizione sociale che renda la vita più sopportabile per chi vi è coinvolto, o più sicura per chi ne è escluso, attraverso l’ignoranza. Non conosco alcuna condizione sociale che abbia il diritto di monopolizzare i mezzi per l’insegnamento reciproco, il miglioramento personale e il divertimento razionale; né una condizione sociale che sia riuscita a mantenere tale status per un periodo prolungato, dopo aver cercato di farlo.
Riguardo ai meriti della pubblicazione “Lowell Offering” come opera letteraria, osserverò soltanto che, mettendo completamente da parte il fatto che gli articoli siano stati scritti da queste ragazze dopo le faticose attività quotidiane, essa può essere paragonata con molti degli annuali letterari inglesi. È piacevole notare che molti dei racconti contenuti in essa parlano delle fabbriche e di coloro che vi lavorano; essi inculcano abitudini di auto-sacrificio e soddisfazione, e insegnano buone dottrine di benevolenza. Un forte senso della bellezza della >natura, come si manifesta nelle zone solitarie lasciate dalle autrici alle loro >casa, pervade le sue pagine, simile all’aria salutare di un villaggio; e sebbene una biblioteca circolante rappresenti un ambiente favorevole allo studio di tali temi, in questa pubblicazione vi sono pochissime allusioni a abiti eleganti, matrimoni raffinati, case lussuose o una vita agiata. Alcuni potrebbero obiettare che talvolta gli articoli siano firmati con nomi piuttosto nobili, ma questa è una consuetudine americana. Uno dei compiti del legislativo dello stato del Massachusetts è proprio quello di cambiare i nomi brutti in quelli belli, così come i bambini migliorano i gusti dei loro genitori. Questi cambiamenti, che costano poco o nulla, portano a che decine di “Mary Anne” vengano solennemente trasformate in “Bevelina” ogni sessione legislativa.
Si dice che, in occasione della visita del generale Jackson o del generale Harrison in questa città (non ricordo esattamente quale), egli abbia percorso tre miglia e mezza tra queste giovani donne tutte vestite con ombrelli e calze di seta. Ma poiché non sono a conoscenza di alcuna conseguenza negativa derivante da questo evento, se non il fatto che tutte le signore abbiano improvvisamente alzato i loro ombrelli e mostrato le loro calze di seta in piazza; e forse anche il fallimento di qualche speculatore del New England che aveva acquistato tutto a qualsiasi prezzo, nella speranza di una domanda che non si è mai verificata; non attribuisco molta importanza a questa storia.
In questo breve resoconto di Lowell, e nell’espressione insufficiente della soddisfazione che mi ha procurato, non posso fare a meno di osservare che qualsiasi straniero per il quale lo stato di queste persone nel loro paese sia un argomento di interesse e di riflessione ansiosa, eviterà certamente di stabilire paragoni tra queste fabbriche e quelle del nostro stesso Paese. Molte delle circostanze che da anni hanno avuto un forte impatto sulle nostre città manifatturiere non si sono verificate qui; inoltre, a Lowell non esiste una vera e propria popolazione operaia: queste ragazze (spesso figlie di piccoli agricoltori) vengono da altri Stati, rimangono per qualche anno nelle fabbriche e poi tornano definitivamente nel loro paese d’origine.
Il contrasto sarebbe estremamente netto: si tratterebbe del confronto tra il Bene e il Male, tra la luce della vita e l’oscurità più profonda. Io mi astengo dal parteciparvi, perché ritengo giusto farlo. Tuttavia esorto con ancora maggiore fervore tutti coloro che leggono queste pagine a riflettere su questa differenza tra questa città e quei luoghi di estrema miseria; a ricordare, se possibile, nonostante le lotte e i conflitti, gli sforzi necessari per liberarli dal loro dolore e dai pericoli che li minacciano; e soprattutto, a rendersi conto di quanto il prezioso tempo stia passando in fretta.
Tornai di notte con lo stesso treno e nella stessa carrozza. Uno dei passeggeri, estremamente desideroso di spiegare a lungo alla mia compagna (ovviamente non a me) i veri principi su cui dovrebbero essere scritti i libri di viaggio in America da parte degli inglesi, fingetti di addormentarmi. Ma, guardando fuori dalla finestra con la coda dell’occhio, trovai molti motivi di divertimento nel osservare gli effetti del fuoco nel camino: al mattino erano invisibili, ma ora, nella oscurità, si vedevano chiaramente; viaggiavamo infatti in mezzo a scintille luminose che ci circondavano come una tempesta di neve infuocata.
CHAPTER V WORCESTER. THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN. TO NEW YORK
LEAVING Boston on the afternoon of Saturday the fifth of February, we proceeded by another railroad to Worcester: a pretty New England town, where we had arranged to remain under the hospitable roof of the Governor of the State, until Monday morning.
These towns and cities of New England (many of which would be villages in Old England), are as favourable specimens of rural America, as their people are of rural Americans. The well-trimmed lawns and green meadows of home are not there; and the grass, compared with our ornamental plots and pastures, is rank, and rough, and wild: but delicate slopes of land, gently-swelling hills, wooded valleys, and slender streams, abound. Every little colony of houses has its church and school-house peeping from among the white roofs and shady trees; every house is the whitest of the white; every Venetian blind the greenest of the green; every fine day’s sky the bluest of the blue. A sharp dry wind and a slight frost had so hardened the roads when we alighted at Worcester, that their furrowed tracks were like ridges of granite. There was the usual aspect of newness on every object, of course. All the buildings looked as if they had been built and painted that morning, and could be taken down on Monday with very little trouble. In the keen evening air, every sharp outline looked a hundred times sharper than ever. The clean cardboard colonnades had no more perspective than a Chinese bridge on a tea-cup, and appeared equally well calculated for use. The razor-like edges of the detached cottages seemed to cut the very wind as it whistled against them, and to send it smarting on its way with a shriller cry than before. Those slightly-built wooden dwellings behind which the sun was setting with a brilliant lustre, could be so looked through and through, that the idea of any inhabitant being able to hide himself from the public gaze, or to have any secrets from the public eye, was not entertainable for a moment. Even where a blazing fire shone through the uncurtained windows of some distant house, it had the air of being newly lighted, and of lacking warmth; and instead of awakening thoughts of a snug chamber, bright with faces that first saw the light round that same hearth, and ruddy with warm hangings, it came upon one suggestive of the smell of new mortar and damp walls.
So I thought, at least, that evening. Next morning when the sun was shining brightly, and the clear church bells were ringing, and sedate people in their best clothes enlivened the pathway near at hand and dotted the distant thread of road, there was a pleasant Sabbath peacefulness on everything, which it was good to feel. It would have been the better for an old church; better still for some old graves; but as it was, a wholesome repose and tranquillity pervaded the scene, which after the restless ocean and the hurried city, had a doubly grateful influence on the spirits.
We went on next morning, still by railroad, to Springfield. From that place to Hartford, whither we were bound, is a distance of only five-and-twenty miles, but at that time of the year the roads were so bad that the journey would probably have occupied ten or twelve hours. Fortunately, however, the winter having been unusually mild, the Connecticut River was ‘open,’ or, in other words, not frozen. The captain of a small steamboat was going to make his first trip for the season that day (the second February trip, I believe, within the memory of man), and only waited for us to go on board. Accordingly, we went on board, with as little delay as might be. He was as good as his word, and started directly.
It certainly was not called a small steamboat without reason. I omitted to ask the question, but I should think it must have been of about half a pony power. Mr. Paap, the celebrated Dwarf, might have lived and died happily in the cabin, which was fitted with common sash-windows like an ordinary dwelling-house. These windows had bright-red curtains, too, hung on slack strings across the lower panes; so that it looked like the parlour of a Lilliputian public-house, which had got afloat in a flood or some other water accident, and was drifting nobody knew where. But even in this chamber there was a rocking-chair. It would be impossible to get on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair. I am afraid to tell how many feet short this vessel was, or how many feet narrow: to apply the words length and width to such measurement would be a contradiction in terms. But I may state that we all kept the middle of the deck, lest the boat should unexpectedly tip over; and that the machinery, by some surprising process of condensation, worked between it and the keel: the whole forming a warm sandwich, about three feet thick.
It rained all day as I once thought it never did rain anywhere, but in the Highlands of Scotland. The river was full of floating blocks of ice, which were constantly crunching and cracking under us; and the depth of water, in the course we took to avoid the larger masses, carried down the middle of the river by the current, did not exceed a few inches. Nevertheless, we moved onward, dexterously; and being well wrapped up, bade defiance to the weather, and enjoyed the journey. The Connecticut River is a fine stream; and the banks in summer-time are, I have no doubt, beautiful; at all events, I was told so by a young lady in the cabin; and she should be a judge of beauty, if the possession of a quality include the appreciation of it, for a more beautiful creature I never looked upon.
CAPITOLO V
WORCESTER. IL Fiume Connecticut. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN. Verso New York.
Lasciando Boston nel pomeriggio di sabato, il 5 febbraio, proseguimmo con un altro treno fino a Worcester: una graziosa città della Nuova Inghilterra, dove avevamo concordato di trascorrere il tempo sotto l’ospitalità del governatore dello stato, fino alla mattina di lunedì.
Queste città e paesi della Nuova Inghilterra (molti dei quali in Old England sarebbero stati semplici villaggi) rappresentano esempi perfetti dell’aspetto rurale dell’America, proprio come le loro persone ne sono un esempio caratteristico. Non ci sono quei prati ben curati e quelle verdi colline tipiche delle nostre case; l’erba, rispetto ai nostri giardini ornamentali e pascoli, è rigogliosa ma ruvida e selvaggia. Tuttavia, ci sono dolci pendii, colline ondulate, valli boschive e ruscelli sottili in abbondanza. Ogni piccola colonia di case ha la sua chiesa e la sua scuola che spuntano tra i tetti bianchi e gli alberi ombrosi; ogni casa è la più bianca possibile, ogni persiana è la più verde, e il cielo in una bella giornata è il più azzurro. Quando atterrammo a Worcester, un forte vento secco aveva indurito le strade al punto che le loro orme sembravano creste di granito. Ovviamente, ogni oggetto presentava quell’aspetto tipico della novità: tutti gli edifici sembravano essere stati costruiti e dipinti proprio quella mattina, e avrebbero potuto essere smantellati il lunedì seguente senza alcun problema. Nell’aria fresca della sera, ogni linea netta appariva cento volte più definita del solito; le colonne di cartone sembravano altrettanto solide e funzionali di un ponte cinese su una tazza da tè. I bordi affilati delle casette in legno sembravano tagliare letteralmente il vento che soffiava contro di loro, facendolo ululare ancora più forte. Quegli edifici in legno, dallo stile semplice, avevano una trasparenza tale che non era nemmeno possibile immaginare che qualcuno potesse nascondersi alla vista del pubblico o avere segreti che sfuggissero agli occhi di tutti. Anche quando un fuoco ardente brillava attraverso le finestre di qualche casa lontana, sembrava appena acceso e privo di calore; al posto di evocare immagini di stanze accoglienti, piene di volti che vedevano la luce per la prima volta intorno a quel focolare, o di arredi caldi e confortevoli, quelle scene suscitavano invece l’immagine di murature umide e di cemento fresco.
Quella sera, almeno, pensai così. La mattina seguente, quando il sole splendeva intensamente e le chiare campane della chiesa suonavano, mentre persone tranquille, vestite con i loro abiti migliori, animavano il sentiero lì vicino e punteggiavano la distante strada, c’era una piacevole serenità domenicale in tutto ciò che mi circondava. Era bello sentirla. Sarebbe stato ancora meglio se si fosse trattato di una vecchia chiesa, o addirittura di alcune antiche tombe; ma com’era, un’atmosfera di pace e tranquillità pervadeva l’intero luogo. Dopo il caos dell’oceano in tempesta e la frenesia della città, tutto ciò aveva un effetto particolarmente benefico sulle nostre anime.
Il giorno seguente proseguimmo ancora in treno verso Springfield. Da quel luogo fino a Hartford, la nostra destinazione, la distanza era di soli venticinque miglia, ma in quella stagione dell’anno le strade erano così cattive che il viaggio avrebbe probabilmente richiesto dieci o dodici ore. Fortunatamente, però, l’inverno era stato insolitamente mite, quindi il Fiume Connecticut non era ghiacciato. Il capitano di una piccola barca a vapore stava per effettuare il suo primo viaggio della stagione quel giorno (credo fosse il secondo viaggio di febbraio nella memoria degli esseri umani) e aspettò soltanto che salissimo a bordo. Così facemmo, con il minimo ritardo possibile. Lui mantenne la sua parola e partì immediatamente.
Di certo non veniva chiamato “piccolo battello a vapore” senza motivo. Ho dimenticato di porre questa domanda, ma credo che dovesse avere una potenza simile alla metà di quella di un cavallo. Il signor Paap, il celebre Nanetto, avrebbe potuto vivere e morire felicemente nella cabina, arredata con normali finestre a battenti come in una casa qualsiasi. Queste finestre avevano anche tende di un rosso brillante, appese su corde sottili attraverso i pannelli inferiori; il tutto dava l’impressione del salotto di una piccolissima casa pubblica, finita per galleggiare a causa di un’inondazione o qualche altro incidente legato all’acqua, e che ora stesse vagando chissà dove. Ma anche in quella cabina c’era una sedia a dondolo. In America, sarebbe impossibile vivere senza una sedia a dondolo. Non oso nemmeno dire quanto fosse corto o stretto questo vascello: definirlo “lungo” o “largo” sarebbe stato assurdo. Posso solo dire che tutti noi ci tenevamo nella parte centrale del ponte, per evitare che la barca si capovolgesse all’improvviso; inoltre, il motore funzionava, per qualche misterioso processo di condensazione, tra quella parte del ponte e la chiglia. Il tutto formava una sorta di “sandwich” caldo, alto circa tre piedi.
Piovve tutto il giorno; pensavo che in nessun posto piovesse mai, tranne nelle Highlands della Scozia. Il fiume era pieno di blocchi di ghiaccio galleggianti, che continuavano a schiantarsi e rompersi sotto di noi; la profondità dell’acqua, nel tratto che seguivamo per evitare i massi più grandi, non superava pochi pollici. Tuttavia proseguimmo con abilità; essendo ben avvolti nei nostri indumenti, sfidammo il maltempo e godemmo del viaggio. Il fiume del Connecticut è un bel corso d’acqua; le sue rive, durante l’estate, devono essere davvero belle. Almeno così mi disse una giovane donna nella cabina in cui soggiornavamo; e lei dovrebbe saper giudicare la bellezza, se possedere una qualità significa anche saperla apprezzare. Non ho mai visto creatura più bella di lei.
After two hours and a half of this odd travelling (including a stoppage at a small town, where we were saluted by a gun considerably bigger than our own chimney), we reached Hartford, and straightway repaired to an extremely comfortable hotel: except, as usual, in the article of bedrooms, which, in almost every place we visited, were very conducive to early rising.
We tarried here, four days. The town is beautifully situated in a basin of green hills; the soil is rich, well-wooded, and carefully improved. It is the seat of the local legislature of Connecticut, which sage body enacted, in bygone times, the renowned code of ‘Blue Laws,’ in virtue whereof, among other enlightened provisions, any citizen who could be proved to have kissed his wife on Sunday, was punishable, I believe, with the stocks. Too much of the old Puritan spirit exists in these parts to the present hour; but its influence has not tended, that I know, to make the people less hard in their bargains, or more equal in their dealings. As I never heard of its working that effect anywhere else, I infer that it never will, here. Indeed, I am accustomed, with reference to great professions and severe faces, to judge of the goods of the other world pretty much as I judge of the goods of this; and whenever I see a dealer in such commodities with too great a display of them in his window, I doubt the quality of the article within.
In Hartford stands the famous oak in which the charter of King Charles was hidden. It is now inclosed in a gentleman’s garden. In the State House is the charter itself. I found the courts of law here, just the same as at Boston; the public institutions almost as good. The Insane Asylum is admirably conducted, and so is the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.
I very much questioned within myself, as I walked through the Insane Asylum, whether I should have known the attendants from the patients, but for the few words which passed between the former, and the Doctor, in reference to the persons under their charge. Of course I limit this remark merely to their looks; for the conversation of the mad people was mad enough.
There was one little, prim old lady, of very smiling and good-humoured appearance, who came sidling up to me from the end of a long passage, and with a curtsey of inexpressible condescension, propounded this unaccountable inquiry:
‘Does Pontefract still flourish, sir, upon the soil of England?’
‘He does, ma’am,’ I rejoined.
‘When you last saw him, sir, he was—’
‘Well, ma’am,’ said I, ‘extremely well. He begged me to present his compliments. I never saw him looking better.’
At this, the old lady was very much delighted. After glancing at me for a moment, as if to be quite sure that I was serious in my respectful air, she sidled back some paces; sidled forward again; made a sudden skip (at which I precipitately retreated a step or two); and said:
‘I am an antediluvian, sir.’
I thought the best thing to say was, that I had suspected as much from the first. Therefore I said so.
‘It is an extremely proud and pleasant thing, sir, to be an antediluvian,’ said the old lady.
‘I should think it was, ma’am,’ I rejoined.
The old lady kissed her hand, gave another skip, smirked and sidled down the gallery in a most extraordinary manner, and ambled gracefully into her own bed-chamber.
In another part of the building, there was a male patient in bed; very much flushed and heated.
‘Well,’ said he, starting up, and pulling off his night-cap: ‘It’s all settled at last. I have arranged it with Queen Victoria.’
‘Arranged what?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Why, that business,’ passing his hand wearily across his forehead, ‘about the siege of New York.’
‘Oh!’ said I, like a man suddenly enlightened. For he looked at me for an answer.
‘Yes. Every house without a signal will be fired upon by the British troops. No harm will be done to the others. No harm at all. Those that want to be safe, must hoist flags. That’s all they’ll have to do. They must hoist flags.’
Even while he was speaking he seemed, I thought, to have some faint idea that his talk was incoherent. Directly he had said these words, he lay down again; gave a kind of a groan; and covered his hot head with the blankets.
There was another: a young man, whose madness was love and music. After playing on the accordion a march he had composed, he was very anxious that I should walk into his chamber, which I immediately did.
By way of being very knowing, and humouring him to the top of his bent, I went to the window, which commanded a beautiful prospect, and remarked, with an address upon which I greatly plumed myself:
‘What a delicious country you have about these lodgings of yours!’
‘Poh!’ said he, moving his fingers carelessly over the notes of his instrument: ‘Well enough for such an Institution as this!’
I don’t think I was ever so taken aback in all my life.
‘I come here just for a whim,’ he said coolly. ‘That’s all.’
‘Oh! That’s all!’ said I.
‘Yes. That’s all. The Doctor’s a smart man. He quite enters into it. It’s a joke of mine. I like it for a time. You needn’t mention it, but I think I shall go out next Tuesday!’
I assured him that I would consider our interview perfectly confidential; and rejoined the Doctor. As we were passing through a gallery on our way out, a well-dressed lady, of quiet and composed manners, came up, and proffering a slip of paper and a pen, begged that I would oblige her with an autograph, I complied, and we parted.
‘I think I remember having had a few interviews like that, with ladies out of doors. I hope she is not mad?’
‘Yes.’
‘On what subject? Autographs?’
‘No. She hears voices in the air.’
‘Well!’ thought I, ‘it would be well if we could shut up a few false prophets of these later times, who have professed to do the same; and I should like to try the experiment on a Mormonist or two to begin with.’
Dopo due ore e mezza di questo strano viaggio (inclusa una sosta in una piccola città, dove fummo salutati da un cannone decisamente più grande del nostro camino), arrivammo a Hartford e ci recammo immediatamente in un hotel estremamente confortevole, tranne che, come al solito, per quanto riguardava le camere da letto, che in quasi tutti i luoghi che visitammo erano particolarmente adatte a farci alzare presto.
Rimanemmo qui per quattro giorni. La città sorge in una conca di colline verdi; il terreno è fertile, ricco di alberi e curatissimo. È la sede del parlamento locale del Connecticut: quel saggio organo legislativo, in tempi passati, emanò il famoso codice delle “Leggi Blu”. Secondo tale codice, tra le altre disposizioni progressiste, qualsiasi cittadino che venisse sorpreso a baciare sua moglie di domenica era punito, credo con la gogna. In queste zone persiste ancora troppo lo spirito puritano dei tempi passati; tuttavia, per quanto ne so, tale influenza non ha reso le persone meno rigide nelle loro transazioni commerciali, né più equilibrate nei loro rapporti sociali. Poiché non ho mai sentito parlare di effetti simili altrove, deduco che qui non accadrà mai. Del resto, sono abituato a giudicare i “beni dell’altro mondo” in base ai comportamenti delle persone, e quando vedo un commerciante esporre troppo apertamente tali beni nella sua vetrina, [mi chiedo] della qualità di quelli all’interno.
A Hartford si trova quel famoso quercio nel quale fu nascosto lo statuto di -Re Carlo. Oggi è racchiuso nel giardino di un gentiluomo. Nella >Casa Statale si trova lo stesso statuto originale. Ho notato che i tribunali qui sono esattamente come a Boston; anche le istituzioni pubbliche sono quasi altrettanto buone. L’ospedale psichiatrico è gestito in modo eccellente, così come l’istituto per sordi e muti.
Mentre camminavo all’interno dell’Ospedale Psichiatrico, mi chiedevo molto se avrei dovuto riconoscere gli assistenti dai pazienti, ma si trattava soltanto di poche parole scambiate tra questi ultimi e il Dottore riguardo alle persone a loro affidate. Ovviamente, questo commento si riferisce esclusivamente al loro aspetto esteriore; infatti, le conversazioni delle persone malate erano già abbastanza folli di per sé.
C’era una piccola vecchietta, molto gentile e di buon umore; si avvicinò a me dall’estremità di un lungo corridoio e, con un inchino pieno di inesprimibile condiscendenza, mi pose questa domanda inspiegabile.
“Pontefract fiorisce ancora, signore, sulla terra d’Inghilterra?”
“Sì, signora,” risposi.
“Quando l’ultima volta lo ha visto, signore, lui era, ”
“Beh, signora,” dissi, “estremamente bene. Mi ha supplicato di trasmetterle i suoi complimenti. Non l’avevo mai visto in così buona forma.”
A questo punto, la vecchia signora fu molto felice. Dopo avermi guardato per un momento, come per assicurarsi che fossi davvero serio nel mio atteggiamento rispettoso, si allontanò di qualche passo; poi tornò avanti; fece improvvisamente un saltello (a cui io mi ritirai rapidamente di uno o due passi); e disse:
“Sono un antediluviano, signore.”
Ho pensato che la cosa migliore da dire fosse che già dal principio avevo sospettato qualcosa del genere; quindi l’ho detto.
“Signore, è davvero un grande onore e una grande gioia essere considerato un ‘anteniluviano’”, disse la vecchia signora.
“Credo proprio di sì, signora,” risposi.
La vecchia signora le baciò la mano, fece un altro saltello, sorrise e si diresse verso il corridoio in modo davvero straordinario, per poi entrare con grazia nella sua camera da letto.
In un’altra parte dell’edificio, c’era un paziente di sesso maschile a letto; era molto arrossito e aveva la febbre alta.
“Beh,” disse lui, alzandosi e togliendosi il cappello da notte, “finalmente tutto è stato sistemato. Ho fatto le cose in modo che la Regina Vittoria sia soddisfatta.”
“Organizzato cosa?” chiese il Dottore.
“Ah, quella faccenda, ”, disse passandosi stancamente la mano sulla fronte, “quella relativa all’assedio di New York.”
“Oh!”, dissi io, come se improvvisamente fossi stato illuminato. Perché lui mi guardava in attesa di una risposta.
‘Sì. Ogni >casa senza segnale radio verrà bombardata dalle truppe britanniche. Alle altre non verrà fatto alcun danno. Assolutamente nessun danno. Chi vuole essere al sicuro deve issare le bandiere. È tutto ciò che deve fare: issare le bandiere.’
Anche mentre parlava, sembrava, pensai, avere una vaga consapevolezza del fatto che ciò che stava dicendo fosse incoerente. Appena ebbe pronunciato quelle parole, si sdraiò di nuovo, emise un gemito e si coprì la testa calda con le coperte.
C’era un altro: un giovane il cui >pazzia era l'''amore''' e la musica. Dopo aver suonato sull’accompagnatore una marcia che aveva composto, era molto ansioso che entrassi nella sua stanza, cosa che feci immediatamente.
Per essere molto comprensiva e accontentarlo fino in fondo, mi avvicinai alla finestra, da cui si godeva di un bellissimo panorama, e commentai, con un tono che mi diede grande soddisfazione.
“Che paese delizioso è questo, con questi luoghi in cui soggiornate!”
“Poh!”, disse, muovendo casualmente le dita sulle note del suo strumento: “Bene sufficiente per un’istituzione del genere!”
Non credo di essere mai stato così sorpreso in tutta la mia vita.
“Vengo qui solo per un capriccio,” disse freddamente. “Nient’altro.”
“Oh! È tutto qui!” dissi io.
“Sì. È tutto qui. Il Dottore è un uomo intelligente; ci capisce molto bene. È solo uno scherzo mio. Mi diverte farlo ogni tanto. Non c’è bisogno di parlarne, ma penso che uscirò il prossimo martedì!”
Gli assicurai che avrei considerato il nostro colloquio strettamente confidenziale; poi mi riunii al Dottore. Mentre attraversavamo una galleria per uscire, una signora ben vestita, dal comportamento tranquillo e composto, ci si avvicinò, ci offrì un foglietto di carta e una penna e ci pregò di firmarle un autografo; io acconsentii e poi ci separammo.
“Credo di ricordare di aver avuto alcune interviste del genere, con donne all’aperto. Spero che lei non sia arrabbiata, ”
“Sì, davvero.”
“Su quale argomento? Autografi?”
“Non. Lei sente voci nell’aria.”
‘Bene!’, pensai, ‘sarebbe davvero bene se riuscissimo a zittire alcuni di questi falsi profeti dei tempi moderni, che sostengono di fare la stessa cosa; e vorrei provare questo esperimento su uno o due mormoni, per iniziare.’
In this place, there is the best jail for untried offenders in the world. There is also a very well-ordered State prison, arranged upon the same plan as that at Boston, except that here, there is always a sentry on the wall with a loaded gun. It contained at that time about two hundred prisoners. A spot was shown me in the sleeping ward, where a watchman was murdered some years since in the dead of night, in a desperate attempt to escape, made by a prisoner who had broken from his cell. A woman, too, was pointed out to me, who, for the murder of her husband, had been a close prisoner for sixteen years.
‘Do you think,’ I asked of my conductor, ‘that after so very long an imprisonment, she has any thought or hope of ever regaining her liberty?’
‘Oh dear yes,’ he answered. ‘To be sure she has.’
‘She has no chance of obtaining it, I suppose?’
‘Well, I don’t know:’ which, by-the-bye, is a national answer. ‘Her friends mistrust her.’
‘What have they to do with it?’ I naturally inquired.
‘Well, they won’t petition.’
‘But if they did, they couldn’t get her out, I suppose?’
‘Well, not the first time, perhaps, nor yet the second, but tiring and wearying for a few years might do it.’
‘Does that ever do it?’
‘Why yes, that’ll do it sometimes. Political friends’ll do it sometimes. It’s pretty often done, one way or another.’
I shall always entertain a very pleasant and grateful recollection of Hartford. It is a lovely place, and I had many friends there, whom I can never remember with indifference. We left it with no little regret on the evening of Friday the 11th, and travelled that night by railroad to New Haven. Upon the way, the guard and I were formally introduced to each other (as we usually were on such occasions), and exchanged a variety of small-talk. We reached New Haven at about eight o’clock, after a journey of three hours, and put up for the night at the best inn.
New Haven, known also as the City of Elms, is a fine town. Many of its streets (as its alias sufficiently imports) are planted with rows of grand old elm-trees; and the same natural ornaments surround Yale College, an establishment of considerable eminence and reputation. The various departments of this Institution are erected in a kind of park or common in the middle of the town, where they are dimly visible among the shadowing trees. The effect is very like that of an old cathedral yard in England; and when their branches are in full leaf, must be extremely picturesque. Even in the winter time, these groups of well-grown trees, clustering among the busy streets and houses of a thriving city, have a very quaint appearance: seeming to bring about a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it; which is at once novel and pleasant.
After a night’s rest, we rose early, and in good time went down to the wharf, and on board the packet New York for New York. This was the first American steamboat of any size that I had seen; and certainly to an English eye it was infinitely less like a steamboat than a huge floating bath. I could hardly persuade myself, indeed, but that the bathing establishment off Westminster Bridge, which I left a baby, had suddenly grown to an enormous size; run away from home; and set up in foreign parts as a steamer. Being in America, too, which our vagabonds do so particularly favour, it seemed the more probable.
The great difference in appearance between these packets and ours, is, that there is so much of them out of the water: the main-deck being enclosed on all sides, and filled with casks and goods, like any second or third floor in a stack of warehouses; and the promenade or hurricane-deck being a-top of that again. A part of the machinery is always above this deck; where the connecting-rod, in a strong and lofty frame, is seen working away like an iron top-sawyer. There is seldom any mast or tackle: nothing aloft but two tall black chimneys. The man at the helm is shut up in a little house in the fore part of the boat (the wheel being connected with the rudder by iron chains, working the whole length of the deck); and the passengers, unless the weather be very fine indeed, usually congregate below. Directly you have left the wharf, all the life, and stir, and bustle of a packet cease. You wonder for a long time how she goes on, for there seems to be nobody in charge of her; and when another of these dull machines comes splashing by, you feel quite indignant with it, as a sullen cumbrous, ungraceful, unshiplike leviathan: quite forgetting that the vessel you are on board of, is its very counterpart.
There is always a clerk’s office on the lower deck, where you pay your fare; a ladies’ cabin; baggage and stowage rooms; engineer’s room; and in short a great variety of perplexities which render the discovery of the gentlemen’s cabin, a matter of some difficulty. It often occupies the whole length of the boat (as it did in this case), and has three or four tiers of berths on each side. When I first descended into the cabin of the New York, it looked, in my unaccustomed eyes, about as long as the Burlington Arcade.
The Sound which has to be crossed on this passage, is not always a very safe or pleasant navigation, and has been the scene of some unfortunate accidents. It was a wet morning, and very misty, and we soon lost sight of land. The day was calm, however, and brightened towards noon. After exhausting (with good help from a friend) the larder, and the stock of bottled beer, I lay down to sleep; being very much tired with the fatigues of yesterday. But I woke from my nap in time to hurry up, and see Hell Gate, the Hog’s Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious localities, attractive to all readers of famous Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History. We were now in a narrow channel, with sloping banks on either side, besprinkled with pleasant villas, and made refreshing to the sight by turf and trees. Soon we shot in quick succession, past a light-house; a madhouse (how the lunatics flung up their caps and roared in sympathy with the headlong engine and the driving tide!); a jail; and other buildings: and so emerged into a noble bay, whose waters sparkled in the now cloudless sunshine like Nature’s eyes turned up to Heaven.
Then there lay stretched out before us, to the right, confused heaps of buildings, with here and there a spire or steeple, looking down upon the herd below; and here and there, again, a cloud of lazy smoke; and in the foreground a forest of ships’ masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags. Crossing from among them to the opposite shore, were steam ferry-boats laden with people, coaches, horses, waggons, baskets, boxes: crossed and recrossed by other ferry-boats: all travelling to and fro: and never idle. Stately among these restless Insects, were two or three large ships, moving with slow majestic pace, as creatures of a prouder kind, disdainful of their puny journeys, and making for the broad sea. Beyond, were shining heights, and islands in the glancing river, and a distance scarcely less blue and bright than the sky it seemed to meet. The city’s hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of wheels, tingled in the listening ear. All of which life and stir, coming across the stirring water, caught new life and animation from its free companionship; and, sympathising with its buoyant spirits, glistened as it seemed in sport upon its surface, and hemmed the vessel round, and plashed the water high about her sides, and, floating her gallantly into the dock, flew off again to welcome other comers, and speed before them to the busy port.
In questo luogo si trova la migliore prigione al mondo per i rei non ancora processati. C’è anche una prigione statale molto ben organizzata, costruita secondo lo stesso progetto di quella di Boston, con la differenza che qui c’è sempre una sentinella sul muro armata di un fucile carico. A quel tempo conteneva circa duecento detenuti. Mi fu mostrato un punto nella zona riservata ai dormitori, dove alcuni anni prima, nel cuore della notte, un guardiano fu assassinato durante un disperato tentativo di fuga da parte di un prigioniero che si era evaso dalla sua cella. Mi fu anche indicata una donna che, per l’omicidio del marito, era stata rinchiusa lì per sedici anni.
“Pensi,” chiesi al mio direttore d’orchestra, “che dopo un’carcere così lunga, lei abbia ancora qualche pensiero o qualche >speranza di poter riacquistare la sua libertà?”
“Ah sì, certamente che lo ha,” rispose. “Senza dubbio.”
“Non ha alcuna possibilità di ottenerlo, suppongo?”
‘Beh, non lo so, ’, che tra l’altro è una risposta tipica da tutti. ‘I suoi amici non le fidano.’
“Cosa c’entrano loro in questa faccenda?” chiesi naturalmente.
‘Beh, non presenteranno alcuna petizione.’
“Ma se ci provassero, non riuscirebbero comunque a portarla fuori, giusto?”
‘Beh, forse non è la prima volta, né nemmeno la seconda. Ma alcuni anni di sforzi continui potrebbero riuscirci.’
“Funziona mai davvero?”
“Sì, a volte funziona davvero. A volte i compagni politici lo fanno. È una pratica abbastanza comune, in un modo o nell’altro.”
Avrò sempre un ricordo molto piacevole e grato di Hartford. È un posto meraviglioso, e lì avevo molti amici che non potrò mai dimenticare con indifferenza. L’abbiamo lasciato con non poco rammarico nella serata di venerdì 11° e quella notte abbiamo viaggiato in treno fino a New Haven. Lungo la strada, il guardiano e io ci siamo presentati formalmente l’un l’altro (come facevamo solitamente in occasioni del genere) e abbiamo scambiato varie chiacchiere. Siamo arrivati a New Haven verso le otto di ore, dopo un viaggio di tre ore, e ci siamo fermati per la notte nell’albergo migliore della città.
New Haven, conosciuta anche come la “Città degli Olmi”, è una bellissima città. Molte delle sue strade sono fiancheggiate da file di maestosi olmi antichi; lo stesso scenario naturale circonda l’Università di Yale, un istituto di grande prestigio e rinomanza. I vari dipartimenti di questa università sorgono in una sorta di parco situato nel centro della città, dove sono appena visibili tra gli alberi che li ombreggiano. L’effetto complessivo ricorda molto quello di un antico cortile di cattedrale in Inghilterra; e quando i rami degli alberi sono pienamente fogliati, il panorama deve essere davvero incantevole. Anche durante l’inverno, questi gruppi di alberi ben curati, che si trovano tra le strade trafficate e le case di una città in fiore, presentano un aspetto molto caratteristico: sembrano creare una sorta di compromesso tra città e campagna, come se entrambi gli elementi si fossero incontrati a metà strada e avessero stretto “la mano” l’uno all’altro. Un’immagine davvero originale e piacevole.
Dopo una notte di riposo, ci alzammo presto e, in tempi discretamente rapidi, raggiungemmo il molo per imbarcarci sul piroscafo New York diretti a New York. Era la prima nave a vapore americana di qualsiasi dimensione che vedessi; e certamente, agli occhi di un inglese, assomigliava molto di più a una enorme vasca da bagno galleggiante che a una vera nave a vapore. A malapena riuscivo a convincermi che non si trattasse, in realtà, dell’impianto balneare vicino al Westminster Bridge – che avevo lasciato quando ero ancora un bambino – che fosse improvvisamente cresciuto enormemente, fuggito dalla sua sede originale e trasformato in una nave a vapore. Essendo anche in America, un luogo particolarmente amato dai nostri vagabondi, questa spiegazione mi sembrava ancora più plausibile.
La grande differenza nell’aspetto tra questi vascelli e i nostri è che ne ce ne sono tantissimi in superficie dell’acqua: il ponte principale è circondato su tutti i lati e riempito di barili e merci, proprio come un secondo o terzo piano in uno stabilimento commerciale; sopra di esso si trova il ponte passeggeri. Una parte delle macchine è sempre posizionata al di sopra di questo ponte; si può vedere la barra di collegamento muoversi all’interno di un robusto e alto sistema meccanico, come se fosse una sega a motore. Raramente ci sono alberi o attrezzature nautiche: in alto non si vedono che due alte ciminiere nere. Il timoniere è chiuso all’interno di una piccola cabina nella parte anteriore della nave (la ruota del timone è collegata alla barra direzionale tramite catene di ferro, che si estendono per tutta la lunghezza del ponte); i passeggeri, a meno che il tempo non sia davvero splendido, di solito si riuniscono sul ponte inferiore. Non appena si lascia il molo, ogni forma di vita, movimento e frenesia scompare. Si rimane per molto tempo a chiedersi come possa questa nave procedere, visto che sembra non ci sia nessuno a gestirla; e quando un altro di questi vascelli silenziosi e goffi passa accanto, si prova quasi indignazione nei suoi confronti, considerandolo un mostro ingombrante, brutto e privo di grazia nautica. Dimenticando completamente che la nave su cui ci si trova è in realtà il suo perfetto contrario.
Al ponte inferiore c’è sempre l’ufficio del commesso dove si paga il biglietto; una cabina per signore; stanze per i bagagli e per il carico; la cabina dell’ingegnere; insomma, un’infinità di elementi che rendono piuttosto difficile individuare la cabina riservata ai gentiluomini. Spesso occupa l’intera lunghezza della barca (come in questo caso) e presenta tre o quattro livelli di cuccette su ciascun lato. Quando sono sceso per la prima volta nella cabina del New York, a me, che non ci ero abituato, è sembrata lunga all’incirca quanto il Burlington Arcade.
Il tratto di fiume che dobbiamo attraversare non è sempre sicuro o piacevole da navigare, e ha già fatto da teatro a alcuni incidenti sfortunati. Quella mattina faceva freddo e c’era molta nebbia; presto abbiamo perso di vista la riva. Tuttavia, il tempo era sereno e verso mezzogiorno si è schiarito. Dopo aver esaurito (con l’aiuto di un amico) le provviste di cibo e birra in bottiglia, mi sono addormentato, estremamente stanco per le fatiche della giornata precedente. Ma mi sono svegliato in tempo per ammirare Hell Gate, Hog’s Back, Frying Pan e altre località famose descritte da Diedrich Knickerbocker nella sua “Storia”. Ora ci trovavamo in un canale stretto, con rive scoscese su entrambi i lati, punteggiate di graziose ville; l’ambiente era piacevole da vedere, grazie al prato e agli alberi. Poco dopo abbiamo superato rapidamente una casa luminosa, un manicomio (i pazzi salutavano con il cappello in mano, esultando all’unisono con il rumore del motore e la corrente del fiume, ), una prigione e altri edifici; infine siamo emersi in una baia magnifica, le cui acque scintillavano sotto il sole sereno, come se gli occhi della Natura fossero rivolti al cielo.
Davanti a noi, a destra, si estendevano confusi ammassi di edifici, con qua e là una guglia o un campanile che guardavano verso il basso, verso la folla sottostante; qua e là si alzava anche una nuvola di fumo pigro; in primo piano c’era una foresta di alberi maestri delle navi, animati dalle vele che sventolavano e dalle bandiere che ondeggiavano. Attraverso di loro, verso la riva opposta, si muovevano traghetti a vapore carichi di persone, carrozze, cavalli, carri, cesti, scatole: attraversati e ricoperti da altri traghetti; tutti in movimento costante, senza un attimo di pausa. Tra questi mezzi frenetici spiccavano due o tre grandi navi, che si muovevano con lentezza ma maestosità, come creature di una specie più nobile, disdegnose dei loro viaggi insignificanti, dirette verso il mare aperto. Più in là si vedevano alte cime e isole lungo il corso del fiume; la distanza sembrava altrettanto azzurra e luminosa del cielo che incontrava. Il rumore incessante della città, lo sferragliare dei verricelli, il suono delle campane, il latrato dei cani, il rumore degli zoccoli risuonavano nell’aria; tutta questa vita e movimento, trasportati dall’acqua increspata del fiume, sembravano prendere nuova vitalità dal loro incontro con gli elementi naturali; in sintonia con quell’energia vitale, tutto brillava sulla superficie dell’acqua, circondando la nave, sollevando spruzzi intorno a lei e aiutandola ad attraccare con grazia al molo. Poi si allontanavano di nuovo per accogliere altri viaggiatori e precederli verso il porto affollato.
CHAPTER VI NEW YORK
THE beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, but many of its streets have the same characteristics; except that the houses are not quite so fresh-coloured, the sign-boards are not quite so gaudy, the gilded letters not quite so golden, the bricks not quite so red, the stone not quite so white, the blinds and area railings not quite so green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors not quite so bright and twinkling. There are many by-streets, almost as neutral in clean colours, and positive in dirty ones, as by-streets in London; and there is one quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles’s.
The great promenade and thoroughfare, as most people know, is Broadway; a wide and bustling street, which, from the Battery Gardens to its opposite termination in a country road, may be four miles long. Shall we sit down in an upper floor of the Carlton House Hotel (situated in the best part of this main artery of New York), and when we are tired of looking down upon the life below, sally forth arm-in-arm, and mingle with the stream?
Warm weather! The sun strikes upon our heads at this open window, as though its rays were concentrated through a burning-glass; but the day is in its zenith, and the season an unusual one. Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on them, they would hiss and smoke, and smell like half-quenched fires. No stint of omnibuses here! Half-a-dozen have gone by within as many minutes. Plenty of hackney cabs and coaches too; gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages—rather of a clumsy make, and not very different from the public vehicles, but built for the heavy roads beyond the city pavement. Negro coachmen and white; in straw hats, black hats, white hats, glazed caps, fur caps; in coats of drab, black, brown, green, blue, nankeen, striped jean and linen; and there, in that one instance (look while it passes, or it will be too late), in suits of livery. Some southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and swells with Sultan pomp and power. Yonder, where that phaeton with the well-clipped pair of grays has stopped—standing at their heads now—is a Yorkshire groom, who has not been very long in these parts, and looks sorrowfully round for a companion pair of top-boots, which he may traverse the city half a year without meeting. Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen elsewhere, in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings! The young gentlemen are fond, you see, of turning down their shirt-collars and cultivating their whiskers, especially under the chin; but they cannot approach the ladies in their dress or bearing, being, to say the truth, humanity of quite another sort. Byrons of the desk and counter, pass on, and let us see what kind of men those are behind ye: those two labourers in holiday clothes, of whom one carries in his hand a crumpled scrap of paper from which he tries to spell out a hard name, while the other looks about for it on all the doors and windows.
Irishmen both! You might know them, if they were masked, by their long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons, and their drab trousers, which they wear like men well used to working dresses, who are easy in no others. It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and countrywomen of those two labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement! Irishmen both, and sorely puzzled too, to find out what they seek. Let us go down, and help them, for the love of home, and that spirit of liberty which admits of honest service to honest men, and honest work for honest bread, no matter what it be.
That’s well! We have got at the right address at last, though it is written in strange characters truly, and might have been scrawled with the blunt handle of the spade the writer better knows the use of, than a pen. Their way lies yonder, but what business takes them there? They carry savings: to hoard up? No. They are brothers, those men. One crossed the sea alone, and working very hard for one half year, and living harder, saved funds enough to bring the other out. That done, they worked together side by side, contentedly sharing hard labour and hard living for another term, and then their sisters came, and then another brother, and lastly, their old mother. And what now? Why, the poor old crone is restless in a strange land, and yearns to lay her bones, she says, among her people in the old graveyard at home: and so they go to pay her passage back: and God help her and them, and every simple heart, and all who turn to the Jerusalem of their younger days, and have an altar-fire upon the cold hearth of their fathers.
This narrow thoroughfare, baking and blistering in the sun, is Wall Street: the Stock Exchange and Lombard Street of New York. Many a rapid fortune has been made in this street, and many a no less rapid ruin. Some of these very merchants whom you see hanging about here now, have locked up money in their strong-boxes, like the man in the Arabian Nights, and opening them again, have found but withered leaves. Below, here by the water-side, where the bowsprits of ships stretch across the footway, and almost thrust themselves into the windows, lie the noble American vessels which have made their Packet Service the finest in the world. They have brought hither the foreigners who abound in all the streets: not, perhaps, that there are more here, than in other commercial cities; but elsewhere, they have particular haunts, and you must find them out; here, they pervade the town.
CAPITOLO VI
New York
La bellissima metropoli di America non è affatto una città così pulita come Boston, ma molte delle sue strade presentano le stesse caratteristiche: solo che le case non sono altrettanto colorate, i cartelli pubblicitari non sono altrettanto vistosi, le lettere dorate non sono altrettanto brillanti, i mattoni non sono altrettanto rossi, la pietra non è altrettanto bianca, le persiane e le ringhiere non sono altrettanto verdi, e i pomelli e le targhe sulle porte delle case non sono altrettanto luminosi. Ci sono molte strade secondarie, quasi altrettanto monotone nei colori puliti e scuri come quelle di Londra; inoltre, c’è un quartiere comunemente chiamato “Five Points” che, per quanto riguarda la sporcizia e la miseria, può essere paragonato senza problemi a Seven Dials o ad altre zone famose di St. Giles’s.
La grande passeggiata e via principale, come la maggior parte delle persone sa, è Broadway: una strada larga e affollata che, dai Battery Gardens fino alla sua estremità opposta, dove si trasforma in una strada di campagna, può avere una lunghezza di circa quattro miglia. Che ne dite di sederci al piano superiore dell’hotel Carlton House (situato nella parte migliore di questa arteria principale di New York)? Quando ci stancheremo di osservare la vita che si svolge sotto di noi, potremo uscire insieme e mescolarci tra la folla.
Clima caldo! Il sole batte direttamente sulla nostra testa attraverso questa finestra aperta, come se i suoi raggi fossero concentrati attraverso un cannocchiale; ma è ancora mezzogiorno, e la stagione è insolita. Esiste davvero una strada così soleggiata come questo Broadway? I ciottoli del marciapiede sono lucidati dal passaggio delle persone fino a brillare; i mattoni rossi delle case sembrano ancora essere nei forni caldi e asciutti. E i tetti di quegli omnibus sembrano pronti a sibilare e fumare se vi si versasse dell’acqua sopra, emanando un odore simile a quello di fuochi appena spenti. Qui ci sono tantissimi omnibus: mezza dozzina sono passati in pochi minuti. Ci sono anche molti taxi a cavalli e carrozze; calessini, phaeton, vetture a ruote grandi. Piuttosto malconce, non molto diverse dai veicoli pubblici, ma costruite per le strade accidentate al di fuori dei marciapiedi della città. Conductori neri e bianchi. Con cappelli di paglia, cappelli neri, cappelli bianchi, berretti lucidi, berretti di pelliccia. In abiti scuri, neri, marroni, verdi, blu, color canna, jeans a strisce e stoffe di lino. E lì, in quell’unico caso (guardate mentre passa, altrimenti sarà troppo tardi), uomini in abiti da servitori. Probabilmente qualche repubblicano del Sud che fa indossare uniformi ai suoi servi, mostrando tutta la pompa e il potere di un sultano. Là, quel phaeton con quei cavalli grigi ben curati. Il cocchiere è un giovane dello Yorkshire: non è da molto in queste parti, e sembra cercare disperatamente un paio di stivali adatti per viaggiare per mezza città senza incontrarne altri. Oh, signore. Come si vestono quelle donne! In questi dieci minuti abbiamo visto più colori di quanti ne avremmo visti in molti giorni altrove. Che varietà di ombrelli. Che sete e rasi arcobaleno. Quanti calzini sottili, scarpe strette, nastri fluttuanti, frange di seta. E quanti abiti eleganti, con cappucci vistosi e fodere colorate. I giovani signori amano abbassare il colletto della camicia e curarsi la barba, soprattutto sotto il mento. Ma non possono certo competere con le donne per quanto riguarda l’abbigliamento o il portamento. A dire il vero, appartengono a un’altra specie di umanità. Lasciateci ora guardare quegli uomini dietro di voi: quei due lavoratori in abiti festivi. Uno tiene in mano un pezzo di carta stropicciato, cercando di leggere un nome difficile da pronunciare; l’altro lo cerca su tutte le porte e le finestre.
Entrambi irlandesi! Forse li riconoscereste anche se fossero mascherati: dai loro lunghi cappotti blu con bottoni brillanti e dai pantaloni scuri che indossano, simili ai vestiti da lavoro di chi è abituato a faticare duramente. Senza quegli uomini e quelle donne, sarebbe difficile mantenere in funzione le vostre repubbliche modello. Chi altro, infatti, scaverebbe, lavorerebbe sodo, si occuperebbe dei lavori domestici, costruirebbe canali e strade, realizzerebbe grandi progetti di miglioramento del paese? Entrambi irlandesi. E anche molto perplessi riguardo a ciò che cercano. Andiamo ad aiutarli, per amore della >casa e per quel spirito di libertà che valorizza il lavoro onesto e il rispetto reciproco tra persone oneste, indipendentemente dal tipo di lavoro svolto.
Benissimo! Finalmente siamo arrivati all’indirizzo giusto, anche se scritto in caratteri davvero strani, e probabilmente scarabocchiato con l’impugnatura ruvida di una pala, piuttosto che con una penna. La loro destinazione è laggiù, ma quale motivo li spinge ad andare proprio lì? Portano con sé dei risparmi: forse per accumularli? No. Sono fratelli. Uno ha attraversato il mare da solo, ha lavorato sodo per sei mesi e, vivendo in condizioni molto difficili, è riuscito a risparmiare abbastanza denaro per far venire l’altro qui. Una volta fatto questo, hanno continuato a lavorare insieme, condividendo felicemente fatiche e privazioni. Poi sono arrivate le loro sorelle, un altro fratello, e infine la loro vecchia madre. E ora? Beh, quella povera vecchina è inquieta in una terra straniera, desidera arrendersi alla morte tra il suo popolo, nel vecchio cimitero di casa sua. Quindi vanno a pagare le spese del suo viaggio di ritorno. Che Dio li aiuti tutti, insieme a ogni cuore semplice e a chiunque si rivolga verso la “Gerusalemme” dei propri giorni più giovani, e possieda un altare con il fuoco sacro sul freddo focolare dei propri antenati.
Questo stretto passaggio, arroventato e coperto di vesciche sotto il sole, è Wall Street: la Borsa Valori e Lombard Street di New York. Molte fortune sono state rapidamente accumulate in questa strada, così come molte rovine altrettanto rapide. Alcuni di questi mercanti che ora vedete qui intorno hanno chiuso i loro soldi nelle casseforti, proprio come l’uomo delle “Mille e una notte”; quando le hanno riaperte, però, hanno trovato soltanto foglie appassite. Più in basso, lungo il lato del fiume, dove gli alberi maestri delle navi si estendono sopra i marciapiedi, quasi sfiorando le finestre, giacciono quelle nobili imbarcazioni americane che hanno reso il servizio di trasporto via nave il migliore al mondo. Sono state queste navi a portare qui gli stranieri che abbondano in tutte le strade della città; forse non ce ne sono più di quante in altre città commerciali, ma altrove loro hanno i loro luoghi preferiti per frequentare. Qui, invece, sono dappertutto.
We must cross Broadway again; gaining some refreshment from the heat, in the sight of the great blocks of clean ice which are being carried into shops and bar-rooms; and the pine-apples and water-melons profusely displayed for sale. Fine streets of spacious houses here, you see!—Wall Street has furnished and dismantled many of them very often—and here a deep green leafy square. Be sure that is a hospitable house with inmates to be affectionately remembered always, where they have the open door and pretty show of plants within, and where the child with laughing eyes is peeping out of window at the little dog below. You wonder what may be the use of this tall flagstaff in the by-street, with something like Liberty’s head-dress on its top: so do I. But there is a passion for tall flagstaffs hereabout, and you may see its twin brother in five minutes, if you have a mind.
Again across Broadway, and so—passing from the many-coloured crowd and glittering shops—into another long main street, the Bowery. A railroad yonder, see, where two stout horses trot along, drawing a score or two of people and a great wooden ark, with ease. The stores are poorer here; the passengers less gay. Clothes ready-made, and meat ready-cooked, are to be bought in these parts; and the lively whirl of carriages is exchanged for the deep rumble of carts and waggons. These signs which are so plentiful, in shape like river buoys, or small balloons, hoisted by cords to poles, and dangling there, announce, as you may see by looking up, ‘OYSTERS IN EVERY STYLE.’ They tempt the hungry most at night, for then dull candles glimmering inside, illuminate these dainty words, and make the mouths of idlers water, as they read and linger.
What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama!—a famous prison, called The Tombs. Shall we go in?
So. A long, narrow, lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its centre, a bridge, for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these bridges sits a man: dozing or reading, or talking to an idle companion. On each tier, are two opposite rows of small iron doors. They look like furnace-doors, but are cold and black, as though the fires within had all gone out. Some two or three are open, and women, with drooping heads bent down, are talking to the inmates. The whole is lighted by a skylight, but it is fast closed; and from the roof there dangle, limp and drooping, two useless windsails.
A man with keys appears, to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and, in his way, civil and obliging.
‘Are those black doors the cells?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they all full?’
‘Well, they’re pretty nigh full, and that’s a fact, and no two ways about it.’
‘Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely?’
‘Why, we do only put coloured people in ’em. That’s the truth.’
‘When do the prisoners take exercise?’
‘Well, they do without it pretty much.’
‘Do they never walk in the yard?’
‘Considerable seldom.’
‘Sometimes, I suppose?’
‘Well, it’s rare they do. They keep pretty bright without it.’
‘But suppose a man were here for a twelvemonth. I know this is only a prison for criminals who are charged with grave offences, while they are awaiting their trial, or under remand, but the law here affords criminals many means of delay. What with motions for new trials, and in arrest of judgment, and what not, a prisoner might be here for twelve months, I take it, might he not?’
‘Well, I guess he might.’
‘Do you mean to say that in all that time he would never come out at that little iron door, for exercise?’
‘He might walk some, perhaps—not much.’
‘Will you open one of the doors?’
‘All, if you like.’
The fastenings jar and rattle, and one of the doors turns slowly on its hinges. Let us look in. A small bare cell, into which the light enters through a high chink in the wall. There is a rude means of washing, a table, and a bedstead. Upon the latter, sits a man of sixty; reading. He looks up for a moment; gives an impatient dogged shake; and fixes his eyes upon his book again. As we withdraw our heads, the door closes on him, and is fastened as before. This man has murdered his wife, and will probably be hanged.
‘How long has he been here?’
‘A month.’
‘When will he be tried?’
‘Next term.’
‘When is that?’
‘Next month.’
‘In England, if a man be under sentence of death, even he has air and exercise at certain periods of the day.’
‘Possible?’
With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the women’s side: making, as he goes, a kind of iron castanet of the key and the stair-rail!
Each cell door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others shrink away in shame.—For what offence can that lonely child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh! that boy? He is the son of the prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father; and is detained here for safe keeping, until the trial; that’s all.
But it is a dreadful place for the child to pass the long days and nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it not?—What says our conductor?
‘Well, it an’t a very rowdy life, and that’s a fact!’
Again he clinks his metal castanet, and leads us leisurely away. I have a question to ask him as we go.
‘Pray, why do they call this place The Tombs?’
‘Well, it’s the cant name.’
‘I know it is. Why?’
‘Some suicides happened here, when it was first built. I expect it come about from that.’
‘I saw just now, that that man’s clothes were scattered about the floor of his cell. Don’t you oblige the prisoners to be orderly, and put such things away?’
Dobbiamo attraversare di nuovo Broadway; rinfrescarci un po’ dal caldo, ammirando quei grandi blocchi di ghiaccio pulito che vengono portati nelle botteghe e nei bar, nonché le ananas e i cetrioli d’acqua esposti in abbondanza per la vendita. Vedete: strade belle, con case spaziose. Wall Street ne ha arredate e poi smantellate molte, molto spesso. E qui c’è una piazza verde e rigogliosa. Sicuramente si tratta di una casa accogliente, dove le persone che vi abitano rimarranno sempre nel ricordo con affetto: porte aperte, piante bellissime all’interno. E un bambino con gli occhi sorridenti che spia fuori dalla finestra il cagnolino sotto di lui. Vi chiederete a cosa possa servire quel alto palo della bandiera in quella strada secondaria, con qualcosa che assomiglia al copricapo della Libertà sulla sua sommità. Anch’io me lo chiedo. Ma qui intorno c’è una vera passione per questi alti pali della bandiera; se vi interessa, potrete vedere il suo “gemello” in cinque minuti.
Di nuovo lungo Broadway. Superando la folla colorata e i negozi scintillanti, si arriva in un’altra lunga strada principale: il Bowery. Laggiù c’è una ferrovia: due robusti cavalli tirano con facilità una dozzina di persone e un enorme carro di legno. I negozi qui sono più modesti; i passeggeri, meno allegri. In queste zone si comprano abiti pronti e carne cotta. Il frastuono delle carrozze viene sostituito dal rumore cupo dei carri e dei vagoni. Questi cartelli, simili a boe per i fiumi o piccoli palloncini sospesi con corde ai pali, annunciano, come si può leggere, “Ostriche di ogni tipo”. Di notte attirano soprattutto gli affamati: le candele fiocche all’interno illuminano quelle parole graziose, facendo venire l’acquolina in bocca ai passanti che si soffermano a leggerle.
Che orrore di prigione, simile al palazzo di un incantatore in un melodramma! Una famosa prigione, chiamata “Le Tombe”. Entriamo?
So. Un edificio lungo, stretto e alto, riscaldato come al solito da stufe, con quattro gallerie una sopra l’altra che lo circondano e comunicano tra loro tramite scale. Tra i due lati di ciascuna galleria, e al suo centro, ci sono dei ponti per facilitare il passaggio. Su ognuno di questi ponti c’è un uomo: che sonnecchia, legge o chiacchiera con un compagno ozioso. Su ogni livello ci sono due file opposte di piccole porte di ferro; sembrano porte di forni, ma sono fredde e nere, come se il fuoco all’interno fosse completamente spento. Alcune di queste porte sono aperte, e donne con la testa china parlano con chi si trova all’interno. L’intero edificio è illuminato da una finestra sul soffitto, ma questa è chiusa a chiave; dal tetto pendono, inerti e flosci, due vele di tela inutili.
Appare un uomo con le chiavi, per mostrarci intorno alla proprietà. Un tipo attraente, e, in qualche modo, cortese e disponibile.
“Quei portoni neri sono le celle?”
“Sì, davvero.”
“Sono tutti pieni?”
‘Beh, sono quasi pieni, ed è un fatto indiscutibile.’
“Quelli che si trovano in fondo sono sicuramente malsani, vero?”
“Beh, infatti mettiamo solo persone di colore lì dentro. Questa è la verità.”
“Quando fanno esercizio i prigionieri?”
‘Beh, in realtà se la cavano benissimo anche senza.’
“Non camminano mai nel cortile?”
“Raramente molto.”
“A volte, immagino, ”
‘Beh, è raro che lo facciano. Rimangono abbastanza luminosi anche senza.’
‘Ma supponiamo che un uomo rimanga qui per dodici mesi. So che questo è soltanto un carcere per criminali accusati di gravi reati, mentre aspettano il processo o sono in custodia cautelare; tuttavia, la legge qui offre ai criminali molti modi per ritardare le procedure. Con le richieste di nuovo processo, gli arresti delle sentenze e simili, un detenuto potrebbe rimanere qui per dodici mesi. Non credete?’
‘Beh’, immagino che possa farlo.’
“Volete dire che, in tutto quel tempo, non usciva mai da quella piccola porta di ferro per fare esercizio?”
“Forse potrebbe camminare un po’, ma non molto.”
“Aprirai una di quelle porte?”
“Come volete voi.”
I cardini scattano e tintinnano, e una delle porte si apre lentamente sui suoi ganci. Entriamo a dare un’occhiata: una piccola cella spoglia, nella quale la luce filtra attraverso una fessura alta nel muro. C’è un semplice lavandino, un tavolo e un letto. Su quest’ultimo siede un uomo di sessant’anni; sta leggendo. Alza lo sguardo per un momento, scuote la testa con impazienza e poi riporta gli occhi sul suo libro. Mentre ci ritiriamo, la porta si chiude dietro di lui e viene chiusa a chiave come prima. Quest’uomo ha ucciso sua moglie e probabilmente verrà impiccato.
“Da quanto tempo è qui?”
“Un mese.”
“Quando verrà processato?”
“Prossimo semestre.”
“Quando sarà?”
“Il mese prossimo.”
“In Inghilterra, se un uomo è condannato alla morte, anche lui ha diritto all’aria e all’esercizio fisico in determinati momenti della giornata.”
“Possibile?”
Con quale straordinaria e incomprensibile freddezza lo dice. E con quanta noncuranza si dirige verso il lato delle donne, facendo, mentre cammina, un sorta di “rullo di tamburo” con la chiave e la ringhiera delle scale!
Ogni porta della cella su questo lato presenta un’apertura quadrata. Alcune donne spiavano ansiosamente attraverso di essa al suono dei passi; altre si ritraevano imbarazzate. Per quale colpa può essere rinchiuso qui quel bambino solitario, di dieci o dodici anni? Oh. Quel ragazzo è il figlio del prigioniero che abbiamo visto poco fa; è un testimone contro suo padre ed è trattenuto qui per garantirne la sicurezza, fino al processo. Nient’altro.
Ma è un posto terribile per quel bambino dover trascorrere lì i suoi lunghi giorni e le sue lunghe notti. È davvero una trattamento troppo duro per un giovane testimone, non credete? E cosa dice il nostro direttore?
“Beh, non è certo una vita molto movimentata. E questo è un fatto!”
Di nuovo fa tintinnare le sue castagnette di metallo e ci conduce via con calma. Ho una domanda da fargli mentre camminiamo.
“Perché chiamano questo posto ‘Le Tombe’?”
“Beh, è il nome della canzone.”
“Lo so che è così. Perché?”
“Alcuni suicidi sono avvenuti qui quando è stato costruito per la prima volta. Immagino che sia dovuto a questo.”
“Ho appena visto che i vestiti di quell’uomo erano sparsi per tutto il pavimento della sua cella. Non dovreste far sì che i prigionieri mantengano l’ordine e mettere via cose del genere?”
‘Where should they put ’em?’
‘Not on the ground surely. What do you say to hanging them up?’
He stops and looks round to emphasise his answer:
‘Why, I say that’s just it. When they had hooks they would hang themselves, so they’re taken out of every cell, and there’s only the marks left where they used to be!’
The prison-yard in which he pauses now, has been the scene of terrible performances. Into this narrow, grave-like place, men are brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the gibbet on the ground; the rope about his neck; and when the sign is given, a weight at its other end comes running down, and swings him up into the air—a corpse.
The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle, the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five. From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad, the thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them, the prison-wall is interposed as a thick gloomy veil. It is the curtain to his bed of death, his winding-sheet, and grave. From him it shuts out life, and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood in that last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often all-sufficient to sustain. There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no ruffians to uphold a ruffian’s name before. All beyond the pitiless stone wall, is unknown space.
Let us go forth again into the cheerful streets.
Once more in Broadway! Here are the same ladies in bright colours, walking to and fro, in pairs and singly; yonder the very same light blue parasol which passed and repassed the hotel-window twenty times while we were sitting there. We are going to cross here. Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs have just now turned the corner.
Here is a solitary swine lounging homeward by himself. He has only one ear; having parted with the other to vagrant-dogs in the course of his city rambles. But he gets on very well without it; and leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club-men at home. He leaves his lodgings every morning at a certain hour, throws himself upon the town, gets through his day in some manner quite satisfactory to himself, and regularly appears at the door of his own house again at night, like the mysterious master of Gil Blas. He is a free-and-easy, careless, indifferent kind of pig, having a very large acquaintance among other pigs of the same character, whom he rather knows by sight than conversation, as he seldom troubles himself to stop and exchange civilities, but goes grunting down the kennel, turning up the news and small-talk of the city in the shape of cabbage-stalks and offal, and bearing no tails but his own: which is a very short one, for his old enemies, the dogs, have been at that too, and have left him hardly enough to swear by. He is in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for every one makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest give him the wall, if he prefer it. He is a great philosopher, and seldom moved, unless by the dogs before mentioned. Sometimes, indeed, you may see his small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase garnishes a butcher’s door-post, but he grunts out ‘Such is life: all flesh is pork!’ buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage-stalks, at any rate.
They are the city scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would recognise it for a pig’s likeness. They are never attended upon, or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own resources in early life, and become preternaturally knowing in consequence. Every pig knows where he lives, much better than anybody could tell him. At this hour, just as evening is closing in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their way to the last. Occasionally, some youth among them who has over-eaten himself, or has been worried by dogs, trots shrinkingly homeward, like a prodigal son: but this is a rare case: perfect self-possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being their foremost attributes.
The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down the long thoroughfare, dotted with bright jets of gas, it is reminded of Oxford Street, or Piccadilly. Here and there a flight of broad stone cellar-steps appears, and a painted lamp directs you to the Bowling Saloon, or Ten-Pin alley; Ten-Pins being a game of mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an act forbidding Nine-Pins. At other downward flights of steps, are other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster-cellars—pleasant retreats, say I: not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese-plates (or for thy dear sake, heartiest of Greek Professors!), but because of all kinds of caters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the swallowers of oysters alone are not gregarious; but subduing themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not by two hundreds.
But how quiet the streets are! Are there no itinerant bands; no wind or stringed instruments? No, not one. By day, are there no Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurers, Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs? No, not one. Yes, I remember one. One barrel-organ and a dancing-monkey—sportive by nature, but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian school. Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white mouse in a twirling cage.
“Dove dovrebbero metterle?”
“Di certo non per terra. Che ne dici di appenderli?”
Si ferma e guarda intorno per sottolineare la sua risposta:
“Beh, proprio questo è il punto. Quando avevano gli ganci, si sarebbero davvero impiccati; quindi gli hanno tolti da tutte le celle, e sono rimasti solo i segni del loro precedente posizionamento!”
Il cortile della prigione in cui ora si ferma è stato teatro di atti terribili. In questo luogo stretto, simile a una tomba, gli uomini vengono portati per morire. Quella povera creatura sta sotto la forca; la corda intorno al suo collo. E quando arriva il segnale, un peso all’altro capo della corda si abbassa rapidamente, sollevandola in aria. Un cadavere.
La legge richiede che in questo spettacolo desolante siano presenti il giudice, la giuria e venticinque cittadini. Per la comunità, tutto ciò rimane nascosto; per i dissoluti e i malvagi, questa realtà rappresenta un mistero terribile. Tra il criminale e loro, il muro della prigione funge da spesso velo oscuro e impenetrabile. È come la cortina che separa il criminale dal suo letto di morte, dalla sua bara e dalla sua tomba. Quel muro esclude dalla sua vita tutti gli stimoli capaci di infondergli coraggio nell’ultima ora. Stimoli che, spesso, bastano da soli a sostenerlo nel momento del pericolo. Non ci sono occhi audaci in grado di renderlo ancora più temerario; non ci sono teppisti pronti a difendere il nome di un criminale. Tutto ciò che si trova al di là di quel muro spietato è uno spazio sconosciuto.
Andiamo ancora una volta per le strade allegra.
Ancora una volta a Broadway! Ecco le stesse signore, vestite di colori vivaci, che camminano avanti e indietro, a coppie o da sole; laggiù c’è proprio lo stesso ombrello blu chiaro che è passato davanti alla finestra dell’hotel venti volte mentre noi eravamo lì seduti. Ora passeremo di qua. State attenti ai maiali: due scrofe robuste stanno correndo dietro questa carrozza, e proprio adesso un gruppo selezionato di sei o sette signori sta girando l’angolo.
Ecco un maiale solitario che torna a casa da solo. Ha soltanto un orecchio; l’altro gli è stato strappato via dai cani randagi durante le sue scorribande per la città. Ma se la cava molto bene anche senza, e conduce una vita vagabonda, gentile e disinvolta, piuttosto simile a quella dei nostri membri del club. Ogni mattina lascia il suo rifugio alle stesse ore, si avventura per la città, trascorre la giornata in modi che lo soddisfano appieno, e poi torna regolarmente a casa alla sera, come il misterioso padrone di Gil Blas. È un maiale spensierato, indifferente, con molti amici del suo stesso carattere; li conosce più per l’aspetto che per le parole, poiché raramente si prende la briga di fermarsi a chiacchierare. Si limita a grugnire lungo i vicoli, diffondendo notizie e pettegolezzi sulla città sotto forma di gambi di cavolo e interiora. E non porta altre code che la sua: molto corta, a dire il vero. I suoi vecchi nemici, i cani, ci hanno già pensato loro. È, in ogni senso, un maiale “repubblicano”: va dove vuole, si mescola con la “ migliore società ”. E tutti gli fanno spazio quando appare; anche i più arroganti gli lasciano il passo, se lo preferisce. È un grande filosofo. Raramente si commuove, tranne che per via dei cani menzionati prima. A volte, forse, si vede il suo occhietto brillare davanti al cadavere di un amico macellato. Ma lui grugnisce: “Così è la vita. Tutta carne è maiale, ” Poi seppellisce nuovamente il naso nel fango e continua per la sua strada, consolandosi con il pensiero che, almeno, ora ci sono meno gambi di cavolo da temere.
Sono i raccoglitori di rifiuti della città, questi maiali. Bestie brutte e orribili; per la maggior parte hanno schiene marroni e magre, simili ai coperchi di vecchi bauli in crine di cavallo, macchiate da chiazze nere poco salutari. Hanno anche zampe lunghe e magre, nonché musi appuntiti; se si riuscisse a convincerne uno a posare per un ritratto di profilo, nessuno lo riconoscerebbe come il volto di un maiale. Non vengono mai curati, nutriti, guidati o catturati; sin da piccoli vengono lasciati a cavarsela da soli, e per questo diventano straordinariamente astuti. Ogni maiale sa esattamente dove vive, molto meglio di quanto chiunque possa dirglielo. In quest’ora, proprio quando cala la sera, li si vede gironzolare a gruppi verso i loro letti, mangiando fino all’ultimo boccone. Di tanto in tanto, qualche giovane maiale che si è saziato troppo o che è stato inseguito dai >cani corre spaventato verso casa, come un figlio prodigo. Ma questo accade raramente: la perfetta padronanza di sé, l’assoluta autosufficienza e una calma imperturbabile sono le loro principali caratteristiche.
Le strade e i negozi sono ora illuminati; e mentre lo sguardo si sposta lungo questa via principale, punteggiata da vivaci fasci di luce gassosa, ci viene in mente Oxford Street o Piccadilly. Qui e là compaiono ampi gradini di pietra che portano nei sotterranei; una lampada dipinta indica la direzione del bowling saloon o della sala da biliardo a dieci pin: un gioco che combina fortuna e abilità, inventato quando il legislatore approvò una legge che vietava il gioco a nove pin. In altri punti, altre lampade indicano la posizione dei locali dove si servono ostriche: piacevoli ritrovi, non solo per la squisita cucina di questi frutti di mare – quasi grandi quanto piatti di formaggio (per l’amor del cielo, ) – ma anche perché in queste zone si possono trovare ogni tipo di cibo, pesce, carne o pollame. Gli amanti delle ostriche, però, non sono inclini a riunirsi in gruppi numerosi; piuttosto, seguendo la “natura” stessa degli alimenti che consumano, si ritirano in angoli appartati, seduti in piccoli spazi separati, in coppie, e non in grandi gruppi.
Ma che silenzio c’è per le strade! Non ci sono bande itineranti, né strumenti a fiato o a corda. No, nessuno. Di giorno, non ci sono Punch, Fantocini, cani danzanti, giocolieri, maghi, orchestrine, nemmeno organi a barile. No, nessuno. Sì, ricordo uno: un organo a barile e una scimmia ballerina. Sportiva per natura, ma ormai solo un’altra scimmia noiosa e goffa, di quella che si definirebbe “di scuola utilitarista”. Nient’altro di vivace. No, nemmeno un topolino bianco in una gabbia che ruota.
Are there no amusements? Yes. There is a lecture-room across the way, from which that glare of light proceeds, and there may be evening service for the ladies thrice a week, or oftener. For the young gentlemen, there is the counting-house, the store, the bar-room: the latter, as you may see through these windows, pretty full. Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass! No amusements? What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety of twist, doing, but amusing themselves? What are the fifty newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but amusements? Not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff; dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey.—No amusements!
Let us go on again; and passing this wilderness of an hotel with stores about its base, like some Continental theatre, or the London Opera House shorn of its colonnade, plunge into the Five Points. But it is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two heads of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained officers if you met them in the Great Desert. So true it is, that certain pursuits, wherever carried on, will stamp men with the same character. These two might have been begotten, born, and bred, in Bow Street.
We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of other kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, are rife enough where we are going now.
This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors, have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?
So far, nearly every house is a low tavern; and on the bar-room walls, are coloured prints of Washington, and Queen Victoria of England, and the American Eagle. Among the pigeon-holes that hold the bottles, are pieces of plate-glass and coloured paper, for there is, in some sort, a taste for decoration, even here. And as seamen frequent these haunts, there are maritime pictures by the dozen: of partings between sailors and their lady-loves, portraits of William, of the ballad, and his Black-Eyed Susan; of Will Watch, the Bold Smuggler; of Paul Jones the Pirate, and the like: on which the painted eyes of Queen Victoria, and of Washington to boot, rest in as strange companionship, as on most of the scenes that are enacted in their wondering presence.
What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread?—a miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it, sits a man: his elbows on his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. ‘What ails that man?’ asks the foremost officer. ‘Fever,’ he sullenly replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of a feverish brain, in such a place as this!
Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come. A negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer’s voice—he knows it well—but comforted by his assurance that he has not come on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle. The match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusty rags upon the ground; then dies away and leaves a denser darkness than before, if there can be degrees in such extremes. He stumbles down the stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper with his hand. Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face in some strange mirror.
Mount up these other stairs with no less caution (there are traps and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the roof. Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of sleeping negroes. Pah! They have a charcoal fire within; there is a smell of singeing clothes, or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.
Non ci sono divertimenti? Sì. C’è un aula di conferenze dall’altra parte della strada, da cui proviene quella luce abbagliante; inoltre, per le signore ci possono essere servizi serali tre volte a settimana, o anche più spesso. Per i giovani gentiluomini, ci sono la banca, il negozio, il bar. Quest’ultimo, come potete vedere attraverso queste finestre, è piuttosto affollato. Ascoltate! Il suono dei martelli che frantumano i blocchi di ghiaccio, e il rumore fresco e gorgogliante del ghiaccio tritato mentre viene mescolato da un bicchiere all’altro. Non ci sono divertimenti? E quei tipi che fumano sigari e bevono alcolici forti, i cui cappelli e abiti presentano ogni possibile forma e colore. Cosa fanno, se non divertirsi? Quei cinquanta giornali che quei ragazzini vocianti distribuiscono per strada. Non sono forse anche loro un tipo di divertimento? Non divertimenti banali o insipidi, ma roba davvero forte: diffusione di calunnie e insulti, distruzione di proprietà private, incoraggiamento di gusti perversi. E ancora, invenzioni di bugie per saziare le menti più voraci. Accusare ogni persona impegnata nella vita pubblica dei motivi più volgari e spregevoli. Allontanare da chi si dedica alle buone azioni e alla giustizia ogni persona onesta. E infine, incitare con urla, fischi e applausi i peggiori individui. No, davvero: nessun divertimento.
Andiamo avanti ancora; superando questa landa desolata di hotel con negozi attorno alle loro basi, simili a qualche teatro continentale o alla London Opera House priva della sua colonnata, immergiamoci nei Five Points. Ma prima è necessario che prendiamo con noi questi due ufficiali di polizia: li riconoscereste subito come agenti abili e ben addestrati, anche se li incontraste nel Grande Deserto. È davvero vero che certe attività, qualunque sia il luogo in cui vengano svolte, lasciano sempre un segno caratteristico su coloro che le praticano. Questi due agenti potrebbero essere nati e cresciuti proprio a Bow Street.
Non abbiamo visto mendicanti per le strade né di notte né di giorno; ma ce ne sono molti di altri tipi di persone che vagano senza meta. Povertà, miseria e vizio sono davvero diffusi nel luogo verso cui stiamo andando ora.
Questo è il posto: questi vicoli stretti, che si diramano a destra e a sinistra, e che puzzano ovunque di fango e sporcizia. Le vite che si conducono qui producono gli stessi risultati che altrove. Quei volti grossolani e gonfi alle porte hanno dei loro equivalenti nelle casa e in tutto il resto del mondo. La lussuria ha fatto invecchiare prematuramente queste case stesse. Guardate come le travi marce stanno crollando, e come le finestre rattoppate e rotte sembrano fissarvi con sguardo cupo, come occhi feriti in liti ubriachi. Molti di quei “maiali” vivono qui. Si chiedono mai perché i loro padroni camminino eretti invece di strisciare sul pavimento? E perché parlino invece di grugnire?
Finora, quasi ogni casa è una semplice taverna; sulle pareti del locale, ci sono stampe colorate di Washington, della Regina Vittoria d’Inghilterra e dell’Aquila Americana. Tra gli scaffali dove si conservano le bottiglie, ci sono pezzi di vetro e carta colorata: anche qui, in qualche modo, c’è un certo gusto per la decorazione. Poiché questi luoghi sono frequentati da marinai, ci sono dozzine di dipinti marittimi: scene di addio tra marinai e le loro amanti, ritratti di William, del personaggio della ballata e della sua “Susan dagli occhi neri”, di Will Watch, il temerario contrabbandiere, di Paul Jones il pirata, e simili. Su questi dipinti, gli occhi dipinti della Regina Vittoria e di Washington sembrano trovarsi in una compagnia davvero strana, proprio come nella maggior parte delle scene che vi si svolgono sotto il loro “stupito” sguardo.
Che posto è questo, verso cui ci conduce questa strada squallida? Una sorta di piazza composta da case malandate, alcune delle quali si raggiungono solo attraverso scale di legno traballanti e senza ringhiere. Cosa c’è al di là di questi gradini che scricchiolano sotto i nostri passi? Una stanza misera, illuminata soltanto da una debole candela, priva di ogni comodità, tranne quella che potrebbe nascondersi in un letto miserabile. Accanto ad essa, siede un uomo: con i gomiti sulle ginocchia, la fronte nascosta tra le mani. “Che cosa gli è successo?” chiede l’ufficiale che va avanti. “Febbre,” risponde lui in tono cupo, senza alzare lo sguardo. Immaginate le fantasie di una mente febbricitante, in un posto del genere.
Salite questi gradini bui come la notte, fate attenzione a non inciampare sui listelli tremolanti, e seguitemi in questa tana di lupi, dove né un raggio di luce né un soffio d’aria sembrano penetrare. Un ragazzo nero, svegliato dal suono della voce dell’ufficiale – lo conosce bene – si rassicura quando viene detto che non è venuto per motivi ufficiali, e si affretta ad accendere una candela. La fiamma lampeggia per un momento, rivelando grandi mucchi di stracci polverosi sul pavimento; poi si spegne, lasciando ancora più oscurità, se mai possano esistere gradi in tali estremi. Il ragazzo scende barcollando le scale e poco dopo ritorna, tenendo una candela con la mano per schermarne la luce. Allora si vedono quei mucchi di stracci muoversi lentamente: il pavimento è coperto da gruppi di donne nere che si stanno svegliando dal loro sonno. I loro denti bianchi tremolano, i loro occhi brillanti lampeggiano per la sorpresa e la paura, come se fossero innumerevoli ripetizioni dello stesso volto africano, riflesso in uno strano specchio.
Salite questi gradini con la stessa cautela (ci sono trappole e insidie qui, per coloro che non sono così bene accompagnati come noi) fino al tetto; lì, dove le travi nude si incrociano sopra la testa, la tranquilla notte filtra attraverso le fessure del tetto. Aprite la porta di una di queste stanzette anguste piene di neri addormentati. Pah! Hanno un fuoco fatto di carbone; c’è l’odore di vestiti o carne che bruciano. Si raccolgono tutti intorno al braciere, e i vapori che ne derivano accecano e soffocano. Da ogni angolo, mentre vi guardate intorno in queste tenebre, vedete figure che si muovono, semisveglie, come se l’ora del giudizio fosse imminente. E ogni oscena tomba sembra rilasciare i suoi morti. Lì dove i cani ululerebbero, donne, uomini e ragazzi si allontanano per dormire, costringendo i topi spaventati a cercare rifugi migliori.
Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep, underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American eagles out of number: ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
Our leader has his hand upon the latch of ‘Almack’s,’ and calls to us from the bottom of the steps; for the assembly-room of the Five Point fashionables is approached by a descent. Shall we go in? It is but a moment.
Heyday! the landlady of Almack’s thrives! A buxom fat mulatto woman, with sparkling eyes, whose head is daintily ornamented with a handkerchief of many colours. Nor is the landlord much behind her in his finery, being attired in a smart blue jacket, like a ship’s steward, with a thick gold ring upon his little finger, and round his neck a gleaming golden watch-guard. How glad he is to see us! What will we please to call for? A dance? It shall be done directly, sir: ‘a regular break-down.’
The corpulent black fiddler, and his friend who plays the tambourine, stamp upon the boarding of the small raised orchestra in which they sit, and play a lively measure. Five or six couple come upon the floor, marshalled by a lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly, and the greatest dancer known. He never leaves off making queer faces, and is the delight of all the rest, who grin from ear to ear incessantly. Among the dancers are two young mulatto girls, with large, black, drooping eyes, and head-gear after the fashion of the hostess, who are as shy, or feign to be, as though they never danced before, and so look down before the visitors, that their partners can see nothing but the long fringed lashes.
But the dance commences. Every gentleman sets as long as he likes to the opposite lady, and the opposite lady to him, and all are so long about it that the sport begins to languish, when suddenly the lively hero dashes in to the rescue. Instantly the fiddler grins, and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the landlady; new confidence in the landlord; new brightness in the very candles.
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!
The air, even in these distempered parts, is fresh after the stifling atmosphere of the houses; and now, as we emerge into a broader street, it blows upon us with a purer breath, and the stars look bright again. Here are The Tombs once more. The city watch-house is a part of the building. It follows naturally on the sights we have just left. Let us see that, and then to bed.
What! do you thrust your common offenders against the police discipline of the town, into such holes as these? Do men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie here all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapours which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench! Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world! Look at them, man—you, who see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see what they are? Do you know how drains are made below the streets, and wherein these human sewers differ, except in being always stagnant?
Well, he don’t know. He has had five-and-twenty young women locked up in this very cell at one time, and you’d hardly realise what handsome faces there were among ’em.
In God’s name! shut the door upon the wretched creature who is in it now, and put its screen before a place, quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the worst old town in Europe.
Are people really left all night, untried, in those black sties?—Every night. The watch is set at seven in the evening. The magistrate opens his court at five in the morning. That is the earliest hour at which the first prisoner can be released; and if an officer appear against him, he is not taken out till nine o’clock or ten.—But if any one among them die in the interval, as one man did, not long ago? Then he is half-eaten by the rats in an hour’s time; as that man was; and there an end.
What is this intolerable tolling of great bells, and crashing of wheels, and shouting in the distance? A fire. And what that deep red light in the opposite direction? Another fire. And what these charred and blackened walls we stand before? A dwelling where a fire has been. It was more than hinted, in an official report, not long ago, that some of these conflagrations were not wholly accidental, and that speculation and enterprise found a field of exertion, even in flames: but be this as it may, there was a fire last night, there are two to-night, and you may lay an even wager there will be at least one, to-morrow. So, carrying that with us for our comfort, let us say, Good night, and climb up-stairs to bed.
Anche qui ci sono viali e vicoli lastricati di fango fino alle ginocchia, stanze sotterranee dove si danza e si giocano; le pareti sono decorate con disegni rozzi di navi, fortezze, bandiere e aquile americane, innumerevoli. Case in rovina, aperte sulla strada; da ampie fessure nelle pareti si intravedono altre rovine, come se il mondo del vizio e della miseria non avesse altro da mostrare. Terribili tuguri che prendono il loro nome dal rapino e dall’omicidio. Tutto ciò che è ripugnante, decadente e in rovina si trova qui.
Il nostro leader ha la mano sulla serratura di ‘Almack’s’ e ci chiama dal basso delle scale; infatti, l’ingresso della sala riunioni dei membri dell’alta società del Five Point Fashionables si trova in basso. Entriamo? Ci vorrà solo un attimo.
I tempi d’oro! La padrona di Almack prospera. Una donna mulatta, grassoccia e formosa, con occhi scintillanti; la sua testa è elegantemente adornata con un fazzoletto dai mille colori. Anche il proprietario non le è da meno in termini di eleganza: indossa una giacca blu attillata, come quella di un cameriere di bordo; sul dito mignolo porta un grosso anello d’oro e al collo una lucida catena d’oro con orologio. Che felicità vederci! Cosa desideriamo ordinare? Una danza? Sarà eseguita immediatamente, signori: “una vera e propria festa”.
Il corpulento violinista nero e il suo amico che suona la tamburina battono i piedi sul palco rialzato dove si siedono per suonare un brano vivace. Cinque o sei coppie salgono sul palco, guidate da un giovane negro vivace e spiritoso, il ballerino più abile conosciuto. Lui non smette mai di fare facce strane ed è la delizia di tutti gli altri, che sorridono senza sosta. Tra i ballerini ci sono due giovani ragazze mulatte, con grandi occhi neri e cascanti, e un copricapo alla moda della padrona di casa; sembrano timide, o fingono di esserlo, come se non avessero mai ballato prima. Guardano sempre verso il basso, tanto che i loro partner riescono a vedere solo le lunghe ciglia frangiate.
Ma la danza inizia. Ogni gentiluomo si avvicina, secondo i suoi desideri, alla signora di fronte a lui, e viceversa; tuttavia, il procedimento diventa così lento che lo spettacolo sembra perdere slancio. Quando all’improvviso il vivace eroe interviene per salvare la situazione. All’istante, il violinista ricomincia a suonare con entusiasmo; il tamburello riprende a rimbombare energicamente; i ballerini ridono di nuovo; la padrona di casa sorride felice; il padrone di casa si sente più sicuro di sé. E persino le candele sembrano brillare con maggiore intensità.
Mescolamento semplice, mescolamento doppio, tagli e incroci; schioccando le dita, rotolando gli occhi, girando sulle ginocchia, mostrando le piante dei piedi davanti a sé, ruotando sui talloni e sulle punte dei piedi, come se fossero soltanto le dita di un uomo su un tamburello; danzando con due gambe sinistre, due gambe destre, due gambe di legno, due gambe di filo, due gambe “a molla”, tutte sorti di gambe, o addirittura nessuna gamba. Che cosa significa tutto questo per lui? E in quale ambito della vita, o in quale “danza” della vita, un uomo può ricevere un applauso così entusiasta e fragoroso quando, dopo aver fatto danzare la sua partner fino allo sfinimento e se stesso altrettanto, finisce per saltare gloriosamente sul bancone del bar e chiedere qualcosa da bere, accompagnato dal riso di milioni di “imitazioni” di Jim Crow, in un suono davvero unico e inimitabile!
L’aria, anche in queste zone poco salubri, è fresca rispetto all’atmosfera soffocante delle case; ora, mentre usciamo su una strada più larga, ci investe con un respiro più pulito, e le stelle sembrano brillare di nuovo. Ecco di nuovo le Tombe. La torre di guardia della città fa parte dell’edificio stesso; segue naturalmente i luoghi che abbiamo appena visitato. Andiamo a darci un’occhiata, e poi andiamo a letto.
Che cosa! Mettete davvero questi criminali comuni sotto la disciplina della polizia cittadina, in posti del genere? Uomini e donne per i quali non è stato provato alcun crimine, giacciono qui tutta la notte nella totale oscurità, circondati dai fumi nauseabondi prodotti da quella lampada fioca che ci illumina, respirando quest’odore disgustoso e offensivo! Perché, caro mio, prigioni così indecenti e ripugnanti potrebbero portare disonore anche all’impero più dispotico del mondo! Guardatele, voi che le vedete ogni notte e ne custodite le chiavi. Riuscite davvero a capire cosa siano? Sapete come vengono costruiti i canali fognari sotto le strade, e in cosa differiscano questi “canali umani”, se non nel fatto che sono sempre stagnanti?
Beh, lui non lo sa. In un certo momento, ha avuto venticinque giovani donne rinchiuse proprio in questa cella, e difficilmente si potrebbe immaginare quanto fossero belle alcune di loro.
Nel nome di Dio! Chiudete la porta di quella misera creatura che si trova al suo interno, e mettete davanti ad essa uno schermo che possa nascondere un luogo davvero senza pari, in termini di vizi, negligenza e malvagità, il peggiore dei vecchi quartieri d’Europa.
Le persone vengono davvero lasciate lì, da sole, di notte, in quelle prigioni oscure e sporche? Ogni notte. L’orario di apertura è alle sette di sera; il magistrato tiene la sua udienza alle cinque del mattino. Quell’è l’ora più presto in cui un prigioniero può essere rilasciato; se però compare un funzionario contro di lui, non viene fatto uscire prima delle nove o delle dieci. Ma se qualcuno di loro muore nel frattempo, come è successo poco tempo fa a quel uomo, allora viene divorato dai topi in soltanto un’ora; ed è la fine.
Che cos’è questo insopportabile suono di grandi campane, il rumore delle ruote che si schiantano e le grida in lontananza? Un incendio. E quella luce rossa scura nella direzione opposta? Un altro incendio. E queste mura annerite e bruciate davanti a noi? Una dimora dove è scoppiato un incendio. Non molto tempo fa, in un rapporto ufficiale, si accennava che alcune di queste calamità non fossero del tutto accidentali, e che speculazioni e intrighi trovassero terreno fertile persino tra le fiamme. Ma sia come sia, ieri sera c’è stato un incendio, stasera ne sono stati due. E si può scommettere con certezza che ce ne sarà almeno uno anche domani. Quindi, portandoci questo pensiero con noi per rassicurarci, diciamo “Buona Nightnotte” e andiamo a letto.
One day, during my stay in New York, I paid a visit to the different public institutions on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which. One of them is a Lunatic Asylum. The building is handsome; and is remarkable for a spacious and elegant staircase. The whole structure is not yet finished, but it is already one of considerable size and extent, and is capable of accommodating a very large number of patients.
I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity. The different wards might have been cleaner and better ordered; I saw nothing of that salutary system which had impressed me so favourably elsewhere; and everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror. In the dining-room, a bare, dull, dreary place, with nothing for the eye to rest on but the empty walls, a woman was locked up alone. She was bent, they told me, on committing suicide. If anything could have strengthened her in her resolution, it would certainly have been the insupportable monotony of such an existence.
The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay within the shortest limits, and declined to see that portion of the building in which the refractory and violent were under closer restraint. I have no doubt that the gentleman who presided over this establishment at the time I write of, was competent to manage it, and had done all in his power to promote its usefulness: but will it be believed that the miserable strife of Party feeling is carried even into this sad refuge of afflicted and degraded humanity? Will it be believed that the eyes which are to watch over and control the wanderings of minds on which the most dreadful visitation to which our nature is exposed has fallen, must wear the glasses of some wretched side in Politics? Will it be believed that the governor of such a house as this, is appointed, and deposed, and changed perpetually, as Parties fluctuate and vary, and as their despicable weathercocks are blown this way or that? A hundred times in every week, some new most paltry exhibition of that narrow-minded and injurious Party Spirit, which is the Simoom of America, sickening and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach, was forced upon my notice; but I never turned my back upon it with feelings of such deep disgust and measureless contempt, as when I crossed the threshold of this madhouse.
At a short distance from this building is another called the Alms House, that is to say, the workhouse of New York. This is a large Institution also: lodging, I believe, when I was there, nearly a thousand poor. It was badly ventilated, and badly lighted; was not too clean;—and impressed me, on the whole, very uncomfortably. But it must be remembered that New York, as a great emporium of commerce, and as a place of general resort, not only from all parts of the States, but from most parts of the world, has always a large pauper population to provide for; and labours, therefore, under peculiar difficulties in this respect. Nor must it be forgotten that New York is a large town, and that in all large towns a vast amount of good and evil is intermixed and jumbled up together.
In the same neighbourhood is the Farm, where young orphans are nursed and bred. I did not see it, but I believe it is well conducted; and I can the more easily credit it, from knowing how mindful they usually are, in America, of that beautiful passage in the Litany which remembers all sick persons and young children.
I was taken to these Institutions by water, in a boat belonging to the Island jail, and rowed by a crew of prisoners, who were dressed in a striped uniform of black and buff, in which they looked like faded tigers. They took me, by the same conveyance, to the jail itself.
It is an old prison, and quite a pioneer establishment, on the plan I have already described. I was glad to hear this, for it is unquestionably a very indifferent one. The most is made, however, of the means it possesses, and it is as well regulated as such a place can be.
The women work in covered sheds, erected for that purpose. If I remember right, there are no shops for the men, but be that as it may, the greater part of them labour in certain stone-quarries near at hand. The day being very wet indeed, this labour was suspended, and the prisoners were in their cells. Imagine these cells, some two or three hundred in number, and in every one a man locked up; this one at his door for air, with his hands thrust through the grate; this one in bed (in the middle of the day, remember); and this one flung down in a heap upon the ground, with his head against the bars, like a wild beast. Make the rain pour down, outside, in torrents. Put the everlasting stove in the midst; hot, and suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch’s cauldron. Add a collection of gentle odours, such as would arise from a thousand mildewed umbrellas, wet through, and a thousand buck-baskets, full of half-washed linen—and there is the prison, as it was that day.
The prison for the State at Sing Sing is, on the other hand, a model jail. That, and Auburn, are, I believe, the largest and best examples of the silent system.
In another part of the city, is the Refuge for the Destitute: an Institution whose object is to reclaim youthful offenders, male and female, black and white, without distinction; to teach them useful trades, apprentice them to respectable masters, and make them worthy members of society. Its design, it will be seen, is similar to that at Boston; and it is a no less meritorious and admirable establishment. A suspicion crossed my mind during my inspection of this noble charity, whether the superintendent had quite sufficient knowledge of the world and worldly characters; and whether he did not commit a great mistake in treating some young girls, who were to all intents and purposes, by their years and their past lives, women, as though they were little children; which certainly had a ludicrous effect in my eyes, and, or I am much mistaken, in theirs also. As the Institution, however, is always under a vigilant examination of a body of gentlemen of great intelligence and experience, it cannot fail to be well conducted; and whether I am right or wrong in this slight particular, is unimportant to its deserts and character, which it would be difficult to estimate too highly.
Un giorno, durante il mio soggiorno a New York, visitai diverse istituzioni pubbliche situate a Long Island o nel Rhode Island. Non ricordo esattamente quale. Una di queste era un manicomio. L’edificio era molto bello e si distingueva per una scalinata spaziosa ed elegante. L’intera struttura non era ancora completata, ma già aveva dimensioni notevoli ed era in grado di ospitare un numero molto elevato di pazienti.
Non posso dire di aver tratto molto conforto dall’ispezione di questa carità. Le diverse ali dell’edificio forse erano più pulite e meglio ordinate; tuttavia non vidi nulla di quel sistema organizzativo che mi aveva colpito positivamente in altri luoghi. Tutto aveva un aspetto trasandato, apatico, quasi da manicomio, il che era davvero doloroso da vedere. Quell’idiota che se ne stava rannicchiato con i capelli lunghi e disordinati; quel pazzo che balbettava con la sua risata orribile e il dito puntato; quegli sguardi vuoti, quei volti selvaggi. Tutti lì, senza alcun velo di mascheramento, nella loro bruttezza e nel loro orrore nudi. Nella sala da pranzo, un ambiente spoglio, monotono e desolato, dove l’unico oggetto visibile erano le pareti vuote. C’era una donna rinchiusa lì dentro, da sola. Mi dissero che era decisa a compiere il suicidio. Se qualcosa avrebbe potuto rafforzare la sua determinazione, sicuramente sarebbe stata l’insopportabile monotonia di una vita del genere.
La terribile folla che riempiva questi saloni e queste gallerie mi colpì così profondamente che decisi di abbreviare al massimo la mia permanenza, rifiutandomi di visitare quella parte dell’edificio in cui i individui ribelli e violenti venivano tenuti sotto stretto controllo. Non ho alcun >dubbio che il signore che all’epoca presiedeva questa istituzione fosse competente nel suo ruolo e avesse fatto tutto il possibile per promuoverne l’utilità; ma si può davvero credere che le miserie causate dalle lotte tra fazioni politiche si estendano anche in questo triste rifugio per gli esseri umani sofferenti e degradati? Si può davvero credere che coloro che dovrebbero sorvegliare e regolare i comportamenti delle persone, le quali sono esposte alle più terribili calamità della nostra >natura, debbano indossare gli occhiali di una qualche squallida fazione politica? Si può davvero credere che il responsabile di un luogo come questo venga nominato, destituito e sostituito continuamente, a seconda delle fluttuazioni delle fazioni politiche e dei loro mutevoli orientamenti? Centinaia di volte alla settimana venivo costretto ad assistere a nuove manifestazioni di quel ristretto e dannoso spirito partigiano, che rappresenta il vero flagello dell’America, distruggendo tutto ciò che è sano e positivo al suo passaggio; ma mai ho voltato le spalle a queste cose con un disgusto così profondo e un disprezzo così infinito, come quando ho varcato la soglia di questo “manicomio”.
A poca distanza da questo edificio c’è un altro chiamato “Alms House”, ovvero l’ospizio di New York. Si tratta di un’istituzione molto grande: credo che, quando ci sono stato, ospitasse quasi mille persone povere. L’ambiente era scarsamente areato e illuminato; non troppo pulito, in definitiva. E nel complesso mi ha lasciato una brutta impressione. Tuttavia, bisogna ricordare che New York, essendo un grande centro commerciale e meta di persone provenienti da tutte le parti degli Stati e da gran parte del mondo, deve necessariamente occuparsi di un numero elevato di poveri; per questo motivo incontra particolari difficoltà in questo ambito. Inoltre, non bisogna dimenticare che New York è una città grande, e che in tutte le città grandi si mescolano inevitabilmente molte cose positive e negative.
Nella stessa zona si trova la fattoria, dove vengono accuditi e allevati giovani orfani. Non l’ho vista di persona, ma credo che venga gestita in modo ottimo; e posso crederci ancora di più, considerando quanto gli americani tengano solitamente conto di quel bellissimo passaggio presente nella Litania che ricorda tutte le persone malate e i bambini piccoli.
Fui portato in queste istituzioni tramite l’acqua, su una barca appartenente alla prigione dell’isola; la barca era guidata da un equipaggio di prigionieri, vestiti con uniformi a strisce nere e gialle, che li facevano assomigliare a tigri sbiadite. Con lo stesso mezzo mi portarono anche dentro la prigione stessa.
È un vecchio carcere, e inoltre una struttura piuttosto pionieristica, secondo il progetto che ho già descritto. Sono stato contento di saperlo, perché senza dubbio si tratta di un posto molto mediocre. Tuttavia, vengono sfruttati al meglio i mezzi a disposizione, e la sua gestione è davvero buona per quanto ci si possa aspettare da un luogo del genere.
Le donne lavorano in capanne coperte, costruite appositamente per questo scopo. Se ricordo bene, non ci sono negozi per gli uomini, ma comunque la maggior parte di loro lavora in alcune cave di pietra nelle vicinanze. Poiché il tempo era davvero molto umido, quel lavoro fu sospeso e i prigionieri rimasero nelle loro celle. Immaginate queste celle: circa due o trecento in totale, e in ciascuna un uomo rinchiuso; alcuni vicino alla porta per respirare, con le mani infilate attraverso la grata; altri sdraiati a letto (a metà giornata, ricordatevelo); altri ancora gettati a terra, con la testa contro le sbarre, come bestie selvatiche. Immaginate ora che la pioggia batta forte all’esterno. Mettete nel mezzo di quelle celle un “forno” eterno: caldo, soffocante e pieno di vapore, come il calderone di una strega. Aggiungete poi mille odori delicati, quelli che emergerebbero da migliaia di ombrelli ammuffiti e bagnati, da migliaia di cesti pieni di lenzuola mezzi lavate. Ecco com’era quella prigione quel giorno.
D’altra parte, la prigione dello Stato di Sing Sing è un esempio modello di istituto penitenziario. Insieme ad Auburn, credo siano i più grandi e migliori esempi del cosiddetto “sistema silenzioso”.
In un’altra parte della >città si trova il Rifugio per i Diseredati: un’istituzione il cui scopo è redimere giovani delinquenti, sia maschi che femmine, bianchi e neri, senza distinzioni; insegnare loro mestieri utili, affidarli a rispettabili maestri e farne membri meritevoli della società. Si può notare che il suo funzionamento è simile a quello dell’istituzione di Boston; si tratta comunque di un ente altrettanto meritorio e ammirevole. Durante la mia ispezione di questa nobile opera di carità, mi è venuta in mente una dubbia: il direttore possedesse davvero una conoscenza sufficiente del mondo e delle persone che vi operano; e non commettesse un grave errore nel trattare alcune giovani ragazze, le quali, a giudicare dall’età e dal loro passato, erano ormai donne, come se fossero ancora bambine? A mio parere, questo comportamento aveva un effetto assurdo; forse anche per loro. Tuttavia, poiché l’istituzione è sempre sotto la stretta supervisione di un gruppo di gentiluomini molto intelligenti ed esperti, non può che essere gestita in modo eccellente. Che io abbia ragione o meno su questo particolare, ciò non influisce minimamente sulle sue qualità e sul suo valore, i quali sono certamente inestimabili.
In addition to these establishments, there are in New York, excellent hospitals and schools, literary institutions and libraries; an admirable fire department (as indeed it should be, having constant practice), and charities of every sort and kind. In the suburbs there is a spacious cemetery: unfinished yet, but every day improving. The saddest tomb I saw there was ‘The Strangers’ Grave. Dedicated to the different hotels in this city.’
There are three principal theatres. Two of them, the Park and the Bowery, are large, elegant, and handsome buildings, and are, I grieve to write it, generally deserted. The third, the Olympic, is a tiny show-box for vaudevilles and burlesques. It is singularly well conducted by Mr. Mitchell, a comic actor of great quiet humour and originality, who is well remembered and esteemed by London playgoers. I am happy to report of this deserving gentleman, that his benches are usually well filled, and that his theatre rings with merriment every night. I had almost forgotten a small summer theatre, called Niblo’s, with gardens and open air amusements attached; but I believe it is not exempt from the general depression under which Theatrical Property, or what is humorously called by that name, unfortunately labours.
The country round New York is surpassingly and exquisitely picturesque. The climate, as I have already intimated, is somewhat of the warmest. What it would be, without the sea breezes which come from its beautiful Bay in the evening time, I will not throw myself or my readers into a fever by inquiring.
The tone of the best society in this city, is like that of Boston; here and there, it may be, with a greater infusion of the mercantile spirit, but generally polished and refined, and always most hospitable. The houses and tables are elegant; the hours later and more rakish; and there is, perhaps, a greater spirit of contention in reference to appearances, and the display of wealth and costly living. The ladies are singularly beautiful.
Before I left New York I made arrangements for securing a passage home in the George Washington packet ship, which was advertised to sail in June: that being the month in which I had determined, if prevented by no accident in the course of my ramblings, to leave America.
I never thought that going back to England, returning to all who are dear to me, and to pursuits that have insensibly grown to be a part of my nature, I could have felt so much sorrow as I endured, when I parted at last, on board this ship, with the friends who had accompanied me from this city. I never thought the name of any place, so far away and so lately known, could ever associate itself in my mind with the crowd of affectionate remembrances that now cluster about it. There are those in this city who would brighten, to me, the darkest winter-day that ever glimmered and went out in Lapland; and before whose presence even Home grew dim, when they and I exchanged that painful word which mingles with our every thought and deed; which haunts our cradle-heads in infancy, and closes up the vista of our lives in age.
Oltre a questi istituti, a New York esistono eccellenti ospedali e scuole, istituzioni letterarie e biblioteche; un ammirevole dipartimento dei vigili del fuoco (come è giusto che sia, data la costante attività di pronto intervento), nonché varie organizzazioni di beneficenza. Nei sobborghi si trova un cimitero spazioso: ancora incompleto, ma che migliora giorno dopo giorno. La tomba più triste che abbia visto lì era quella dei “Strangers”, dedicata ai vari hotel presenti in questa città.
Ci sono tre teatri principali. Due di essi, il Park e il Bowery, sono edifici grandi, eleganti e bellissimi, ma, con rammarico devo dire, generalmente desolati. Il terzo, l’Olympic, è un piccolo teatro dedicato a spettacoli di vaudeville e burlesque. È gestito in modo eccezionale dal signor Mitchell, un attore comico dal grande senso dell’umorismo e dall’originalità; gli spettatori londinesi lo ricordano e lo apprezzano molto. Sono felice di poter dire che i suoi posti a sedere sono solitamente pieni, e che il suo teatro risuona sempre di risate ogni sera. Avevo quasi dimenticato un piccolo teatro estivo chiamato Niblo’s, dotato anche di giardini e intrattenimenti all’aperto; ma credo che non sia esente dalla generale crisi che, purtroppo, colpisce il settore teatrale.
La regione circostante New York è straordinariamente e incantevolmente pittoresca. Il clima, come ho già accennato, è tra i più caldi. Quanto sarebbe diverso senza le brezze marine che soffiano nella sua bellissima baia alla sera. Non oso nemmeno immaginare quale effetto avrebbe su di me e sui miei lettori se lo facessi.
Il tono della migliore società di questa >città è simile a quello di Boston; qua e là, forse, c’è un maggiore spirito mercantile, ma nel complesso la società è raffinata ed elegante, e sempre molto ospitale. Le case e i banchetti sono squisiti; le abitudini sociali, però, tendono ad essere più tarde e più dissolute; inoltre, c’è forse un maggiore spirito di competizione riguardo all’apparenza, alla dimostrazione di ricchezza e a uno stile di vita costoso. Le signore sono particolarmente belle.
Prima di lasciare New York, presi accordi per assicurarmi un passaggio verso casa a bordo della nave George Washington, la cui partenza era annunciata per giugno: era proprio quel mese in cui avevo deciso, a meno che non si verificassero incidenti durante il mio viaggio, di lasciare America.
Non avrei mai pensato che tornare in Inghilterra, rivedere tutte le persone care per me e riprendere quelle attività che ormai fanno parte della mia >natura, potesse causarmi tanta tristezza. Quando infine mi sono congedato a bordo di questa nave, lasciando gli amici che mi avevano accompagnato in questa >città, non avrei mai immaginato che il nome di un luogo così lontano e appena conosciuto potesse suscitare in me tanti ricordi affettuosi. In questa >città ci sono persone capaci di rendere più luminoso anche il giorno d’inverno più buio che abbia mai visto in Lapponia; e davanti alla loro presenza, persino la )casa sembra perdere il suo splendore, quando io e loro scambiamo quelle parole dolorose che accompagnano ogni nostro pensiero e azione. Parole che ci perseguitano fin dall’infanzia e offuscano la vista della nostra vita da adulti.
CHAPTER VII PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON
THE journey from New York to Philadelphia, is made by railroad, and two ferries; and usually occupies between five and six hours. It was a fine evening when we were passengers in the train: and watching the bright sunset from a little window near the door by which we sat, my attention was attracted to a remarkable appearance issuing from the windows of the gentleman’s car immediately in front of us, which I supposed for some time was occasioned by a number of industrious persons inside, ripping open feather-beds, and giving the feathers to the wind. At length it occurred to me that they were only spitting, which was indeed the case; though how any number of passengers which it was possible for that car to contain, could have maintained such a playful and incessant shower of expectoration, I am still at a loss to understand: notwithstanding the experience in all salivatory phenomena which I afterwards acquired.
I made acquaintance, on this journey, with a mild and modest young quaker, who opened the discourse by informing me, in a grave whisper, that his grandfather was the inventor of cold-drawn castor oil. I mention the circumstance here, thinking it probable that this is the first occasion on which the valuable medicine in question was ever used as a conversational aperient.
We reached the city, late that night. Looking out of my chamber-window, before going to bed, I saw, on the opposite side of the way, a handsome building of white marble, which had a mournful ghost-like aspect, dreary to behold. I attributed this to the sombre influence of the night, and on rising in the morning looked out again, expecting to see its steps and portico thronged with groups of people passing in and out. The door was still tight shut, however; the same cold cheerless air prevailed: and the building looked as if the marble statue of Don Guzman could alone have any business to transact within its gloomy walls. I hastened to inquire its name and purpose, and then my surprise vanished. It was the Tomb of many fortunes; the Great Catacomb of investment; the memorable United States Bank.
The stoppage of this bank, with all its ruinous consequences, had cast (as I was told on every side) a gloom on Philadelphia, under the depressing effect of which it yet laboured. It certainly did seem rather dull and out of spirits.
It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street. The collar of my coat appeared to stiffen, and the brim of my hat to expand, beneath its quakery influence. My hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded themselves upon my breast of their own calm accord, and thoughts of taking lodgings in Mark Lane over against the Market Place, and of making a large fortune by speculations in corn, came over me involuntarily.
Philadelphia is most bountifully provided with fresh water, which is showered and jerked about, and turned on, and poured off, everywhere. The Waterworks, which are on a height near the city, are no less ornamental than useful, being tastefully laid out as a public garden, and kept in the best and neatest order. The river is dammed at this point, and forced by its own power into certain high tanks or reservoirs, whence the whole city, to the top stories of the houses, is supplied at a very trifling expense.
There are various public institutions. Among them a most excellent Hospital—a quaker establishment, but not sectarian in the great benefits it confers; a quiet, quaint old Library, named after Franklin; a handsome Exchange and Post Office; and so forth. In connection with the quaker Hospital, there is a picture by West, which is exhibited for the benefit of the funds of the institution. The subject is, our Saviour healing the sick, and it is, perhaps, as favourable a specimen of the master as can be seen anywhere. Whether this be high or low praise, depends upon the reader’s taste.
In the same room, there is a very characteristic and life-like portrait by Mr. Sully, a distinguished American artist.
My stay in Philadelphia was very short, but what I saw of its society, I greatly liked. Treating of its general characteristics, I should be disposed to say that it is more provincial than Boston or New York, and that there is afloat in the fair city, an assumption of taste and criticism, savouring rather of those genteel discussions upon the same themes, in connection with Shakspeare and the Musical Glasses, of which we read in the Vicar of Wakefield. Near the city, is a most splendid unfinished marble structure for the Girard College, founded by a deceased gentleman of that name and of enormous wealth, which, if completed according to the original design, will be perhaps the richest edifice of modern times. But the bequest is involved in legal disputes, and pending them the work has stopped; so that like many other great undertakings in America, even this is rather going to be done one of these days, than doing now.
In the outskirts, stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary: conducted on a plan peculiar to the state of Pennsylvania. The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.
In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.
CAPITOLO VII
Filadelfia, e la sua solitaria prigione
Il viaggio da New York a Filadelfia avviene tramite ferrovia e due traghetti; di solito richiede tra le cinque e le sei ore. Fu una bella serata quando eravamo a bordo del treno: osservando il brillante tramonto attraverso una piccola finestra vicino alla porta dove sedevamo, la mia attenzione fu attratta da un fenomeno strano che si verificava dalle finestre del vagone del signore immediatamente davanti a noi. All’inizio pensai che fosse dovuto al fatto che alcune persone all’interno stavano aprendo i letti di piume e facendo volare le piume nel vento. Alla fine mi resi conto che in realtà si trattava semplicemente di persone che sputavano. Anche se non riesco ancora a capire come sia possibile che un numero così elevato di passeggeri, all’interno di quel vagone, possa produrre una quantità così continua e incessante di saliva. Nonostante l’esperienza accumulata in seguito riguardo a tutti i fenomeni legati alla produzione di saliva.
Durante questo Viaggio, ho fatto conoscenza con un giovane quaker mite e modesto, il quale ha iniziato la conversazione informandomi, sussurrando in modo serio, che suo nonno era l’inventore dell’olio di ricino ottenuto tramite processo di trafilatura a freddo. Menziono questo dettaglio perché ritengo probabile che questa sia la prima occasione in cui questo prezioso medicinale sia mai stato utilizzato come stimolante per le conversazioni.
Raggiungemmo la città tardi quella notte. Guardando fuori dalla finestra della mia stanza, prima di andare a letto, vidi, dall’altra parte della strada, un bellissimo edificio in marmo bianco che aveva un aspetto triste e desolato, simile a quello di uno fantasma. attribuii questo effetto all’atmosfera cupa della notte; al mattino, guardai di nuovo fuori, aspettandomi di vedere i gradini e il portico affollati da persone che entravano ed uscivano. Ma la porta era ancora chiusa a chiave; l’aria fredda e desolata persisteva. L’edificio sembrava essere abitato soltanto dalla statua di marmo di Don Guzman. Mi affrettai a chiedere il suo nome e lo scopo per cui veniva utilizzato. E allora la mia sorpresa svanì: si trattava della Tomba di molte fortune, della Grande Catacomba degli investimenti, della memorabile United States Bank.
La chiusura di questa banca, con tutte le sue conseguenze disastrose, aveva gettato (come mi fu detto da tutti) un’atmosfera cupa su Filadelfia, che ne influenzava negativamente la vita quotidiana. La città sembrava davvero piuttosto triste e senza spirito.
È una bella città, ma estremamente regolare. Dopo averla percorso per un’ora o due, avrei dato qualunque cosa per trovare una strada tortuosa. Il colletto del mio cappotto sembrava irrigidirsi, il bordo del mio cappello allargarsi, sotto l’influenza di quell’ordine perfetto. I miei capelli si riducevano a una corta chioma liscia; le mie mani si posavano sul petto da sole, in modo spontaneo. E mi vennero in mente idee come affittare una stanza in Mark Lane, di fronte al mercato, o fare un sacco di soldi speculando sul grano.
Filadelfia dispone in abbondanza di acqua fresca, che viene utilizzata ovunque: spruzzata, convogliata verso determinati punti, fatta scorrere o raccolta in serbatoi. Le opere idrauliche, situate in una posizione elevata vicino alla città, sono tanto decorative quanto funzionali; sono state progettate con gusto come un giardino pubblico e vengono mantenute nella massima cura e ordine. In questo tratto, il fiume viene bloccato da dighe e la sua forza naturale viene sfruttata per convogliare l’acqua in serbatoi; così, l’intera città, fino ai piani più alti delle abitazioni, può disporre di acqua a un costo molto basso.
Esistono varie istituzioni pubbliche. Tra queste, un ospedale davvero eccellente: una struttura gestita dai Quaker, ma assolutamente non settaria per i grandi benefici che offre; una tranquilla e caratteristica vecchia biblioteca intitolata a Franklin; un bellissimo ufficio cambiavalute e postale, e così via. In relazione all’ospedale dei Quaker, vi è un dipinto di West esposto al fine di raccogliere fondi per l’istituzione. L’argomento del dipinto è il nostro Salvatore che guarisce i malati; forse si tratta dell’esempio più rappresentativo dell’opera dello stesso artista che si possa trovare ovunque. Se questa sia un complimento o meno, dipende dal gusto del lettore.
Nella stessa stanza, c’è un ritratto molto caratteristico e realistico realizzato dal signor Sully, un rinomato artista americano.
Il mio soggiorno a Filadelfia è stato molto breve, ma ciò che ho visto della sua società mi è piaciuto moltissimo. Parlando delle sue caratteristiche generali, direi che sia più “provinciale” di Boston o New York, e che in questa bella città si percepisca una certa attitudine verso il gusto e la critica artistica; tuttavia, queste tendenze preferiscono discussioni raffinate su temi legati a Shakespeare o alle cosiddette “lenti musicali”, di cui abbiamo letto nei racconti del Vicar of Wakefield. Vicino alla città sorge una straordinaria struttura in marmo, ancora incompleta, destinata al Girard College: fu fondata da un gentiluomo defunto di quel nome e di enorme ricchezza; se completata secondo il progetto originale, potrebbe diventare l’edificio più imponente dei tempi moderni. Tuttavia, la donazione è coinvolta in controversie legali, e fino a quando queste non saranno risolte i lavori sono sospesi; quindi, come molte altre grandi imprese in America, anche questa probabilmente verrà realizzata in futuro piuttosto che subito.
Nei sobborghi sorge una grande prigione, chiamata il Penitenziario Orientale: costruita secondo un progetto tipico dello stato della Pennsylvania. Il sistema adottato qui prevede un isolamento totale, rigido e senza speranza di rilascio. Credo che, nei suoi effetti, sia crudele e ingiusto.
Nella sua intenzione, sono assolutamente convinto che sia gentile, umana e miri alla riforma; ma ritengo che coloro che hanno ideato questo sistema di disciplina carceraria, così come quei gentiluomini benevoli che lo attuano, non abbiano la minima idea di ciò che stanno facendo. Credo che pochissime persone siano in grado di comprendere l’enorme quantità di tortura e sofferenza che questa terribile punizione, prolungata per anni, infligge alle vittime; e nel tentativo di farne una stima, basandomi su ciò che ho visto sui loro volti e su ciò che so con certezza provino dentro di sé, sono ancora più convinto che esista una profondità di terribile resistenza in loro, tale da essere comprensibile soltanto dalle vittime stesse, e che nessun uomo abbia il diritto di infliggerla a un suo simile. Ritengo che questa lenta e quotidiana manipolazione dei misteri del cervello sia infinitamente peggiore di qualsiasi tortura fisica: e poiché i suoi segni orribili non sono così evidenti agli occhi o al tatto come le cicatrici sulla pelle; poiché le sue “ferite” non si manifestano in superficie e essa provoca pochi lamenti udibili dall’uomo; per questo la denuncio ancora di più, come una punizione segreta contro cui l’umanità addormentata non è stata ancora risvegliata a opporsi. Una volta ho esitato, chiedendomi se, avendo il potere di dire “Sì” o “No”, avrei permesso che venisse applicata in alcuni casi in cui la durata della detenzione era breve; ma ora dichiaro solennemente che, per nessuna ricompensa o onore al mondo, potrei camminare sotto il cielo aperto durante il giorno, o sdraiarmi nel mio letto di notte, con la consapevolezza che qualcuno, per qualsiasi periodo di tempo e per qualsiasi motivo, stia subendo questa sconosciuta punizione nella sua cella silenziosa, e che io ne sia la causa, anche solo in minima misura.
I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially connected with its management, and passed the day in going from cell to cell, and talking with the inmates. Every facility was afforded me, that the utmost courtesy could suggest. Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view, and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given. The perfect order of the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration of the system, there can be no kind of question.
Between the body of the prison and the outer wall, there is a spacious garden. Entering it, by a wicket in the massive gate, we pursued the path before us to its other termination, and passed into a large chamber, from which seven long passages radiate. On either side of each, is a long, long row of low cell doors, with a certain number over every one. Above, a gallery of cells like those below, except that they have no narrow yard attached (as those in the ground tier have), and are somewhat smaller. The possession of two of these, is supposed to compensate for the absence of so much air and exercise as can be had in the dull strip attached to each of the others, in an hour’s time every day; and therefore every prisoner in this upper story has two cells, adjoining and communicating with, each other.
Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.
His name, and crime, and term of suffering, are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell-door, and in a book of which the governor of the prison has one copy, and the moral instructor another: this is the index of his history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence: and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in which part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.
Every cell has double doors: the outer one of sturdy oak, the other of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed. He has a Bible, and a slate and pencil, and, under certain restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the purpose, and pen and ink and paper. His razor, plate, and can, and basin, hang upon the wall, or shine upon the little shelf. Fresh water is laid on in every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure. During the day, his bedstead turns up against the wall, and leaves more space for him to work in. His loom, or bench, or wheel, is there; and there he labours, sleeps and wakes, and counts the seasons as they change, and grows old.
The first man I saw, was seated at his loom, at work. He had been there six years, and was to remain, I think, three more. He had been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but even after his long imprisonment, denied his guilt, and said he had been hardly dealt by. It was his second offence.
He stopped his work when we went in, took off his spectacles, and answered freely to everything that was said to him, but always with a strange kind of pause first, and in a low, thoughtful voice. He wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commanded. He had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch clock from some disregarded odds and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum. Seeing me interested in this contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it ‘would play music before long.’ He had extracted some colours from the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall. One, of a female, over the door, he called ‘The Lady of the Lake.’
He smiled as I looked at these contrivances to while away the time; but when I looked from them to him, I saw that his lip trembled, and could have counted the beating of his heart. I forget how it came about, but some allusion was made to his having a wife. He shook his head at the word, turned aside, and covered his face with his hands.
‘But you are resigned now!’ said one of the gentlemen after a short pause, during which he had resumed his former manner. He answered with a sigh that seemed quite reckless in its hopelessness, ‘Oh yes, oh yes! I am resigned to it.’ ‘And are a better man, you think?’ ‘Well, I hope so: I’m sure I hope I may be.’ ‘And time goes pretty quickly?’ ‘Time is very long gentlemen, within these four walls!’
Fui accompagnato in questa prigione da due signori ufficialmente legati alla sua gestione; trascorsi la giornata visitando una cella dopo l’altra e parlando con i detenuti. Mi fu reso disponibile ogni comfort che la massima cortesia potesse offrire: nulla mi fu nascosto o tenuto segreto, e tutte le informazioni che cercavo vennero fornite apertamente e onestamente. L’ordine perfetto dell’edificio merita davvero grandi lodi, e non si può mettere in dubbio la bontà delle intenzioni di tutte le persone direttamente coinvolte nella gestione del sistema.
Tra il corpo della prigione e il muro esterno, c’è un ampio giardino. Entrandovi attraverso una piccola apertura nella massiccia porta, percorremmo il sentiero che si snodava davanti a noi fino alla sua estremità opposta, entrando così in una grande sala da cui partivano sette lunghi corridoi. Su entrambi i lati di ciascun corridoio, c’era una lunga fila di porte di cella basse; sopra di esse, un’altra galleria di celle simili a quelle inferiori, ma prive del cortile ristretto presente al piano terra e di dimensioni leggermente più ridotte. Si riteneva che il possesso di due di queste celle compensasse la mancanza di aria fresca e attività fisica disponibili nei corridoi sottostanti, dove ogni prigioniero poteva trascorrere un’ora al giorno; per questo motivo, ogni detenuto al piano superiore disponeva di due celle adiacenti e comunicanti tra loro.
Rimasto fermo nel punto centrale e guardando giù in queste tetre prigioni, il silenzio e la tranquillità che vi regnano sono davvero spaventosi. Di tanto in tanto si sente il suono somnolento dell’ago di un tessitore solitario o del martello di uno scarpeggiere, ma viene soffocato dalle spesse mura e dal pesante portone della prigione, rendendo ancora più profondo il silenzio generale. Su testa e volto di ogni prigioniero che entra in questa melanconica casa viene calato un cappuccio nero; avvolto in questo buio velo, simbolo del sipario che lo separa dal mondo esterno, viene condotto nella sua cella da cui non uscirà mai più, fino a quando non sarà trascorso l’intero termine della sua detenzione. Non sente mai parlare di moglie e figli, di casa o amici, né dell’esistenza o della morte di alcuna creatura. Vede gli agenti della prigione, ma a parte loro non incontra mai volti umani né sente voci umane. È come un uomo sepolto vivo, che verrà riesumato solo dopo molti anni. Nel frattempo, è morto per tutto tranne che per angosie tormentose e un orribile disperazione.
Il suo nome, il crimine che ha commesso e la durata della sua sofferenza sono sconosciuti persino all’ufficiale che gli porta il cibo quotidiano. Sulla porta della sua cella è numerato un foglio, e in un libro – di cui il direttore del carcere ne possiede una copia, mentre l’insegnante morale ne ha un’altra – è riportato l’indice della sua storia. Al di là di queste pagine, il carcere non conserva alcuna traccia della sua esistenza: e anche se dovesse vivere nella stessa cella per dieci lunghi anni, non avrebbe modo di sapere, nemmeno all’ultima ora, in quale parte dell’edificio si trovi; quali persone siano intorno a lui; se nelle lunghe notti invernali ci siano altre persone vive nelle vicinanze, o se si trovi in qualche angolo solitario di quel grande carcere, con muri, corridoi e porte di ferro che lo separano dall’unica altra persona che condivida quelle terribili condizioni.
Ogni cella è dotata di due porte: quella esterna è fatta di solido rovere, l’altra di ferro grigliato; attraverso quest’ultima viene consegnato il cibo. Lui possiede una Bibbia, una lavagna e una matita; in alcune circostanze può anche disporre di altri libri, penne, inchiostro e carta, sempre previa autorizzazione. La sua rasoietta, il piatto, la scodella e il lavandino sono appesi al muro o posizionati sulla piccola mensola. Ogni cella è rifornita di acqua fresca, che può attingere a piacimento. Durante il giorno, il suo letto viene riposto contro il muro, lasciando così più spazio per lavorare. Lì trova anche il suo telaio da lavoro, o la sua panca, e lì lavora, dorme, si sveglia, e osserva come cambiano le stagioni, invecchiando lentamente.
Il primo uomo che vidi era seduto al suo telaio, al lavoro. Ci lavorava da sei anni e, credo, avrebbe continuato ancora per tre. Era stato condannato come ricettatore di merci rubate, ma anche dopo quella lunga carcerazione negò la propria colpevolezza, sostenendo di essere stato trattato in modo ingiusto. Quella era la sua seconda infrazione.
Si fermò dal lavoro non appena entrammo, si tolse gli occhiali e rispose liberamente a tutto ciò che gli veniva detto, ma sempre dopo una strana pausa e con voce bassa e pensierosa. Indossava un cappello di carta fatto da lui stesso e ne era molto compiaciuto quando qualcuno lo notava e lo lodava. Aveva costruito con grande ingegno un tipo di orologio olandese utilizzando alcuni oggetti inutilizzati; la sua bottiglia di aceto fungeva da pendolo. Vedendomi interessato a questo invento, me lo mostrò con grande orgoglio, dicendo che stava pensando di migliorarlo e sperava che presto il martello e un pezzetto di vetro rotto accanto ad esso “suonassero musica”. Aveva estratto alcuni colori dal filato utilizzato per lavorare e aveva dipinto alcune figure semplici sul muro; una di queste, raffigurante una donna, era posta sopra la porta e lui la chiamava “La Dama del Lago”.
Sorrise quando vidi queste invenzioni per passare il tempo; ma quando spostai lo sguardo da esse a lui, notai che le sue labbra tremavano e si potevano contare i battiti del suo cuore. Non ricordo come sia successo, ma fu fatta qualche allusione al fatto che avesse una moglie. Scosse la testa alla menzione di questo argomento, si girò da un’altra parte e si coprì il viso con le mani.
“Ma ora sei rassegnato, vero?” disse uno dei gentiluomini dopo una breve pausa, durante la quale aveva ripreso il suo solito comportamento. Lui rispose con un sospiro che sembrava estremamente disperato: “Oh sì, oh sì. Sono rassegnato.” “E pensi di essere diventato una persona migliore?” “Beh, spero di sì; sono sicuro di sperarlo.” “E il tempo passa abbastanza in fretta?” “Il tempo, signori, in queste quattro mura, passa molto lentamente!”
He gazed about him—Heaven only knows how wearily!—as he said these words; and in the act of doing so, fell into a strange stare as if he had forgotten something. A moment afterwards he sighed heavily, put on his spectacles, and went about his work again.
In another cell, there was a German, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for larceny, two of which had just expired. With colours procured in the same manner, he had painted every inch of the walls and ceiling quite beautifully. He had laid out the few feet of ground, behind, with exquisite neatness, and had made a little bed in the centre, that looked, by-the-bye, like a grave. The taste and ingenuity he had displayed in everything were most extraordinary; and yet a more dejected, heart-broken, wretched creature, it would be difficult to imagine. I never saw such a picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind. My heart bled for him; and when the tears ran down his cheeks, and he took one of the visitors aside, to ask, with his trembling hands nervously clutching at his coat to detain him, whether there was no hope of his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle was really too painful to witness. I never saw or heard of any kind of misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man.
In a third cell, was a tall, strong black, a burglar, working at his proper trade of making screws and the like. His time was nearly out. He was not only a very dexterous thief, but was notorious for his boldness and hardihood, and for the number of his previous convictions. He entertained us with a long account of his achievements, which he narrated with such infinite relish, that he actually seemed to lick his lips as he told us racy anecdotes of stolen plate, and of old ladies whom he had watched as they sat at windows in silver spectacles (he had plainly had an eye to their metal even from the other side of the street) and had afterwards robbed. This fellow, upon the slightest encouragement, would have mingled with his professional recollections the most detestable cant; but I am very much mistaken if he could have surpassed the unmitigated hypocrisy with which he declared that he blessed the day on which he came into that prison, and that he never would commit another robbery as long as he lived.
There was one man who was allowed, as an indulgence, to keep rabbits. His room having rather a close smell in consequence, they called to him at the door to come out into the passage. He complied of course, and stood shading his haggard face in the unwonted sunlight of the great window, looking as wan and unearthly as if he had been summoned from the grave. He had a white rabbit in his breast; and when the little creature, getting down upon the ground, stole back into the cell, and he, being dismissed, crept timidly after it, I thought it would have been very hard to say in what respect the man was the nobler animal of the two.
There was an English thief, who had been there but a few days out of seven years: a villainous, low-browed, thin-lipped fellow, with a white face; who had as yet no relish for visitors, and who, but for the additional penalty, would have gladly stabbed me with his shoemaker’s knife. There was another German who had entered the jail but yesterday, and who started from his bed when we looked in, and pleaded, in his broken English, very hard for work. There was a poet, who after doing two days’ work in every four-and-twenty hours, one for himself and one for the prison, wrote verses about ships (he was by trade a mariner), and ‘the maddening wine-cup,’ and his friends at home. There were very many of them. Some reddened at the sight of visitors, and some turned very pale. Some two or three had prisoner nurses with them, for they were very sick; and one, a fat old negro whose leg had been taken off within the jail, had for his attendant a classical scholar and an accomplished surgeon, himself a prisoner likewise. Sitting upon the stairs, engaged in some slight work, was a pretty coloured boy. ‘Is there no refuge for young criminals in Philadelphia, then?’ said I. ‘Yes, but only for white children.’ Noble aristocracy in crime!
There was a sailor who had been there upwards of eleven years, and who in a few months’ time would be free. Eleven years of solitary confinement!
‘I am very glad to hear your time is nearly out.’ What does he say? Nothing. Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh upon his fingers, and raise his eyes for an instant, every now and then, to those bare walls which have seen his head turn grey? It is a way he has sometimes.
Does he never look men in the face, and does he always pluck at those hands of his, as though he were bent on parting skin and bone? It is his humour: nothing more.
It is his humour too, to say that he does not look forward to going out; that he is not glad the time is drawing near; that he did look forward to it once, but that was very long ago; that he has lost all care for everything. It is his humour to be a helpless, crushed, and broken man. And, Heaven be his witness that he has his humour thoroughly gratified!
There were three young women in adjoining cells, all convicted at the same time of a conspiracy to rob their prosecutor. In the silence and solitude of their lives they had grown to be quite beautiful. Their looks were very sad, and might have moved the sternest visitor to tears, but not to that kind of sorrow which the contemplation of the men awakens. One was a young girl; not twenty, as I recollect; whose snow-white room was hung with the work of some former prisoner, and upon whose downcast face the sun in all its splendour shone down through the high chink in the wall, where one narrow strip of bright blue sky was visible. She was very penitent and quiet; had come to be resigned, she said (and I believe her); and had a mind at peace. ‘In a word, you are happy here?’ said one of my companions. She struggled—she did struggle very hard—to answer, Yes; but raising her eyes, and meeting that glimpse of freedom overhead, she burst into tears, and said, ‘She tried to be; she uttered no complaint; but it was natural that she should sometimes long to go out of that one cell: she could not help that,’ she sobbed, poor thing!
Si guardò intorno. Solo il cielo sa quanto stancamente! Mentre pronunciava queste parole, assunse un’espressione strana, come se avesse dimenticato qualcosa. Un attimo dopo sospirò profondamente, si mise gli occhiali e riprese a lavorare.
In un’altra cella c’era un tedesco, condannato a cinque anni di carcere per furto; due di quegli anni erano appena trascorsi. Utilizzando colori ottenuti nello stesso modo, aveva dipinto ogni centimetro delle pareti e del soffitto in modo davvero bellissimo. Aveva anche sistemato con estrema cura gli pochi metri quadrati di terreno presente nella cella, creando al centro un piccolo letto che, a dire il vero, assomigliava a una tomba. Il gusto e l’ingegnosità dimostrati da quell’uomo in tutto ciò che faceva erano davvero straordinari; eppure, era difficile immaginare una creatura più sconsolata, più distrutta dal dolore. Non avevo mai visto un esempio così evidente di desolazione e angoscia. Il mio cuore si stringeva per lui; quando le lacrime gli scorrevano lungo le guance e prendeva uno dei visitatori da parte, chiedendo con mani tremanti se ci fosse qualche speranza che la sua terribile condanna venisse commutata, la scena era davvero troppo dolorosa da sopportare. Non avevo mai visto né sentito parlare di una miseria più straziante di quella di quell’uomo.
In una terza cella, c’era un uomo alto e forte di colore nero, un ladro specializzato nella produzione di viti e simili oggetti. Il suo tempo in prigione stava per scadere. Non solo era un ladro molto abile, ma era anche noto per la sua audacia e la sua ferocia, nonché per il numero elevato delle sue condanne precedenti. Ci intrattenne con una lunga descrizione dei suoi “successi”, raccontandoli con tale gusto che sembrava davvero leccarsi le labbra mentre narrava aneddoti su furti di argenteria o su anziane donne che osservava sedute alla finestra con occhiali d’argento, e che poi derubava. Questo individuo, con la minima incoraggiamento, avrebbe mescolato alle sue storie professionali anche le più odiose menzogne; ma mi sbaglio di grosso se pensa che possa superare l’ipocrisia assoluta con cui dichiarava di benedire il giorno in cui era finito in quella prigione, e di non commettere mai più furti per tutta la vita.
C’era un uomo a cui era permesso, come concessione, tenere dei conigli. A causa del forte odore che regnava nella sua stanza, gli chiesero di uscire nel corridoio. Lui obbedì naturalmente e, proteggendosi il viso pallido dal sole improvviso che filtrava dalla grande finestra, sembrava così esangue e irreale da dare l’impressione fosse stato chiamato direttamente dall’tomba. Teneva un coniglio bianco sul petto; quando la piccola creatura si mise a terra e tornò furtivamente nella sua gabbia, e lui, una volta congedato, la seguì timidamente, mi chiesi se fosse davvero possibile stabilire in quale dei due casi quell’uomo rappresentasse l’animale più nobile.
C’era un ladro inglese che era stato lì soltanto pochi giorni su sette anni: un individuo malvagio, volgare, dalle labbra sottili, con il viso pallido; che ancora non gradiva affatto la compagnia dei visitatori, e che, se non fosse stato per quella punizione aggiuntiva, mi avrebbe volentieri pugnalato con il suo coltello da calzolaio. C’era anche un tedesco che era entrato in prigione solo ieri; al nostro arrivo si era alzato dal letto e, con il suo inglese stentato, aveva supplicato disperatamente di poter lavorare. C’era poi un poeta che, dopo aver svolto due giorni di lavoro ogni ventiquattro ore – uno per sé e uno per la prigione – scriveva versi sui navigli (il suo mestiere era quello di marinaio), sul “dannoso calice del vino” e sui suoi amici a casa. Ne c’erano moltissimi. Alcuni arrossivano alla vista dei visitatori, altri impallidivano; due o tre avevano con sé infermiere, poiché erano molto malati; uno, un vecchio negro grasso il cui piede era stato amputato in prigione, aveva come assistenti uno studioso classico e un abile chirurgo, anch’essi prigionieri. Seduto sulle scale, impegnato in qualche piccolo lavoro, c’era un ragazzo di bell’aspetto, “Allora, a Filadelfia non esiste alcun rifugio per i giovani criminali?”, chiesi. “Sì, ma solo per i bambini bianchi.” Che nobile aristocrazia del crimine.
C’era un marinaio che vi era rimasto per oltre undici anni e che, in pochi mesi, sarebbe stato libero. Undici anni di reclusione solitaria!
“Sono molto felice di sapere che il tuo tempo sta per scadere.” Cosa dice?
Niente. Perché guarda continuamente le sue mani, si gratta la pelle delle dita e, di tanto in tanto, alza lo sguardo verso quelle pareti nude che hanno visto i suoi capelli imbiancare? A volte fa così.
Non guarda mai gli uomini negli occhi e continua sempre a tormentarsi quelle sue mani, come se volesse strappare via pelle e ossa. È solo il suo umore; nient’altro.
È anche il suo umorismo a fargli dire che non guarda con impazienza all’uscita; che non è felice che il tempo si avvicini; che una volta sì, l’aspettava con ansia, ma era molto tempo fa; che ormai non gli importa più nulla. È proprio il suo umorismo a fargli essere un uomo indifeso, spezzato e distrutto. E che Dio sia testimone: il suo umorismo è davvero pienamente soddisfatto!
C’erano tre giovani donne in celle adiacenti; tutte erano state condannate nello stesso momento per aver cospirato per derubare il loro procuratore. Nella silenzio e nella solitudine della loro vita, erano diventate molto belle. Il loro aspetto era molto triste; avrebbe potuto commuovere anche il visitatore più duro fino alle lacrime, ma non quel tipo di dolore che si risveglia nel contemplare gli uomini. Una di loro era una giovane ragazza; non aveva ancora vent’anni, se ricordo bene; la sua stanza, bianca come la neve, era decorata con opere realizzate da un ex prigioniero; il sole, nella sua massima splendore, filtrava attraverso una stretta fessura nel muro, rivelando una sottile striscia di cielo azzurro. Era molto pentita e tranquilla; aveva imparato ad accettare la situazione, diceva (e credo che fosse vero); il suo animo era in pace. “In breve, sei felice qui?”, le chiese uno dei miei compagni. Lei cercò disperatamente di rispondere “Sì”; ma alzando lo sguardo e incontrando quell’immagine di libertà sopra di sé, scoppiò in lacrime e disse: “Ci provava. Non si è mai lamentata. Ma era naturale che a volte desiderasse uscire da quella cella. Non poteva farci nulla, ” singhiozzò, poverina.
I went from cell to cell that day; and every face I saw, or word I heard, or incident I noted, is present to my mind in all its painfulness. But let me pass them by, for one, more pleasant, glance of a prison on the same plan which I afterwards saw at Pittsburg.
When I had gone over that, in the same manner, I asked the governor if he had any person in his charge who was shortly going out. He had one, he said, whose time was up next day; but he had only been a prisoner two years.
Two years! I looked back through two years of my own life—out of jail, prosperous, happy, surrounded by blessings, comforts, good fortune—and thought how wide a gap it was, and how long those two years passed in solitary captivity would have been. I have the face of this man, who was going to be released next day, before me now. It is almost more memorable in its happiness than the other faces in their misery. How easy and how natural it was for him to say that the system was a good one; and that the time went ‘pretty quick—considering;’ and that when a man once felt that he had offended the law, and must satisfy it, ‘he got along, somehow:’ and so forth!
‘What did he call you back to say to you, in that strange flutter?’ I asked of my conductor, when he had locked the door and joined me in the passage.
‘Oh! That he was afraid the soles of his boots were not fit for walking, as they were a good deal worn when he came in; and that he would thank me very much to have them mended, ready.’
Those boots had been taken off his feet, and put away with the rest of his clothes, two years before!
I took that opportunity of inquiring how they conducted themselves immediately before going out; adding that I presumed they trembled very much.
‘Well, it’s not so much a trembling,’ was the answer—‘though they do quiver—as a complete derangement of the nervous system. They can’t sign their names to the book; sometimes can’t even hold the pen; look about ’em without appearing to know why, or where they are; and sometimes get up and sit down again, twenty times in a minute. This is when they’re in the office, where they are taken with the hood on, as they were brought in. When they get outside the gate, they stop, and look first one way and then the other; not knowing which to take. Sometimes they stagger as if they were drunk, and sometimes are forced to lean against the fence, they’re so bad:—but they clear off in course of time.’
As I walked among these solitary cells, and looked at the faces of the men within them, I tried to picture to myself the thoughts and feelings natural to their condition. I imagined the hood just taken off, and the scene of their captivity disclosed to them in all its dismal monotony.
At first, the man is stunned. His confinement is a hideous vision; and his old life a reality. He throws himself upon his bed, and lies there abandoned to despair. By degrees the insupportable solitude and barrenness of the place rouses him from this stupor, and when the trap in his grated door is opened, he humbly begs and prays for work. ‘Give me some work to do, or I shall go raving mad!’
He has it; and by fits and starts applies himself to labour; but every now and then there comes upon him a burning sense of the years that must be wasted in that stone coffin, and an agony so piercing in the recollection of those who are hidden from his view and knowledge, that he starts from his seat, and striding up and down the narrow room with both hands clasped on his uplifted head, hears spirits tempting him to beat his brains out on the wall.
Again he falls upon his bed, and lies there, moaning. Suddenly he starts up, wondering whether any other man is near; whether there is another cell like that on either side of him: and listens keenly.
There is no sound, but other prisoners may be near for all that. He remembers to have heard once, when he little thought of coming here himself, that the cells were so constructed that the prisoners could not hear each other, though the officers could hear them. Where is the nearest man—upon the right, or on the left? or is there one in both directions? Where is he sitting now—with his face to the light? or is he walking to and fro? How is he dressed? Has he been here long? Is he much worn away? Is he very white and spectre-like? Does he think of his neighbour too?
Scarcely venturing to breathe, and listening while he thinks, he conjures up a figure with his back towards him, and imagines it moving about in this next cell. He has no idea of the face, but he is certain of the dark form of a stooping man. In the cell upon the other side, he puts another figure, whose face is hidden from him also. Day after day, and often when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he thinks of these two men until he is almost distracted. He never changes them. There they are always as he first imagined them—an old man on the right; a younger man upon the left—whose hidden features torture him to death, and have a mystery that makes him tremble.
The weary days pass on with solemn pace, like mourners at a funeral; and slowly he begins to feel that the white walls of the cell have something dreadful in them: that their colour is horrible: that their smooth surface chills his blood: that there is one hateful corner which torments him. Every morning when he wakes, he hides his head beneath the coverlet, and shudders to see the ghastly ceiling looking down upon him. The blessed light of day itself peeps in, an ugly phantom face, through the unchangeable crevice which is his prison window.
By slow but sure degrees, the terrors of that hateful corner swell until they beset him at all times; invade his rest, make his dreams hideous, and his nights dreadful. At first, he took a strange dislike to it; feeling as though it gave birth in his brain to something of corresponding shape, which ought not to be there, and racked his head with pains. Then he began to fear it, then to dream of it, and of men whispering its name and pointing to it. Then he could not bear to look at it, nor yet to turn his back upon it. Now, it is every night the lurking-place of a ghost: a shadow:—a silent something, horrible to see, but whether bird, or beast, or muffled human shape, he cannot tell.
Quel giorno visitai una cella dopo l’altra; ogni volto che vidi, ogni parola che udii, ogni evento che notai, mi tornano ora alla mente con tutta la loro dolorosa intensità. Ma lasciate che li ignori, per dedicarmi a un ricordo più piacevole: quello di una prigione costruita secondo lo stesso progetto che in seguito vidi a Pittsburgh.
Quando ho esaminato la questione nello stesso modo, ho chiesto al governatore se avesse qualcuno sotto la sua responsabilità che stesse per essere rilasciato. Ha detto di sì, che c’era qualcuno il cui termine di detenzione sarebbe scaduto il giorno dopo; ma quel prigioniero era stato rinchiuso soltanto per due anni.
Due anni! Ho ripensato a questi due anni della mia vita: fuori dalla prigione, prospero, felice, circondato da benedizioni, comodità e fortuna. E ho pensato a quanto fosse grande la differenza tra quella realtà e quei due anni trascorsi in solitaria prigionia. Ora ho davanti a me il volto di quest’uomo, che sarebbe stato rilasciato il giorno dopo. Il suo sorriso è quasi più memorabile del dolore negli altri volti. Per lui era così facile e naturale dire che quel sistema fosse buono, che il tempo fosse “passato abbastanza in fretta”, e che quando una persona si rende conto di aver offeso la legge e deve pagarne le conseguenze, “in qualche modo riesce a cavarsela”. E così via!
“Con quale nome ti ha chiamato indietro per dirti qualcosa, con quel tono strano e affrettato?” gli chiesi del mio direttore d’orchestra, quando ebbe chiuso la porta e si unì a me nel corridoio.
“Oh! Temeva che le suole delle sue scarpe non fossero adatte per camminare, visto che erano piuttosto consumate quando è arrivato; e mi avrebbe ringraziato molto se le avessi riparate e pronte per l’uso.”
Quei stivali gli erano stati tolti dai piedi e messi via insieme al resto dei suoi vestiti, due anni prima!
Ho approfittato dell’occasione per chiedere come si fossero comportati poco prima di uscire, aggiungendo che presumevo tremassero molto.
“Beh,” fu la risposta, “non è tanto un tremore, anche se tremolano davvero, quanto un completo squilibrio del sistema nervoso. Non riescono nemmeno a scrivere il proprio nome sul libro; a volte non riescono nemmeno a tenere in mano la penna; guardano intorno senza capire perché o dove si trovino; e a volte si alzano e si siedono di nuovo, venti volte in un minuto. È quando sono in ufficio, dove vengono portati lì con il cappuccio indossato, proprio come quando sono stati portati dentro. Quando escono dal cancello, si fermano e guardano prima da una parte e poi dall’altra, senza sapere quale direzione prendere. A volte barcollano come se fossero ubriachi; altre volte devono appoggiarsi al recinto, sono davvero in condizioni gravi, ma con il tempo migliorano.”
Mentre camminavo tra queste celle solitarie e osservavo i volti degli uomini al loro interno, cercavo di immaginare i pensieri e i sentimenti che dovevano provare data la loro situazione. Mi figuravo il cappuccio appena rimosso e la scena della loro prigionia rivelata loro in tutta la sua desolata monotonia.
All’inizio, l’uomo è sbalordito. La sua reclusione gli appare come una visione orribile; la sua vecchia vita, invece, sembra una realtà concreta. Si getta sul letto e giace lì, abbandonato al dispero. Gradualmente, l’insopportabile solitudine e la desolazione di quel luogo lo fanno uscire da questo stato di torpore; quando la trappola nella sua porta a grate viene aperta, chiede umilmente lavoro. “Datemi qualcosa da fare. Altrimenti impazzirò!”
Lui ce l’ha; e a tratti si impegna nel lavoro; ma di tanto in tanto lo assale un forte senso di angoscia al pensiero degli anni che vengono sprecati in quella “tomba di pietra”, e un dolore così acuto al ricordo di coloro che sono nascosti alla sua vista e alla sua conoscenza, che si alza dal suo posto, cammina avanti e indietro nella stanza stretta, tenendosi le mani sulla testa, e sembra sentire spiriti che lo tentano a sbattere la testa contro il muro.
Di nuovo si sdraia sul letto, gemendo. All’improvviso si alza, chiedendosi se ci sia qualche altro uomo nelle vicinanze; se ci siano altre celle simili su entrambi i lati. Ascolta attentamente.
Non c’è alcun suono, ma potrebbero esserci altri prigionieri nelle vicinanze. Ricorda di aver sentito, una volta, quando non pensava affatto di finire qui lui stesso, che le celle erano progettate in modo tale che i prigionieri non potessero sentirsi a vicenda, mentre gli agenti sì. Dove si trova l’uomo più vicino: a destra o a sinistra? O ce ne sono due in entrambe le direzioni? In questo momento è seduto, con il viso rivolto verso la luce? Oppure cammina avanti e indietro? Come è vestito? È qui da molto tempo? Sembra molto consumato dal tempo? È molto pallido, quasi come uno spettro? E lui, pensa anche al suo vicino?
A malapena osando respirare, e ascoltando attentamente mentre lui riflette, immagina una figura con le spalle rivolte verso di sé, che si muove nella cella accanto. Non conosce il suo volto, ma è certo della sua forma scura e curva. Una figura di un uomo anziano a destra, e una più giovane a sinistra; i tratti nascosti di quest’ultima lo tormentano fino alla follia. Un mistero che lo fa tremare.
I giorni noiosi passano con un ritmo solenne, come i dolenti a un funerale; e lentamente lui inizia a sentire che le pareti bianche della cella nascondono qualcosa di terribile: che il loro colore è orribile; che la loro superficie liscia gli raffredda il sangue; che c’è un angolo odioso che lo tormenta. Ogni mattina, al risveglio, si nasconde sotto le coperte e rabbrividisce alla vista del soffitto spaventoso che lo sovrasta. Anche la benedetta luce del giorno, filtrando attraverso la fessura immutabile che rappresenta la sua prigione e la sua finestra, sembra assumere l’aspetto di un brutto fantasma.
Gradualmente, ma con certezza, le terribili ombre di quell’angolo odioso iniziarono ad assediarlo in ogni momento; invasero il suo riposo, rendevano i suoi sogni orribili e le sue notti spaventose. All’inizio provò un strano disgusto per quel luogo; aveva l’impressione che nel suo cervello nascesse qualcosa di forma corrispondente a quelle ombre, qualcosa che non avrebbe dovuto esistere, e questo lo tormentava profondamente. Poi iniziò ad temerle, poi a sognarle, e a vedere uomini che sussurravano il loro nome e le indicavano con il dito. Alla fine non riusciva più nemmeno a guardarle, né a voltare le spalle a esse. Ora, ogni notte, quel luogo diventa la dimora di un fantasma, di un’ombra, qualcosa di silenzioso e orribile da vedere; ma non riesce a capire se si tratti di un uccello, di una bestia o della forma di un essere umano.
[Picture: The Solitary Prisoner]
When he is in his cell by day, he fears the little yard without. When he is in the yard, he dreads to re-enter the cell. When night comes, there stands the phantom in the corner. If he have the courage to stand in its place, and drive it out (he had once: being desperate), it broods upon his bed. In the twilight, and always at the same hour, a voice calls to him by name; as the darkness thickens, his Loom begins to live; and even that, his comfort, is a hideous figure, watching him till daybreak.
Again, by slow degrees, these horrible fancies depart from him one by one: returning sometimes, unexpectedly, but at longer intervals, and in less alarming shapes. He has talked upon religious matters with the gentleman who visits him, and has read his Bible, and has written a prayer upon his slate, and hung it up as a kind of protection, and an assurance of Heavenly companionship. He dreams now, sometimes, of his children or his wife, but is sure that they are dead, or have deserted him. He is easily moved to tears; is gentle, submissive, and broken-spirited. Occasionally, the old agony comes back: a very little thing will revive it; even a familiar sound, or the scent of summer flowers in the air; but it does not last long, now: for the world without, has come to be the vision, and this solitary life, the sad reality.
If his term of imprisonment be short—I mean comparatively, for short it cannot be—the last half year is almost worse than all; for then he thinks the prison will take fire and he be burnt in the ruins, or that he is doomed to die within the walls, or that he will be detained on some false charge and sentenced for another term: or that something, no matter what, must happen to prevent his going at large. And this is natural, and impossible to be reasoned against, because, after his long separation from human life, and his great suffering, any event will appear to him more probable in the contemplation, than the being restored to liberty and his fellow-creatures.
If his period of confinement have been very long, the prospect of release bewilders and confuses him. His broken heart may flutter for a moment, when he thinks of the world outside, and what it might have been to him in all those lonely years, but that is all. The cell-door has been closed too long on all its hopes and cares. Better to have hanged him in the beginning than bring him to this pass, and send him forth to mingle with his kind, who are his kind no more.
On the haggard face of every man among these prisoners, the same expression sat. I know not what to liken it to. It had something of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind and deaf, mingled with a kind of horror, as though they had all been secretly terrified. In every little chamber that I entered, and at every grate through which I looked, I seemed to see the same appalling countenance. It lives in my memory, with the fascination of a remarkable picture. Parade before my eyes, a hundred men, with one among them newly released from this solitary suffering, and I would point him out.
The faces of the women, as I have said, it humanises and refines. Whether this be because of their better nature, which is elicited in solitude, or because of their being gentler creatures, of greater patience and longer suffering, I do not know; but so it is. That the punishment is nevertheless, to my thinking, fully as cruel and as wrong in their case, as in that of the men, I need scarcely add.
My firm conviction is that, independent of the mental anguish it occasions—an anguish so acute and so tremendous, that all imagination of it must fall far short of the reality—it wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world. It is my fixed opinion that those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased. There are many instances on record, of men who have chosen, or have been condemned, to lives of perfect solitude, but I scarcely remember one, even among sages of strong and vigorous intellect, where its effect has not become apparent, in some disordered train of thought, or some gloomy hallucination. What monstrous phantoms, bred of despondency and doubt, and born and reared in solitude, have stalked upon the earth, making creation ugly, and darkening the face of Heaven!
Suicides are rare among these prisoners: are almost, indeed, unknown. But no argument in favour of the system, can reasonably be deduced from this circumstance, although it is very often urged. All men who have made diseases of the mind their study, know perfectly well that such extreme depression and despair as will change the whole character, and beat down all its powers of elasticity and self-resistance, may be at work within a man, and yet stop short of self-destruction. This is a common case.
That it makes the senses dull, and by degrees impairs the bodily faculties, I am quite sure. I remarked to those who were with me in this very establishment at Philadelphia, that the criminals who had been there long, were deaf. They, who were in the habit of seeing these men constantly, were perfectly amazed at the idea, which they regarded as groundless and fanciful. And yet the very first prisoner to whom they appealed—one of their own selection confirmed my impression (which was unknown to him) instantly, and said, with a genuine air it was impossible to doubt, that he couldn’t think how it happened, but he was growing very dull of hearing.
That it is a singularly unequal punishment, and affects the worst man least, there is no doubt. In its superior efficiency as a means of reformation, compared with that other code of regulations which allows the prisoners to work in company without communicating together, I have not the smallest faith. All the instances of reformation that were mentioned to me, were of a kind that might have been—and I have no doubt whatever, in my own mind, would have been—equally well brought about by the Silent System. With regard to such men as the negro burglar and the English thief, even the most enthusiastic have scarcely any hope of their conversion.
Il prigioniero solitario
Quando è nella sua cella di giorno, teme il piccolo cortile che c’è fuori. Quando è nel cortile, ha paura di rientrare in cella. Quando arriva la notte, appare il fantasma nell’angolo. Se ha il coraggio di mettersi al suo posto e scacciarlo via (una volta ci è riuscito, in un momento di disperazione), il fantasma si posiziona sul suo letto. Al crepuscolo, sempre alla stessa ora, una voce lo chiama per nome; man mano che l’oscurità aumenta, la sua “macchina” inizia a funzionare. Ma anche quella, che dovrebbe essere un conforto, non è altro che una figura orribile che lo osserva fino all’alba.
Di nuovo, gradualmente, queste orribili fantasie lo abbandonano una dopo l’altra: a volte tornano inaspettatamente, ma con maggiore distanza di tempo e sotto forme meno allarmanti. Ha parlato di questioni religiose con il signore che lo visita, ha letto la sua Bibbia, ha scritto una preghiera su una lavagna e l’ha appesa come una sorta di protezione, come un segno della presenza di compagni celesti. Ora a volte sogna i suoi figli o sua moglie, ma è certo che siano morti o lo abbiano abbandonato. Si commuove facilmente alle lacrime; è gentile, docile e scoraggiato. Di tanto in tanto, quella vecchia sofferenza ritorna: qualcosa di molto semplice può rinnovarla; persino un suono familiare o il profumo delle fiori estivi nell’aria. Ma ora non dura a lungo: perché il mondo esterno è diventato la sua visione, e questa vita solitaria, la triste realtà della sua esistenza.
Se la sua pena di carcere dovesse essere breve – intendo dire, relativamente parlando; poiché comunque non può esserlo – l’ultimo semestre sarebbe quasi peggiore di tutto il resto: in quel periodo lui pensa che la prigione possa prendere fuoco e che venga bruciato tra le rovine, o che sia condannato a morire all’interno delle mura, o che venga trattenuto con false accuse e condannato a un’altra pena. O che, in ogni caso, debba accadere qualcosa per impedirgli di essere rilasciato. E questo è naturale; è impossibile contraddirlo, perché, dopo una lunga separazione dalla vita umana e dopo tali grandi sofferenze, qualsiasi evenienza gli sembrerà più probabile rispetto al ritorno in libertà e alla possibilità di riunirsi con i suoi simili.
Se il suo periodo di reclusione è stato molto lungo, la prospettiva della liberazione lo confonde e lo sconcerta. Il suo cuore spezzato potrebbe tremare per un momento, quando pensa al mondo esterno e a ciò che avrebbe potuto significare per lui in tutti quegli anni solitari. Ma è tutto qui. La porta della cella ha tenuto chiusi troppo a lungo tutti i suoi sogni e le sue speranze. Sarebbe stato meglio impiccarlo fin dall’inizio, piuttosto che portarlo in questa situazione e farlo uscire tra persone che ormai non sono più della sua stessa specie.
Sul volto stanco di ogni prigioniero c’era la stessa espressione. Non so a cosa paragonarla. Aveva qualcosa di quella concentrazione forzata che si nota sui volti dei ciechi e dei sordi, mescolata con una sorta di orrore, come se tutti fossero stati segretamente terrorizzati. In ogni piccola cella in cui entravo, e dietro ogni griglia attraverso la quale guardavo, sembrava di vedere sempre lo stesso volto spaventoso. Quell’immagine è rimasta nella mia memoria, con la fascinazione di un dipinto straordinario. Se davanti ai miei occhi comparissero cento uomini, tra cui uno appena liberato da questa solitaria sofferenza, riuscirei subito a individuarlo.
I volti delle donne, come ho detto, rendono le persone più umane e raffinate. Forse questo è dovuto alla loro migliore >natura, che emerge nella solitudine, oppure al fatto che siano creature più gentili, dotate di maggiore pazienza e capaci di sopportare più a lungo la sofferenza; non lo so con certezza. Ma è così. Che comunque, a mio parere, la punizione sia altrettanto crudele e ingiusta nel loro caso quanto in quello degli uomini, non c’è bisogno di aggiungere altro.
La mia ferma convinzione è che, indipendentemente dall’angoscia mentale che provoca – un’angoscia così acuta e terribile da far sì che qualsiasi immaginazione al riguardo rimanga ben lontana dalla realtà – essa riduce la mente in uno stato morbido, rendendola incapace di affrontare il duro contatto e le attività impegnative del mondo. Sono convinto che coloro che hanno subito questa “punizione” tornino nella società in condizioni morali precarie e malate. Esistono molti esempi di persone che hanno scelto, o sono state costrette a vivere una vita di perfetta solitudine, ma non ricordo quasi nessuno, nemmeno tra saggi dotati di un’intelligenza forte e vigorevole, il cui comportamento non sia stato influenzato negativamente da questa condizione: pensieri disordinati o allucinazioni cupe ne sono spesso la conseguenza. Che mostri orribili, nati dalla disperazione e dal >dubbio e cresciuti nella solitudine, hanno popolato la terra, rendendo brutta la creazione stessa e oscurando il volto del Cielo.
I suicidi sono rari tra questi prigionieri: sono quasi, in realtà, sconosciuti. Tuttavia, nessuna argomentazione a favore di questo sistema può essere ragionevolmente dedotta da questa circostanza, nonostante venga spesso invocata. Tutti coloro che hanno studiato le malattie mentali sanno perfettamente che forme estreme di depressione e disperazione capaci di cambiare completamente il carattere di una persona e di distruggere tutte le sue capacità di elasticità e autodifesa possono agire al suo interno, senza però portarla alla distruzione di sé stessa. Questo è un caso molto comune.
Sono assolutamente certo che ciò renda i sensi torpidi e, gradualmente, indebolisca le facoltà fisiche. Ho detto a coloro che erano con me in questa stessa istituzione a Filadelfia che i criminali che vi erano rimasti per molto tempo erano diventati sordi. Coloro che avevano l’abitudine di vederli costantemente rimasero profondamente sorpresi da questa idea, che consideravano infondata e fantasiosa. Eppure, il primo prigioniero a cui fecero riferimento – scelto proprio da loro – confermò immediatamente la mia impressione (che per lui era sconosciuta), dicendo con un tono così sincero da renderne impossibile il >dubbio che non riuscisse a spiegarsi come fosse possibile, ma che effettivamente stava diventando sempre più sordo.
Che si tratti di una punizione particolarmente ingiusta, e che colpisca soprattutto i peggiori individui, non vi è alcun >dubbio. Per quanto riguarda l’efficacia di questo sistema come mezzo di riforma, rispetto a quel codice di regolamenti che permette ai prigionieri di lavorare insieme senza comunicare tra loro, non ho la minima >fede in tale efficacia. Tutti gli esempi di riforma che mi sono stati raccontati riguardavano situazioni che, a mio parere, avrebbero potuto essere risolte altrettanto bene con il Sistema del Silenzio. Per quanto riguarda individui come il ladro negro o il furfante inglese, persino i più entusiasti hanno pochissime >speranze di una loro conversione.
It seems to me that the objection that nothing wholesome or good has ever had its growth in such unnatural solitude, and that even a dog or any of the more intelligent among beasts, would pine, and mope, and rust away, beneath its influence, would be in itself a sufficient argument against this system. But when we recollect, in addition, how very cruel and severe it is, and that a solitary life is always liable to peculiar and distinct objections of a most deplorable nature, which have arisen here, and call to mind, moreover, that the choice is not between this system, and a bad or ill-considered one, but between it and another which has worked well, and is, in its whole design and practice, excellent; there is surely more than sufficient reason for abandoning a mode of punishment attended by so little hope or promise, and fraught, beyond dispute, with such a host of evils.
As a relief to its contemplation, I will close this chapter with a curious story arising out of the same theme, which was related to me, on the occasion of this visit, by some of the gentlemen concerned.
At one of the periodical meetings of the inspectors of this prison, a working man of Philadelphia presented himself before the Board, and earnestly requested to be placed in solitary confinement. On being asked what motive could possibly prompt him to make this strange demand, he answered that he had an irresistible propensity to get drunk; that he was constantly indulging it, to his great misery and ruin; that he had no power of resistance; that he wished to be put beyond the reach of temptation; and that he could think of no better way than this. It was pointed out to him, in reply, that the prison was for criminals who had been tried and sentenced by the law, and could not be made available for any such fanciful purposes; he was exhorted to abstain from intoxicating drinks, as he surely might if he would; and received other very good advice, with which he retired, exceedingly dissatisfied with the result of his application.
He came again, and again, and again, and was so very earnest and importunate, that at last they took counsel together, and said, ‘He will certainly qualify himself for admission, if we reject him any more. Let us shut him up. He will soon be glad to go away, and then we shall get rid of him.’ So they made him sign a statement which would prevent his ever sustaining an action for false imprisonment, to the effect that his incarceration was voluntary, and of his own seeking; they requested him to take notice that the officer in attendance had orders to release him at any hour of the day or night, when he might knock upon his door for that purpose; but desired him to understand, that once going out, he would not be admitted any more. These conditions agreed upon, and he still remaining in the same mind, he was conducted to the prison, and shut up in one of the cells.
In this cell, the man, who had not the firmness to leave a glass of liquor standing untasted on a table before him—in this cell, in solitary confinement, and working every day at his trade of shoemaking, this man remained nearly two years. His health beginning to fail at the expiration of that time, the surgeon recommended that he should work occasionally in the garden; and as he liked the notion very much, he went about this new occupation with great cheerfulness.
He was digging here, one summer day, very industriously, when the wicket in the outer gate chanced to be left open: showing, beyond, the well-remembered dusty road and sunburnt fields. The way was as free to him as to any man living, but he no sooner raised his head and caught sight of it, all shining in the light, than, with the involuntary instinct of a prisoner, he cast away his spade, scampered off as fast as his legs would carry him, and never once looked back.
A mio parere, l’obiezione secondo cui nulla di positivo o buono possa mai crescere in una tale solitudine innaturale, e che persino un cane o uno qualsiasi degli animali più intelligenti soffrirebbero sotto la sua influenza, rappresenta di per sé un argomento sufficiente contro questo sistema. Ma se consideriamo inoltre quanto sia crudele e severo tale modo di punizione, e come una vita solitaria sia sempre soggetta a obiezioni particolari e di natura estremamente deplorevole, allora c’è sicuramente motivo più che sufficiente per abbandonare un sistema di punizione che comporta così poche speranze o promesse positive, e che è invece pieno di mali innegabili.
Per alleviare la tensione derivante dalla lettura di questo capitolo, concluderò con una storia curiosa che tratta dello stesso tema e che mi è stata raccontata, durante questa visita, da alcuni dei gentiluomini coinvolti.
Durante una delle riunioni periodiche degli ispettori di questo carcere, un operaio di Filadelfia si presentò davanti al consiglio e chiese con insistenza di essere messo in isolamento. Quando gli fu chiesto quale motivo potesse spingerlo a fare questa strana richiesta, rispose di avere una irresistibile tendenza ad ubriacarsi; che indulgeva costantemente in questo vizio, con grande sofferenza e rovina per sé stesso; che non aveva alcuna forza di volontà per resistere; che desiderava essere messo al di fuori della portata delle tentazioni; e che non riusciva a pensare a nessun altro modo per farlo. Gli fu fatto notare che il carcere era destinato ai criminali che erano stati processati e condannati dalla legge, e che quindi non poteva essere utilizzato per scopi del genere; gli fu consigliato di astenersi dai liquori inebrianti, poiché sicuramente avrebbe potuto farlo se lo avesse voluto; ricevette inoltre altri ottimi suggerimenti, ma se ne andò estremamente insoddisfatto del risultato della sua richiesta.
Tornò ancora e ancora, con tale insistenza e determinazione che alla fine decisero di consultarsi tra loro e dissero: “Se lo rifiutiamo ancora, sicuramente riuscirà a soddisfare tutti i requisiti necessari per essere ammesso. Meglio chiuderlo dentro; presto sarà felice di andarsene e così potremo sbarazzarcene.” Gli fecero quindi firmare una dichiarazione nella quale si impegnava a non intentare mai alcuna causa legale per un falso carcere; nella dichiarazione precisava che la sua reclusione era stata volontaria e richiesta da lui stesso. Gli dissero inoltre che l’ufficiale incaricato aveva l’ordine di rilasciarlo in qualsiasi momento della giornata o della notte, non appena bussasse alla porta per tale scopo; tuttavia gli fecero capire chiaramente che, una volta uscito, non sarebbe più stato ammesso. Dopo aver concordato su queste condizioni e essersi assicurati che lui fosse ancora d’accordo, lo portarono nella prigione e lo rinchiusero in una cella.
In questa cella, quest’uomo, che non aveva la forza di lasciare un bicchiere di alcol intatto sul tavolo davanti a sé. In questa cella, confinato in solitudine e impegnato ogni giorno nel suo lavoro di calzolaio, rimase per quasi due anni. Alla scadenza di quel periodo, la sua salute iniziò ad peggiorare; il chirurgo gli consigliò quindi di dedicarsi occasionalmente al giardinaggio; poiché gli piaceva molto l’idea, intraprese questa nuova attività con grande entusiasmo.
Un giorno d’estate, mentre scavava lì con grande impegno, il cancello esterno si trovò per caso aperto: al di là si intravedeva la ben ricordata strada polverosa e i campi bruciati dal sole. Quel sentiero era accessibile a chiunque, ma non appena alzò lo sguardo e ne vide tutta la bellezza sotto la luce del sole, con l’istinto involontario di un prigioniero, gettò via la pala e fuggì il più velocemente possibile, senza mai voltarsi indietro.
CHAPTER VIII WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE. AND THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE
WE left Philadelphia by steamboat, at six o’clock one very cold morning, and turned our faces towards Washington.
In the course of this day’s journey, as on subsequent occasions, we encountered some Englishmen (small farmers, perhaps, or country publicans at home) who were settled in America, and were travelling on their own affairs. Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle one in the public conveyances of the States, these are often the most intolerable and the most insufferable companions. United to every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American travellers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of insolent conceit and cool assumption of superiority, quite monstrous to behold. In the coarse familiarity of their approach, and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which they are in great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon the decent old restraints of home), they surpass any native specimens that came within my range of observation: and I often grew so patriotic when I saw and heard them, that I would cheerfully have submitted to a reasonable fine, if I could have given any other country in the whole world, the honour of claiming them for its children.
As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’ as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.
On board this steamboat, there were two young gentlemen, with shirt-collars reversed as usual, and armed with very big walking-sticks; who planted two seats in the middle of the deck, at a distance of some four paces apart; took out their tobacco-boxes; and sat down opposite each other, to chew. In less than a quarter of an hour’s time, these hopeful youths had shed about them on the clean boards, a copious shower of yellow rain; clearing, by that means, a kind of magic circle, within whose limits no intruders dared to come, and which they never failed to refresh and re-refresh before a spot was dry. This being before breakfast, rather disposed me, I confess, to nausea; but looking attentively at one of the expectorators, I plainly saw that he was young in chewing, and felt inwardly uneasy, himself. A glow of delight came over me at this discovery; and as I marked his face turn paler and paler, and saw the ball of tobacco in his left cheek, quiver with his suppressed agony, while yet he spat, and chewed, and spat again, in emulation of his older friend, I could have fallen on his neck and implored him to go on for hours.
We all sat down to a comfortable breakfast in the cabin below, where there was no more hurry or confusion than at such a meal in England, and where there was certainly greater politeness exhibited than at most of our stage-coach banquets. At about nine o’clock we arrived at the railroad station, and went on by the cars. At noon we turned out again, to cross a wide river in another steamboat; landed at a continuation of the railroad on the opposite shore; and went on by other cars; in which, in the course of the next hour or so, we crossed by wooden bridges, each a mile in length, two creeks, called respectively Great and Little Gunpowder. The water in both was blackened with flights of canvas-backed ducks, which are most delicious eating, and abound hereabouts at that season of the year.
These bridges are of wood, have no parapet, and are only just wide enough for the passage of the trains; which, in the event of the smallest accident, wound inevitably be plunged into the river. They are startling contrivances, and are most agreeable when passed.
We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.
After dinner, we went down to the railroad again, and took our seats in the cars for Washington. Being rather early, those men and boys who happened to have nothing particular to do, and were curious in foreigners, came (according to custom) round the carriage in which I sat; let down all the windows; thrust in their heads and shoulders; hooked themselves on conveniently, by their elbows; and fell to comparing notes on the subject of my personal appearance, with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed figure. I never gained so much uncompromising information with reference to my own nose and eyes, and various impressions wrought by my mouth and chin on different minds, and how my head looks when it is viewed from behind, as on these occasions. Some gentlemen were only satisfied by exercising their sense of touch; and the boys (who are surprisingly precocious in America) were seldom satisfied, even by that, but would return to the charge over and over again. Many a budding president has walked into my room with his cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, and stared at me for two whole hours: occasionally refreshing himself with a tweak of his nose, or a draught from the water-jug; or by walking to the windows and inviting other boys in the street below, to come up and do likewise: crying, ‘Here he is!’ ‘Come on!’ ‘Bring all your brothers!’ with other hospitable entreaties of that nature.
CAPITOLO VIII
WASHINGTON: LA LEGISLATURA E LA CASA DEL PRESIDENTE
Partimmo da Filadelfia in battello a vapore, alle sei di una mattina molto fredda, e dirigemmo il nostro viaggio verso Washington.
Durante il Viaggio di oggi, come anche in occasioni successive, abbiamo incontrato alcuni inglesi (forse piccoli agricoltori o proprietari di pub nelle campagne) che si erano stabiliti in America e viaggiavano per motivi personali. Tra tutte le categorie di persone che si trovano nei mezzi di trasporto pubblico degli Stati Uniti, questi sono spesso i compagni più insopportabili e fastidiosi. Insieme a tutte le caratteristiche sgradevoli tipiche dei peggiori viaggiatori americani, questi nostri connazionali mostrano un’arroganza insolente e una presunzione di superiorità davvero disgustose da osservare. Con la loro mancanza di rispetto e la loro invadenza (che manifestano con grande fretta, come se volessero “vendicarsi” delle regole decenti del loro Paese d’origine), superano qualsiasi esempio simile che io abbia mai incontrato. Spesso, quando li vedevamo e li sentivamo parlare, provavo un tale patriottismo che sarei stato felice di pagare una multa ragionevole, se solo avessi potuto attribuire a qualsiasi altro paese al mondo l’onore di considerarli propri figli.
Se Washington può essere considerata la sede principale di quella pratica disgustosa di masticare tabacco e sputarne il succo, è giunto il momento in cui devo confessare, senza alcun velo, che la diffusione di queste due abitudini orribili ha iniziato a diventare davvero insopportabile, per non dire offensiva e disgustosa. In tutti i luoghi pubblici d’America, questa pratica sporca è ampiamente diffusa. Nei tribunali, il giudice ha il suo posacenere, l’usciere il suo, i testimoni il loro, e anche i prigionieri ne sono forniti; inoltre, per i membri della giuria e gli spettatori vengono predisposti appositi contenitori per lo sputo. Negli ospedali, ai studenti di medicina viene chiesto, tramite avvisi affissi sui muri, di espellere il succo del tabacco nei contenitori destinati a questo scopo, evitando così di sporcare le scale. Nei edifici pubblici, ai visitatori viene anche chiesto di utilizzare tali contenitori invece di sputare sulle basi delle colonne marmoree. Tuttavia, in alcune zone questa pratica è strettamente legata a ogni pasto, a ogni incontro mattutino e a tutte le attività della vita sociale. Lo straniero che seguirà le mie orme scoprirà che a Washington questa abitudine è al suo apice, rigogliosa nella sua follia pericolosa. E non si lasci convincere (come io stesso feci, con mio grande imbarazzo) che i turisti precedenti abbiano esagerato sulla sua diffusione: la realtà stessa rappresenta un’esagerazione di orrore che non può essere superata.
A bordo di questo battello a vapore c’erano due giovani signori, con i colletti delle camicie rivolti come al solito e armati di grandi bastoni da passeggio; posizionarono due sedie nel mezzo del ponte, a una distanza di circa quattro passi l’una dall’altra, tirarono fuori le loro scatole da tabacco e si sedettero uno di fronte all’altro per masticare. In meno di un quarto d’ora, questi giovani avevano sparpagliato intorno a sé, sulle piastrelle pulite del ponte, una vera e propria “pioggia gialla”; in questo modo avevano creato una sorta di “cerchio magico” al cui interno nessuno osava avvicinarsi, e non mancavano mai di rinnovare quella “barriera protettiva” ogni volta che qualcosa si asciugava. Poiché tutto ciò accadeva prima della colazione, devo ammettere che mi fece venire la nausea. Ma osservando attentamente uno di loro, notai chiaramente che stava masticando con troppa foga e provai anch’io un senso di disagio. Tuttavia, quando vidi il suo viso diventare sempre più pallido e la pallina di tabacco nella sua guancia sinistra tremare per l’agonia repressa, mentre continuava a sputare, masticare e sputare ancora, imitando il comportamento del suo amico più anziano, non ho potuto fare a meno di desiderare che continuasse così per ore intere.
Ci sedemmo tutti insieme per fare colazione nella cabina sottostante; non c’era alcuna fretta né confusione, proprio come avviene durante una normale colazione in Inghilterra. E certamente si dimostrò maggiore cortesia di quanta ne si riscontri nella maggior parte dei banchetti organizzati sui nostri treni viaggiatori. Intorno alle nove di mattina arrivammo alla stazione ferroviaria e proseguimmo il nostro viaggio con altri vagoni. A mezzogiorno scendemmo nuovamente, per attraversare un ampio fiume su un altro battello a vapore; sbarcammo sulla riva opposta, dove continuammo il nostro viaggio con altri vagoni. Nel corso dell’ora successiva attraversammo diversi ponti in legno, ognuno lungo circa un miglio, oltre a due ruscelli chiamati rispettivamente “Grande Polvere da Sparo” e “Piccola Polvere da Sparo”. L’acqua di entrambi i corsi d’acqua era torbida a causa dei numerosi anatre dalle ali di tela. Queste anatre sono molto deliziose da mangiare, e in questa stagione dell’anno sono particolarmente abbondanti in queste zone.
Questi ponti sono di legno, non hanno parapetti e sono appena sufficientemente larghi per il passaggio dei treni; il minimo incidente potrebbe farli cadere inevitabilmente nel fiume. Sono strutture sorprendenti, ma almeno piacevoli da attraversare.
Ci fermammo per pranzare a Baltimora e, essendo ormai in Maryland, fummo serviti, per la prima volta, da schiavi. Il fatto di dover chiedere aiuto o servizi a creature umane che vengono comprate e vendute, e di farlo, per così dire, in compagnia delle loro condizioni disumane, non è certo una sensazione piacevole. Questa istituzione esiste, forse nella sua forma meno ripugnante e più mitigata, in città come questa; ma si tratta comunque di schiavitù. E sebbene io fossi, al riguardo, una persona innocente, la sua presenza mi riempì di vergogna e rimorso.
Dopo cena, scendemmo di nuovo sulla ferrovia e ci sedemmo nei vagoni diretti a Washington. Essendo ancora presto, quegli uomini e ragazzi che non avevano nulla di particolare da fare e erano curiosi dei forestieri, si avvicinarono (secondo l’usanza) al vagone in cui sedevo; abbassarono tutte le finestre, infilarono la testa e le spalle all’interno, si appoggiarono con i gomiti e iniziarono a confrontare le loro impressioni sul mio aspetto personale, con tale indifferenza come se fossi una statuina di pezza. In quelle occasioni ottenni informazioni molto precise riguardo al mio naso, ai miei occhi, nonché all’impatto che il mio viso aveva su di loro. Alcuni gentiluomini si accontentarono semplicemente di esaminarmi con le mani; i ragazzi (che in America sono sorprendentemente precoci) invece non erano mai soddisfatti, e continuavano a osservarmi ripetutamente. Molti futuri presidenti sono entrati nella mia stanza con il cappello in testa e le mani in tasca, fissandomi per due ore intere; di tanto in tanto si rinfrescavano pizzicandosi il naso o bevendo un sorso d’acqua. Oppure invitavano altri ragazzi per strada a fare lo stesso, esclamando: “Eccolo lì! Venite su!” con altre espressioni altrettanto ospitali.
We reached Washington at about half-past six that evening, and had upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and commanding eminence. Arrived at the hotel; I saw no more of the place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.
Breakfast over next morning, I walk about the streets for an hour or two, and, coming home, throw up the window in the front and back, and look out. Here is Washington, fresh in my mind and under my eye.
Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest, preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster; widen it a little; throw in part of St. John’s Wood; put green blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought not to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of everybody’s way the better; call one the Post Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field without the bricks, in all central places where a street may naturally be expected: and that’s Washington.
The hotel in which we live, is a long row of small houses fronting on the street, and opening at the back upon a common yard, in which hangs a great triangle. Whenever a servant is wanted, somebody beats on this triangle from one stroke up to seven, according to the number of the house in which his presence is required; and as all the servants are always being wanted, and none of them ever come, this enlivening engine is in full performance the whole day through. Clothes are drying in the same yard; female slaves, with cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads are running to and fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning up his stomach to the sun, and grunting ‘that’s comfortable!’; and neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which is tingling madly all the time.
I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long, straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. Standing anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flag-staff as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger than a tea-chest. Under the window is a small stand of coaches, whose slave-drivers are sunning themselves on the steps of our door, and talking idly together. The three most obtrusive houses near at hand are the three meanest. On one—a shop, which never has anything in the window, and never has the door open—is painted in large characters, ‘THE CITY LUNCH.’ At another, which looks like a backway to somewhere else, but is an independent building in itself, oysters are procurable in every style. At the third, which is a very, very little tailor’s shop, pants are fixed to order; or in other words, pantaloons are made to measure. And that is our street in Washington.
It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features. One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses gone out of town for ever with their masters. To the admirers of cities it is a Barmecide Feast: a pleasant field for the imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project, with not even a legible inscription to record its departed greatness.
Such as it is, it is likely to remain. It was originally chosen for the seat of Government, as a means of averting the conflicting jealousies and interests of the different States; and very probably, too, as being remote from mobs: a consideration not to be slighted, even in America. It has no trade or commerce of its own: having little or no population beyond the President and his establishment; the members of the legislature who reside there during the session; the Government clerks and officers employed in the various departments; the keepers of the hotels and boarding-houses; and the tradesmen who supply their tables. It is very unhealthy. Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.
Arrivammo a Washington verso le sei e mezza di quella sera, e lungo la strada godemmo di un bellissimo panorama del Campidoglio, un edificio magnifico in stile corinzio, situato su una posizione elevata e imponente. Arrivati all’hotel, non vidi più nulla di quella città quella notte; ero molto stanco e felice di poter andare a letto.
Dopo colazione la mattina seguente, cammino per le strade per un’ora o due; tornando a casa, apro le finestre davanti e dietro e guardo fuori. Ecco Washington, ancora fresco nella mia mente e sotto i miei occhi.
Prendete le parti peggiori delle strade della città e di Pentonville, o i sobborghi disordinati di Parigi, dove le case sono le più piccole; conservate tutte le loro peculiarità, soprattutto i negozi e gli abitazioni. A Pentonville (ma non a Washington), queste strutture sono occupate da agenti immobiliari, gestori di ristoranti economici e appassionati di uccelli. Bruciate tutto; ricostruite il quartiere in legno e intonaco; allargatelo un po’; incorporatevi anche parte del bosco di St. John’s Wood; installate tende verdi davanti a tutte le case private, con tende rosse e bianche alle finestre; ristrutturate tutte le strade; piantate molto erba grossolana in tutti i luoghi dove non dovrebbe esserci; costruite tre edifici bellissimi in pietra e marmo, ovunque sia possibile, ma il più lontano possibile dal passaggio delle persone; chiamateli Ufficio Postale, Ufficio Brevetti e Tesoro. Fate sì che la mattina faccia un caldo torrido e il pomeriggio un freddo gelido, con occasionali tornado di vento e polvere. Lasciate anche un campo pieno di mattoni, nei luoghi centrali dove ci si aspetterebbe naturalmente l’apertura di una strada: ed ecco, questo è Washington.
L’hotel in cui viviamo è costituito da una lunga fila di piccole case affacciate sulla strada e che si aprono sul retro in un cortile comune, dove è appeso un grande triangolo. Ogni volta che c’è bisogno di un servitore, qualcuno batte su questo triangolo: dal primo colpo fino al settimo, a seconda del numero di case in cui è richiesto il suo intervento; poiché i servitori sono sempre necessari e nessuno di loro arriva mai, questo “meccanismo” rumoroso funziona senza sosta per tutta la giornata. I vestiti vengono messi ad asciugare nello stesso cortile; schiave con fazzoletti di cotone intorno alla testa corrono avanti e indietro per sbrigare le faccende dell’hotel; camerieri neri portano piatti in mano avanti e indietro; due grandi cani giocano su un mucchio di mattoni nel centro del cortile; un maiale si sdraia al sole grugnendo “Che comodità!”. E né gli uomini, né le donne, né i cani, né il maiale, né alcuna creatura vivente prestano la minima attenzione a quel triangolo che continua a vibrare incessantemente.
Vado davanti alla finestra e guardo attraverso la strada una lunga fila di case, tutte a un piano, che terminano quasi di fronte, ma leggermente a sinistra, in un tratto desolato coperto d’erba alta, che sembra un pezzetto di campagna che ha “iniziato a bere” e si è completamente perso. In mezzo a questo spazio aperto, come se fosse caduto dal luna, c’è un edificio di legno strano, storto e con una sola finestra; sembra una chiesa, e da un campanile più alto di un baule da tè spunta un’asta su cui sventola una bandiera. Sotto la finestra c’è una piccola fila di carrozze; i loro cocchieri si riposano sui gradini della nostra porta chiacchierando senza scopo. Le tre case più evidenti nelle vicinanze sono anche le più brutte: su una c’è un negozio la cui finestra è sempre vuota e la cui porta non si apre mai; sopra di essa è scritto a grandi caratteri “PRANZO IN CITTÀ”. Un’altra casa, che sembra essere solo un vicolo secondario, in realtà vende ostriche di ogni tipo. La terza è una piccolissima bottega di sarto: i pantaloni vi vengono fatti su misura. E questa è la nostra strada a Washington.
A volte viene chiamata la “Città delle Magnifiche Distanze”, ma forse sarebbe più appropriato definirla la “Città delle Magnifiche Intenzioni”; infatti, solo osservandola dall’alto del Campidoglio si possono comprendere appieno le vaste ambizioni di colui che l’ha progettata: un francese pieno di aspirazioni. Viali ampi e sterminati che sembrano iniziare da nulla e portare da nessuna parte; strade lunghe chilometri che attendono soltanto case, vie e abitanti; edifici pubblici che necessitano soltanto di persone per essere completi; e ornamenti per le grandi arterie che mancano soltanto di queste stesse arterie per essere veramente splendidi. Questi sono i tratti principali di questa città. Si potrebbe quasi immaginare che la stagione sia già finita e che la maggior parte delle case sia stata abbandonata dai suoi proprietari per sempre. Per gli amanti delle città, è una vera e propria “Festa di Barmecide”: un piacevole campo di esercizio per l’immaginazione; un monumento eretto in onore di un progetto mai realizzato, senza nemmeno un’iscrizione leggibile che ricordi la sua “grandezza” passata.
Così com’è, è probabile che rimanga così. Fu originariamente scelta come sede del Governo al fine di evitare i conflitti e gli interessi contrastanti tra le diverse nazioni; inoltre, si trovava lontana dalle folle, un aspetto da non sottovalutare nemmeno in America. Non dispone di attività commerciali proprie: la sua popolazione è composta principalmente dal Presidente e dal suo staff, dai membri del parlamento che vi risiedono durante le sessioni legislative, dagli impiegati e dai funzionari governativi, dai gestori degli hotel e delle locande, nonché dai commercianti che forniscono i servizi necessari. L’ambiente è molto insalubre: poche persone sceglierebbero di vivere a Washington se non fossero costrette a farlo; inoltre, le correnti migratorie e speculative difficilmente si dirigono verso luoghi così noiosi e stagnanti.
The principal features of the Capitol, are, of course, the two houses of Assembly. But there is, besides, in the centre of the building, a fine rotunda, ninety-six feet in diameter, and ninety-six high, whose circular wall is divided into compartments, ornamented by historical pictures. Four of these have for their subjects prominent events in the revolutionary struggle. They were painted by Colonel Trumbull, himself a member of Washington’s staff at the time of their occurrence; from which circumstance they derive a peculiar interest of their own. In this same hall Mr. Greenough’s large statue of Washington has been lately placed. It has great merits of course, but it struck me as being rather strained and violent for its subject. I could wish, however, to have seen it in a better light than it can ever be viewed in, where it stands.
There is a very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol; and from a balcony in front, the bird’s-eye view, of which I have just spoken, may be had, together with a beautiful prospect of the adjacent country. In one of the ornamented portions of the building, there is a figure of Justice; whereunto the Guide Book says, ‘the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the opposite extreme.’ Poor Justice! she has been made to wear much stranger garments in America than those she pines in, in the Capitol. Let us hope that she has changed her dress-maker since they were fashioned, and that the public sentiment of the country did not cut out the clothes she hides her lovely figure in, just now.
The House of Representatives is a beautiful and spacious hall, of semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars. One part of the gallery is appropriated to the ladies, and there they sit in front rows, and come in, and go out, as at a play or concert. The chair is canopied, and raised considerably above the floor of the House; and every member has an easy chair and a writing desk to himself: which is denounced by some people out of doors as a most unfortunate and injudicious arrangement, tending to long sittings and prosaic speeches. It is an elegant chamber to look at, but a singularly bad one for all purposes of hearing. The Senate, which is smaller, is free from this objection, and is exceedingly well adapted to the uses for which it is designed. The sittings, I need hardly add, take place in the day; and the parliamentary forms are modelled on those of the old country.
I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether I had not been very much impressed by the heads of the lawmakers at Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed: and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with indignant consternation by answering ‘No, that I didn’t remember being at all overcome.’ As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this subject in as few words as possible.
In the first place—it may be from some imperfect development of my organ of veneration—I do not remember having ever fainted away, or having even been moved to tears of joyful pride, at sight of any legislative body. I have borne the House of Commons like a man, and have yielded to no weakness, but slumber, in the House of Lords. I have seen elections for borough and county, and have never been impelled (no matter which party won) to damage my hat by throwing it up into the air in triumph, or to crack my voice by shouting forth any reference to our Glorious Constitution, to the noble purity of our independent voters, or, the unimpeachable integrity of our independent members. Having withstood such strong attacks upon my fortitude, it is possible that I may be of a cold and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters; and therefore my impressions of the live pillars of the Capitol at Washington must be received with such grains of allowance as this free confession may seem to demand.
Did I see in this public body an assemblage of men, bound together in the sacred names of Liberty and Freedom, and so asserting the chaste dignity of those twin goddesses, in all their discussions, as to exalt at once the Eternal Principles to which their names are given, and their own character and the character of their countrymen, in the admiring eyes of the whole world?
It was but a week, since an aged, grey-haired man, a lasting honour to the land that gave him birth, who has done good service to his country, as his forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores of years after the worms bred in its corruption, are but so many grains of dust—it was but a week, since this old man had stood for days upon his trial before this very body, charged with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic, which has for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn children. Yes. And publicly exhibited in the same city all the while; gilded, framed and glazed hung up for general admiration; shown to strangers not with shame, but pride; its face not turned towards the wall, itself not taken down and burned; is the Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, which solemnly declares that All Men are created Equal; and are endowed by their Creator with the Inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness!
It was not a month, since this same body had sat calmly by, and heard a man, one of themselves, with oaths which beggars in their drink reject, threaten to cut another’s throat from ear to ear. There he sat, among them; not crushed by the general feeling of the assembly, but as good a man as any.
Le principali caratteristiche del Campidoglio sono, naturalmente, le due camere dell’Assemblea. Ma c’è anche, al centro dell’edificio, una bellissima rotonda con un diametro di novantasei piedi e un’altezza anch’essa di novantasei piedi; il suo muro circolare è diviso in diverse sezioni, decorate da dipinti storici. Quattro di questi dipinti raffigurano eventi importanti della lotta rivoluzionaria; sono stati realizzati dal Colonnello Trumbull, che all’epoca era membro dello staff di Washington; per questo motivo possiedono un interesse particolare. Nella stessa sala è stata recentemente collocata la grande statua di Washington realizzata da Mr. Greenough. Naturalmente ha molti pregi, ma a mio parere appare piuttosto forzata e esagerata rispetto al soggetto rappresentato. Vorrei comunque averla vista in condizioni migliori di quelle attuali.
Nel Campidoglio c’è una biblioteca molto piacevole e comoda; da un balcone situato di fronte si può godere quella vista a volo d’uccello di cui ho appena parlato, insieme ad un bellissimo panorama della zona circostante. In una delle parti decorate dell’edificio c’è una statua della Giustizia; il libro guida afferma che “l’artista inizialmente aveva pensato di darle un aspetto più nudo, ma gli fu detto che l’opinione pubblica di questo paese non lo avrebbe accettato; perciò, nella sua cautela, forse è andato nell’estremo opposto”. Povera Giustizia. In America le sono stati fatti indossare abiti molto più strani di quelli che desiderava nel Campidoglio. Speriamo che da allora abbia cambiato sarto, e che l’opinione pubblica del paese non abbia rifiutato i vestiti in cui ora nasconde la sua bella figura.
La >Casa dei Rappresentanti è un’aula bella e spaziosa, di forma semicircolare, sostenuta da bellissimi pilastri. Una parte della galleria è riservata alle signore, le quali vi siedono nelle file anteriori, entrando ed uscendo come in un teatro o in un concerto. Le sedie sono dotate di baldacchini e si trovano a notevole distanza dal pavimento dell’aula; ogni membro dispone inoltre di una poltrona comoda e di uno scrittoio personale. Questo sistema, tuttavia, viene criticato da alcuni come estremamente sfortunato e poco opportuno, poiché incoraggia sedute prolungate e discorsi banali. È senz’altro un ambiente elegante da vedere, ma assai inadatto a qualsiasi scopo legato all’ascolto delle deliberazioni parlamentari. Il Senato, essendo più piccolo, è esente da questo difetto ed è estremamente adatto agli scopi per cui è stato creato. Le sedute, come è facile intuire, si svolgono di giorno; inoltre, le procedure parlamentari seguono lo schema delle antiche tradizioni britanniche.
Durante i miei viaggi in altri luoghi, mi è stato spesso chiesto se fossi rimasto particolarmente colpito dalle “teste” dei legislatori a Washington; intendo non i loro capi o leader, ma letteralmente le loro teste individuali e personali, su cui cresceva i capelli e attraverso cui si esprimeva il carattere frenologico di ciascun legislatore. Quasi altrettanto spesso, rispondevo con indignazione al mio interlocutore, dicendo: “No, non ricordo affatto di essere rimasto colpito in alcun modo”. Poiché devo ripetere questa dichiarazione a qualunque costo, ne seguirò immediatamente il racconto, esprimendo le mie impressioni su questo argomento nel minor numero possibile di parole.
In primo luogo, forse a causa di un qualche sviluppo imperfetto del mio senso di venerazione, non ricordo mai di essere svenuto, né di aver provato lacrime di gioiosa orgoglio alla vista di alcun organo legislativo. Ho affrontato la Casa dei Comuni con coraggio, senza cedere a nessuna debolezza, tranne forse il sonno, nella Casa dei Lord. Ho assistito alle elezioni per borghi e contee, ma in nessun caso sono stato spinto (indipendentemente dal partito vincente) a gettare il mio cappello in aria in segno di trionfo, né a rovinarmi la voce gridando frasi riguardanti la nostra Gloriosa Costituzione, la nobile purezza dei nostri elettori indipendenti o l’integrità impeccabile dei nostri membri. Avendo resistito a tali attacchi alla mia forza d’animo, è possibile che io abbia un temperamento freddo e insensibile in queste questioni; pertanto, le mie impressioni sui pilastri fondamentali del Campidoglio a Washington devono essere considerate con una certa dose di scetticismo, proprio come richiede questa mia sincera confessione.
Ho forse visto in questo corpo pubblico un insieme di uomini uniti dai sacri nomi della Libertà e dell’Indipendenza, che nelle loro discussioni esaltano sia i Principi Eterni a cui questi nomi si riferiscono, sia il proprio carattere e quello dei propri connazionali, davanti agli occhi ammirati di tutto il mondo?
Era passata soltanto una settimana da quando quell’uomo anziano, dai capelli grigi, che aveva rappresentato un onore duraturo per la terra che lo aveva dato alla luce, che aveva reso grandi servizi al proprio paese, proprio come avevano fatto i suoi antenati, e che sarebbe stato ricordato per molti anni ancora dopo che le larve avessero iniziato a decomporre il suo corpo, era stato processato davanti a questo stesso tribunale. Era accusato di aver osato denunciare quell’attività infame che aveva come merci proibite uomini e donne, nonché i loro bambini ancora non nati. Sì. Quella dichiarazione fu esposta pubblicamente nella stessa città, dorata, incorniciata e protetta da vetro, per essere ammirata da tutti; mostrata agli estranei non con vergogna, ma con orgoglio. La Dichiarazione Unanime dei Tredici Stati Uniti d’America, che dichiara solennemente che tutti gli uomini sono creati uguali e che il loro Creatore li ha dotati dei diritti inalienabili alla vita, alla libertà e alla ricerca della felicità!
Non era passato nemmeno un mese da quando lo stesso corpo sedeva tranquillamente lì e aveva sentito un uomo, uno di loro, pronunciare oscenità che persino i mendicanti rifiuterebbero durante una bevuta, minacciando di tagliare la gola a qualcun altro da un orecchio all’altro. Lì sedeva, tra di loro; non schiacciato dall’opinione generale dell’assemblea, ma ugualmente un buon uomo come chiunque altro.
There was but a week to come, and another of that body, for doing his duty to those who sent him there; for claiming in a Republic the Liberty and Freedom of expressing their sentiments, and making known their prayer; would be tried, found guilty, and have strong censure passed upon him by the rest. His was a grave offence indeed; for years before, he had risen up and said, ‘A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!’ But there are many kinds of hunters engaged in the Pursuit of Happiness, and they go variously armed. It is the Inalienable Right of some among them, to take the field after their Happiness equipped with cat and cartwhip, stocks, and iron collar, and to shout their view halloa! (always in praise of Liberty) to the music of clanking chains and bloody stripes.
Where sat the many legislators of coarse threats; of words and blows such as coalheavers deal upon each other, when they forget their breeding? On every side. Every session had its anecdotes of that kind, and the actors were all there.
Did I recognise in this assembly, a body of men, who, applying themselves in a new world to correct some of the falsehoods and vices of the old, purified the avenues to Public Life, paved the dirty ways to Place and Power, debated and made laws for the Common Good, and had no party but their Country?
I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon’s teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences: such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.
Did I see among them, the intelligence and refinement: the true, honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there, were drops of its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay. It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked. And thus this lowest of all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the farthest from that degradation.
That there are, among the representatives of the people in both Houses, and among all parties, some men of high character and great abilities, I need not say. The foremost among those politicians who are known in Europe, have been already described, and I see no reason to depart from the rule I have laid down for my guidance, of abstaining from all mention of individuals. It will be sufficient to add, that to the most favourable accounts that have been written of them, I more than fully and most heartily subscribe; and that personal intercourse and free communication have bred within me, not the result predicted in the very doubtful proverb, but increased admiration and respect. They are striking men to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Crichtons in varied accomplishments, Indians in fire of eye and gesture, Americans in strong and generous impulse; and they as well represent the honour and wisdom of their country at home, as the distinguished gentleman who is now its Minister at the British Court sustains its highest character abroad.
I visited both houses nearly every day, during my stay in Washington. On my initiatory visit to the House of Representatives, they divided against a decision of the chair; but the chair won. The second time I went, the member who was speaking, being interrupted by a laugh, mimicked it, as one child would in quarrelling with another, and added, ‘that he would make honourable gentlemen opposite, sing out a little more on the other side of their mouths presently.’ But interruptions are rare; the speaker being usually heard in silence. There are more quarrels than with us, and more threatenings than gentlemen are accustomed to exchange in any civilised society of which we have record: but farm-yard imitations have not as yet been imported from the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The feature in oratory which appears to be the most practised, and most relished, is the constant repetition of the same idea or shadow of an idea in fresh words; and the inquiry out of doors is not, ‘What did he say?’ but, ‘How long did he speak?’ These, however, are but enlargements of a principle which prevails elsewhere.
The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.
Restava soltanto una settimana: un’altra opportunità per quell’corpo di adempiere al proprio dovere verso coloro che lo avevano inviato lì; un’altra occasione per rivendicare, in una Repubblica, la Libertà e la possibilità di esprimere liberamente i propri sentimenti, nonché di far conoscere le proprie preghiere. Tuttavia, sarebbe stato processato, dichiarato colpevole e subire severe condanne da parte degli altri. Il suo era davvero un crimine grave: anni prima aveva già gridato: “Un branco di schiavi, maschi e femmine, in vendita, destinati a riprodursi come bestiame, legati tra loro da catene di ferro, passano proprio ora per le strade, sotto le finestre del vostro Tempio dell’Uguaglianza! Guardate!” Ma ci sono molti tipi di “cacciatori” alla ricerca della Felicità, e ognuno di loro si armi in modo diverso. Per alcuni di loro, è un diritto inalienabile recarsi “in campo” alla ricerca della propria Felicità, equipaggiati di fruste, catene e collari di ferro, e gridare le proprie idee, sempre a lode della Libertà, al suono di catene che tintinnano e strisce di sangue.
Dove sedevano tutti quei legislatori che pronunciavano minacce, parole offensive e sfide violente, proprio come fanno i caricatori di carbone quando dimenticano le loro buone maniere? Dappertutto. Ogni sessione legislativa era piena di aneddoti del genere, e tutti i protagonisti di quelle scenate erano lì presenti.
Ho riconosciuto in questa assemblea un gruppo di uomini che, in un mondo nuovo, si sono impegnati a correggere alcune delle falsità e dei vizi del passato, purificando i sentieri della vita pubblica, rendendo più puliti i percorsi che portavano al potere, discutendo e formulando leggi nel interesse comune. E non avevano alcun partito, se non quello della loro patria.
Vidi in loro i mezzi che alimentano le più spregevoli deviazioni della “macchina politica virtuosa”, gli strumenti più malvagi mai creati. Truffe disprezzabili durante le elezioni; manipolazioni sleali di funzionari pubblici; attacchi codardi agli avversari, protetti da giornali calunniosi e da penne assoldate come armi offensive; umiliazioni verso individui senza principi, i cui unici meriti risiedono nel seminare ogni giorno nuovi disastri con le loro azioni corrotte. Tutto ciò rappresentava, in parole povere, la forma più depravata e sfacciata di una fazione disonesta. Queste cose si manifestavano ovunque, in ogni angolo di quella affollata sala.
Ho forse visto tra loro intelligenza e raffinatezza; il vero, onesto cuore patriottico di America? Qui e là c’erano gocce del suo >sangue e della sua vita, ma queste appena tingevano quel flusso di avventurieri disperati che si dirigono verso profitto e denaro. Il gioco di questi uomini, e dei loro istinti dissoluti, consiste nel rendere le lotte politiche così feroci e brutali da distruggere ogni senso di rispetto per se stessi nelle persone oneste; in questo modo, individui sensibili e delicati vengono tenuti alla larga, lasciando che siano loro, e persone del loro genere, a imporre le proprie visioni egoistiche senza alcun controllo. E così continua questa lotta meschina e disonesta; coloro che in altri paesi, grazie alla propria intelligenza e posizione sociale, aspirerebbero certamente a stabilire le leggi, qui invece si allontanano il più possibile da tale degradazione.
Non c’è bisogno che dica che, tra i rappresentanti del popolo in entrambe le Camere e tra tutti i partiti, ci sono uomini di alto carattere e grandi capacità. I politici più noti in Europa sono già stati descritti, e non vedo motivo di deviare dalla regola che mi sono imposto: astenermi da qualsiasi menzione individuale. Sarà sufficiente aggiungere che, rispetto alle descrizioni più lusinghiere che ne sono state fatte, condivido pienamente e sinceramente tali opinioni; inoltre, gli scambi personali e le libere comunicazioni hanno suscitato in me non certo il risultato previsto da quel proverbio poco affidabile, ma un’ammirazione e un rispetto ancora maggiori. Sono uomini straordinari: difficili da ingannare, pronti ad agire con determinazione, dotati di grande energia e versatilità; possiedono lo sguardo e i gesti appassionati tipici degli indiani, l’impulso forte e generoso degli americani. E rappresentano alla perfezione l’onore e la saggezza del loro paese in patria, proprio come il distinto gentiluomo che attualmente ne è il ministro presso la Corte britannica ne sostiene l’immagine più elevata all’estero.
Visitavo entrambe le camere quasi ogni giorno durante il mio soggiorno a Washington. La prima volta che visitai la Casa dei Rappresentanti, ci fu disaccordo riguardo a una decisione del presidente; ma alla fine il presidente vinse. La seconda volta che andai lì, il parlamentare che stava tenendo un discorso fu interrotto da una risata; lui la imitò, come farebbe un >bambino che si scontra con un altro, aggiungendo che avrebbe fatto “rispettabili signori dall’altra parte” cantare ancora un po’, ma più tardi. Tuttavia, le interruzioni sono rare; di solito il parlante viene ascoltato in silenzio. Lì ci sono più litigi e più minacce di quante ne avvengano nelle società civili che conosciamo; ma ancora non si sono diffuse quelle imitazioni volgari tipiche dei cortili delle fattorie, provenienti dal Parlamento del Regno Unito. La caratteristica principale dell’oratoria lì sembra essere la ripetizione costante della stessa idea, o di una sua “ombra”, espresso con parole diverse; e quando si chiede qualcosa fuori dall’aula, non si domanda “Cosa ha detto?”, ma “Quanto tempo ha parlato?”. Tuttavia, queste pratiche non sono altro che estensioni di un principio che è comune anche altrove.
Il Senato è un’istituzione dignitosa e decorosa, e le sue deliberazioni si svolgono con grande serietà e ordine. Entrambe le camere sono ricoperte di tappeti eleganti; tuttavia, lo stato in cui questi tappeti finiscono a trovarsi a causa del totale disprezzo per i posacenere forniti a ogni membro onorevole, nonché gli straordinari “miglioramenti” apportati al loro design con getti e schizzi di vari colori in tutte le direzioni, sono davvero troppo orribili da poter essere descritti. Mi limiterò quindi a consigliare vivamente a tutti gli estranei di non guardare per terra; e se dovesse capitare loro di far cadere qualcosa, anche solo il proprio portafoglio, di non raccoglierlo assolutamente con le mani nude.
It is somewhat remarkable too, at first, to say the least, to see so many honourable members with swelled faces; and it is scarcely less remarkable to discover that this appearance is caused by the quantity of tobacco they contrive to stow within the hollow of the cheek. It is strange enough too, to see an honourable gentleman leaning back in his tilted chair with his legs on the desk before him, shaping a convenient ‘plug’ with his penknife, and when it is quite ready for use, shooting the old one from his mouth, as from a pop-gun, and clapping the new one in its place.
I was surprised to observe that even steady old chewers of great experience, are not always good marksmen, which has rather inclined me to doubt that general proficiency with the rifle, of which we have heard so much in England. Several gentlemen called upon me who, in the course of conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces; and one (but he was certainly short-sighted) mistook the closed sash for the open window, at three. On another occasion, when I dined out, and was sitting with two ladies and some gentlemen round a fire before dinner, one of the company fell short of the fireplace, six distinct times. I am disposed to think, however, that this was occasioned by his not aiming at that object; as there was a white marble hearth before the fender, which was more convenient, and may have suited his purpose better.
The Patent Office at Washington, furnishes an extraordinary example of American enterprise and ingenuity; for the immense number of models it contains are the accumulated inventions of only five years; the whole of the previous collection having been destroyed by fire. The elegant structure in which they are arranged is one of design rather than execution, for there is but one side erected out of four, though the works are stopped. The Post Office is a very compact and very beautiful building. In one of the departments, among a collection of rare and curious articles, are deposited the presents which have been made from time to time to the American ambassadors at foreign courts by the various potentates to whom they were the accredited agents of the Republic; gifts which by the law they are not permitted to retain. I confess that I looked upon this as a very painful exhibition, and one by no means flattering to the national standard of honesty and honour. That can scarcely be a high state of moral feeling which imagines a gentleman of repute and station, likely to be corrupted, in the discharge of his duty, by the present of a snuff-box, or a richly-mounted sword, or an Eastern shawl; and surely the Nation who reposes confidence in her appointed servants, is likely to be better served, than she who makes them the subject of such very mean and paltry suspicions.
At George Town, in the suburbs, there is a Jesuit College; delightfully situated, and, so far as I had an opportunity of seeing, well managed. Many persons who are not members of the Romish Church, avail themselves, I believe, of these institutions, and of the advantageous opportunities they afford for the education of their children. The heights of this neighbourhood, above the Potomac River, are very picturesque: and are free, I should conceive, from some of the insalubrities of Washington. The air, at that elevation, was quite cool and refreshing, when in the city it was burning hot.
The President’s mansion is more like an English club-house, both within and without, than any other kind of establishment with which I can compare it. The ornamental ground about it has been laid out in garden walks; they are pretty, and agreeable to the eye; though they have that uncomfortable air of having been made yesterday, which is far from favourable to the display of such beauties.
My first visit to this house was on the morning after my arrival, when I was carried thither by an official gentleman, who was so kind as to charge himself with my presentation to the President.
We entered a large hall, and having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered, walked without further ceremony through the rooms on the ground floor, as divers other gentlemen (mostly with their hats on, and their hands in their pockets) were doing very leisurely. Some of these had ladies with them, to whom they were showing the premises; others were lounging on the chairs and sofas; others, in a perfect state of exhaustion from listlessness, were yawning drearily. The greater portion of this assemblage were rather asserting their supremacy than doing anything else, as they had no particular business there, that anybody knew of. A few were closely eyeing the movables, as if to make quite sure that the President (who was far from popular) had not made away with any of the furniture, or sold the fixtures for his private benefit.
After glancing at these loungers; who were scattered over a pretty drawing-room, opening upon a terrace which commanded a beautiful prospect of the river and the adjacent country; and who were sauntering, too, about a larger state-room called the Eastern Drawing-room; we went up-stairs into another chamber, where were certain visitors, waiting for audiences. At sight of my conductor, a black in plain clothes and yellow slippers who was gliding noiselessly about, and whispering messages in the ears of the more impatient, made a sign of recognition, and glided off to announce him.
We had previously looked into another chamber fitted all round with a great, bare, wooden desk or counter, whereon lay files of newspapers, to which sundry gentlemen were referring. But there were no such means of beguiling the time in this apartment, which was as unpromising and tiresome as any waiting-room in one of our public establishments, or any physician’s dining-room during his hours of consultation at home.
È piuttosto sorprendente, per dirlo poco, vedere così tanti membri onorabili con il viso gonfio; e non meno sorprendente scoprire che questa condizione è causata dalla quantità di tabacco che riescono a nascondere nella cavità delle guance. È anche abbastanza strano vedere un gentiluomo onorabile appoggiarsi allo schienale della sua sedia inclinata, con le gambe posate sul tavolo davanti a sé; utilizza il suo coltello da tasca per creare una “pallina” di tabacco adatta all’uso, e quando è pronta, la espelle dalla bocca come se fosse un fucile a pompa, per poi sostituirla con quella nuova.
Fui sorpreso nel constatare che anche quegli anziani abituati da tempo all’uso del fucile, e con grande esperienza, non sempre erano buoni tiratori; questo mi ha portato a dubitare della reale efficacia di una competenza generale nell’uso del fucile, di cui abbiamo sentito tanto parlare in Inghilterra. Alcuni gentiluomini vennero da me e, durante le conversazioni, spesso mancarono il portacenere situato a cinque passi di distanza; uno di loro (ma sicuramente era miope) scambiò una cintura chiusa per una finestra aperta, a tre passi di distanza. Un’altra volta, durante un pasto fuori casa, mentre ero seduto con due signore e alcuni gentiluomini intorno al camino prima del pasto, uno dei presenti mancò il camino ben sei volte. Tuttavia, sono incline a pensare che ciò fosse dovuto al fatto che non mirava proprio al camino; davanti alla grata del camino c’era infatti un caminetto in marmo bianco, che era più comodo da usare e forse più adatto ai suoi scopi.
L’Ufficio Brevetti di Washington rappresenta un esempio straordinario dell’imprenditorialità e dell’inventiva americana; il gran numero di modelli che contiene costituisce infatti l’accumulo delle invenzioni realizzate in soli cinque anni, poiché la collezione precedente era stata distrutta da un incendio. La struttura elegante in cui questi modelli sono disposti riflette piuttosto una concezione progettuale che una reale realizzazione pratica, poiché solo una delle quattro facce dell’edificio è stata effettivamente costruita, nonostante i lavori siano stati interrotti. L’Ufficio Postale è un edificio molto compatto e bellissimo; in uno dei suoi reparti, tra una collezione di oggetti rari e curiosi, sono conservati i doni ricevuti nel corso del tempo dagli ambasciatori americani presso le corti straniere da parte dei vari sovrani per cui questi agivano come agenti della Repubblica; doni che, secondo la legge, non possono essere trattenuti. Devo ammettere che ho trovato questa esposizione particolarmente dolorosa e assolutamente poco lusinghiera dello standard nazionale di onestà e onore. È davvero difficile considerare elevata una mentalità morale che immagina un gentiluomo di prestigio e posizione, potenzialmente corruttibile, possa essere indotto a compiere il proprio dovere in cambio del dono di una scatola da tabacco, di una spada riccamente decorata o di uno scialle orientale; e certamente una nazione che ripone fiducia nei propri funzionari designati sarà meglio servita rispetto a quella che li sottopone a sospetti così meschini e insignificanti.
A George Town, nei sobborghi, c’è un Collegio Gesuita; situato in modo incantevole e, per quanto ne abbia potuto constatare, ben gestito. Molte persone che non appartengono alla Chiesa Cattolica Romana approfittano, credo, di queste istituzioni e delle opportunità vantaggiose che offrono per l’educazione dei loro figli. Le zone più alte di questo quartiere, sopra il fiume Potomac, sono davvero pittoresche; inoltre, si presume che siano libere da alcune delle insalubrità tipiche di Washington. L’aria, a quella quota, era piuttosto fresca e rinfrescante, mentre in città faceva un caldo torrido.
La residenza presidenziale assomiglia di più a una casa da club inglese, sia all’interno che all’esterno, piuttosto che a qualsiasi altro tipo di istituzione con cui possa essere paragonata. Il terreno circostante è stato sistemato in sentieri per i giardini; sono belli e gradevoli alla vista, anche se presentano quell’aspetto poco naturale di essere stati creati il giorno prima, il che non è affatto favorevole alla mostra di tali bellezze.
La mia prima visita a questa casa avvenne la mattina seguente al mio arrivo; fui portato lì da un gentiluomo ufficiale, il quale fu così premuroso da occuparsi personalmente della mia presentazione al Presidente.
Entrammo in un grande salone; dopo aver suonato il campanello due o tre volte senza che nessuno rispondesse, proseguimmo senza ulteriori formalità attraverso le stanze al piano terra, mentre diversi altri gentiluomini (per lo più con il cappello in testa e le mani in tasca) se ne stavano tranquillamente. Alcuni di loro avevano con sé delle signore a cui mostravano l’edificio; altri si sdraiavano su sedie e divani; altri ancora, completamente esausti per la noia, sbadigliavano senza sosta. La maggior parte di quella compagnia sembrava più interessata ad affermare la propria supremazia che a fare qualcosa di concreto, poiché non avevano alcun compito specifico lì, almeno per quanto si potesse sapere. Qualcuno osservava attentamente i mobili, come se volesse assicurarsi che il Presidente (che non era affatto popolare) non avesse portato via nulla o venduto gli arredi a proprio vantaggio.
Dopo aver dato un’occhiata a questi ospiti, sparsi in un bel salotto che si affacciava su una terrazza da cui si godeva di un bellissimo panorama sul fiume e sui paesaggi circostanti; e che passeggiavano anche intorno a una sala più grande chiamata “Salotto Orientale”, salimmo al piano di sopra in un’altra stanza, dove c’erano alcuni visitatori in attesa di essere ricevuti. Non appena vidi il mio accompagnatore – un uomo di colore in abiti semplici e con pantofole gialle che si muoveva silenziosamente e sussurrava messaggi alle orecchie di coloro che erano più impazienti – fece un segno di riconoscimento e andò ad annunciarlo.
Avevamo già esaminato un’altra stanza arredata su tutti i lati con un grande tavolo o bancone di legno nudo, sopra il quale erano disposte pile di giornali a cui diversi signori facevano riferimento. Ma in questa stanza non esistevano mezzi simili per passare il tempo, che era altrettanto noioso e snervante quanto qualsiasi sala d’attesa in uno dei nostri luoghi pubblici, o la sala da pranzo di un medico durante le ore di consultazione a casa.
There were some fifteen or twenty persons in the room. One, a tall, wiry, muscular old man, from the west; sunburnt and swarthy; with a brown white hat on his knees, and a giant umbrella resting between his legs; who sat bolt upright in his chair, frowning steadily at the carpet, and twitching the hard lines about his mouth, as if he had made up his mind ‘to fix’ the President on what he had to say, and wouldn’t bate him a grain. Another, a Kentucky farmer, six-feet-six in height, with his hat on, and his hands under his coat-tails, who leaned against the wall and kicked the floor with his heel, as though he had Time’s head under his shoe, and were literally ‘killing’ him. A third, an oval-faced, bilious-looking man, with sleek black hair cropped close, and whiskers and beard shaved down to blue dots, who sucked the head of a thick stick, and from time to time took it out of his mouth, to see how it was getting on. A fourth did nothing but whistle. A fifth did nothing but spit. And indeed all these gentlemen were so very persevering and energetic in this latter particular, and bestowed their favours so abundantly upon the carpet, that I take it for granted the Presidential housemaids have high wages, or, to speak more genteelly, an ample amount of ‘compensation:’ which is the American word for salary, in the case of all public servants.
We had not waited in this room many minutes, before the black messenger returned, and conducted us into another of smaller dimensions, where, at a business-like table covered with papers, sat the President himself. He looked somewhat worn and anxious, and well he might; being at war with everybody—but the expression of his face was mild and pleasant, and his manner was remarkably unaffected, gentlemanly, and agreeable. I thought that in his whole carriage and demeanour, he became his station singularly well.
Being advised that the sensible etiquette of the republican court admitted of a traveller, like myself, declining, without any impropriety, an invitation to dinner, which did not reach me until I had concluded my arrangements for leaving Washington some days before that to which it referred, I only returned to this house once. It was on the occasion of one of those general assemblies which are held on certain nights, between the hours of nine and twelve o’clock, and are called, rather oddly, Levees.
I went, with my wife, at about ten. There was a pretty dense crowd of carriages and people in the court-yard, and so far as I could make out, there were no very clear regulations for the taking up or setting down of company. There were certainly no policemen to soothe startled horses, either by sawing at their bridles or flourishing truncheons in their eyes; and I am ready to make oath that no inoffensive persons were knocked violently on the head, or poked acutely in their backs or stomachs; or brought to a standstill by any such gentle means, and then taken into custody for not moving on. But there was no confusion or disorder. Our carriage reached the porch in its turn, without any blustering, swearing, shouting, backing, or other disturbance: and we dismounted with as much ease and comfort as though we had been escorted by the whole Metropolitan Force from A to Z inclusive.
The suite of rooms on the ground-floor were lighted up, and a military band was playing in the hall. In the smaller drawing-room, the centre of a circle of company, were the President and his daughter-in-law, who acted as the lady of the mansion; and a very interesting, graceful, and accomplished lady too. One gentleman who stood among this group, appeared to take upon himself the functions of a master of the ceremonies. I saw no other officers or attendants, and none were needed.
The great drawing-room, which I have already mentioned, and the other chambers on the ground-floor, were crowded to excess. The company was not, in our sense of the term, select, for it comprehended persons of very many grades and classes; nor was there any great display of costly attire: indeed, some of the costumes may have been, for aught I know, grotesque enough. But the decorum and propriety of behaviour which prevailed, were unbroken by any rude or disagreeable incident; and every man, even among the miscellaneous crowd in the hall who were admitted without any orders or tickets to look on, appeared to feel that he was a part of the Institution, and was responsible for its preserving a becoming character, and appearing to the best advantage.
That these visitors, too, whatever their station, were not without some refinement of taste and appreciation of intellectual gifts, and gratitude to those men who, by the peaceful exercise of great abilities, shed new charms and associations upon the homes of their countrymen, and elevate their character in other lands, was most earnestly testified by their reception of Washington Irving, my dear friend, who had recently been appointed Minister at the court of Spain, and who was among them that night, in his new character, for the first and last time before going abroad. I sincerely believe that in all the madness of American politics, few public men would have been so earnestly, devotedly, and affectionately caressed, as this most charming writer: and I have seldom respected a public assembly more, than I did this eager throng, when I saw them turning with one mind from noisy orators and officers of state, and flocking with a generous and honest impulse round the man of quiet pursuits: proud in his promotion as reflecting back upon their country: and grateful to him with their whole hearts for the store of graceful fancies he had poured out among them. Long may he dispense such treasures with unsparing hand; and long may they remember him as worthily!
The term we had assigned for the duration of our stay in Washington was now at an end, and we were to begin to travel; for the railroad distances we had traversed yet, in journeying among these older towns, are on that great continent looked upon as nothing.
I had at first intended going South—to Charleston. But when I came to consider the length of time which this journey would occupy, and the premature heat of the season, which even at Washington had been often very trying; and weighed moreover, in my own mind, the pain of living in the constant contemplation of slavery, against the more than doubtful chances of my ever seeing it, in the time I had to spare, stripped of the disguises in which it would certainly be dressed, and so adding any item to the host of facts already heaped together on the subject; I began to listen to old whisperings which had often been present to me at home in England, when I little thought of ever being here; and to dream again of cities growing up, like palaces in fairy tales, among the wilds and forests of the west.
The advice I received in most quarters when I began to yield to my desire of travelling towards that point of the compass was, according to custom, sufficiently cheerless: my companion being threatened with more perils, dangers, and discomforts, than I can remember or would catalogue if I could; but of which it will be sufficient to remark that blowings-up in steamboats and breakings-down in coaches were among the least. But, having a western route sketched out for me by the best and kindest authority to which I could have resorted, and putting no great faith in these discouragements, I soon determined on my plan of action.
This was to travel south, only to Richmond in Virginia; and then to turn, and shape our course for the Far West; whither I beseech the reader’s company, in a new chapter.
C’erano circa quindici o venti persone nella stanza. Una di loro era un anziano alto, magro e muscoloso, proveniente dall’Ovest; abbronzato e scuro di pelle, con un cappello marrone chiaro sulle ginocchia e un enorme ombrello tra le gambe; sedeva dritto sulla sedia, fissando con aria cupa il tappeto e contraendo continuamente i muscoli intorno alla bocca, come se avesse deciso di “fissare” l’attenzione del Presidente su ciò che aveva da dire, senza lasciarsi intimidire in alcun modo. Un altro era un agricoltore del Kentucky, alto sei piedi e sei pollici; con il cappello in testa e le mani sotto la gonna del suo abito, si appoggiava al muro e calciava il pavimento con la punta del piede, come se avesse la testa di Time sotto lo scarpe e stesse letteralmente “uccidendolo”. Un terzo era un uomo dal viso ovale e dall’aspetto cupo; i capelli neri erano tagliati corti e baffi e barba rasate fino a diventare dei piccoli puntini blu; succhiava la punta di un grosso bastone e, di tanto in tanto, lo tirava fuori dalla bocca per controllare come stesse andando. Un quarto non faceva altro che fischiare; il quinto non faceva altro che sputare. E infatti, tutti questi signori erano così perseveranti ed energici in queste attività, e “distribuivano” le loro attenzioni con tale abbondanza sul tappeto, che suppongo che le cameriere della Casa Presidenziale ricevano salari elevati, o, per dire in modo più gentile, un’ampia “compensazione”: è così che negli Stati Uniti si chiama lo stipendio di tutti i funzionari pubblici.
Non eravamo trascorsi molti minuti in questa stanza, quando il messaggero vestito di nero tornò e ci condusse in un’altra stanza di dimensioni più ridotte. Lì, davanti a un tavolo coperto di documenti, sedeva lo stesso Presidente. Sembrava piuttosto stanco e ansioso. E del resto, essendo in guerra con tutti, non c’era da meravigliarsi; tuttavia l’espressione sul suo volto era gentile e piacevole, e il suo comportamento era estremamente naturale, cortese e gradevole. Pensai che, nel suo modo di comportarsi e nell’intera sua figura, egli rappresentasse in modo davvero eccellente la propria posizione.
Avendo ricevuto il consiglio che le buone maniere della repubblicana >corte permettessero a un viaggiatore come me di rifiutare, senza alcuna improprietà, un invito a cena che mi arrivò solo dopo che avevo già organizzato i miei preparativi per lasciare Washington alcuni giorni prima dell’evento in questione, tornai una sola volta in questa >casa. Fu l’occasione di uno di quegli assemblee generali che si tengono ogni tanto nelle sere, tra le nove e le dodici, e che vengono chiamate, in modo piuttosto strano, “Levees”.
Sono andato, con mia moglie, verso le dieci. Nell’atrio c’era una folla piuttosto densa di carrozze e persone; per quanto potessi vedere, non esistevano regole precise riguardo all’imbarco o allo sbarco delle persone dalle carrozze. Di certo non c’erano poliziotti che calmassero i cavalli spaventati, né che tagliassero le loro redini o minacciassero loro con le mazze; e sono pronto a giurare che nessuna persona innocente fu colpita violentemente alla testa, pungolata alle spalle o allo stomaco, né costretta ad arrestarsi con metodi simili. Tuttavia non c’era alcun disordine. La nostra carrozza arrivò al portico nel suo turno, senza alcun trambusto, imprecazioni, grida o altri problemi; scendemmo dalla carrozza con la stessa facilità e comodità come se fossimo stati scortati dall’intera forza di polizia metropolitana da un capo all’altro della città.
Le stanze al piano terra erano illuminate, e un’orchestra militare suonava nell’atrio. Nella sala più piccola, al centro di un gruppo di persone, c’erano il Presidente e sua nuora, che fungevano da padrone di casa; c’era anche una signora molto interessante, graziosa e raffinata. Un gentiluomo che si trovava in mezzo a quel gruppo sembrava assumersi il ruolo di cerimoniere. Non vidi altri ufficiali o assistenti, e in realtà non ne erano necessari.
Il grande salotto, di cui ho già parlato, e le altre stanze al piano terra erano strapiene. La compagnia, nel senso che noi diamo a questa parola, non era raffinata; comprendeva infatti persone di ogni estrazione sociale. Non c’era nemmeno alcuna evidente ostentazione di abiti costosi; anzi, alcuni degli abiti indossati potevano essere, per quel che ne so, addirittura grotteschi. Tuttavia, il decoro e la correttezza nel comportamento prevalevano in modo assoluto; non si verificò alcun incidente scortese o sgradevole. Ogni uomo, anche tra quella folla eterogenea presente nella sala – persone ammesse senza alcuna autorizzazione o biglietto per assistere – sembrava rendersi conto di far parte di quell’istituzione e di essere responsabile del mantenimento di un’immagine dignitosa e vantaggiosa della stessa.
Che anche questi visitatori, a prescindere dal loro rango sociale, possedessero un certo gusto raffinato, una profonda apprezzazione per i doni intellettuali e un sincero ringraziamento verso coloro che, attraverso l’esercizio pacifico delle proprie grandi capacità, aggiungevano nuovo splendore alle case dei loro connazionali e elevavano il loro carattere in terre straniere, fu dimostrato con grande calore durante l’accoglienza riservata a Washington Irving, mio caro amico che aveva recentemente ricevuto l’incarico di Ministro presso la >corte di Spagna. Quella sera, nel suo nuovo ruolo, egli fu il primo e l’ultimo ad essere accolto tra loro prima di partire all’estero. Credo sinceramente che, nonostante tutta la follia della politica americana, pochi uomini pubblici siano stati accolti con tanta sincerità, devozione e affetto come questo incantevole scrittore. Raramente ho rispettato tanto un’assemblea pubblica quanto quella folla entusiasta: vidi tutti loro abbandonare oratori rumorosi e funzionari di stato per radunarsi intorno a quest’uomo dai modi tranquilli e discreti, orgogliosi del suo successo che rappresentava anche il successo della loro nazione, e grati verso di lui con tutto il cuore per le meravigliose idee che aveva condiviso con loro. Possa egli continuare a donarci tali tesori generosamente; e possano tutti ricordarlo come una persona davvero degna di ammirazione!
Il periodo che avevamo stabilito per la nostra permanenza a Washington era ormai terminato, e dovevamo iniziare il viaggio; le distanze percorse su ferrovia, infatti, rispetto alle lunghe distanze che avremmo dovuto attraversare viaggiando tra queste città più antiche, sembravano nulla in confronto.
Inizialmente avevo intenzione di dirigermi verso sud, a Charleston. Ma quando considerai la lunghezza del tempo che questa viaggio avrebbe richiesto, nonché il calore prematuro della stagione – che anche a Washington spesso risultava estremamente opprimente – e poi valutai, nel mio intimo, il dolore derivante dal dover vivere costantemente con l’immagine della schiavitù davanti agli occhi, rispetto alle scarse probabilità di poterla mai vedere realmente, nella tempo che avevo a disposizione, e considerando inoltre tutti gli elementi già presenti riguardo a questo argomento, cominciai ad ascoltare quei vecchi sussurri che spesso mi risuonavano in mente in Inghilterra, quando mai avrei pensato di trovarmi qui; e iniziai di nuovo a sognare città che, come palazzi nei racconti di fate, sorgessero tra le lande selvagge e le foreste dell’Ovest.
I consigli che ricevetti da quasi tutti quando iniziai ad assecondare il mio desiderio di viaggiare verso quel punto della bussola furono, secondo l’uso comune, piuttosto scoraggianti: al mio compagno venivano minacciate più pericoli, rischi e disagi di quanti io possa ricordare o elencare, anche se ci provassi; tra questi, i disastri causati dagli esplosioni dei vapori e dai guasti alle carrozze erano senz’altro i meno gravi. Tuttavia, avendo ricevuto indicazioni per una rotta verso ovest da parte dell’autorità più competente e gentile a cui potessi rivolgermi, e non dando troppo credito a queste parole scoraggianti, decisi rapidamente quale fosse il mio piano d’azione.
Si trattava di viaggiare verso sud, fino a Richmond in Virginia; poi di cambiare direzione e orientare il nostro percorso verso l’Ovest Lontano. Dove invito il lettore a seguirmi in un nuovo capitolo.
CHAPTER IX A NIGHT STEAMER ON THE POTOMAC RIVER. VIRGINIA ROAD, AND A BLACK DRIVER. RICHMOND. BALTIMORE. THE HARRISBURG MAIL, AND A GLIMPSE OF THE CITY. A CANAL BOAT
WE were to proceed in the first instance by steamboat; and as it is usual to sleep on board, in consequence of the starting-hour being four o’clock in the morning, we went down to where she lay, at that very uncomfortable time for such expeditions when slippers are most valuable, and a familiar bed, in the perspective of an hour or two, looks uncommonly pleasant.
It is ten o’clock at night: say half-past ten: moonlight, warm, and dull enough. The steamer (not unlike a child’s Noah’s ark in form, with the machinery on the top of the roof) is riding lazily up and down, and bumping clumsily against the wooden pier, as the ripple of the river trifles with its unwieldy carcase. The wharf is some distance from the city. There is nobody down here; and one or two dull lamps upon the steamer’s decks are the only signs of life remaining, when our coach has driven away. As soon as our footsteps are heard upon the planks, a fat negress, particularly favoured by nature in respect of bustle, emerges from some dark stairs, and marshals my wife towards the ladies’ cabin, to which retreat she goes, followed by a mighty bale of cloaks and great-coats. I valiantly resolve not to go to bed at all, but to walk up and down the pier till morning.
I begin my promenade—thinking of all kinds of distant things and persons, and of nothing near—and pace up and down for half-an-hour. Then I go on board again; and getting into the light of one of the lamps, look at my watch and think it must have stopped; and wonder what has become of the faithful secretary whom I brought along with me from Boston. He is supping with our late landlord (a Field Marshal, at least, no doubt) in honour of our departure, and may be two hours longer. I walk again, but it gets duller and duller: the moon goes down: next June seems farther off in the dark, and the echoes of my footsteps make me nervous. It has turned cold too; and walking up and down without my companion in such lonely circumstances, is but poor amusement. So I break my staunch resolution, and think it may be, perhaps, as well to go to bed.
I go on board again; open the door of the gentlemen’s cabin and walk in. Somehow or other—from its being so quiet, I suppose—I have taken it into my head that there is nobody there. To my horror and amazement it is full of sleepers in every stage, shape, attitude, and variety of slumber: in the berths, on the chairs, on the floors, on the tables, and particularly round the stove, my detested enemy. I take another step forward, and slip on the shining face of a black steward, who lies rolled in a blanket on the floor. He jumps up, grins, half in pain and half in hospitality; whispers my own name in my ear; and groping among the sleepers, leads me to my berth. Standing beside it, I count these slumbering passengers, and get past forty. There is no use in going further, so I begin to undress. As the chairs are all occupied, and there is nothing else to put my clothes on, I deposit them upon the ground: not without soiling my hands, for it is in the same condition as the carpets in the Capitol, and from the same cause. Having but partially undressed, I clamber on my shelf, and hold the curtain open for a few minutes while I look round on all my fellow-travellers again. That done, I let it fall on them, and on the world: turn round: and go to sleep.
I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good deal of noise. The day is then just breaking. Everybody wakes at the same time. Some are self-possessed directly, and some are much perplexed to make out where they are until they have rubbed their eyes, and leaning on one elbow, looked about them. Some yawn, some groan, nearly all spit, and a few get up. I am among the risers: for it is easy to feel, without going into the fresh air, that the atmosphere of the cabin is vile in the last degree. I huddle on my clothes, go down into the fore-cabin, get shaved by the barber, and wash myself. The washing and dressing apparatus for the passengers generally, consists of two jack-towels, three small wooden basins, a keg of water and a ladle to serve it out with, six square inches of looking-glass, two ditto ditto of yellow soap, a comb and brush for the head, and nothing for the teeth. Everybody uses the comb and brush, except myself. Everybody stares to see me using my own; and two or three gentlemen are strongly disposed to banter me on my prejudices, but don’t. When I have made my toilet, I go upon the hurricane-deck, and set in for two hours of hard walking up and down. The sun is rising brilliantly; we are passing Mount Vernon, where Washington lies buried; the river is wide and rapid; and its banks are beautiful. All the glory and splendour of the day are coming on, and growing brighter every minute.
At eight o’clock, we breakfast in the cabin where I passed the night, but the windows and doors are all thrown open, and now it is fresh enough. There is no hurry or greediness apparent in the despatch of the meal. It is longer than a travelling breakfast with us; more orderly, and more polite.
Soon after nine o’clock we come to Potomac Creek, where we are to land; and then comes the oddest part of the journey. Seven stage-coaches are preparing to carry us on. Some of them are ready, some of them are not ready. Some of the drivers are blacks, some whites. There are four horses to each coach, and all the horses, harnessed or unharnessed, are there. The passengers are getting out of the steamboat, and into the coaches; the luggage is being transferred in noisy wheelbarrows; the horses are frightened, and impatient to start; the black drivers are chattering to them like so many monkeys; and the white ones whooping like so many drovers: for the main thing to be done in all kinds of hostlering here, is to make as much noise as possible. The coaches are something like the French coaches, but not nearly so good. In lieu of springs, they are hung on bands of the strongest leather. There is very little choice or difference between them; and they may be likened to the car portion of the swings at an English fair, roofed, put upon axle-trees and wheels, and curtained with painted canvas. They are covered with mud from the roof to the wheel-tire, and have never been cleaned since they were first built.
CAPITOLO IX
Una nave a vapore sulla Fiume Potomac di notte. La Strada della Virginia e un autista nero.
Richmond, Baltimora. Il “Harrisburg Mail” e uno sguardo alla città. Una barca a canale.
Inizialmente dovevamo proseguire in battello a vapore; e poiché è abitudine )dormire a bordo, data l’orario di partenza delle quattro del mattino, ci recammo sul posto alle quell’ora particolarmente scomoda per simili viaggi: quando le pantofole risultano davvero indispensabili e un letto familiare, sebbene distante solo un’ora o due, appare incredibilmente piacevole.
Sono le dieci di ore di notte: si potrebbe dire mezzanotte e un quarto. La luce della luna è calda e fioca. La nave a vapore (che assomiglia in forma all’arca di Noè di un bambino, con le macchine posizionate sopra il tetto) si muove lentamente su e giù, urtando goffamente contro il molo di legno; le onde del fiume giocano con la sua ingombrante struttura. Il molo si trova a una certa distanza dalla città. Qui sotto non c’è nessuno; solo un paio di lampade spente sui ponti della nave indicano ancora la presenza di vita, dopo che il nostro treno se n’è andato. Non appena i nostri passi risuonano sulle assi del molo, una donna di colore grassoccia, particolarmente dotata dalla natura in termini di vivacità, appare da qualche scala buia e accompagna mia moglie nella cabina delle signore. Io, invece, decido coraggiosamente di non andare a letto affatto, ma di camminare avanti e indietro sul molo fino all’alba.
Inizio il mio passeggio, pensando a ogni sorta di cose e persone lontane, senza considerare nulla che sia vicino a me; cammino avanti e indietro per mezz’ora. Poi torno a bordo; mi avvicino alla luce di una lampada, guardo l’orologio e penso che debba essersi fermato. Mi chiedo cosa sia successo al fedele segretario che ho portato con me da Boston. Probabilmente sta cenando con il nostro ex padrone di casa (un feldmaresciallo, senza dubbio, ) in onore della nostra partenza. Potrebbe essere ancora lì per altre due ore. Cammino di nuovo, ma tutto diventa sempre più noioso: la luna tramonta; il prossimo giugno sembra ancora più lontano nell’oscurità. I suoni dei miei passi mi innervosiscono. Fa anche freddo. Camminare avanti e indietro, in queste circostanze solitarie, non è certo un grande divertimento. Così rinuncio alla mia ferma risoluzione. E penso che forse sia meglio andare a letto.
Rientro a bordo; apro la porta della cabina degli uomini e entro. Per qualche motivo – forse perché tutto è così silenzioso – ho pensato che non ci fosse nessuno lì dentro. Con orrore e sorpresa, scopro che è piena di persone addormentate, in ogni posizione possibile: nei letti, sulle sedie, per terra, sui tavoli, soprattutto intorno al camino, il mio nemico numero uno. Faccio un altro passo avanti e inciampo nel viso lucido di un cameriere di colore, che giace avvolto in una coperta per terra. Lui si alza di scatto, sorride – metà per dolore, metà per gentilezza – sussurra il mio nome all’orecchio e, cercando tra i dormienti, mi accompagna al mio letto. Mi fermo accanto ad esso e conto questi passeggeri addormentati: ne sono più di quaranta. Non ha senso andare avanti, quindi inizio a spogliarmi. Poiché tutte le sedie sono occupate e non c’è nulla su cui mettere i miei vestiti, li lascio per terra, senza però non sporcare le mani, visto che il pavimento è nella stessa condizione dei tappeti del Campidoglio, e per lo stesso motivo. Dopo essermi spogliato solo in parte, mi arrampico sul mio lettino e tengo la tenda aperta per qualche minuto, per guardarmi intorno ancora una volta. Una volta fatto questo, lascio che la tenda ricada su di loro, e su tutto il mondo. Mi giro e vado a dormire.
Mi sveglio, naturalmente, quando iniziamo a muoverci, perché c’è un bel po’ di rumore. È appena l’alba. Tutti si alzano alla stessa ora. Alcuni si riprendono subito, altri invece fanno fatica a capire dove si trovino finché non si strofinano gli occhi e non guardano intorno appoggiandosi su un gomito. Alcuni sbadigliano, alcuni gemettono; quasi tutti sputano. E poi ci alziamo. Io faccio parte di quelli che si alzano presto: basta infatti sentire l’atmosfera della cabina per capire che è davvero insopportabile. Mi avvolgo nei vestiti, scendo nella cabina anteriore, mi faccio rasare dal barbiere e mi lavo. Gli strumenti per lavarsi e vestirsi disponibili per i passeggeri consistono in due asciugamani, tre piccoli bacini di legno, una botte d’acqua e un mestolo per servirla, sei pollici quadrati di specchio, due barattoli di sapone giallo, un pettine e una spazzola per i capelli. Ma niente per i denti. Tutti usano il pettine e la spazzola, tranne me. Tutti mi guardano con curiosità quando li uso. E due o tre signori hanno voglia di prendermi in giro per le mie abitudini. Ma non lo fanno. Dopo essermi lavato, vado sul ponte e cammino avanti e indietro per due ore. Il sole sorge splendidamente; stiamo passando vicino a Mount Vernon, dove è sepolto Washington. Il fiume è ampio e veloce; le sue rive sono bellissime. Tutta la gloria e lo splendore di quella giornata stanno iniziando a manifestarsi. E diventano sempre più evidenti, minuto dopo minuto.
Alle otto in punto, facciamo colazione nella cabina dove ho trascorso la notte, ma le finestre e le porte sono tutte aperte, quindi ora fa abbastanza fresco. Nella preparazione del pasto non c’è alcuna fretta né avidità; tutto avviene in modo più ordinato e cortese rispetto ai nostri soliti pasti veloci durante i viaggi.
Poco dopo le nove, arriviamo al Potomac Creek, dove dovremo sbarcare; e poi arriva la parte più strana del Viaggio. Sette diligenze si stanno preparando per portarci via: alcune sono pronte, altre no. Alcuni cocchieri sono neri, altri bianchi. Ogni diligenza è trainata da quattro cavalli; tutti i cavalli, sia attaccati che liberi, sono lì presenti. I passeggeri stanno scendendo dalla nave a vapore e salendo sulle diligenze; i bagagli vengono trasferiti con rumorosi carri a ruote; i cavalli sono spaventati e impazienti di partire; i cocchieri neri li chiamano a gran voce, come se fossero scimmie; quelli bianchi invece gridano come mandriani. Il compito principale, in tutto questo caos, è creare il più possibile rumore. Le diligenze assomigliano un po’ alle carrozze francesi, ma sono di qualità molto inferiore. Al posto delle molle, sono fissate a strisce di cuoio molto resistente; non ci sono grandi differenze tra una e l’altra. Si potrebbero paragonare alla parte “carrozzeria” dei dondoli alle feste inglesi: con tetto, assi e ruote, e coperte da tela dipinta. Sono ricoperte di fango, dalla parte superiore fino ai cerchioni delle ruote. E non sono mai state pulite da quando sono state costruite.
The tickets we have received on board the steamboat are marked No. 1, so we belong to coach No. 1. I throw my coat on the box, and hoist my wife and her maid into the inside. It has only one step, and that being about a yard from the ground, is usually approached by a chair: when there is no chair, ladies trust in Providence. The coach holds nine inside, having a seat across from door to door, where we in England put our legs: so that there is only one feat more difficult in the performance than getting in, and that is, getting out again. There is only one outside passenger, and he sits upon the box. As I am that one, I climb up; and while they are strapping the luggage on the roof, and heaping it into a kind of tray behind, have a good opportunity of looking at the driver.
He is a negro—very black indeed. He is dressed in a coarse pepper-and-salt suit excessively patched and darned (particularly at the knees), grey stockings, enormous unblacked high-low shoes, and very short trousers. He has two odd gloves: one of parti-coloured worsted, and one of leather. He has a very short whip, broken in the middle and bandaged up with string. And yet he wears a low-crowned, broad-brimmed, black hat: faintly shadowing forth a kind of insane imitation of an English coachman! But somebody in authority cries ‘Go ahead!’ as I am making these observations. The mail takes the lead in a four-horse waggon, and all the coaches follow in procession: headed by No. 1.
By the way, whenever an Englishman would cry ‘All right!’ an American cries ‘Go ahead!’ which is somewhat expressive of the national character of the two countries.
The first half-mile of the road is over bridges made of loose planks laid across two parallel poles, which tilt up as the wheels roll over them; and IN the river. The river has a clayey bottom and is full of holes, so that half a horse is constantly disappearing unexpectedly, and can’t be found again for some time.
But we get past even this, and come to the road itself, which is a series of alternate swamps and gravel-pits. A tremendous place is close before us, the black driver rolls his eyes, screws his mouth up very round, and looks straight between the two leaders, as if he were saying to himself, ‘We have done this often before, but now I think we shall have a crash.’ He takes a rein in each hand; jerks and pulls at both; and dances on the splashboard with both feet (keeping his seat, of course) like the late lamented Ducrow on two of his fiery coursers. We come to the spot, sink down in the mire nearly to the coach windows, tilt on one side at an angle of forty-five degrees, and stick there. The insides scream dismally; the coach stops; the horses flounder; all the other six coaches stop; and their four-and-twenty horses flounder likewise: but merely for company, and in sympathy with ours. Then the following circumstances occur.
BLACK DRIVER (to the horses). ‘Hi!’
Nothing happens. Insides scream again.
BLACK DRIVER (to the horses). ‘Ho!’
Horses plunge, and splash the black driver.
GENTLEMAN INSIDE (looking out). ‘Why, what on airth—’
Gentleman receives a variety of splashes and draws his head in again, without finishing his question or waiting for an answer.
BLACK DRIVER (still to the horses). ‘Jiddy! Jiddy!’
Horses pull violently, drag the coach out of the hole, and draw it up a bank; so steep, that the black driver’s legs fly up into the air, and he goes back among the luggage on the roof. But he immediately recovers himself, and cries (still to the horses),
‘Pill!’
No effect. On the contrary, the coach begins to roll back upon No. 2, which rolls back upon No. 3, which rolls back upon No. 4, and so on, until No. 7 is heard to curse and swear, nearly a quarter of a mile behind.
BLACK DRIVER (louder than before). ‘Pill!’
Horses make another struggle to get up the bank, and again the coach rolls backward.
BLACK DRIVER (louder than before). ‘Pe-e-e-ill!’
Horses make a desperate struggle.
BLACK DRIVER (recovering spirits). ‘Hi, Jiddy, Jiddy, Pill!’
Horses make another effort.
BLACK DRIVER (with great vigour). ‘Ally Loo! Hi. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo!’
Horses almost do it.
BLACK DRIVER (with his eyes starting out of his head). ‘Lee, den. Lee, dere. Hi. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo. Lee-e-e-e-e!’
They run up the bank, and go down again on the other side at a fearful pace. It is impossible to stop them, and at the bottom there is a deep hollow, full of water. The coach rolls frightfully. The insides scream. The mud and water fly about us. The black driver dances like a madman. Suddenly we are all right by some extraordinary means, and stop to breathe.
A black friend of the black driver is sitting on a fence. The black driver recognises him by twirling his head round and round like a harlequin, rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, and grinning from ear to ear. He stops short, turns to me, and says:
‘We shall get you through sa, like a fiddle, and hope a please you when we get you through sa. Old ‘ooman at home sa:’ chuckling very much. ‘Outside gentleman sa, he often remember old ‘ooman at home sa,’ grinning again.
‘Ay ay, we’ll take care of the old woman. Don’t be afraid.’
The black driver grins again, but there is another hole, and beyond that, another bank, close before us. So he stops short: cries (to the horses again) ‘Easy. Easy den. Ease. Steady. Hi. Jiddy. Pill. Ally. Loo,’ but never ‘Lee!’ until we are reduced to the very last extremity, and are in the midst of difficulties, extrication from which appears to be all but impossible.
And so we do the ten miles or thereabouts in two hours and a half; breaking no bones, though bruising a great many; and in short getting through the distance, ‘like a fiddle.’
This singular kind of coaching terminates at Fredericksburgh, whence there is a railway to Richmond. The tract of country through which it takes its course was once productive; but the soil has been exhausted by the system of employing a great amount of slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land: and it is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees. Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me.
I biglietti che abbiamo ricevuto a bordo della barca a vapore sono contrassegnati con il numero 1, quindi appartengiamo al vagone numero 1. Getto il mio cappotto sulla cassa e aiuto mia moglie e la sua cameriera a salire all’interno del vagone. C’è solo un gradino, alto circa un metro dal suolo, e di solito si utilizza una sedia per raggiungerlo; quando non c’è nessuna sedia, le signore si affidano alla Provvidenza. Il vagone può ospitare nove persone all’interno, con sedili disposti da un’estremità all’altra del vagone, proprio come facciamo in Inghilterra per sistemare le gambe. Quindi, l’unica operazione più difficile durante il viaggio è uscire dal vagone. C’è solo un passeggero all’esterno, e si siede sulla cassa; essendo io quel passeggero, salgo su anch’io. Mentre loro fissano i bagagli sul tetto del vagone e li sistemano dietro, ho l’opportunità di osservare bene il conducente.
È un negro, davvero molto scuro di pelle. È vestito con un abito grezzo, pieno di rattoppi e riparazioni (soprattutto alle ginocchia), calze grigie, enormi scarpe alte con suole non nere e pantaloni molto corti. Porta due guanti strani: uno di lana mista e l’altro di pelle. Ha anche un frustino molto corto, rotto a metà e legato con del filo. Eppure indossa un cappello nero a tesa larga e corona bassa, una sorta di assurda imitazione di un cocchiere inglese! Ma mentre faccio queste osservazioni, qualcuno in posizione di autorità grida “Avanti!”. La posta viaggia in testa a un carro trainato da quattro cavalli, e tutte le altre carrozze seguono in processione, guidate dalla prima.
A proposito, ogni volta che un inglese dice “Va bene!”, un americano dice “Avanti!”, il che riflette in qualche modo i caratteri nazionali dei due paesi.
I primi mezzo miglio di quella strada sono costituiti da ponti realizzati con assi slegati posizionati su due pali paralleli; questi ponti si inclinano non appena le ruote li attraversano. Inoltre, la strada attraversa anche il >fiume. Il fondo del fiume è argilloso e pieno di buche; per questo motivo, metà di un >cavallo scompare continuamente in modo improvviso e non viene ritrovata per diverso tempo.
Ma superiamo anche questo e arriviamo alla strada stessa, che è una serie di paludi alternate a fossati pieni di ghiaia. Una situazione terribile ci aspetta poco lontano; il conducente negro alza gli occhi al cielo, stringe la bocca in un cerchio perfetto e guarda dritto tra i due veicoli davanti a noi, come se stesse pensando: “L’abbiamo già fatto molte volte, ma questa volta credo che finiremo per schiantarci”. Afferra le redini con entrambe le mani, tira con forza e inizia a muoversi avanti e indietro; danza sul parabrezza con entrambi i piedi (tenendosi ben seduto, naturalmente), proprio come il povero Ducrow sui suoi cavalli impetuosi. Arriviamo al punto critico: affondiamo nel fango fino quasi alle finestre del veicolo, ci incliniamo di quarantacinque gradi su un lato, e rimaniamo bloccati lì. Gli interni del carro emettono urla disperate; il veicolo si ferma completamente; i cavalli annaspano; anche gli altri sei carri si fermano, e i loro quarantadue cavalli fanno lo stesso, ma solo per essere “compagni di sventura” e in segno di solidarietà con noi. Poi succedono le seguenti cose.
BLACK DRIVER (“Ehi!”)
Niente succede. Dentro urlano di nuovo.
BLACK DRIVER (“Ai cavalli!”) “Ho!”
I cavalli si tuffano nell’acqua, schizzando l’acqua addosso al conducente in nero.
UOMINI DI BUON CUORE. MA CHE COSA STAI DICENDO?
Il gentiluomo riceve diverse risposte frammentarie e ritira di nuovo la testa, senza completare la sua domanda né aspettare una risposta.
Guida nera, “Giù le mani!”
I cavalli tirano con forza, trascinano il carro fuori dal buco e lo portano su un pendio così ripido che le gambe del cocchiere nero volano in aria, facendolo ritornare tra i bagagli sul tetto. Ma si riprende immediatamente e continua a gridare (ancora verso i cavalli).
“Pillo!”
Nessun effetto. Al contrario, l’allenatore inizia a rimproverare il numero 2, che a sua volta rimprovera il numero 3, il quale a sua volta rimprovera il numero 4, e così via, fino a quando si sente il numero 7 imprecare e maledire, situato a quasi un quarto di miglio di distanza.
BLACK DRIVER (“Più forte di prima”. “La pillola!”)
I cavalli fanno un altro sforzo per salire sul pendio, e di nuovo il carro si ribalta all’indietro.
Guidatore Nero (più forte che prima). “M-m-male!”
I cavalli lottano disperatamente.
BLACK DRIVER (Riprendendo il coraggio). “Ehi, Jiddy, Jiddy, Pill!”
I cavalli fanno un altro sforzo.
Guida in nero (con grande vigore). “Ally Loo! Ciao. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo!”
Gli cavalli quasi ci riescono.
Il conducente nero (con gli occhi che sembravano uscire dalla testa): “Lee, vieni qui. Lee, vieni. Ciao. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo. Lee-e-e-e-e!”
Corrono su per la riva e poi scendono dall’altra parte a una velocità spaventosa. È impossibile fermarli; in fondo c’è un profondo burrone pieno d’acqua. Il carro rotola in modo terribile, gli interni urlano, fango e acqua volano intorno a noi. Il conducente, vestito di nero, danza come un pazzo. All’improvviso, per qualche motivo inspiegabile, siamo tutti salvi e ci fermiamo per riprendere fiato.
Un amico nero del conducente nero è seduto su una recinzione. Il conducente nero lo riconosce girando la testa avanti e indietro come un arlecchino, rollando gli occhi, alzando le spalle e sorridendo da un orecchio all’altro. Si ferma di colpo, si gira verso di me e dice:
“Riusciremo a sistemarti tutto, sai, come se fosse facile, e speriamo di farti contento quando avremo finito. Quella vecchia signora di casa, sai, ” ridacchiava molto. “Quel gentiluomo là fuori, spesso pensa a quella vecchia signora di casa, ” sorrideva di nuovo.
“Ah ah, ci occuperemo noi della vecchia donna. Non avere paura.”
Il conducente negro sorride di nuovo, ma c’è un altro buco, e oltre di esso, un’altra scarpata, proprio davanti a noi. Così si ferma bruscamente; grida di nuovo ai cavalli: “Calmi. Calmi. Andate piano. Sì. Bene, ” Ma mai “Lee!”, finché non ci troviamo nella situazione più disperata possibile, immersi in difficoltà dalle quali sembra impossibile uscire.
E così percorriamo i dieci miglia, più o meno, in due ore e mezza; senza romperci nessuna ossa, anche se ci facciamo molti lividi. In breve, superiamo la distanza “come se nulla fosse”.
Questo particolare tipo di coltivazione termina a Fredericksburgh, da dove c’è una ferrovia che conduce a Richmond. La zona attraverso cui si estende un tempo era fertile; ma il suolo è stato esaurito a causa dell’utilizzo massiccio di lavoro schiavistico per la coltivazione, senza mai rinnovarlo: oggi non è molto diverso da un deserto sabbioso ricoperto d’alberi. Per quanto desolato e poco attraente possa apparire, fui davvero felice di scoprire qualcosa che fosse stato colpito dalle conseguenze negative di questa orribile istituzione; e provai una gioia ancora maggiore nel contemplare quella terra inaridita, rispetto a quanto avrebbe potuto offrirmi la più rigogliosa e prospera coltivazione nello stesso luogo.
In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system. The barns and outhouses are mouldering away; the sheds are patched and half roofless; the log cabins (built in Virginia with external chimneys made of clay or wood) are squalid in the last degree. There is no look of decent comfort anywhere. The miserable stations by the railway side, the great wild wood-yards, whence the engine is supplied with fuel; the negro children rolling on the ground before the cabin doors, with dogs and pigs; the biped beasts of burden slinking past: gloom and dejection are upon them all.
In the negro car belonging to the train in which we made this journey, were a mother and her children who had just been purchased; the husband and father being left behind with their old owner. The children cried the whole way, and the mother was misery’s picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe. The black in Sinbad’s Travels with one eye in the middle of his forehead which shone like a burning coal, was nature’s aristocrat compared with this white gentleman.
[Picture: Black and White]
It was between six and seven o’clock in the evening, when we drove to the hotel: in front of which, and on the top of the broad flight of steps leading to the door, two or three citizens were balancing themselves on rocking-chairs, and smoking cigars. We found it a very large and elegant establishment, and were as well entertained as travellers need desire to be. The climate being a thirsty one, there was never, at any hour of the day, a scarcity of loungers in the spacious bar, or a cessation of the mixing of cool liquors: but they were a merrier people here, and had musical instruments playing to them o’ nights, which it was a treat to hear again.
The next day, and the next, we rode and walked about the town, which is delightfully situated on eight hills, overhanging James River; a sparkling stream, studded here and there with bright islands, or brawling over broken rocks. Although it was yet but the middle of March, the weather in this southern temperature was extremely warm; the peech-trees and magnolias were in full bloom; and the trees were green. In a low ground among the hills, is a valley known as ‘Bloody Run,’ from a terrible conflict with the Indians which once occurred there. It is a good place for such a struggle, and, like every other spot I saw associated with any legend of that wild people now so rapidly fading from the earth, interested me very much.
The city is the seat of the local parliament of Virginia; and in its shady legislative halls, some orators were drowsily holding forth to the hot noon day. By dint of constant repetition, however, these constitutional sights had very little more interest for me than so many parochial vestries; and I was glad to exchange this one for a lounge in a well-arranged public library of some ten thousand volumes, and a visit to a tobacco manufactory, where the workmen are all slaves.
I saw in this place the whole process of picking, rolling, pressing, drying, packing in casks, and branding. All the tobacco thus dealt with, was in course of manufacture for chewing; and one would have supposed there was enough in that one storehouse to have filled even the comprehensive jaws of America. In this form, the weed looks like the oil-cake on which we fatten cattle; and even without reference to its consequences, is sufficiently uninviting.
Many of the workmen appeared to be strong men, and it is hardly necessary to add that they were all labouring quietly, then. After two o’clock in the day, they are allowed to sing, a certain number at a time. The hour striking while I was there, some twenty sang a hymn in parts, and sang it by no means ill; pursuing their work meanwhile. A bell rang as I was about to leave, and they all poured forth into a building on the opposite side of the street to dinner. I said several times that I should like to see them at their meal; but as the gentleman to whom I mentioned this desire appeared to be suddenly taken rather deaf, I did not pursue the request. Of their appearance I shall have something to say, presently.
On the following day, I visited a plantation or farm, of about twelve hundred acres, on the opposite bank of the river. Here again, although I went down with the owner of the estate, to ‘the quarter,’ as that part of it in which the slaves live is called, I was not invited to enter into any of their huts. All I saw of them, was, that they were very crazy, wretched cabins, near to which groups of half-naked children basked in the sun, or wallowed on the dusty ground. But I believe that this gentleman is a considerate and excellent master, who inherited his fifty slaves, and is neither a buyer nor a seller of human stock; and I am sure, from my own observation and conviction, that he is a kind-hearted, worthy man.
The planter’s house was an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought Defoe’s description of such places strongly to my recollection. The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and heat without. Before the windows was an open piazza, where, in what they call the hot weather—whatever that may be—they sling hammocks, and drink and doze luxuriously. I do not know how their cool rejections may taste within the hammocks, but, having experience, I can report that, out of them, the mounds of ices and the bowls of mint-julep and sherry-cobbler they make in these latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.
In questo distretto, come in tutti gli altri dove la schiavitù regna sovrana (ho spesso sentito ammetterlo anche da coloro che ne sono i più ferventi sostenitori), c’è un’atmosfera di rovina e decadenza che è inseparabile da quel sistema. I granai e le stalle marciscono; gli hangar sono fatiscenti e sembrano privi di tetto; le capanne in legno (costruite in Virginia con camini esterni realizzati in argilla o legno) sono estremamente squallide. Non si trova da nessuna parte traccia di un minimo di comodità decente. Le misere stazioni ferroviarie, i vasti terreni boschivi da cui vengono riforniti i treni di carburante, i bambini neri che giacciono a terra davanti alle porte delle capanne insieme a cani e maiali. Tutti questi luoghi sono pervasi da oscurità e desolazione.
Nel vagone nero del treno su cui abbiamo fatto questo Viaggio, c’erano una madre e i suoi figli che erano stati appena acquistati; il marito e padre erano rimasti con il loro vecchio proprietario. I bambini piangevano per tutto il tragitto, e la madre era l’immagine stessa della disperazione. Il difensore di Vita, Libertà e la ricerca della Felicità che li aveva comprati viaggiava nello stesso treno; e ogni volta che ci fermavamo, scendeva per assicurarsi che fossero al sicuro. Il negro dei “Viaggi di Sinbad”, con un occhio nel mezzo della fronte che brillava come un carbone ardente, era, rispetto a questo gentiluomo bianco, l’aristocratico creato dalla >natura.
In Bianco e Nero
Era tra le sei e le sette di sera quando ci recammo all’hotel: davanti ad esso, in cima alla larga scalinata che conduceva all’ingresso, due o tre cittadini si dondolavano sulle poltrone a dondolo fumando sigari. Trovammo un luogo molto grande ed elegante, e fummo intrattenuti esattamente come i viaggiatori desiderano essere. Poiché il clima era caldo e umido, non c’era mai, in nessun momento della giornata, carenza di persone che si rilassavano nel vasto bar, né interruzioni nella preparazione di bevande fresche; inoltre, la gente qui era molto più allegra, e le notti suonavano spesso strumenti musicali, il cui ascolto rappresentava davvero un piacere.
Il giorno dopo, e quello successivo, cavalcammo e camminammo per la città, situata in modo incantevole su otto colline, con vista sul fiume James; un ruscello scintillante, punteggiato qua e là da isole luminose o che scorreva impetuoso tra rocce frantumate. Sebbene fosse solo a metà marzo, il clima in quella regione a latitudini meridionali era estremamente caldo; i peschi e le magnolie erano in piena fioritura e gli alberi erano verdi. In una zona pianeggiante tra le colline si trovava una valle chiamata “Bloody Run”, così denominata a causa di un terribile scontro con gli Indiani che un tempo vi ebbe luogo. Era un posto ideale per simili battaglie, e, come ogni altro luogo legato alle leggende di quel popolo selvaggio ormai rapidamente scomparso dalla faccia della terra, mi interessava moltissimo.
La >città è la sede del parlamento locale della Virginia; e nelle sue aule legislative ombrose, alcuni oratori continuavano a parlare, con voce monotona, sotto il caldo sole di mezzogiorno. Tuttavia, a causa della ripetizione costante, queste scene legate alla vita politica locale non mi interessavano affatto più di tante altre riunioni parrocchiali; perciò fui felice di lasciarle per un salotto situato in una biblioteca pubblica ben organizzata, che conteneva circa diecimila volumi, e per una visita a una fabbrica di tabacco, dove tutti i lavoratori erano schiavi.
Vidi in questo posto l’intero processo di raccolta, lavorazione, pressatura, essiccazione, imballaggio in botti e marchiatura. Tutto il tabacco così trattato era destinato alla produzione di tabacco da masticare; si sarebbe potuto pensare che ci fosse abbastanza in quel magazzino per riempire persino le “mascelle” enormi dell’America. In questa forma, la pianta assomiglia al pane di olio con cui ingrassiamo il bestiame; e anche senza considerare le sue conseguenze negative, ha un aspetto decisamente poco attraente.
Molti di quei lavoratori sembravano uomini forti, e non è certo necessario aggiungere che tutti lavoravano in silenzio. Dopo le due del pomeriggio, a un determinato orario, a loro era permesso cantare; mentre ero lì, alle due, circa venti di loro cantarono un >Inno a cappella, e lo fecero piuttosto bene, continuando intanto a lavorare. Mentre stavo per andarmene, suonò una campana e tutti si diressero verso un edificio situato dall’altra parte della strada per pranzo. Dissi più volte che avrei voluto vederli mentre mangiavano; ma poiché l’uomo a cui ne parlai sembrava essere diventato improvvisamente sordo, non insistetti nella mia richiesta. Ne parlerò ancora in seguito riguardo al loro aspetto.
Il giorno seguente visitai una piantagione o fattoria di circa dodicimila acri, situata sulla sponda opposta del fiume. Anche questa volta, sebbene fossi andato insieme al proprietario della tenuta nel “quartiere” in cui vivono gli schiavi, non mi fu permesso di entrare nelle loro capanne. Tutto ciò che vidi furono delle baracche molto misere e fatiscenti; nei dintorni, gruppi di bambini seminudi si crogiolavano al sole o giacevano sul terreno polveroso. Credo però che questo signore sia una persona premurosa ed eccellente: ha ereditato cinquanta schiavi e non si occupa né dell’acquisto né della vendita di esseri umani; sono convinto, sulla base delle mie osservazioni personali, che sia un uomo gentile e meritevole.
La casa del coltivatore era un’abitazione ariosa e rustica; la descrizione che Defoe fa di questi luoghi mi tornò immediatamente in mente. Quel giorno faceva molto caldo, ma poiché le tende erano tutte chiuse e le finestre e le porte spalancate, una freschezza ombreggiata si diffondeva nelle stanze, un vero sollievo dopo il calore esterno. Davanti alle finestre c’era una piazza aperta; in quella che loro chiamano la stagione calda – ma cosa significhi esattamente, – appendono le amache e si rilassano bevendo e sonnecchiando. Non so come possa essere il sapore di quelle bevande fresche all’interno delle amache, ma, avendone sperimentato l’effetto, posso dire che, rispetto a esse, i mucchi di ghiaccio, le ciotole di mint-julep e gli sherry-cobbler che preparano in queste latitudini rappresentano davvero le bevande più rinfrescanti che si possano desiderare durante l’estate, per chi voglia mantenere la propria serenità d’animo.
There are two bridges across the river: one belongs to the railroad, and the other, which is a very crazy affair, is the private property of some old lady in the neighbourhood, who levies tolls upon the townspeople. Crossing this bridge, on my way back, I saw a notice painted on the gate, cautioning all persons to drive slowly: under a penalty, if the offender were a white man, of five dollars; if a negro, fifteen stripes.
The same decay and gloom that overhang the way by which it is approached, hover above the town of Richmond. There are pretty villas and cheerful houses in its streets, and Nature smiles upon the country round; but jostling its handsome residences, like slavery itself going hand in hand with many lofty virtues, are deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into ruinous heaps. Hinting gloomily at things below the surface, these, and many other tokens of the same description, force themselves upon the notice, and are remembered with depressing influence, when livelier features are forgotten.
To those who are happily unaccustomed to them, the countenances in the streets and labouring-places, too, are shocking. All men who know that there are laws against instructing slaves, of which the pains and penalties greatly exceed in their amount the fines imposed on those who maim and torture them, must be prepared to find their faces very low in the scale of intellectual expression. But the darkness—not of skin, but mind—which meets the stranger’s eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of all fairer characters traced by Nature’s hand; immeasurably outdo his worst belief. That travelled creation of the great satirist’s brain, who fresh from living among horses, peered from a high casement down upon his own kind with trembling horror, was scarcely more repelled and daunted by the sight, than those who look upon some of these faces for the first time must surely be.
I left the last of them behind me in the person of a wretched drudge, who, after running to and fro all day till midnight, and moping in his stealthy winks of sleep upon the stairs betweenwhiles, was washing the dark passages at four o’clock in the morning; and went upon my way with a grateful heart that I was not doomed to live where slavery was, and had never had my senses blunted to its wrongs and horrors in a slave-rocked cradle.
It had been my intention to proceed by James River and Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore; but one of the steamboats being absent from her station through some accident, and the means of conveyance being consequently rendered uncertain, we returned to Washington by the way we had come (there were two constables on board the steamboat, in pursuit of runaway slaves), and halting there again for one night, went on to Baltimore next afternoon.
The most comfortable of all the hotels of which I had any experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is Barnum’s, in that city: where the English traveller will find curtains to his bed, for the first and probably the last time in America (this is a disinterested remark, for I never use them); and where he will be likely to have enough water for washing himself, which is not at all a common case.
This capital of the state of Maryland is a bustling, busy town, with a great deal of traffic of various kinds, and in particular of water commerce. That portion of the town which it most favours is none of the cleanest, it is true; but the upper part is of a very different character, and has many agreeable streets and public buildings. The Washington Monument, which is a handsome pillar with a statue on its summit; the Medical College; and the Battle Monument in memory of an engagement with the British at North Point; are the most conspicuous among them.
There is a very good prison in this city, and the State Penitentiary is also among its institutions. In this latter establishment there were two curious cases.
One was that of a young man, who had been tried for the murder of his father. The evidence was entirely circumstantial, and was very conflicting and doubtful; nor was it possible to assign any motive which could have tempted him to the commission of so tremendous a crime. He had been tried twice; and on the second occasion the jury felt so much hesitation in convicting him, that they found a verdict of manslaughter, or murder in the second degree; which it could not possibly be, as there had, beyond all doubt, been no quarrel or provocation, and if he were guilty at all, he was unquestionably guilty of murder in its broadest and worst signification.
The remarkable feature in the case was, that if the unfortunate deceased were not really murdered by this own son of his, he must have been murdered by his own brother. The evidence lay in a most remarkable manner, between those two. On all the suspicious points, the dead man’s brother was the witness: all the explanations for the prisoner (some of them extremely plausible) went, by construction and inference, to inculcate him as plotting to fix the guilt upon his nephew. It must have been one of them: and the jury had to decide between two sets of suspicions, almost equally unnatural, unaccountable, and strange.
The other case, was that of a man who once went to a certain distiller’s and stole a copper measure containing a quantity of liquor. He was pursued and taken with the property in his possession, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On coming out of the jail, at the expiration of that term, he went back to the same distiller’s, and stole the same copper measure containing the same quantity of liquor. There was not the slightest reason to suppose that the man wished to return to prison: indeed everything, but the commission of the offence, made directly against that assumption. There are only two ways of accounting for this extraordinary proceeding. One is, that after undergoing so much for this copper measure he conceived he had established a sort of claim and right to it. The other that, by dint of long thinking about, it had become a monomania with him, and had acquired a fascination which he found it impossible to resist; swelling from an Earthly Copper Gallon into an Ethereal Golden Vat.
Ci sono due ponti che attraversano il fiume: uno appartiene alla ferrovia, mentre l’altro, una struttura davvero insolita, è di proprietà privata di una vecchia signora del quartiere, la quale impone pedaggi ai cittadini. Tornando indietro, ho visto un avviso dipinto sul cancello che consigliava a tutti di guidare lentamente; in caso di violazione, la multa ammontava a cinque dollari per i bianchi e a quindici strisce per i neri.
Lo stesso degrado e cupore che avvolgono il percorso attraverso cui si raggiunge quella località aleggiano sopra la città di Richmond. Le sue strade sono piene di belle ville e case allegra, e >Natura sorride su tutta la campagna circostante; ma accanto a queste residenze eleganti, come se l’)schiavitù stessa andasse a braccio a molte nobili virtù, si trovano tuguri deplorabili, recinzioni in rovina e mura che crollano trasformandosi in cumuli di macerie. Questi segni cupi, insieme ad altri molti simili, attirano inevitabilmente l’attenzione e lasciano un’impressione deprimente, soprattutto quando i tratti più vivaci di quella realtà vengono dimenticati.
Per coloro che non sono abituati a queste cose, anche i volti delle persone per le strade e nei luoghi di lavoro risultano scioccanti. Chiunque sappia che esistono leggi che vietano di istruire gli schiavi, e che le punizioni previste per tale attività sono di gran lunga più severe delle multe imposte a coloro che li maltrattano o li torturano, deve essere preparato ad incontrare volti la cui espressione intellettuale è estremamente limitata. Ma l’oscurità – non quella della pelle, ma quella dell’animo – che si presenta davanti allo sguardo dello straniero a ogni angolo; l’eliminazione di tutte quelle caratteristiche più belle e nobili tracciate dalla mano della >Natura; tutto ciò supera di gran lunga le sue peggiori previsioni. Quella rappresentazione “viaggiante” creata dal cervello del grande satirico, che, appena uscito dall’ambiente degli animali, osservava con orrore la propria stessa specie da una finestra alta, doveva provare un disgusto e una paura quasi uguali a quelli che, guardando per la prima volta alcuni di questi volti, non possono fare a meno di sentirsi sconvolti.
Lasciai l’ultimo di loro alle mie spalle, sotto le sembianze di un miserabile schiavo: dopo aver corso avanti e indietro per tutto il giorno fino a mezzanotte, e aver poi sonnecchiato furtivamente sulle scale, alle quattro del mattino lavava i corridoi bui. E io proseguii lungo la mia strada con un cuore grato: non ero destinato a vivere in un luogo dove regnavano la schiavitù e le sue ingiustizie; i miei sensi, infatti, non erano mai stati offuscati dai suoi orrori, né nella culla di una vita dominata dalla schiavitù.
Avevo intenzione di proseguire lungo il fiume James e attraverso la baia di Chesapeake fino a Baltimora; ma poiché uno dei vapori era assente dalla sua postazione a causa di un incidente, i mezzi di trasporto risultarono incerti. Così tornammo a Washington per lo stesso itinerario di andata (c’erano due poliziotti a bordo del vascello, in cerca di schiavi fuggiti), facemmo tappa nuovamente lì per una notte e proseguimmo verso Baltimora il pomeriggio seguente.
Il più confortevole di tutti gli hotel che avessi mai provato negli Stati Uniti – e ne avevo provati molti – è quello di Barnum, in quella >città: lì il viaggiatore inglese troverà delle tende per il letto, per la prima e probabilmente anche l’ultima volta in America (questo è un commento imparziale, poiché io personalmente non le uso mai); inoltre, sarà probabile che vi sia abbastanza acqua per lavarsi, il che non è affatto una cosa comune.
Questa capitale dello stato del Maryland è una città vivace e affollata, caratterizzata da un intenso traffico di ogni tipo, soprattutto nel settore del commercio marittimo. Quella parte della città che ne beneficia maggiormente non è certo tra le più pulite; tuttavia la zona superiore presenta caratteristiche molto diverse, con molte strade piacevoli da percorrere e edifici pubblici di notevole valore. Tra i monumenti più significativi vi sono il Monumento a Washington, un imponente pilastro sormontato da una statua; il College Medico; e il Monumento alla Battaglia, eretto in ricordo di uno scontro con i britannici presso North Point.
In questa città c’è una prigione molto buona, e anche il Penitenziario Statale ne fa parte. In quest’ultimo istituto si sono verificati due casi curiosi.
Uno di questi casi riguardava un giovane che era stato processato per l’omicidio di suo padre. Le prove erano interamente circostanziali, molto contraddittorie e dubbiose; inoltre, non era possibile individuare alcun movente che potesse averlo spinto a commettere un crimine così atroce. Era stato processato due volte; la seconda volta, la giuria esitò talmente nel condannarlo da emettere una sentenza di omicidio colposo o omicidio di secondo grado, il che era impossibile, poiché non c’era stata alcuna lite né provocazione, e se fosse stato davvero colpevole, allora lo era senza dubbio di omicidio nel senso più ampio e grave del termine.
La caratteristica straordinaria di questo caso era che, se il povero defunto non fosse stato davvero assassinato dal proprio figlio, allora doveva essere stato ucciso dal proprio fratello. Le prove erano estremamente evidenti tra i due. In tutti gli aspetti sospetti, il fratello del morto era il testimone; tutte le spiegazioni fornite dal prigioniero (alcune delle quali estremamente plausibili) lo incolpavano di aver architettato un piano per far ricadere la colpa sul proprio nipote. Doveva essere stato uno di loro. E la giuria doveva decidere tra due insiemi di sospetti, entrambi quasi altrettanto innaturali, inspiegabili e strani.
L’altro caso riguardava un uomo che una volta si recò in un certo distillatore e rubò un misurino di rame contenente una certa quantità di alcol. Fu inseguito, arrestato insieme al bottino e condannato a due anni di carcere. Al termine della pena, tornò nello stesso negozio e rubò nuovamente lo stesso misurino di rame con la stessa quantità di alcol. Non esisteva alcun motivo per supporre che quell’uomo volesse tornare in prigione: anzi, tutto, tranne il fatto stesso del reato commesso, contraddiceva questa ipotesi. Ci sono solo due spiegazioni possibili per questo comportamento insolito. Una è che, dopo aver subito tante conseguenze a causa di quel misurino, egli abbia ritenuto di avere un qualche diritto su di esso. L’altra è che, a seguito di lunghe riflessioni, questa azione sia diventata una sorta di ossessione per lui, una compulsione dalla quale non riusciva a liberarsi; il misurino di rame, inizialmente banale, era diventato per lui qualcosa di simile a un vaso d’oro etereo.
After remaining here a couple of days I bound myself to a rigid adherence to the plan I had laid down so recently, and resolved to set forward on our western journey without any more delay. Accordingly, having reduced the luggage within the smallest possible compass (by sending back to New York, to be afterwards forwarded to us in Canada, so much of it as was not absolutely wanted); and having procured the necessary credentials to banking-houses on the way; and having moreover looked for two evenings at the setting sun, with as well-defined an idea of the country before us as if we had been going to travel into the very centre of that planet; we left Baltimore by another railway at half-past eight in the morning, and reached the town of York, some sixty miles off, by the early dinner-time of the Hotel which was the starting-place of the four-horse coach, wherein we were to proceed to Harrisburg.
This conveyance, the box of which I was fortunate enough to secure, had come down to meet us at the railroad station, and was as muddy and cumbersome as usual. As more passengers were waiting for us at the inn-door, the coachman observed under his breath, in the usual self-communicative voice, looking the while at his mouldy harness as if it were to that he was addressing himself,
‘I expect we shall want the big coach.’
I could not help wondering within myself what the size of this big coach might be, and how many persons it might be designed to hold; for the vehicle which was too small for our purpose was something larger than two English heavy night coaches, and might have been the twin-brother of a French Diligence. My speculations were speedily set at rest, however, for as soon as we had dined, there came rumbling up the street, shaking its sides like a corpulent giant, a kind of barge on wheels. After much blundering and backing, it stopped at the door: rolling heavily from side to side when its other motion had ceased, as if it had taken cold in its damp stable, and between that, and the having been required in its dropsical old age to move at any faster pace than a walk, were distressed by shortness of wind.
‘If here ain’t the Harrisburg mail at last, and dreadful bright and smart to look at too,’ cried an elderly gentleman in some excitement, ‘darn my mother!’
I don’t know what the sensation of being darned may be, or whether a man’s mother has a keener relish or disrelish of the process than anybody else; but if the endurance of this mysterious ceremony by the old lady in question had depended on the accuracy of her son’s vision in respect to the abstract brightness and smartness of the Harrisburg mail, she would certainly have undergone its infliction. However, they booked twelve people inside; and the luggage (including such trifles as a large rocking-chair, and a good-sized dining-table) being at length made fast upon the roof, we started off in great state.
At the door of another hotel, there was another passenger to be taken up.
‘Any room, sir?’ cries the new passenger to the coachman.
‘Well, there’s room enough,’ replies the coachman, without getting down, or even looking at him.
‘There an’t no room at all, sir,’ bawls a gentleman inside. Which another gentleman (also inside) confirms, by predicting that the attempt to introduce any more passengers ‘won’t fit nohow.’
The new passenger, without any expression of anxiety, looks into the coach, and then looks up at the coachman: ‘Now, how do you mean to fix it?’ says he, after a pause: ‘for I must go.’
The coachman employs himself in twisting the lash of his whip into a knot, and takes no more notice of the question: clearly signifying that it is anybody’s business but his, and that the passengers would do well to fix it, among themselves. In this state of things, matters seem to be approximating to a fix of another kind, when another inside passenger in a corner, who is nearly suffocated, cries faintly, ‘I’ll get out.’
This is no matter of relief or self-congratulation to the driver, for his immovable philosophy is perfectly undisturbed by anything that happens in the coach. Of all things in the world, the coach would seem to be the very last upon his mind. The exchange is made, however, and then the passenger who has given up his seat makes a third upon the box, seating himself in what he calls the middle; that is, with half his person on my legs, and the other half on the driver’s.
‘Go a-head, cap’en,’ cries the colonel, who directs.
‘Gŏ-lāng!’ cries the cap’en to his company, the horses, and away we go.
We took up at a rural bar-room, after we had gone a few miles, an intoxicated gentleman who climbed upon the roof among the luggage, and subsequently slipping off without hurting himself, was seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we had found him. We also parted with more of our freight at different times, so that when we came to change horses, I was again alone outside.
The coachmen always change with the horses, and are usually as dirty as the coach. The first was dressed like a very shabby English baker; the second like a Russian peasant: for he wore a loose purple camlet robe, with a fur collar, tied round his waist with a parti-coloured worsted sash; grey trousers; light blue gloves: and a cap of bearskin. It had by this time come on to rain very heavily, and there was a cold damp mist besides, which penetrated to the skin. I was glad to take advantage of a stoppage and get down to stretch my legs, shake the water off my great-coat, and swallow the usual anti-temperance recipe for keeping out the cold.
When I mounted to my seat again, I observed a new parcel lying on the coach roof, which I took to be a rather large fiddle in a brown bag. In the course of a few miles, however, I discovered that it had a glazed cap at one end and a pair of muddy shoes at the other and further observation demonstrated it to be a small boy in a snuff-coloured coat, with his arms quite pinioned to his sides, by deep forcing into his pockets. He was, I presume, a relative or friend of the coachman’s, as he lay a-top of the luggage with his face towards the rain; and except when a change of position brought his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared to be asleep. At last, on some occasion of our stopping, this thing slowly upreared itself to the height of three feet six, and fixing its eyes on me, observed in piping accents, with a complaisant yawn, half quenched in an obliging air of friendly patronage, ‘Well now, stranger, I guess you find this a’most like an English arternoon, hey?’
Dopo essere rimasto qui per un paio di giorni, mi imposi di attenermi rigorosamente al piano che avevo stabilito poco tempo prima, e decisi di intraprendere il nostro viaggio verso ovest senza ulteriori ritardi. Pertanto, ridussi al minimo indispensabile i bagagli (mandando indietro a New York, per essere successivamente inviati in Canada, tutto ciò che non era assolutamente necessario); procurai le credenziali necessarie presso le banche lungo il cammino; e, osservando il tramonto per due sere consecutive, acquisii una conoscenza così precisa della regione che avremmo attraversato da poter considerare di essere diretti proprio al centro di quel continente. Lasciammo Baltimora con un altro treno alle otto e mezza del mattino, e arrivammo nella città di York, situata a circa sessanta miglia di distanza, poco prima dell’ora di pranzo, presso l’hotel da cui partiva il calesse a quattro cavalli che ci avrebbe portato a Harrisburg.
Questo veicolo, il cui contenitore sono stato abbastanza fortunato da ottenere, era arrivato alla stazione ferroviaria per incontrarci; come al solito, era coperto di fango e molto ingombrante. Mentre sempre più passeggeri ci aspettavano all’interno dell’ostello, il cocchiere mormorò tra sé, con quel suo solito tono autocomunicativo, guardando intanto le sue redini muffite come se stesse parlando proprio con loro.
“Credo che avremo bisogno del carro più grande.”
Non potevo fare a meno di chiedermi quale fosse la dimensione di questo grande veicolo e quante persone potesse contenere; infatti, l’imbarcazione che era troppo piccola per i nostri scopi era di dimensioni superiori a due pesanti carrozze notturne inglesi, e avrebbe potuto essere considerata la “sorella gemella” di una diligenza francese. Tuttavia, le mie congetture furono presto dissipate: non appena finimmo di pranzare, lungo la strada si udì il rumore prodotto da un veicolo che scuoteva i suoi fianchi come un gigante corpulento. Si trattava di una sorta di barca su ruote. Dopo molti tentativi goffi e manovre per parcheggiare, si fermò davanti alla porta; continuava a dondolarsi pesantemente da un lato all’altro anche dopo essersi immobilizzata, come se fosse rimasta “raffreddata” nel suo umido stallo. Inoltre, a causa della sua età avanzata e delle sue condizioni fisiche precarie, era costretta a muoversi a una velocità molto più lenta di quella di un normale passo. E, per completare il quadro, soffriva anche di problemi respiratori.
“Se non è proprio la posta di Harrisburg, così bella e ordinata da vedere,” esclamò un anziano signore con un certo entusiasmo, “maledizione!”
Non so quale sia la sensazione di essere maledetti, né se la madre di un uomo provi più piacere o disgusto per questo processo rispetto ad altre persone; ma se la capacità della vecchia signora di sopportare questa misteriosa cerimonia dipendesse dall’accuratezza della visione di suo figlio riguardo alla brillantezza e all’eleganza astratta della posta di Harrisburg, sicuramente avrebbe subito tutto ciò che le veniva chiesto. Comunque, riuscirono a far entrare dodici persone all’interno del veicolo; e una volta che i bagagli – tra cui oggetti insignificanti come una grande poltrona da dondolo e un tavolo da pranzo di dimensioni considerevoli – furono fissati saldamente sul tetto, partimmo in ottime condizioni.
Alla porta di un altro hotel, c’era un altro passeggero da prendere a bordo.
“Qualsiasi stanza, signore?”, chiede il nuovo passeggero al cocchiere.
“Beh, c’è abbastanza spazio,” risponde il cocchiere, senza scendere dal carro e nemmeno guardandolo.
“Non c’è assolutamente spazio, signore,” grida un gentiluomo all’interno. Un altro gentiluomo (anch’egli all’interno) conferma questa affermazione, prevedendo che qualsiasi tentativo di far entrare altri passeggeri “non riuscirà in alcun modo”.
Il nuovo passeggero, senza mostrare alcuna traccia di ansia, guardò all’interno del vagone e poi alzò lo sguardo verso il conducente: “Allora, come intende risolvere la situazione?”, disse dopo una pausa, “perché devo andare.”
Il cocchiere si occupa soltanto di annodare la frusta e non dà più alcuna attenzione alla questione: questo significa chiaramente che non riguarda affatto lui, e che i passeggeri farebbero meglio a risolverla tra loro. In questa situazione, le cose sembrano avviarsi verso una soluzione di altro tipo, quando un altro passeggero, nascosto in un angolo e quasi soffocato, chiede debolmente: “Me ne andrò”.
Non si tratta certo di un momento di sollievo o di auto-complimento da parte del conducente: la sua immutabile filosofia non viene minimamente turbata da ciò che accade all’interno dell’autobus. Di tutte le cose al mondo, l’autobus sembrerebbe essere l’ultima cosa a cui pensi. Comunque, dopo lo scambio di posto, il passeggero che ha ceduto il suo sedile si siede sul tetto dell’autobus, in quella che lui definisce la “posizione centrale”: metà del suo corpo poggia sulle mie gambe, l’altra metà su quelle del conducente.
“Avanti, capitano,” grida il colonnello che dirige le operazioni.
“Gō-lāng!”, grida il capitano alla sua compagnia, ai cavalli, e via ci mettiamo in movimento.
Dopo aver percorso alcune miglia, ci fermammo in una taverna rurale. Un signore ubriaco salì sul tetto tra i bagagli e, dopo essere scivolato giù senza farsi male, fu visto in lontananza mentre tornava barcollando verso la taverna dove lo avevamo incontrato. Inoltre, abbandonammo ancora parte del nostro carico in momenti diversi; quindi, quando arrivò il momento di cambiare cavalli, mi ritrovai di nuovo solo fuori.
I cocchieri cambiano sempre in base ai cavalli utilizzati, e di solito sono altrettanto sporchi del carro stesso. Il primo era vestito come un povero panettiere inglese; il secondo sembrava un contadino russo: indossava una veste larga di cammello viola con colletto di pelliccia, legata in vita da una cintura di lana a strisce colorate; pantaloni grigi, guanti blu chiaro, e un cappello di pelle d’orso. A quel punto aveva iniziato a piovere molto forte, e c’era anche una nebbia fredda e umida che penetrava nella pelle. Fui felice di approfittare di questa sosta per stirarmi un po’, scuotere l’acqua dal mio cappotto e, ingoiare quella solita “ricetta” anti-alcolica per tenersi al caldo.
Quando mi risedi sul mio sedile, notai un nuovo pacco posato sul tetto della carrozza; pensai che si trattasse di un violino piuttosto grande, avvolto in una borsa marrone. Tuttavia, dopo alcune miglia, scoprii che all’estremità uno del pacco c’era un cappello di vetro e all’altra un paio di scarpe fangose; osservando meglio, capii che si trattava di un bambino piccolo, avvolto in un cappotto color tabacco, con le braccia strette contro il corpo a causa delle tasche piene fino all’orlo. Presumo fosse un parente o un amico del cocchiere, poiché giaceva sopra i bagagli con il viso rivolto verso la pioggia; e a parte i momenti in cui le sue scarpe entravano in contatto con il mio cappello, sembrava addormentato. Alla fine, durante una delle nostre fermate, quel “bambino” si alzò lentamente fino ad raggiungere un’altezza di circa un metro e ottanta centimetri; fissandomi con i suoi occhi, emise suoni acuti e, sbadigliando compiaciuto, disse con tono affabile: “Beh, ora, straniero, immagino che tu trovi tutto questo davvero molto simile a una tipica pomeriggio inglese, eh?”
The scenery, which had been tame enough at first, was, for the last ten or twelve miles, beautiful. Our road wound through the pleasant valley of the Susquehanna; the river, dotted with innumerable green islands, lay upon our right; and on the left, a steep ascent, craggy with broken rock, and dark with pine trees. The mist, wreathing itself into a hundred fantastic shapes, moved solemnly upon the water; and the gloom of evening gave to all an air of mystery and silence which greatly enhanced its natural interest.
We crossed this river by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered in on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was profoundly dark; perplexed, with great beams, crossing and recrossing it at every possible angle; and through the broad chinks and crevices in the floor, the rapid river gleamed, far down below, like a legion of eyes. We had no lamps; and as the horses stumbled and floundered through this place, towards the distant speck of dying light, it seemed interminable. I really could not at first persuade myself as we rumbled heavily on, filling the bridge with hollow noises, and I held down my head to save it from the rafters above, but that I was in a painful dream; for I have often dreamed of toiling through such places, and as often argued, even at the time, ‘this cannot be reality.’
At length, however, we emerged upon the streets of Harrisburg, whose feeble lights, reflected dismally from the wet ground, did not shine out upon a very cheerful city. We were soon established in a snug hotel, which though smaller and far less splendid than many we put up at, it raised above them all in my remembrance, by having for its landlord the most obliging, considerate, and gentlemanly person I ever had to deal with.
As we were not to proceed upon our journey until the afternoon, I walked out, after breakfast the next morning, to look about me; and was duly shown a model prison on the solitary system, just erected, and as yet without an inmate; the trunk of an old tree to which Harris, the first settler here (afterwards buried under it), was tied by hostile Indians, with his funeral pile about him, when he was saved by the timely appearance of a friendly party on the opposite shore of the river; the local legislature (for there was another of those bodies here again, in full debate); and the other curiosities of the town.
I was very much interested in looking over a number of treaties made from time to time with the poor Indians, signed by the different chiefs at the period of their ratification, and preserved in the office of the Secretary to the Commonwealth. These signatures, traced of course by their own hands, are rough drawings of the creatures or weapons they were called after. Thus, the Great Turtle makes a crooked pen-and-ink outline of a great turtle; the Buffalo sketches a buffalo; the War Hatchet sets a rough image of that weapon for his mark. So with the Arrow, the Fish, the Scalp, the Big Canoe, and all of them.
I could not but think—as I looked at these feeble and tremulous productions of hands which could draw the longest arrow to the head in a stout elk-horn bow, or split a bead or feather with a rifle-ball—of Crabbe’s musings over the Parish Register, and the irregular scratches made with a pen, by men who would plough a lengthy furrow straight from end to end. Nor could I help bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose hands and hearts were set there, in all truth and honesty; and who only learned in course of time from white men how to break their faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds. I wonder, too, how many times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had signed away, he knew not what, until it went and cast him loose upon the new possessors of the land, a savage indeed.
Our host announced, before our early dinner, that some members of the legislative body proposed to do us the honour of calling. He had kindly yielded up to us his wife’s own little parlour, and when I begged that he would show them in, I saw him look with painful apprehension at its pretty carpet; though, being otherwise occupied at the time, the cause of his uneasiness did not occur to me.
It certainly would have been more pleasant to all parties concerned, and would not, I think, have compromised their independence in any material degree, if some of these gentlemen had not only yielded to the prejudice in favour of spittoons, but had abandoned themselves, for the moment, even to the conventional absurdity of pocket-handkerchiefs.
It still continued to rain heavily, and when we went down to the Canal Boat (for that was the mode of conveyance by which we were to proceed) after dinner, the weather was as unpromising and obstinately wet as one would desire to see. Nor was the sight of this canal boat, in which we were to spend three or four days, by any means a cheerful one; as it involved some uneasy speculations concerning the disposal of the passengers at night, and opened a wide field of inquiry touching the other domestic arrangements of the establishment, which was sufficiently disconcerting.
However, there it was—a barge with a little house in it, viewed from the outside; and a caravan at a fair, viewed from within: the gentlemen being accommodated, as the spectators usually are, in one of those locomotive museums of penny wonders; and the ladies being partitioned off by a red curtain, after the manner of the dwarfs and giants in the same establishments, whose private lives are passed in rather close exclusiveness.
We sat here, looking silently at the row of little tables, which extended down both sides of the cabin, and listening to the rain as it dripped and pattered on the boat, and plashed with a dismal merriment in the water, until the arrival of the railway train, for whose final contribution to our stock of passengers, our departure was alone deferred. It brought a great many boxes, which were bumped and tossed upon the roof, almost as painfully as if they had been deposited on one’s own head, without the intervention of a porter’s knot; and several damp gentlemen, whose clothes, on their drawing round the stove, began to steam again. No doubt it would have been a thought more comfortable if the driving rain, which now poured down more soakingly than ever, had admitted of a window being opened, or if our number had been something less than thirty; but there was scarcely time to think as much, when a train of three horses was attached to the tow-rope, the boy upon the leader smacked his whip, the rudder creaked and groaned complainingly, and we had begun our journey.
Il paesaggio, che inizialmente era abbastanza monotono, diventava davvero bellissimo nelle ultime dieci o dodici miglia. La nostra strada serpeggiava attraverso la piacevole valle del Susquehanna; il fiume, punteggiato da innumerevoli isole verdi, si estendeva a destra; a sinistra, una ripida salita, costellata di rocce frantumate e oscurata dai pini. La nebbia, intrecciandosi in centinaia di forme fantastiche, si muoveva solennemente sull’acqua; e l’oscurità della sera conferiva a tutto un’atmosfera di mistero e silenzio che aumentava notevolmente il suo fascino naturale.
Attraversammo questo fiume attraverso un ponte di legno, coperto su tutti i lati e lungo quasi un miglio. Era profondamente buio; c’erano grandi travi che si incrociavano in ogni direzione possibile, e attraverso le ampie fessure del pavimento, il rapido fiume brillava laggiù in basso, come una legione di occhi. Non avevamo lanterne; e mentre i cavalli inciampavano e barcollavano in quel luogo buio, verso quella luce lontana e fioca, il percorso sembrava infinito. All’inizio non riuscivo davvero a credere di essere lì. Mentre avanzavamo con fragore, riempiendo il ponte di suoni cupi, tenevo la testa bassa per proteggerla dalle travi sopra di me. Ma sembrava proprio un sogno doloroso. Molte volte avevo sognato di dover attraversare posti del genere, e sempre mi dicevo: “Questo non può essere reale”.
Alla fine, tuttavia, ci trovammo sulle strade di Harrisburg; le deboli luci, riflesse tristemente sul terreno bagnato, non rendevano quella città particolarmente allegra. Presto ci sistemammo in un accogliente hotel che, sebbene più piccolo e molto meno lussuoso di molti altri in cui eravamo stati, rimase per me il migliore di tutti, grazie al suo proprietario: la persona più gentile, premurosa e rispettabile con cui avessi mai avuto a che fare.
Poiché non dovevamo proseguire il nostro Viaggio fino al pomeriggio, la mattina seguente, dopo colazione, uscii per guardarmi intorno; mi mostrarono subito un modello di prigione costruito secondo quel sistema solitario, appena eretto e ancora privo di detenuti; il tronco di un vecchio albero a cui Harris, il primo colono qui (in seguito sepolto sotto di esso), era stato legato da indiani ostili, con la sua pira funebre intorno a lui, quando fu salvato dall’arrivo tempestivo di un gruppo amichevole sulla sponda opposta del [Fiume; inoltre vidi anche l’assemblea legislativa locale (poiché qui esisteva un altro organo simile, impegnato in appassionate [Dibattiti); e altre curiosità della città.
Ero molto interessato ad esaminare numerosi trattati stipulati in un certo periodo con i poveri Indiani, firmati dai vari capi al momento della loro ratifica e conservati presso l’ufficio del Segretario del Commonwealth. Queste firme, naturalmente tracciate dalle loro stesse mani, rappresentano disegni approssimativi delle creature o delle armi da cui prendevano il nome. Ad esempio, la “Grande Tartaruga” disegnava con tratti grossolani una grande tartaruga; il “Bisonte” schizzava un ritratto approssimativo di un bisonte; l’“Ascia da Guerra” rappresentava in modo sommario quell’arma. Lo stesso valeva per la “Fionda”, il “Pesce”, il “Cuoio Capelluto”, la “Grande Canoa” e così via.
Non potevo fare a meno di pensare – mentre osservavo queste deboli e tremolanti opere delle mani capaci di tirare una freccia lunga fino alla testa con un robusto arco di corno d’alce, o di frantumare una perla o una piuma con una pallottola di fucile – alle riflessioni di Crabbe sul registro parrocchiale, e ai segni irregolari lasciati da penne in mano a uomini che sapevano soltanto arare solchi lunghi da un capo all’altro. Non potevo nemmeno fare a meno di provare profonda compassione per quei semplici guerrieri il cui cuore e le loro mani erano dedicati a questo scopo, con tutta la verità e l’onestà possibili; uomini che soltanto nel corso del tempo impararono dagli uomini bianchi come tradire la propria fede e eludere le leggi e gli impegni presi. Mi chiedevo anche quante volte il credulone Big Turtle o il fiducioso Little Hatchet avessero firmato trattati letti loro in modo fraudolento, perdendo così qualcosa di cui non conoscevano nemmeno il valore, fino a ritrovarsi poi abbandonati ai nuovi possessori di quella terra, diventando davvero selvaggi.
Il nostro ospite annunciò, prima del nostro cena anticipata, che alcuni membri dell’organo legislativo avevano proposto di renderci l’onore di venire a trovarci. Ci aveva gentilmente concesso il piccolo salotto di sua moglie; quando lo pregai di farli entrare, notai che guardava con preoccupazione il bel tappeto del salotto. Tuttavia, essendo impegnato in altre cose in quel momento, non riuscii a capire la causa della sua ansia.
Sicuramente sarebbe stato più piacevole per tutte le parti coinvolte, e non avrebbe compromesso, credo, la loro indipendenza in alcun modo significativo, se alcuni di questi signori non si fossero arresi non solo al pregiudizio a favore dei portaceneri, ma si fossero anche, per il momento, adattati all’assurdità convenzionale dei fazzoletti da tasca.
Pioveva ancora forte, e quando dopo cena scendemmo sulla barca del canale – poiché quello era il mezzo di trasporto che avremmo utilizzato – il tempo era altrettanto poco promettente e ostinatamente umido quanto si potesse desiderare. Nemmeno l’aspetto di quella barca, su cui avremmo trascorso tre o quattro giorni, era certo incoraggiante; infatti, suscitava alcune preoccupazioni riguardo al modo in cui i passeggeri sarebbero stati sistemati di notte, e apriva un ampio campo di riflessioni su altre questioni legate alle strutture logistiche dell’imbarcazione, il che risultava piuttosto sconcertante.
Tuttavia, eccola lì: una barca con una piccola casa al suo interno, vista dall’esterno; e una carovana in fiera, vista dall’interno: gli uomini venivano ospitati, come di solito avviene per i visitatori, in uno di quei musei itineranti pieni di meraviglie a buon mercato; mentre le donne erano separate da una tenda rossa, proprio come i nani e i giganti presenti in tali luoghi, i cui affari privati si svolgono in un ambiente piuttosto riservato ed esclusivo.
Ci sedemmo lì, osservando in silenzio la fila di piccoli tavoli che si estendeva su entrambi i lati della cabina, ascoltando la pioggia che gocciolava e tamburellava sulla barca, producendo un suono triste e monotono nell’acqua, fino all’arrivo del treno ferroviario. A causa dell’aggiunta di quei passeggeri, la nostra partenza fu posticipata, e questo ritardo comportò il trasporto di molte scatole che vennero sbattute e agitate sul tetto della barca, con un rumore quasi doloroso, come se fossero state posizionate direttamente sulla testa delle persone. Senza nemmeno l’intervento di un nodo da portiere! Inoltre, alcuni passeggeri erano bagnati fradici; i loro vestiti, avvicinati al camino per riscaldarsi, iniziarono nuovamente a emettere vapore. Non c’è dubbio che sarebbe stato più confortevole se la pioggia battente avesse permesso di aprire una finestra, o se il nostro numero fosse stato inferiore a trenta. Ma non c’era quasi tempo per pensarci: un treno trainato da tre cavalli fu attaccato alla barca, il ragazzo che guidava i cavalli schioccò la frusta, il timone emise dei suoni di protesta, e noi iniziammo il nostro viaggio.
CHAPTER X SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE CANAL BOAT, ITS DOMESTIC ECONOMY, AND ITS PASSENGERS. JOURNEY TO PITTSBURG ACROSS THE ALLEGHANY MOUNTAINS. PITTSBURG
AS it continued to rain most perseveringly, we all remained below: the damp gentlemen round the stove, gradually becoming mildewed by the action of the fire; and the dry gentlemen lying at full length upon the seats, or slumbering uneasily with their faces on the tables, or walking up and down the cabin, which it was barely possible for a man of the middle height to do, without making bald places on his head by scraping it against the roof. At about six o’clock, all the small tables were put together to form one long table, and everybody sat down to tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages.
‘Will you try,’ said my opposite neighbour, handing me a dish of potatoes, broken up in milk and butter, ‘will you try some of these fixings?’
There are few words which perform such various duties as this word ‘fix.’ It is the Caleb Quotem of the American vocabulary. You call upon a gentleman in a country town, and his help informs you that he is ‘fixing himself’ just now, but will be down directly: by which you are to understand that he is dressing. You inquire, on board a steamboat, of a fellow-passenger, whether breakfast will be ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was last below, they were ‘fixing the tables:’ in other words, laying the cloth. You beg a porter to collect your luggage, and he entreats you not to be uneasy, for he’ll ‘fix it presently:’ and if you complain of indisposition, you are advised to have recourse to Doctor So-and-so, who will ‘fix you’ in no time.
One night, I ordered a bottle of mulled wine at an hotel where I was staying, and waited a long time for it; at length it was put upon the table with an apology from the landlord that he feared it wasn’t ‘fixed properly.’ And I recollect once, at a stage-coach dinner, overhearing a very stern gentleman demand of a waiter who presented him with a plate of underdone roast-beef, ‘whether he called that, fixing God A’mighty’s vittles?’
There is no doubt that the meal, at which the invitation was tendered to me which has occasioned this digression, was disposed of somewhat ravenously; and that the gentlemen thrust the broad-bladed knives and the two-pronged forks further down their throats than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in the hands of a skilful juggler: but no man sat down until the ladies were seated; or omitted any little act of politeness which could contribute to their comfort. Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention.
By the time the meal was over, the rain, which seemed to have worn itself out by coming down so fast, was nearly over too; and it became feasible to go on deck: which was a great relief, notwithstanding its being a very small deck, and being rendered still smaller by the luggage, which was heaped together in the middle under a tarpaulin covering; leaving, on either side, a path so narrow, that it became a science to walk to and fro without tumbling overboard into the canal. It was somewhat embarrassing at first, too, to have to duck nimbly every five minutes whenever the man at the helm cried ‘Bridge!’ and sometimes, when the cry was ‘Low Bridge,’ to lie down nearly flat. But custom familiarises one to anything, and there were so many bridges that it took a very short time to get used to this.
As night came on, and we drew in sight of the first range of hills, which are the outposts of the Alleghany Mountains, the scenery, which had been uninteresting hitherto, became more bold and striking. The wet ground reeked and smoked, after the heavy fall of rain, and the croaking of the frogs (whose noise in these parts is almost incredible) sounded as though a million of fairy teams with bells were travelling through the air, and keeping pace with us. The night was cloudy yet, but moonlight too: and when we crossed the Susquehanna river—over which there is an extraordinary wooden bridge with two galleries, one above the other, so that even there, two boat teams meeting, may pass without confusion—it was wild and grand.
I have mentioned my having been in some uncertainty and doubt, at first, relative to the sleeping arrangements on board this boat. I remained in the same vague state of mind until ten o’clock or thereabouts, when going below, I found suspended on either side of the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning.
I was assisted to this conclusion by seeing some of them gathered round the master of the boat, at one of the tables, drawing lots with all the anxieties and passions of gamesters depicted in their countenances; while others, with small pieces of cardboard in their hands, were groping among the shelves in search of numbers corresponding with those they had drawn. As soon as any gentleman found his number, he took possession of it by immediately undressing himself and crawling into bed. The rapidity with which an agitated gambler subsided into a snoring slumberer, was one of the most singular effects I have ever witnessed. As to the ladies, they were already abed, behind the red curtain, which was carefully drawn and pinned up the centre; though as every cough, or sneeze, or whisper, behind this curtain, was perfectly audible before it, we had still a lively consciousness of their society.
CAPITOLO X
Altre informazioni sul battello del canale, sulla sua economia domestica e sui suoi passeggeri. Viaggio verso Pittsburgh attraverso le montagne Allegany. Pittsburgh
Poiché la pioggia continuava a cadere con insistenza, rimanemmo tutti al piano di sotto: i signori umidi intorno al camino, gradualmente invasi dal muschio a causa dell’azione del fuoco; mentre i signori asciutti giacevano distesi sui sedili, dormivano inquietamente con il viso appoggiato ai tavoli, o camminavano avanti e indietro nella cabina. Il che era quasi impossibile per una persona di statura media, senza rischiare di rovinarsi i capelli graffiandosi contro il soffitto. Verso le sei di ore, tutti i tavolini furono messi insieme per formare un unico lungo tavolo, e tutti si sedettero a mangiare tè, caffè, pane, burro, salmone, persico, fegato, bistecche, patate, sottaceti, prosciutto, costolette, budini neri e salsicce.
“Proveresti?” disse il mio vicino di casa, porgendomi un piatto di patate mescolate con latte e burro. “Proveresti queste guarnizioni?”
Ci sono poche parole che svolgano così tante funzioni diverse come questa parola “fix”. È davvero il “Caleb Quotem” del vocabolario americano. Se chiedete l’aiuto di un gentiluomo in una piccola città, vi risponderà che in quel momento si sta “preparando”, ma arriverà subito: con questo intende dire che si sta vestendo. A bordo di una nave a vapore, se chiedete a un passeggero se la colazione sarà pronta presto, vi dirà che probabilmente sì, perché l’ultima volta che è sceso, stavano “mettendo in ordine i tavoli”, cioè preparando il servizio da pranzo. Se chiedete a un portiere di ritirare i vostri bagagli, vi dirà di non preoccuparvi, perché li porterà “subito”. E se vi lamentate di sentirvi male, vi consiglierà di rivolgervi al dottor tal dei tali, che vi rimetterà in sesto in un attimo.
Una notte, ordinai una bottiglia di vino al caldo in un hotel dove soggiornavo e aspettai a lungo che mi venisse portato; alla fine me lo servirono scusandosi con il proprietario dell’hotel, che temeva non fosse stato “preparato correttamente”. Ricordo anche una volta, durante una cena in un treno viaggiante, di aver sentito un signore molto severo chiedere a un cameriere che gli aveva portato un piatto di manzo arrosto poco cotto: “Chiami forse questo preparare il cibo del Potente Dio?”
Non c’è alcun >dubbio che il pasto durante il quale mi fu fatta questa invitazione – e che ha portato a questo discorso digressivo – sia stato consumato con notevole voracità; inoltre, quei signori infilarono i coltelli a lama larga e le forchette a due punte ancora più in profondità nella gola, quanto mai abbia visto tali armi utilizzate prima d’allora, tranne che nelle mani di un abile giocoliere. Nessuno si sedette però finché le signore non furono a tavola; né venne trascurato alcun piccolo gesto di cortesia che potesse contribuire al loro comfort. Inoltre, durante tutti i miei viaggi in America, non ho mai visto una donna essere sottoposta anche solo al minimo atto di scortesia, maleducazione o mancanza di attenzione.
Quando il pasto fu finito, la pioggia, che sembrava essersi esaurita per essere caduta così velocemente, stava quasi cessando anch’essa; diventò quindi possibile uscire sul ponte: il che rappresentò un grande sollievo, nonostante il ponte fosse molto piccolo e ridotto ancora di più dal bagaglio ammucchiato al centro sotto una copertura di tela; su entrambi i lati rimaneva soltanto un passaggio così stretto che camminarci avanti e indietro senza rischiare di cadere nel canale diventava davvero una vera e propria “scienza”. All’inizio era anche un po’ imbarazzante dover abbassarsi agilmente ogni cinque minuti, ogni volta che l’uomo al timone gridava “Ponte!”, e a volte, quando il grido era “Ponte basso”, dovevi quasi sdraiarti completamente. Ma con la pratica ci si abitua a qualsiasi cosa. E poiché c’erano così tanti ponti da attraversare, ci volle davvero poco tempo per abituarsi a questa situazione.
Con l’arrivo della notte, quando iniziammo a intravedere la prima catena di colline, che costituiscono le propaggini delle Montagne Alleghany, il paesaggio, fino ad allora monotono e poco interessante, divenne più maestoso e suggestivo. Il terreno umido emanava un forte odore e fumava a causa delle abbondanti piogge; inoltre, il croaking dei rane (il cui rumore in queste zone è davvero incredibile) sembrava provenire da milioni di esseri fatati che viaggiavano nell’aria, mantenendo il passo con noi. La notte era nuvolosa, ma c’era anche la luce della luna; quando attraversammo il fiume Susquehanna – sul quale sorge un ponte in legno straordinario, con due gallerie sovrapposte, in modo che anche quando due barche si incrociano possano passare senza problemi – il paesaggio risultò davvero selvaggio e maestoso.
All’inizio, ho espresso alcune incertezze e >dubbi riguardo alle sistemazioni per dormire a bordo di questa barca. Sono rimasto in questo stato di indecisione fino a circa le dieci di sera; quando sono sceso sottocoperta, ho scoperto che su entrambi i lati della cabina erano appese tre file lunghe di scaffali per libri, progettati chiaramente per volumi di piccole dimensioni. Osservandoli più attentamente (meravigliandomi di trovare tali strutture letterarie in un posto del genere), ho notato che su ogni scaffale erano disposte delle sorta di coperte e lenzuola molto sottili; allora ho iniziato a capire, anche se vagamente, che i passeggeri stessi costituivano la “biblioteca” di questa barca e che sarebbero stati disposti, uno accanto all’altro, su questi scaffali fino al mattino seguente.
Sono giunto a questa conclusione osservando alcuni di loro riuniti intorno al padrone della barca, davanti a uno dei tavoli, mentre tiravano i dadi con tutte le ansie e le emozioni tipiche dei giocatori; altri, invece, con piccoli pezzi di cartone in mano, frugavano tra gli scaffali alla ricerca dei numeri corrispondenti a quelli che avevano estratto. Non appena un gentiluomo trovava il proprio numero, si spogliava immediatamente e si infilava a letto. La rapidità con cui un giocatore agitato si addormentava profondamente era uno degli spettacoli più strani che avessi mai visto. Per quanto riguarda le signore, erano già a letto, dietro la tenda rossa che veniva accuratamente tirata e fissata al centro; tuttavia, poiché ogni colpo di tosse, starnuto o sussurro proveniente dietro quella tenda era perfettamente udibile, avevamo comunque la sensazione di essere in loro compagnia.
The politeness of the person in authority had secured to me a shelf in a nook near this red curtain, in some degree removed from the great body of sleepers: to which place I retired, with many acknowledgments to him for his attention. I found it, on after-measurement, just the width of an ordinary sheet of Bath post letter-paper; and I was at first in some uncertainty as to the best means of getting into it. But the shelf being a bottom one, I finally determined on lying upon the floor, rolling gently in, stopping immediately I touched the mattress, and remaining for the night with that side uppermost, whatever it might be. Luckily, I came upon my back at exactly the right moment. I was much alarmed on looking upward, to see, by the shape of his half-yard of sacking (which his weight had bent into an exceedingly tight bag), that there was a very heavy gentleman above me, whom the slender cords seemed quite incapable of holding; and I could not help reflecting upon the grief of my wife and family in the event of his coming down in the night. But as I could not have got up again without a severe bodily struggle, which might have alarmed the ladies; and as I had nowhere to go to, even if I had; I shut my eyes upon the danger, and remained there.
One of two remarkable circumstances is indisputably a fact, with reference to that class of society who travel in these boats. Either they carry their restlessness to such a pitch that they never sleep at all; or they expectorate in dreams, which would be a remarkable mingling of the real and ideal. All night long, and every night, on this canal, there was a perfect storm and tempest of spitting; and once my coat, being in the very centre of the hurricane sustained by five gentlemen (which moved vertically, strictly carrying out Reid’s Theory of the Law of Storms), I was fain the next morning to lay it on the deck, and rub it down with fair water before it was in a condition to be worn again.
Between five and six o’clock in the morning we got up, and some of us went on deck, to give them an opportunity of taking the shelves down; while others, the morning being very cold, crowded round the rusty stove, cherishing the newly kindled fire, and filling the grate with those voluntary contributions of which they had been so liberal all night. The washing accommodations were primitive. There was a tin ladle chained to the deck, with which every gentleman who thought it necessary to cleanse himself (many were superior to this weakness), fished the dirty water out of the canal, and poured it into a tin basin, secured in like manner. There was also a jack-towel. And, hanging up before a little looking-glass in the bar, in the immediate vicinity of the bread and cheese and biscuits, were a public comb and hair-brush.
At eight o’clock, the shelves being taken down and put away and the tables joined together, everybody sat down to the tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, all over again. Some were fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on their plates at once. As each gentleman got through his own personal amount of tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, he rose up and walked off. When everybody had done with everything, the fragments were cleared away: and one of the waiters appearing anew in the character of a barber, shaved such of the company as desired to be shaved; while the remainder looked on, or yawned over their newspapers. Dinner was breakfast again, without the tea and coffee; and supper and breakfast were identical.
There was a man on board this boat, with a light fresh-coloured face, and a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, who was the most inquisitive fellow that can possibly be imagined. He never spoke otherwise than interrogatively. He was an embodied inquiry. Sitting down or standing up, still or moving, walking the deck or taking his meals, there he was, with a great note of interrogation in each eye, two in his cocked ears, two more in his turned-up nose and chin, at least half a dozen more about the corners of his mouth, and the largest one of all in his hair, which was brushed pertly off his forehead in a flaxen clump. Every button in his clothes said, ‘Eh? What’s that? Did you speak? Say that again, will you?’ He was always wide awake, like the enchanted bride who drove her husband frantic; always restless; always thirsting for answers; perpetually seeking and never finding. There never was such a curious man.
I wore a fur great-coat at that time, and before we were well clear of the wharf, he questioned me concerning it, and its price, and where I bought it, and when, and what fur it was, and what it weighed, and what it cost. Then he took notice of my watch, and asked me what that cost, and whether it was a French watch, and where I got it, and how I got it, and whether I bought it or had it given me, and how it went, and where the key-hole was, and when I wound it, every night or every morning, and whether I ever forgot to wind it at all, and if I did, what then? Where had I been to last, and where was I going next, and where was I going after that, and had I seen the President, and what did he say, and what did I say, and what did he say when I had said that? Eh? Lor now! do tell!
Finding that nothing would satisfy him, I evaded his questions after the first score or two, and in particular pleaded ignorance respecting the name of the fur whereof the coat was made. I am unable to say whether this was the reason, but that coat fascinated him afterwards; he usually kept close behind me as I walked, and moved as I moved, that he might look at it the better; and he frequently dived into narrow places after me at the risk of his life, that he might have the satisfaction of passing his hand up the back, and rubbing it the wrong way.
La gentilezza di quella persona in posizione di autorità mi aveva garantito uno spazio su uno scaffale, nascosto in un angolo vicino a questa tenda rossa, piuttosto lontano dal resto dei letti. Mi ritirai lì, ringraziandola molto per la sua attenzione. Dopo averne misurato le dimensioni, scoprii che aveva esattamente la larghezza di una normale carta da lettera; all’inizio non sapevo bene come infilarmici dentro. Ma poiché lo scaffale era posto sul fondo, decisi di sdraiarmi a terra e rotolarmi lentamente dentro, fermandomi non appena toccavo il materasso. Rimasi lì tutta la notte, con quel lato rivolto verso l’alto. Per fortuna, atterrai sulla schiena nel momento giusto. Quando alzai lo sguardo, vidi che sopra di me c’era un signore molto pesante; le sottili corde che lo tenevano fermo sembravano del tutto inadeguate. Non potevo fare a meno di pensare alla tristezza di mia moglie e della mia famiglia se fosse caduto durante la notte. Ma poiché non avrei potuto alzarmi senza causare rumore, che avrebbe potuto allarmare le donne presenti, e poiché non avevo nessun altro posto dove andare, chiusi gli occhi di fronte a quel pericolo e rimasi lì.
Una di queste due circostanze straordinarie è indubbiamente un fatto, soprattutto per quanto riguarda quella classe sociale che viaggia su questi battelli. O portano la loro inquietudine a tal punto da non riuscire mai a dormire; oppure sputano nei sogni, il che rappresenterebbe una strana mescolanza di reale e ideale. Per tutta la notte, e ogni notte su questo canale, si verificava un vero e proprio “uragano” di sputi; una volta, il mio cappotto, trovandosi esattamente al centro di questa tempesta causata da cinque signori che si muovevano verticalmente, seguendo fedelmente la Teoria delle Tempeste di Reid, dovette essere lavato con acqua pulita il giorno dopo prima di poter essere indossato di nuovo.
Tra le cinque e le sei del mattino ci alzammo; alcuni di noi andarono sul ponte per dare loro l’opportunità di togliere gli scaffali; altri, poiché faceva molto freddo, si radunarono intorno al camino arrugginito, godendosi il fuoco appena acceso e riempiendo la griglia con quei materiali che avevano generosamente offerto durante tutta la notte. Gli impianti per lavarsi erano molto rudimentali: c’era un mestolo di latta fissato al ponte, con il quale ogni uomo che ritenesse necessario pulirsi (molti, in realtà, erano superiori a questa debolezza) raccoglieva l’acqua sporca dal canale e la versava in una bacinella di latta anch’essa fissata al ponte. C’era anche un asciugamano di carta. Infine, appeso davanti a uno specchietto nel bar, nelle immediate vicinanze del pane, del 形式：formaggio e dei biscotti, c’erano un pettine e una spazzola pubblici.
Alle otto in punto, dopo che gli scaffali furono smontati e riposti e i tavoli messi insieme, tutti si sedettero a mangiare tè, caffè, pane, burro, salmone, persico, fegato, bistecca, patate, sottaceti, prosciutto, costolette, budini neri e salsicce, proprio come prima. Alcuni amavano combinare tutti questi cibi insieme e averli tutti sul proprio piatto contemporaneamente. Quando ogni signore aveva finito di mangiare la propria razione di tè, caffè, pane, burro, salmone, persico, fegato, bistecca, patate, sottaceti, prosciutto, costolette, budini neri e salsicce, si alzava e se ne andava. Quando tutti avevano finito di mangiare, i resti venivano rimossi; uno dei camerieri ricompariva poi in veste di barbiere e rasava chi lo desiderava, mentre gli altri guardavano o sbadigliavano leggendo i loro giornali. La cena diventava di nuovo colazione, senza tè né caffè; e la cena e la colazione erano identiche.
C’era un uomo su questa barca, con il viso chiaro e luminoso e indossando abiti di colore grigio-marrone; era l’uomo più curioso che si possa immaginare. Non parlava mai in altro modo se non con domande. Era una vera e propria incarnazione della curiosità: seduto o in piedi, fermo o in movimento, camminando sul ponte o mangiando, era sempre lì, con uno sguardo pieno di interrogativi negli occhi, altri due nelle sue orecchie inclinate, altri ancora nel suo naso e nella sua mascella sollevata; almeno una mezza dozzina intorno alle sue labbra. E il più grande di tutti in quei capelli, che gli ricadevano ordinatamente sulla fronte in ciocche bionde. Ogni bottone dei suoi vestiti sembrava dire: “Eh? Cosa è stato? Hai detto qualcosa? Ripetilo, per favore, ” Era sempre completamente sveglio, come la sposa incantata che faceva impazzire suo marito; inquieto, assetato di risposte, alla ricerca costante, ma senza mai trovarle. Non esisteva davvero un uomo più curioso di lui.
In quel momento indossavo un grande cappotto di pelliccia; prima ancora che fossimo completamente lontani dal molo, lui iniziò a farmi domande su di esso: il prezzo, dove e quando l’avevo comprato, di quale tipo di pelliccia fosse fatto, quanto pesasse. Poi si concentrò sul mio orologio, chiedendomi quanto costasse, se fosse francese, dove l’avessi ottenuto, come l’avessi avuto, se l’avevo comprato o me l’era stato regalato, come funzionava, dove si trovava il foro della chiave per caricarlo. Mi chiese anche ogni sera o ogni mattina se lo caricassi mai, e cosa sarebbe successo se lo avessi dimenticato; dove fossi stato l’ultima volta, dove stessi andando ora, dove sarei andato dopo. Se avevo incontrato il Presidente, cosa gli avevo detto, e cosa lui aveva risposto. Eh? Davvero, dimmelo!
Rendendomi conto che nulla avrebbe potuto soddisfarlo, evitai le sue domande dopo il primo o il secondo tentativo di rispondere, e in particolare dichiarai di non conoscere il nome del pelo con cui era fatto quel cappotto. Non so se questo sia stato il motivo, ma da allora quel cappotto lo affascinò moltissimo; di solito mi seguiva da vicino mentre camminavo, muovendosi insieme a me per poterlo osservare meglio; spesso addirittura si infilava in posti stretti alle mie spalle, rischiando la vita, solo per potersi compiacere nel passare la mano sulla sua superficie e strofinarla nella direzione sbagliata.
We had another odd specimen on board, of a different kind. This was a thin-faced, spare-figured man of middle age and stature, dressed in a dusty drabbish-coloured suit, such as I never saw before. He was perfectly quiet during the first part of the journey: indeed I don’t remember having so much as seen him until he was brought out by circumstances, as great men often are. The conjunction of events which made him famous, happened, briefly, thus.
The canal extends to the foot of the mountain, and there, of course, it stops; the passengers being conveyed across it by land carriage, and taken on afterwards by another canal boat, the counterpart of the first, which awaits them on the other side. There are two canal lines of passage-boats; one is called The Express, and one (a cheaper one) The Pioneer. The Pioneer gets first to the mountain, and waits for the Express people to come up; both sets of passengers being conveyed across it at the same time. We were the Express company; but when we had crossed the mountain, and had come to the second boat, the proprietors took it into their beads to draft all the Pioneers into it likewise, so that we were five-and-forty at least, and the accession of passengers was not at all of that kind which improved the prospect of sleeping at night. Our people grumbled at this, as people do in such cases; but suffered the boat to be towed off with the whole freight aboard nevertheless; and away we went down the canal. At home, I should have protested lustily, but being a foreigner here, I held my peace. Not so this passenger. He cleft a path among the people on deck (we were nearly all on deck), and without addressing anybody whomsoever, soliloquised as follows:
‘This may suit you, this may, but it don’t suit me. This may be all very well with Down Easters, and men of Boston raising, but it won’t suit my figure nohow; and no two ways about that; and so I tell you. Now! I’m from the brown forests of Mississippi, I am, and when the sun shines on me, it does shine—a little. It don’t glimmer where I live, the sun don’t. No. I’m a brown forester, I am. I an’t a Johnny Cake. There are no smooth skins where I live. We’re rough men there. Rather. If Down Easters and men of Boston raising like this, I’m glad of it, but I’m none of that raising nor of that breed. No. This company wants a little fixing, it does. I’m the wrong sort of man for ’em, I am. They won’t like me, they won’t. This is piling of it up, a little too mountainous, this is.’ At the end of every one of these short sentences he turned upon his heel, and walked the other way; checking himself abruptly when he had finished another short sentence, and turning back again.
It is impossible for me to say what terrific meaning was hidden in the words of this brown forester, but I know that the other passengers looked on in a sort of admiring horror, and that presently the boat was put back to the wharf, and as many of the Pioneers as could be coaxed or bullied into going away, were got rid of.
When we started again, some of the boldest spirits on board, made bold to say to the obvious occasion of this improvement in our prospects, ‘Much obliged to you, sir;’ whereunto the brown forester (waving his hand, and still walking up and down as before), replied, ‘No you an’t. You’re none o’ my raising. You may act for yourselves, you may. I have pinted out the way. Down Easters and Johnny Cakes can follow if they please. I an’t a Johnny Cake, I an’t. I am from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am’—and so on, as before. He was unanimously voted one of the tables for his bed at night—there is a great contest for the tables—in consideration for his public services: and he had the warmest corner by the stove throughout the rest of the journey. But I never could find out that he did anything except sit there; nor did I hear him speak again until, in the midst of the bustle and turmoil of getting the luggage ashore in the dark at Pittsburg, I stumbled over him as he sat smoking a cigar on the cabin steps, and heard him muttering to himself, with a short laugh of defiance, ‘I an’t a Johnny Cake,—I an’t. I’m from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am, damme!’ I am inclined to argue from this, that he had never left off saying so; but I could not make an affidavit of that part of the story, if required to do so by my Queen and Country.
As we have not reached Pittsburg yet, however, in the order of our narrative, I may go on to remark that breakfast was perhaps the least desirable meal of the day, as in addition to the many savoury odours arising from the eatables already mentioned, there were whiffs of gin, whiskey, brandy, and rum, from the little bar hard by, and a decided seasoning of stale tobacco. Many of the gentlemen passengers were far from particular in respect of their linen, which was in some cases as yellow as the little rivulets that had trickled from the corners of their mouths in chewing, and dried there. Nor was the atmosphere quite free from zephyr whisperings of the thirty beds which had just been cleared away, and of which we were further and more pressingly reminded by the occasional appearance on the table-cloth of a kind of Game, not mentioned in the Bill of Fare.
And yet despite these oddities—and even they had, for me at least, a humour of their own—there was much in this mode of travelling which I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look back upon with great pleasure. Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o’clock in the morning, from the tainted cabin to the dirty deck; scooping up the icy water, plunging one’s head into it, and drawing it out, all fresh and glowing with the cold; was a good thing. The fast, brisk walk upon the towing-path, between that time and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came gleaming off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when one lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue sky; the gliding on at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills, sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red, burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by noise of wheels or steam, or any other sound than the limpid rippling of the water as the boat went on: all these were pure delights.
A bordo avevamo un altro esemplare strano, di tipo diverso. Si trattava di un uomo di mezza età, dal viso magro e dalla corporatura snella, vestito con un abito color polvere che non avevo mai visto prima. Durante la prima parte del viaggio rimase perfettamente in silenzio; anzi, non ricordo nemmeno di averlo notato fino a quando le circostanze lo fecero emergere, come spesso accade per le grandi personalità. La sequenza di eventi che lo resero famoso avvenne, in breve, nel seguente modo.
Il canale si estende fino ai piedi della montagna, e lì, naturalmente, finisce; i passeggeri vengono trasportati attraverso di esso con veicoli terrestri e successivamente presi su da un’altra barca del canale, la controparte della prima, che li aspetta dall’altra parte. Ci sono due linee di barche del canale: una si chiama “Express” e l’altra, più economica, “Pioneer”. La barca “Pioneer” arriva per prima alla montagna e aspetta che arrivino i passeggeri dell’“Express”; entrambi i gruppi di viaggiatori vengono trasportati attraverso il canale nello stesso tempo. Noi appartenevamo al servizio “Express”; ma quando abbiamo attraversato la montagna e siamo arrivati alla seconda barca, i proprietari hanno deciso di far salire anche tutti i passeggeri della barca “Pioneer”, così che il numero totale dei passeggeri è aumentato a almeno cinquantaquattro. E l’aggiunta di nuovi passeggeri non ha affatto migliorato le possibilità di dormire bene di notte. I nostri compagni di viaggio si sono lamentati, come fanno in questi casi; ma hanno comunque permesso che la barca partisse con tutto il carico a bordo. E così siamo ripartiti lungo il canale. A >casa, avrei protestato energicamente; ma essendo un straniero qui, ho preferito tacere. Non lo stesso valeva per questo passeggero: si è fatto strada tra la folla sul ponte (eravamo quasi tutti lì) e, senza rivolgersi a nessuno in particolare, ha iniziato a parlare da solo.
“Questo potrebbe andare bene per te, forse sì, ma non per me. Forse è perfetto per le persone del Nord o per gli uomini di Boston, ma assolutamente non si adatta alla mia corporatura. E basta dire. Io vengo dalle foreste marroni del Mississippi; quando il sole splende su di me, beh, splende un po’, almeno. Lì dove vivo, il sole non lampeggia nemmeno. No. Sono un uomo delle foreste marroni, non uno di quelli lisci e puliti. Non ci sono pelle lisce nel posto dove vivo. Siamo gente rude, lì. Se a loro piace così, bene. Ma io non appartengo a quella categoria, né a quella razza. Questa compagnia ha bisogno di qualche modifica. Ma io non sono il tipo adatto per loro. Non gli piacerò, ” Alla fine di ogni una di queste brevi frasi, si girava su tutte le furie e se ne andava nella direzione opposta; poi, dopo aver pronunciato un’altra frase breve, si fermava di colpo e tornava indietro.
È impossibile per me dire quale terribile significato si nascondesse nelle parole di questo boscaiolo bruno, ma so che gli altri passeggeri lo guardavano con una sorta di ammirazione e orrore; in breve, la barca fu riportata al molo e molti dei “Pionieri”, quelli che poterono essere convinti o costretti ad andarsene, furono allontanati.
Quando riprendemmo il viaggio, alcuni dei più coraggiosi tra noi osarono dire, in occasione di questo miglioramento delle nostre prospettive: “Grazie mille, signore”; al che il boscaiolo bruno (che continuava a gire su e giù, agitando la mano), rispose: “No, non siete voi a dovermi ringraziare. Non siete stati voi ad aiutarmi. Potete fare ciò che volete da soli. Io ho solo indicato la strada. Chi vuole può seguirla; ma io non sono uno di loro. Vengo dalle foreste brune del Mississippi, ecco tutto.” La sera stessa fu eletto all’unanimità per occupare un posto accanto al camino. C’era una grande competizione per ottenere quei posti, in riconoscimento dei suoi servizi. E per il resto del viaggio ebbe sempre il posto più caldo vicino al camino. Tuttavia non riuscii mai a scoprire che facesse altro se non sedersi lì; né lo sentii parlare di nuovo, fino a quando, nel caos e nella confusione del momento dello sbarco a Pittsburgh, non lo incrociai mentre fumava una sigara sulle scale della cabina. Lo sentii mormorare tra sé, con una breve risata di sfida: “Non sono uno di loro. Vengo dalle foreste brune del Mississippi, ecco tutto.” Sono incline a pensare che continuasse sempre a ripetere queste parole. Ma non potrei mai giurare su questo particolare aspetto della storia, se mi venisse chiesto dal mio Re e dal mio Paese.
Poiché non siamo ancora arrivati a Pittsburgh, posso continuare la mia narrazione osservando che la colazione era probabilmente il pasto meno desiderabile della giornata: oltre ai numerosi odori saporiti provenienti dai cibi già menzionati, c’erano anche sentori di gin, whisky, brandy e rum provenienti dal piccolo bar vicino, nonché un forte odore di tabacco stantio. Molti dei passeggeri uomini non erano affatto particolari riguardo ai loro indumenti intimi, i quali, in alcuni casi, erano altrettanto gialli quanto i piccoli rivoli di saliva che si formavano agli angoli delle loro bocche durante il masticare e poi si asciugavano lì. L’atmosfera non era nemmeno del tutto priva dei “sussurri” dei trenta letti appena sgombrati, di cui venivamo costantemente ricordati dall’apparizione occasionale, sul tovagliolo, di certi cibi non menzionati nel menu.
Eppure, nonostante queste stranezze – e anche queste, almeno per me, avevano il loro proprio umorismo – c’era molto in questo modo di viaggiare che mi piaceva davvero molto all’epoca e del quale ricordo con grande gioia. Anche correre a petto nudo alle cinque di mattina, dalla cabina impregnata d’umidità al ponte sporco; raccogliere l’acqua gelida, immergere la testa dentro e poi tirarla fuori, fresca e scintillante per il freddo, era davvero una bella cosa. Il rapido cammino lungo il sentiero di traino, tra quell’ora e la colazione, quando ogni vena e arteria sembrava vibrare di salute; la meravigliosa bellezza del primo giorno, quando la luce brillava su tutto intorno; il movimento lento della barca, mentre ci si sdraiava pigramente sul ponte, guardando attraverso il cielo azzurro profondo. Il procedere silenzioso di notte, oltre colline cuphe e alberi scuri, a volte illuminati da un punto rosso ardente dove uomini invisibili si accovacciavano intorno a un fuoco; il bagliore delle stelle luminose, non disturbato dal rumore di ruote o vapore, né da alcun altro suono se non quello dell’acqua che scorreva limpida mentre la barca procedeva. Tutto questo rappresentava vere e proprie delizie.
Then there were new settlements and detached log-cabins and frame-houses, full of interest for strangers from an old country: cabins with simple ovens, outside, made of clay; and lodgings for the pigs nearly as good as many of the human quarters; broken windows, patched with worn-out hats, old clothes, old boards, fragments of blankets and paper; and home-made dressers standing in the open air without the door, whereon was ranged the household store, not hard to count, of earthen jars and pots. The eye was pained to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat, and seldom to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks and twisted branches steeped in its unwholesome water. It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon great tracts where settlers had been burning down the trees, and where their wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while here and there some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two withered arms, and seemed to call down curses on his foes. Sometimes, at night, the way wound through some lonely gorge, like a mountain pass in Scotland, shining and coldly glittering in the light of the moon, and so closed in by high steep hills all round, that there seemed to be no egress save through the narrower path by which we had come, until one rugged hill-side seemed to open, and shutting out the moonlight as we passed into its gloomy throat, wrapped our new course in shade and darkness.
We had left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived at the foot of the mountain, which is crossed by railroad. There are ten inclined planes; five ascending, and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between, being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveller gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages travelling together; and while proper precautions are taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.
It was very pretty travelling thus, at a rapid pace along the heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing: terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow’s work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind. It was amusing, too, when we had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other moving power than the weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long after us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of green and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for the least surprise. But it stopped short of us in a very business-like manner when we reached the canal: and, before we left the wharf, went panting up this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our arrival for the means of traversing the road by which we had come.
On the Monday evening, furnace fires and clanking hammers on the banks of the canal, warned us that we approached the termination of this part of our journey. After going through another dreamy place—a long aqueduct across the Alleghany River, which was stranger than the bridge at Harrisburg, being a vast, low, wooden chamber full of water—we emerged upon that ugly confusion of backs of buildings and crazy galleries and stairs, which always abuts on water, whether it be river, sea, canal, or ditch: and were at Pittsburg.
Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works. Besides the prison to which I have already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other institutions. It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany River, over which there are two bridges; and the villas of the wealthier citizens sprinkled about the high grounds in the neighbourhood, are pretty enough. We lodged at a most excellent hotel, and were admirably served. As usual it was full of boarders, was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story of the house.
We tarried here three days. Our next point was Cincinnati: and as this was a steamboat journey, and western steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season, it was advisable to collect opinions in reference to the comparative safety of the vessels bound that way, then lying in the river. One called the Messenger was the best recommended. She had been advertised to start positively, every day for a fortnight or so, and had not gone yet, nor did her captain seem to have any very fixed intention on the subject. But this is the custom: for if the law were to bind down a free and independent citizen to keep his word with the public, what would become of the liberty of the subject? Besides, it is in the way of trade. And if passengers be decoyed in the way of trade, and people be inconvenienced in the way of trade, what man, who is a sharp tradesman himself, shall say, ‘We must put a stop to this?’
Impressed by the deep solemnity of the public announcement, I (being then ignorant of these usages) was for hurrying on board in a breathless state, immediately; but receiving private and confidential information that the boat would certainly not start until Friday, April the First, we made ourselves very comfortable in the mean while, and went on board at noon that day.
Poi ci furono nuove insediamenti e capanne di tronchi separati, case in legno, che suscitavano grande interesse negli occhi degli stranieri provenienti da paesi più antichi: capanne con semplici forni esterni fatti di argilla; e abitazioni per i maiali quasi altrettanto buone quanto molte delle abitazioni umane. Finestre rotte, riparate con cappelli logori, vecchi vestiti, assi vecchi, frammenti di coperte e carta. Armadi fatti in casa, esposti all’aperto senza porte, nei quali erano disposte le poche cose possedute: vasi di terracotta e pentole. Era doloroso vedere i tronchi degli alberi grandi sparsi ovunque nei campi di grano; raramente si poteva evitare di attraversare paludi stagnanti e fangose, piene di centinaia di tronchi marci e rami contorti immersi in acque malsane. Era davvero triste e opprimente incontrare vaste aree dove gli insediatori avevano bruciato gli alberi; i loro corpi feriti giacevano dappertutto, come quelli di creature assassinate. Qui e lì, qualche gigantesco albero carbonizzato tendeva ancora verso l’alto le sue braccia secche, sembrando maledire i suoi nemici. A volte, di notte, il sentiero serpeggiava attraverso gole desolate, simili a passi di montagna in Scozia: brillavano freddamente alla luce della luna, e le alte colline circostanti rendevano impossibile uscire se non per il sentiero stretto da cui eravamo arrivati. Fino a quando, all’improvviso, una ripida parete di montagna sembrava aprirsi davanti a noi; oscurando la luna mentre vi entravamo, avvolgeva il nostro nuovo cammino nella penombra e nell’oscurità.
Eravamo partiti da Harrisburg venerdì. Domenica mattina arrivammo ai piedi della montagna, attraversata dalla ferrovia. Ci sono dieci piani inclinati: cinque in salita e cinque in discesa; i vagoni vengono trascinati su quelli in salita e fatti scendere lentamente da quelli in discesa grazie a motori fissi; gli spazi relativamente piani tra di loro vengono attraversati, a seconda delle necessità, talvolta da cavalli e talvolta da motrici. A volte i binari sono posizionati sul bordo estremo di ripide scogliere; guardando fuori dal finestrino del vagone, il viaggiatore può vedere giù dritto, senza alcuna pietra o recinzione a separare, nelle profondità della montagna. Tuttavia, il percorso è gestito con grande attenzione: viaggiano soltanto due vagoni insieme, e se si adottano le dovute precauzioni, i pericoli non sono da temere.
Era davvero molto bello viaggiare in quel modo: a velocità elevata lungo le cime della montagna, sotto un forte vento, per poi guardare giù in una valle piena di luce e dolcezza; intravedere, tra i rami degli alberi, capanne sparse qua e là; bambini che correvano verso le porte delle case; cani che uscivano abbaiando. Li potevamo vedere senza sentire il loro abbaiare; maiali spaventati che scappavano a casa; famiglie sedute nei loro semplici giardini; mucche che guardavano in su con indifferenza; uomini in maniche di camicia che osservavano le loro case ancora in costruzione, pianificando il lavoro del giorno dopo. E noi continuavamo a viaggiare, molto in alto sopra di loro, come un tornado. Era anche divertente: dopo aver pranzato, scendevamo lungo un passo ripido, utilizzando soltanto il peso delle carrozze per avanzare. Poi, molto dopo di noi, l’ locomotiva si staccava e scendeva da sola, ronzando come un grande insetto; la sua parte posteriore, verde e dorata, brillava al sole in modo così intenso che, se avesse spiegato le ali e volato via, nessuno si sarebbe sorpreso. Ma quando arrivavamo al canale, l’ locomotiva si fermava in modo molto efficiente; e prima ancora di lasciare il molo, risaliva su questa collina, insieme ai passeggeri che avevano aspettato il nostro arrivo per poter utilizzare la strada attraverso cui eravamo venuti.
Nella serata di lunedì, i fuochi delle fornaci e il rumore degli martelli sui bordi del canale ci avvisarono che stavamo per raggiungere la fine di questa parte del nostro viaggio. Dopo essere passati attraverso un altro luogo incantevole – un lungo acquedotto che attraversava il fiume Alleghany, ancora più strano del ponte di Harrisburg, poiché si trattava di una vasta e bassa struttura in legno piena d’acqua – emergemmo in quella brutta confusione di edifici, gallerie e scale che si affacciano sempre sull’acqua, che si tratti di fiume, mare, canale o fossato: eravamo arrivati a Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh è simile a Birmingham in Inghilterra; almeno così dicono i suoi abitanti. A parte le strade, i negozi, le case, i carri, le fabbriche, gli edifici pubblici e la popolazione, forse lo è davvero. Certo, ha una grande quantità di fumo nell’aria e è famosa per le sue ferriere. Oltre alla prigione di cui ho già parlato, questa città possiede anche un notevole arsenale e altre strutture. Si trova in una posizione molto bella sulle rive del fiume Alleghany, su cui si ergono due ponti; inoltre, le ville dei cittadini più ricchi sparse nelle zone collinari circostanti sono piuttosto belle. Abbiamo soggiornato in un hotel eccellente, dove ci è stato fornito un servizio impeccabile. Come al solito, l’hotel era pieno di ospiti, molto grande e dotato di ampie colonne su ogni piano dell’edificio.
Rimanemmo qui per tre giorni. Il nostro prossimo obiettivo era Cincinnati; poiché si trattava di un viaggio in battello a vapore, e i battelli a vapore occidentali di solito esplodono uno o due al mese durante la stagione, fu opportuno raccogliere pareri riguardo alla sicurezza relativa di questi mezzi navigabili che si dirigevano in quella direzione. Uno di questi battelli, chiamato “Messenger”, veniva raccomandato con particolare favore. Era stato pubblicizzato come un mezzo affidabile, pronto a partire regolarmente ogni giorno per circa quindici giorni, ma ancora non aveva preso il via; inoltre, il suo capitano non sembrava avere una decisione definita al riguardo. Ma così è la prassi. Se infatti le leggi costringessero un cittadino libero e indipendente a mantenere le sue promesse verso il pubblico, quale sarebbe allora il destino della libertà stessa? Inoltre, tutto ciò influisce negativamente sul commercio. E se i passeggeri vengono ingannati a scopo commerciale, e la gente subisce disagi a causa di questo, quale uomo, che sia lui stesso un abile commerciante, oserebbe dire: “Dobbiamo porre fine a tutto ciò”?
Impressionato dalla profonda solennità di quell’annuncio pubblico, io (che allora ignoravo queste usanze) avrei voluto salire a bordo immediatamente, in uno stato di agitazione; ma ricevuta informazione riservata e affidabile secondo cui la barca non sarebbe partita prima di venerdì 1° aprile, ci rilassammo e salimmo a bordo alle mezzogiorno dello stesso giorno.
CHAPTER XI FROM PITTSBURG TO CINCINNATI IN A WESTERN STEAMBOAT. CINCINNATI
THE Messenger was one among a crowd of high-pressure steamboats, clustered together by a wharf-side, which, looked down upon from the rising ground that forms the landing-place, and backed by the lofty bank on the opposite side of the river, appeared no larger than so many floating models. She had some forty passengers on board, exclusive of the poorer persons on the lower deck; and in half an hour, or less, proceeded on her way.
We had, for ourselves, a tiny state-room with two berths in it, opening out of the ladies’ cabin. There was, undoubtedly, something satisfactory in this ‘location,’ inasmuch as it was in the stern, and we had been a great many times very gravely recommended to keep as far aft as possible, ‘because the steamboats generally blew up forward.’ Nor was this an unnecessary caution, as the occurrence and circumstances of more than one such fatality during our stay sufficiently testified. Apart from this source of self-congratulation, it was an unspeakable relief to have any place, no matter how confined, where one could be alone: and as the row of little chambers of which this was one, had each a second glass-door besides that in the ladies’ cabin, which opened on a narrow gallery outside the vessel, where the other passengers seldom came, and where one could sit in peace and gaze upon the shifting prospect, we took possession of our new quarters with much pleasure.
If the native packets I have already described be unlike anything we are in the habit of seeing on water, these western vessels are still more foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.
In the first place, they have no mast, cordage, tackle, rigging, or other such boat-like gear; nor have they anything in their shape at all calculated to remind one of a boat’s head, stem, sides, or keel. Except that they are in the water, and display a couple of paddle-boxes, they might be intended, for anything that appears to the contrary, to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountain top. There is no visible deck, even: nothing but a long, black, ugly roof covered with burnt-out feathery sparks; above which tower two iron chimneys, and a hoarse escape valve, and a glass steerage-house. Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state-rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men: the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water’s edge: and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge’s deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path.
Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood: the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck: under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months’ standing: one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that any journey should be safely made.
Within, there is one long narrow cabin, the whole length of the boat; from which the state-rooms open, on both sides. A small portion of it at the stern is partitioned off for the ladies; and the bar is at the opposite extreme. There is a long table down the centre, and at either end a stove. The washing apparatus is forward, on the deck. It is a little better than on board the canal boat, but not much. In all modes of travelling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of illness is referable to this cause.
We are to be on board the Messenger three days: arriving at Cincinnati (barring accidents) on Monday morning. There are three meals a day. Breakfast at seven, dinner at half-past twelve, supper about six. At each, there are a great many small dishes and plates upon the table, with very little in them; so that although there is every appearance of a mighty ‘spread,’ there is seldom really more than a joint: except for those who fancy slices of beet-root, shreds of dried beef, complicated entanglements of yellow pickle; maize, Indian corn, apple-sauce, and pumpkin.
Some people fancy all these little dainties together (and sweet preserves beside), by way of relish to their roast pig. They are generally those dyspeptic ladies and gentlemen who eat unheard-of quantities of hot corn bread (almost as good for the digestion as a kneaded pin-cushion), for breakfast, and for supper. Those who do not observe this custom, and who help themselves several times instead, usually suck their knives and forks meditatively, until they have decided what to take next: then pull them out of their mouths: put them in the dish; help themselves; and fall to work again. At dinner, there is nothing to drink upon the table, but great jugs full of cold water. Nobody says anything, at any meal, to anybody. All the passengers are very dismal, and seem to have tremendous secrets weighing on their minds. There is no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove, when the meal is over. Every man sits down, dull and languid; swallows his fare as if breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, were necessities of nature never to be coupled with recreation or enjoyment; and having bolted his food in a gloomy silence, bolts himself, in the same state. But for these animal observances, you might suppose the whole male portion of the company to be the melancholy ghosts of departed book-keepers, who had fallen dead at the desk: such is their weary air of business and calculation. Undertakers on duty would be sprightly beside them; and a collation of funeral-baked meats, in comparison with these meals, would be a sparkling festivity.
CAPITOLO XI
Da Pittsburgh a Cincinnati su una nave a vapore occidentale. Cincinnati
La nave messaggera era una tra molte altre navi a vapore ad alta pressione, raggruppate lungo il molo. Vista dal terreno elevato dove si trovava il punto di sbarco, e con il ripido argine sul lato opposto del fiume alle sue spalle, sembrava non essere più grande di tanti modellini galleggianti. A bordo c’erano circa quaranta passeggeri, senza contare le persone più povere che si trovavano sul ponte inferiore; e in mezz’ora, o meno, la nave riprese il suo viaggio.
Avevamo a disposizione, per noi soli, una piccolissima cabina con due letti, che si apriva sulla cabina delle signore. C’era senza dubbio qualcosa di soddisfacente in questa “ubicazione”, poiché si trovava nella parte posteriore della nave, e ci era stato più volte consigliato vivamente di sistemarci il più possibile a poppa, “poiché le navi a vapore di solito esplodono nella parte anteriore”. Questo consiglio non era affatto superfluo, poiché l’aver assistito più volte a incidenti del genere durante la nostra permanenza ne era una prova evidente. Oltre a questo motivo di soddisfazione personale, era davvero un grande sollievo disporre di uno spazio, per quanto ristretto, dove poter essere soli; inoltre, poiché quella serie di piccole cabine aveva ciascuna una seconda porta vetrata, oltre a quella che si apriva sulla cabina delle signore e che dava su un corridoio stretto esterno alla nave, dove gli altri passeggeri raramente si recavano, potevamo sederci in pace e ammirare il paesaggio che cambiava continuamente. Così, abbiamo accolto con grande gioia la nostra nuova sistemazione.
Se i pacchi nativi che ho già descritto sono completamente diversi da quelli a cui siamo abituati di vedere sull’acqua, allora questi vascelli occidentali sono ancora più estranei a tutte le idee che abbiamo riguardo alle barche. Non so proprio a cosa paragonarli o come descriverli.
In primo luogo, non dispongono di albero maestro, cordame, attrezzature da navigazione o altro equipaggiamento tipico di una barca; inoltre, nulla nella loro forma può far pensare alla prua, allo scafo, ai fianchi o alla chiglia di un’imbarcazione. A parte il fatto che si trovino nell’acqua e presentino alcune casse per i remi, potrebbero essere destinati, a dispetto di quanto sembri, a svolgere qualche funzione misteriosa, in terraferma, sulla cima di una montagna. Non esiste nemmeno un ponte visibile: soltanto un lungo tetto nero e brutto, coperto da scintille annerite; sopra di esso si ergono due camini di ferro, una valvola di sfogo rauca e una piccola cabina di pilotaggio in vetro. Poi, man mano che lo sguardo scende verso l’acqua, i lati, le porte e le finestre delle stanze principali sono disposte in modo così strano da sembrare formare una piccola strada, costruita secondo i gusti diversi di una dozzina di persone. L’intero complesso è sostenuto da travi e pilastri posizionati su un barcaio sporco, ma a pochi centimetri sopra il livello dell’acqua; nello spazio ristretto tra questa struttura superiore e il ponte del barcaio si trovano i forni e le macchine, aperti su tutti i lati ai venti e alle piogge che li colpiscono.
Passando una di queste barche di notte e vedendo quella enorme massa di fuoco, esposta proprio come ho appena descritto, che divampa e ruggisce sotto quel fragile mucchio di legno dipinto; quella macchina, non protetta in alcun modo, che continua a funzionare in mezzo alla folla di oziosi, emigranti e bambini che affollano il ponte inferiore; gestita anche da uomini sconsiderati la cui conoscenza dei suoi segreti potrebbe risalire soltanto a sei mesi. Si ha immediatamente la sensazione che il miracolo non stia nel fatto che possano verificarsi così tanti incidenti fatali, ma che qualsiasi viaggio dovrebbe poter essere effettuato in sicurezza.
All’interno c’è una cabina lunga e stretta, che si estende per tutta la lunghezza della barca; da essa si aprono le stanze da letto su entrambi i lati. Una piccola parte nella parte posteriore è separata per le signore; il bancone si trova all’estremità opposta. C’è un lungo tavolo al centro, e ai due estremi ci sono dei fornelli. Gli attrezzi per lavarsi si trovano davanti, sul ponte. È un po’ meglio rispetto alle barche del canale, ma non di molto. In ogni tipo di viaggio, le abitudini americane riguardo ai mezzi per mantenere la pulizia personale e fare un bagno igienico sono estremamente trascurate e sporche; sono convinto che una notevole quantità di malattie sia dovuta a questa ragione.
Dovremo imbarcarci sul “Messenger” tra tre giorni: arriveremo a Cincinnati (a meno di incidenti) lunedì mattina. Ci sono tre pasti al giorno: colazione alle sette, cena alle dodici e mezza, cena serale verso le sei. A ogni pasto, sul tavolo ci sono moltissimi piatti e vassoi piccoli, ma con pochissimo cibo dentro; quindi, anche se sembra che ci sia una grande varietà di piatti, di solito ci sono solo poche portate, tranne per coloro che amano fette di barbabietola rossa, strisce di carne essiccata, insieme complicati di sottaceti gialli, mais, mais indiano, salsa di mele e zucca.
Alcune persone amano servire tutte queste piccole delizie insieme (insieme a dolci conservati), come guarnizione per il loro maiale arrosto. Di solito si tratta di quelle signore e signori con problemi digestivi che consumano quantità incredibili di pane di mais caldo a colazione e a cena, quasi quanto un cuscino di piume potrebbe essere benefico per la digestione! Chi non segue questa abitudine, invece, si sofferma spesso a pensare prima di prendere qualcosa da mangiare; poi tira fuori forchetta e coltello dalla bocca, li mette nel piatto, si serve e riprende il suo lavoro. A cena, non c’è nulla da bere sul tavolo se non grandi giare piene d’acqua fredda. Nessuno dice nulla, durante nessun pasto. Tutti i passeggeri sembrano molto tristi, come se avessero terribili segreti nel cuore. Non ci sono conversazioni, risate, allegria o socialità. A parte il fatto che tutti sputano in silenzio attorno al camino, dopo aver finito di mangiare. Ogni uomo si siede, apatico e stanco; ingoia il cibo come se colazioni, cene e pasti fossero semplicemente necessità della vita, mai legate a divertimento o piacere. E, dopo aver mangiato in un silenzio cupo, si ritira anch’egli nello stesso stato. Se non fosse per queste abitudini “animali”, si potrebbe pensare che tutta la parte maschile del gruppo fossero gli spettri malinconici di ex contabili morti davanti alla scrivania. Un’atmosfera così noiosa, piena di lavoro e calcoli. Accanto a loro, persino un impresario funebre sembrerebbe vivace. E un banchetto con carne arrostita per un funerale, rispetto a questi pasti, sarebbe davvero una festa gioiosa.
The people are all alike, too. There is no diversity of character. They travel about on the same errands, say and do the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow in the same dull cheerless round. All down the long table, there is scarcely a man who is in anything different from his neighbour. It is quite a relief to have, sitting opposite, that little girl of fifteen with the loquacious chin: who, to do her justice, acts up to it, and fully identifies nature’s handwriting, for of all the small chatterboxes that ever invaded the repose of drowsy ladies’ cabin, she is the first and foremost. The beautiful girl, who sits a little beyond her—farther down the table there—married the young man with the dark whiskers, who sits beyond her, only last month. They are going to settle in the very Far West, where he has lived four years, but where she has never been. They were both overturned in a stage-coach the other day (a bad omen anywhere else, where overturns are not so common), and his head, which bears the marks of a recent wound, is bound up still. She was hurt too, at the same time, and lay insensible for some days; bright as her eyes are, now.
Further down still, sits a man who is going some miles beyond their place of destination, to ‘improve’ a newly-discovered copper mine. He carries the village—that is to be—with him: a few frame cottages, and an apparatus for smelting the copper. He carries its people too. They are partly American and partly Irish, and herd together on the lower deck; where they amused themselves last evening till the night was pretty far advanced, by alternately firing off pistols and singing hymns.
They, and the very few who have been left at table twenty minutes, rise, and go away. We do so too; and passing through our little state-room, resume our seats in the quiet gallery without.
A fine broad river always, but in some parts much wider than in others: and then there is usually a green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams. Occasionally, we stop for a few minutes, maybe to take in wood, maybe for passengers, at some small town or village (I ought to say city, every place is a city here); but the banks are for the most part deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, hereabouts, are already in leaf and very green. For miles, and miles, and miles, these solitudes are unbroken by any sign of human life or trace of human footstep; nor is anything seen to move about them but the blue jay, whose colour is so bright, and yet so delicate, that it looks like a flying flower. At lengthened intervals a log cabin, with its little space of cleared land about it, nestles under a rising ground, and sends its thread of blue smoke curling up into the sky. It stands in the corner of the poor field of wheat, which is full of great unsightly stumps, like earthy butchers’-blocks. Sometimes the ground is only just now cleared: the felled trees lying yet upon the soil: and the log-house only this morning begun. As we pass this clearing, the settler leans upon his axe or hammer, and looks wistfully at the people from the world. The children creep out of the temporary hut, which is like a gipsy tent upon the ground, and clap their hands and shout. The dog only glances round at us, and then looks up into his master’s face again, as if he were rendered uneasy by any suspension of the common business, and had nothing more to do with pleasurers. And still there is the same, eternal foreground. The river has washed away its banks, and stately trees have fallen down into the stream. Some have been there so long, that they are mere dry, grizzly skeletons. Some have just toppled over, and having earth yet about their roots, are bathing their green heads in the river, and putting forth new shoots and branches. Some are almost sliding down, as you look at them. And some were drowned so long ago, that their bleached arms start out from the middle of the current, and seem to try to grasp the boat, and drag it under water.
Through such a scene as this, the unwieldy machine takes its hoarse, sullen way: venting, at every revolution of the paddles, a loud high-pressure blast; enough, one would think, to waken up the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound yonder: so old, that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck their roots into its earth; and so high, that it is a hill, even among the hills that Nature planted round it. The very river, as though it shared one’s feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence, hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this mound: and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly than in the Big Grave Creek.
All this I see as I sit in the little stern-gallery mentioned just now. Evening slowly steals upon the landscape and changes it before me, when we stop to set some emigrants ashore.
Five men, as many women, and a little girl. All their worldly goods are a bag, a large chest and an old chair: one, old, high-backed, rush-bottomed chair: a solitary settler in itself. They are rowed ashore in the boat, while the vessel stands a little off awaiting its return, the water being shallow. They are landed at the foot of a high bank, on the summit of which are a few log cabins, attainable only by a long winding path. It is growing dusk; but the sun is very red, and shines in the water and on some of the tree-tops, like fire.
The men get out of the boat first; help out the women; take out the bag, the chest, the chair; bid the rowers ‘good-bye;’ and shove the boat off for them. At the first plash of the oars in the water, the oldest woman of the party sits down in the old chair, close to the water’s edge, without speaking a word. None of the others sit down, though the chest is large enough for many seats. They all stand where they landed, as if stricken into stone; and look after the boat. So they remain, quite still and silent: the old woman and her old chair, in the centre the bag and chest upon the shore, without anybody heeding them all eyes fixed upon the boat. It comes alongside, is made fast, the men jump on board, the engine is put in motion, and we go hoarsely on again. There they stand yet, without the motion of a hand. I can see them through my glass, when, in the distance and increasing darkness, they are mere specks to the eye: lingering there still: the old woman in the old chair, and all the rest about her: not stirring in the least degree. And thus I slowly lose them.
Anche le persone sono tutte uguali: non c’è alcuna diversità di carattere. Viaggiano per gli stessi scopi, dicono e fanno le stesse cose esattamente nello stesso modo, seguendo sempre lo stesso ciclo monotono e senza gioia. Lungo tutta la lunga tavola, quasi nessuno è diverso dal proprio vicino. È davvero un sollievo avere di fronte a sé quella ragazzina di quindici anni con il mento loquace: a dire il vero, lei mantiene appieno le caratteristiche tipiche della “scrittura” della natura. Tra tutte quelle chiacchierone che hanno mai disturbato il riposo delle signore assonnate, lei è sicuramente la prima e la più rappresentativa. La bella ragazza che siede un po’ più in là, si è sposata lo scorso mese con quel giovane dall’ombra scura sulle guance che siede ancora oltre di lei. Andranno ad stabilirsi nel Far West, dove lui ha vissuto per quattro anni, ma dove lei non è mai stata. L’altro giorno sono stati entrambi rovesciati in una carrozza. Un cattivo presagio, in qualunque altro posto, dove simili incidenti non siano così comuni. La sua testa, ancora bendata a causa di una ferita recente, mostra chiaramente i segni dell’incidente. Anche lei è stata ferita nello stesso momento ed è rimasta priva di sensi per diversi giorni. Ma ora, con quegli occhi così luminosi, sembra essere completamente guarita.
Ancora più in basso, c’è un uomo che si dirige a molte miglia oltre il loro luogo di destinazione, per “migliorare” una miniera di rame appena scoperta. Lui porta con sé l’intero villaggio: alcune casette in legno e un impianto per la fusione del rame. Porta anche le persone che vi abitano: sono in parte americani e in parte irlandesi, e si riuniscono sul ponte inferiore; ieri sera si divertivano alternando il fuoco dei pistoli al canto di inni, fino a quando la notte era ormai avanzata.
Loro, e quei pochi che sono rimasti seduti al tavolo per venti minuti, si alzano e se ne vanno. Noi facciamo lo stesso; passando attraverso la nostra piccola sala d’attesa, torniamo ai nostri posti nella tranquilla galleria.
Alla fine di questo ampio fiume, esso è sempre più largo in alcune zone che in altre; spesso c’è anche un’isola verde, ricoperta di alberi, che lo divide in due corsi d’acqua. Di tanto in tanto ci fermiamo per qualche minuto: a volte per raccogliere legna, a volte per accogliere passeggeri in qualche piccola città o villaggio (dovrei dire “città”, perché qui ogni luogo è considerato una “città”); ma le rive sono per lo più solitudini profonde, ricoperte di alberi che, in questa zona, hanno già messo foglie e sono molto verdi. Per chilometri e chilometri, queste solitudini non sono interrotte da alcun segno di vita umana o traccia di passi umani; non si vede nulla muoversi intorno a loro, se non il corvo blu, il cui colore è così brillante eppure così delicato da sembrare un fiore che vola. A intervalli regolari, una capanna di tronchi, con il suo piccolo spazio aperto intorno, si trova nascosta sotto un rilievo del terreno; dal suo camino sale un filo di fumo blu che si snoda verso il cielo. Quella capanna sorge nell’angolo di un misero campo di grano, pieno di grandi ceppi brutti da vedere, simili a blocchi di legno per macellai. A volte il terreno è appena stato disboscato: gli alberi tagliati giacciono ancora sul suolo; la capanna di tronchi è stata costruita solo questa mattina. Mentre passiamo vicino a questo spazio aperto, il colono si appoggia al suo accettaio o martello e guarda con malinconia le persone del “mondo esterno”. I bambini escono dalla capanna temporanea, che sembra una tenda zingara posata a terra, e battono le mani gridando. Il cane ci lancia solo uno sguardo, poi alza di nuovo lo sguardo verso il viso del suo padrone, come se fosse turbato da qualche interruzione nella routine quotidiana e non avesse più nulla da fare con gli esseri umani. Eppure, c’è sempre lo stesso paesaggio, eterno e immutabile. Il fiume ha eroso le sue rive; alberi maestosi sono caduti nel corso d’acqua. Alcuni di essi sono lì da così tanto tempo che ormai non sono altro che scheletri secchi e grigiastri. Alcuni sono appena caduti; avendo ancora terra intorno alle radici, immergono le loro teste verdi nel fiume e stanno germogliando nuovi rami. Alcuni sembrano quasi sul punto di scivolare giù. E alcuni sono stati sommersi tanto tempo fa che le loro “braccia” sbiancate emergono dal centro del corso d’acqua, come se cercassero di afferrare la barca e trascinarla sott’acqua.
Attraverso una scena del genere, quella ingombrante macchina procede con il suo rumore roco e cupo: ad ogni giro delle pale, emette un forte getto d’aria ad alta pressione; sembrerebbe sufficiente, si direbbe, per svegliare tutti gli Indiani sepolti in quel grande tumulo lì vicino. Un tumulo così antico che grandi querce e altri alberi della foresta vi hanno piantato le radici; così alto da essere considerato una collina, persino tra quelle che La Natura ha creato intorno ad esso. Anche il fiume, come se condividesse la nostra compassione per quelle tribù estinte che un tempo vivevano qui in pace, ignare dell’esistenza dei bianchi. Si snoda lungo il suo corso, increspandosi vicino a quel tumulo; e ci sono pochi posti dove l’Ohio scintilla più intensamente che nel Big Grave Creek.
Tutto questo lo vedo mentre sono seduto nella piccola galleria sul ponte di poppa di cui ho appena parlato. La sera avanza lentamente, cambiando il paesaggio davanti ai miei occhi, proprio quando ci fermiamo per far sbarcare alcuni emigranti.
Cinque uomini, altrettante donne e una bambina piccola. Tutti i loro beni terreni sono un sacco, un grande baule e una vecchia sedia: una sedia alta, con schienale rigido e sedile di paglia; una sorta di “insediato solitario” in sé stessa. Vengono portati a riva in barca, mentre la nave rimane poco lontano in attesa del loro ritorno, poiché le acque sono basse. Sbarcano ai piedi di un alto argine, sulla cima del quale si trovano alcune capanne di legno, raggiungibili solo attraverso un lungo sentiero tortuoso. Sta calando la sera; ma il sole è molto rosso e illumina le acque e alcune cime degli alberi, come se fosse fuoco.
Gli uomini scendono per primi dalla barca; aiutano le donne a prendere il bagaglio, la cassa e la sedia; salutano i rematori e spingono la barca lontano da loro. Non appena le pale toccano l’acqua, la donna più anziana del gruppo si siede nella vecchia sedia, vicino al bordo dell’acqua, senza dire una parola. Gli altri non si siedono; anche se la cassa è abbastanza grande da contenere molte persone, rimangono tutti in piedi dove sono scesi dalla barca, come se fossero pietrificati, e continuano a guardare la barca. Rimangono immobili e silenziosi: la vecchia donna nella sua sedia, intorno a lei il bagaglio e la cassa sulla riva. Nessuno li nota; tutti gli occhi sono fissi sulla barca. Questa si avvicina, viene ormeggiata; gli uomini salgono a bordo, il motore si mette in funzione e ripartiamo. Loro però rimangono lì, immobili come statue di pietra. Li vedo ancora attraverso il mio finestrino; nella distanza e nell’oscurità crescente, sembrano soltanto puntini insignificanti. Ancora lì, immobili. La vecchia donna nella sua sedia, e tutti gli altri intorno a lei. Nessun movimento. E così li perdo lentamente di vista.
The night is dark, and we proceed within the shadow of the wooded bank, which makes it darker. After gliding past the sombre maze of boughs for a long time, we come upon an open space where the tall trees are burning. The shape of every branch and twig is expressed in a deep red glow, and as the light wind stirs and ruffles it, they seem to vegetate in fire. It is such a sight as we read of in legends of enchanted forests: saving that it is sad to see these noble works wasting away so awfully, alone; and to think how many years must come and go before the magic that created them will rear their like upon this ground again. But the time will come; and when, in their changed ashes, the growth of centuries unborn has struck its roots, the restless men of distant ages will repair to these again unpeopled solitudes; and their fellows, in cities far away, that slumber now, perhaps, beneath the rolling sea, will read in language strange to any ears in being now, but very old to them, of primeval forests where the axe was never heard, and where the jungled ground was never trodden by a human foot.
Midnight and sleep blot out these scenes and thoughts: and when the morning shines again, it gilds the house-tops of a lively city, before whose broad paved wharf the boat is moored; with other boats, and flags, and moving wheels, and hum of men around it; as though there were not a solitary or silent rood of ground within the compass of a thousand miles.
Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and foot-ways of bright tile. Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance. The streets are broad and airy, the shops extremely good, the private residences remarkable for their elegance and neatness. There is something of invention and fancy in the varying styles of these latter erections, which, after the dull company of the steamboat, is perfectly delightful, as conveying an assurance that there are such qualities still in existence. The disposition to ornament these pretty villas and render them attractive, leads to the culture of trees and flowers, and the laying out of well-kept gardens, the sight of which, to those who walk along the streets, is inexpressibly refreshing and agreeable. I was quite charmed with the appearance of the town, and its adjoining suburb of Mount Auburn: from which the city, lying in an amphitheatre of hills, forms a picture of remarkable beauty, and is seen to great advantage.
There happened to be a great Temperance Convention held here on the day after our arrival; and as the order of march brought the procession under the windows of the hotel in which we lodged, when they started in the morning, I had a good opportunity of seeing it. It comprised several thousand men; the members of various ‘Washington Auxiliary Temperance Societies;’ and was marshalled by officers on horseback, who cantered briskly up and down the line, with scarves and ribbons of bright colours fluttering out behind them gaily. There were bands of music too, and banners out of number: and it was a fresh, holiday-looking concourse altogether.
I was particularly pleased to see the Irishmen, who formed a distinct society among themselves, and mustered very strong with their green scarves; carrying their national Harp and their Portrait of Father Mathew, high above the people’s heads. They looked as jolly and good-humoured as ever; and, working (here) the hardest for their living and doing any kind of sturdy labour that came in their way, were the most independent fellows there, I thought.
The banners were very well painted, and flaunted down the street famously. There was the smiting of the rock, and the gushing forth of the waters; and there was a temperate man with ‘considerable of a hatchet’ (as the standard-bearer would probably have said), aiming a deadly blow at a serpent which was apparently about to spring upon him from the top of a barrel of spirits. But the chief feature of this part of the show was a huge allegorical device, borne among the ship-carpenters, on one side whereof the steamboat Alcohol was represented bursting her boiler and exploding with a great crash, while upon the other, the good ship Temperance sailed away with a fair wind, to the heart’s content of the captain, crew, and passengers.
After going round the town, the procession repaired to a certain appointed place, where, as the printed programme set forth, it would be received by the children of the different free schools, ‘singing Temperance Songs.’ I was prevented from getting there, in time to hear these Little Warblers, or to report upon this novel kind of vocal entertainment: novel, at least, to me: but I found in a large open space, each society gathered round its own banners, and listening in silent attention to its own orator. The speeches, judging from the little I could hear of them, were certainly adapted to the occasion, as having that degree of relationship to cold water which wet blankets may claim: but the main thing was the conduct and appearance of the audience throughout the day; and that was admirable and full of promise.
Cincinnati is honourably famous for its free schools, of which it has so many that no person’s child among its population can, by possibility, want the means of education, which are extended, upon an average, to four thousand pupils, annually. I was only present in one of these establishments during the hours of instruction. In the boys’ department, which was full of little urchins (varying in their ages, I should say, from six years old to ten or twelve), the master offered to institute an extemporary examination of the pupils in algebra; a proposal, which, as I was by no means confident of my ability to detect mistakes in that science, I declined with some alarm. In the girls’ school, reading was proposed; and as I felt tolerably equal to that art, I expressed my willingness to hear a class. Books were distributed accordingly, and some half-dozen girls relieved each other in reading paragraphs from English History. But it seemed to be a dry compilation, infinitely above their powers; and when they had blundered through three or four dreary passages concerning the Treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to this exalted stave in the Ladder of Learning for the astonishment of a visitor; and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard them exercised in simpler lessons, which they understood.
As in every other place I visited, the judges here were gentlemen of high character and attainments. I was in one of the courts for a few minutes, and found it like those to which I have already referred. A nuisance cause was trying; there were not many spectators; and the witnesses, counsel, and jury, formed a sort of family circle, sufficiently jocose and snug.
The society with which I mingled, was intelligent, courteous, and agreeable. The inhabitants of Cincinnati are proud of their city as one of the most interesting in America: and with good reason: for beautiful and thriving as it is now, and containing, as it does, a population of fifty thousand souls, but two-and-fifty years have passed away since the ground on which it stands (bought at that time for a few dollars) was a wild wood, and its citizens were but a handful of dwellers in scattered log huts upon the river’s shore.
La notte è buia; procediamo nell’ombra della riva boscosa, il che la rende ancora più scura. Dopo aver attraversato per un lungo tempo quel labirinto di rami cupi, arriviamo in uno spazio aperto dove gli alberi alti stanno bruciando. La forma di ogni ramo e foglia si delinea in un bagliore rosso intenso; quando la brezza agita quella luce, sembra che i rami crescano nel fuoco. È uno spettacolo simile a quelli descritti nelle leggende sui boschi incantati. Peccato però vedere queste meraviglie distruggersi in modo così tragico, da sole; chissà quanti anni dovranno trascorrere prima che la magia che le ha create possa farle rinascere su questa terra. Ma il tempoarriverà. E quando, tra le ceneri, la crescita di secoli ancora inediti avrà messo radici, gli uomini di epoche lontane torneranno in queste solitudini deserte; i loro simili, nelle città lontane che forse ora giacciono sommersi dal mare, leggeranno storie di foreste primordiali dove mai fu udito il suono dell’ascia, dove il terreno selvaggio non fu mai calpestato da piede umano.
Mezzanotte e il sonno cancellano queste scene e questi pensieri; e quando la mattina splende di nuovo, illumina le cime delle case di una vivace città, davanti alla cui ampia banchina la barca è ancorata, insieme ad altre imbarcazioni, bandiere, ruote in movimento e il rumore delle persone intorno; come se non esistesse nemmeno un angolo di terra desolato o silenzioso entro i confini di mille miglia.
Cincinnati è una bellissima città; allegra, prospera e vivace. Non ho spesso visto un luogo che si presenti in modo così favorevole e piacevole a uno sconosciuto al primo sguardo: con le sue case pulite di colore rosso e bianco, le strade ben lastricate e i marciapiedi fatti di piastrelle luminose. Anche osservandola più da vicino, non perde nulla del suo fascino. Le strade sono ampie e ariose, i negozi eccellenti, le abitazioni private notevoli per la loro eleganza e pulizia. Nei vari stili di queste costruzioni si nota una certa fantasia e ingegnosità; dopo l’atmosfera monotona dei battelli a vapore, questo aspetto è davvero delizioso, poiché dimostra che tali qualità esistono ancora. La cura con cui queste belle ville sono decorate e reso attraenti si riflette anche nella coltivazione di alberi e fiori, nonché nell’organizzazione di giardini ben curati; il loro aspetto rappresenta una vera fonte di freschezza e piacere per chi le osserva lungo le strade. Sono rimasto davvero incantato dall’aspetto della città e del suo sobborgo adiacente, Mount Auburn: da qui la città, situata all’interno di un anfiteatro di colline, offre uno spettacolo di notevole bellezza che si apprezza pienamente da qualsiasi punto di vista.
Quel giorno, subito dopo il nostro arrivo, si tenne qui un grande Congresso per la Temperanza; e poiché il corteo passò sotto le finestre dell’hotel in cui soggiornavamo, quando partì la mattina, ne ebbi l’opportunità di assistervi. Il corteo era composto da diverse migliaia di uomini appartenenti a varie “Società Auxiliari per la Temperanza di Washington”; era guidato da ufficiali a cavallo che si muovevano rapidamente avanti e indietro lungo la fila, con sciarpe e nastri dai colori vivaci che sventolavano alle loro spalle. C’erano anche bande musicali e innumerevoli bandiere; insomma, era un insieme davvero festoso e gioioso da vedere.
Ero particolarmente felice di vedere gli irlandesi, che formavano una comunità distinta tra loro e si presentavano molto ordinatamente con i loro fazzoletti verdi; portavano con sé l’arpa nazionale e il ritratto del Padre Mathew, esposti in alto sopra le teste della gente. Sembravano sempre così allegri e di buon umore; lavorando sodo per guadagnarsi da vivere e svolgendo qualsiasi tipo di lavoro duro che si presentasse, erano, a mio parere, i individui più indipendenti di lì.
I cartelli erano molto ben dipinti e venivano esposti lungo la strada in modo molto visibile. C’erano raffigurazioni della roccia che veniva colpita e delle acque che ne sgorgavano; c’era anche l’immagine di un uomo moderato che, con un “notevole martello” (come probabilmente avrebbe detto il portabandiera), sferrava un colpo mortale a un serpente che sembrava sul punto di attaccarlo dal vertice di una botte di alcol. Ma la caratteristica principale di questa parte dello spettacolo era un enorme simbolo allegorico, trasportato dai carpentieri navali: su un lato era raffigurata la nave a vapore “Alcohol” che scoppiava il suo caldaio con un gran fragore; sull’altro lato, la “buona nave” Temperance navigava spinta da una bella brezza, a grande soddisfazione del capitano, dell’equipaggio e dei passeggeri.
Dopo aver percorso la città in processione, questi gruppi si diressero verso un luogo prestabilito, dove, come indicato nel programma stampato, sarebbero stati accolti dai bambini delle varie scuole libere, i quali avrebbero “cantato canzoni sulla temperanza”. Non sono riuscito ad arrivare in tempo per ascoltare questi giovani cantanti o per raccontare di questo nuovo tipo di intrattenimento vocale. Almeno, per me era nuovo. Tuttavia, in un ampio spazio aperto, ogni gruppo si era riunito intorno al proprio stendardo, ascoltando in silenzio i propri oratori. Dai pochi frammenti che sono riuscito a sentire, gli interventi sembravano davvero adatti all’occasione; ma ciò che conta veramente era il comportamento e l’aspetto dell’auditorio durante tutto il giorno. E questi aspetti erano davvero ammirevoli e promettenti.
Cincinnati è onorevolmente famosa per le sue scuole gratuite: ne esistono così tante che nessun bambino della sua popolazione potrebbe mai mancare dei mezzi necessari per ricevere un’educazione, che, in media, viene offerta a quattromila studenti all’anno. Io ho assistito soltanto a una di queste istituzioni durante le ore di lezione. Nella sezione maschile, piena di bambini di età compresa tra i sei e i dodici anni, l’insegnante propose di organizzare un esame improvvisato sugli algoritmi; poiché non ero affatto sicuro della mia capacità di individuare eventuali errori in quella materia, rifiutai con qualche preoccupazione. Nella scuola femminile venne proposta l’attività della lettura; essendo abbastanza competente in questa disciplina, accettai di partecipare a una lezione. Ci furono distribuite delle copie di libro e alcune ragazze si alternarono nella lettura di passaggi tratti dalla storia inglese; tuttavia sembrava trattarsi di materiale estremamente difficile per loro. Dopo aver affrontato con difficoltà tre o quattro passaggi noiosi riguardanti il Trattato di Amiens e altri argomenti altrettanto poco interessanti (ovviamente senza comprenderne nemmeno una parola), dichiarai di essere pienamente soddisfatto. È molto probabile che tutto ciò fosse soltanto un’esibizione destinata ad impressionare i visitatori. In altre occasioni, probabilmente si dedicassero a lezioni più semplici e comprensibili per loro; ma sarei stato ancora più contento se le avessi viste esercitarsi in argomenti che potessero davvero apprendere.
Come in tutti gli altri posti che ho visitato, anche qui i giudici erano gentiluomini di alto carattere e cultura. Sono stato in uno dei tribunali per qualche minuto e l’ho trovato simile a quelli di cui ho già parlato. Si stava processando un caso piuttosto noioso; non c’erano molti spettatori, e i testimoni, gli avvocati e la giuria formavano una sorta di cerchio familiare, piuttosto allegro e rilassato.
La società con cui mi relazionavo era intelligente, cortese e piacevole. Gli abitanti di Cincinnati sono orgogliosi della loro città, considerata una delle più interessanti d’America; e a ragione: oggi è bella e fiorente, con una popolazione di cinquantamila persone. Tuttavia, venticinque anni fa il terreno su cui sorgeva (acquistato all’epoca per pochi dollari) era ancora una foresta selvaggia, e i suoi primi abitanti erano soltanto un ristretto gruppo di persone che vivevano in capanne di legno sparse lungo le rive del fiume.
CHAPTER XII FROM CINCINNATI TO LOUISVILLE IN ANOTHER WESTERN STEAMBOAT; AND FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS IN ANOTHER. ST. LOUIS
LEAVING Cincinnati at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, we embarked for Louisville in the Pike steamboat, which, carrying the mails, was a packet of a much better class than that in which we had come from Pittsburg. As this passage does not occupy more than twelve or thirteen hours, we arranged to go ashore that night: not coveting the distinction of sleeping in a state-room, when it was possible to sleep anywhere else.
There chanced to be on board this boat, in addition to the usual dreary crowd of passengers, one Pitchlynn, a chief of the Choctaw tribe of Indians, who sent in his card to me, and with whom I had the pleasure of a long conversation.
He spoke English perfectly well, though he had not begun to learn the language, he told me, until he was a young man grown. He had read many books; and Scott’s poetry appeared to have left a strong impression on his mind: especially the opening of The Lady of the Lake, and the great battle scene in Marmion, in which, no doubt from the congeniality of the subjects to his own pursuits and tastes, he had great interest and delight. He appeared to understand correctly all he had read; and whatever fiction had enlisted his sympathy in its belief, had done so keenly and earnestly. I might almost say fiercely. He was dressed in our ordinary everyday costume, which hung about his fine figure loosely, and with indifferent grace. On my telling him that I regretted not to see him in his own attire, he threw up his right arm, for a moment, as though he were brandishing some heavy weapon, and answered, as he let it fall again, that his race were losing many things besides their dress, and would soon be seen upon the earth no more: but he wore it at home, he added proudly.
He told me that he had been away from his home, west of the Mississippi, seventeen months: and was now returning. He had been chiefly at Washington on some negotiations pending between his Tribe and the Government: which were not settled yet (he said in a melancholy way), and he feared never would be: for what could a few poor Indians do, against such well-skilled men of business as the whites? He had no love for Washington; tired of towns and cities very soon; and longed for the Forest and the Prairie.
I asked him what he thought of Congress? He answered, with a smile, that it wanted dignity, in an Indian’s eyes.
He would very much like, he said, to see England before he died; and spoke with much interest about the great things to be seen there. When I told him of that chamber in the British Museum wherein are preserved household memorials of a race that ceased to be, thousands of years ago, he was very attentive, and it was not hard to see that he had a reference in his mind to the gradual fading away of his own people.
This led us to speak of Mr. Catlin’s gallery, which he praised highly: observing that his own portrait was among the collection, and that all the likenesses were ‘elegant.’ Mr. Cooper, he said, had painted the Red Man well; and so would I, he knew, if I would go home with him and hunt buffaloes, which he was quite anxious I should do. When I told him that supposing I went, I should not be very likely to damage the buffaloes much, he took it as a great joke and laughed heartily.
He was a remarkably handsome man; some years past forty, I should judge; with long black hair, an aquiline nose, broad cheek-bones, a sunburnt complexion, and a very bright, keen, dark, and piercing eye. There were but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said, and their number was decreasing every day. A few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilised, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence. But they were not many; and the rest were as they always had been. He dwelt on this: and said several times that unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilised society.
When we shook hands at parting, I told him he must come to England, as he longed to see the land so much: that I should hope to see him there, one day: and that I could promise him he would be well received and kindly treated. He was evidently pleased by this assurance, though he rejoined with a good-humoured smile and an arch shake of his head, that the English used to be very fond of the Red Men when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for them, since.
He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of Nature’s making, as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat, another kind of being. He sent me a lithographed portrait of himself soon afterwards; very like, though scarcely handsome enough; which I have carefully preserved in memory of our brief acquaintance.
There was nothing very interesting in the scenery of this day’s journey, which brought us at midnight to Louisville. We slept at the Galt House; a splendid hotel; and were as handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghanies.
The city presenting no objects of sufficient interest to detain us on our way, we resolved to proceed next day by another steamboat, the Fulton, and to join it, about noon, at a suburb called Portland, where it would be delayed some time in passing through a canal.
The interval, after breakfast, we devoted to riding through the town, which is regular and cheerful: the streets being laid out at right angles, and planted with young trees. The buildings are smoky and blackened, from the use of bituminous coal, but an Englishman is well used to that appearance, and indisposed to quarrel with it. There did not appear to be much business stirring; and some unfinished buildings and improvements seemed to intimate that the city had been overbuilt in the ardour of ‘going-a-head,’ and was suffering under the re-action consequent upon such feverish forcing of its powers.
CAPITOLO XII
Da Cincinnati a Louisville su un altro battello a vapore del West; e da Louisville a St. Louis su un altro ancora. St. Louis
Lasciando Cincinnati alle undici del mattino, salimmo sul battello a vapore Pike diretto a Louisville; questo trasportava anche la corrispondenza ed era di una classe molto superiore rispetto a quello con cui eravamo arrivati da Pittsburgh. Poiché il viaggio durava al massimo dodici o tredici ore, decidemmo di sbarcare quella sera stessa: non avevamo alcun desiderio di godere dei vantaggi offerti dalle cabine di lusso, quando era possibile dormire ovunque altro.
Su questa barca, oltre alla solita folla noiosa di passeggeri, c’era anche un certo Pitchlynn, capo della tribù Choctaw di indiani; mi inviò la sua carta e ebbe l’opportunità di conversare a lungo con me.
Parlava inglese in modo perfetto; nonostante non avesse iniziato a imparare quella lingua fino a quando non era diventato un giovane adulto, mi disse di aver letto molti libri. La poesia di Scott sembrava aver lasciato una profonda impressione nella sua mente: in particolare l’inizio de “La Dama del Lago” e la grande scena di battaglia in “Marmion”. Senza alcun dubbio, a causa della similitudine tra quei temi e i suoi interessi personali, provava un grande interesse e piacere nel leggerli. Sembrava comprendere perfettamente tutto ciò che aveva letto; e qualsiasi opera di fantasia riuscisse a suscitare la sua empatia, lo faceva in modo così intenso e sincero, quasi furioso. Era vestito con il nostro abbigliamento quotidiano, che gli cadeva morbido addosso, conferendogli un’aria disinvolta e graziosa. Quando gli dissi di volerlo vedere nei suoi abiti tradizionali, alzò per un momento il braccio destro, come se stesse brandendo un’arma pesante, e rispose che la sua gente stava perdendo molte cose, oltre ai propri costumi. E presto sarebbe scomparsa dalla faccia della terra. Ma a casa, aggiunse con orgoglio, li indossava ancora.
Mi disse che era stato lontano dalla sua >casa, a ovest del Mississippi, per diciassette mesi; ora stava tornando. Era stato principalmente a Washington per partecipare a alcune trattative in corso tra la sua tribù e il >Governo; trattative che, disse con un tono melancolico, non erano ancora state risolte e temeva che probabilmente non lo sarebbero mai state: perché cosa potevano fare pochi indiani poveri contro uomini d’affari così abili come i bianchi? Non provava alcun affetto per Washington; si stancava molto in fretta delle città e desiderava ardentemente la Foresta e le Praterie.
Gli ho chiesto cosa pensasse del Congresso; lui ha risposto, sorridendo, che, agli occhi di un indiano, il Congresso desidera dignità.
Disse che gli sarebbe molto piaciuto vedere l’Inghilterra prima di morire; parlò con grande interesse delle meraviglie che si possono trovare lì. Quando gli raccontai di quella sala del British Museum dove sono conservati ricordi domestici di una razza che scomparve migliaia di anni fa, mostrò grande attenzione; non fu difficile capire che stava pensando al graduale scomparire della sua stessa gente.
Questo ci portò a parlare della galleria del signor Catlin, di cui egli fece grandi lodi: osservò che il suo ritratto faceva parte della collezione e che tutte le rappresentazioni umane presenti erano “eleganti”. Disse anche che il signor Cooper aveva dipinto il “Red Man” in modo eccellente; e aggiunse che anch’io, se fossi andato a casa con lui per cacciare i bisonti – cosa che desiderava molto che facessi – avrei fatto lo stesso. Quando gli dissi che, anche se ci andassi, probabilmente non avrei causato grandi danni ai bisonti, ne rise molto divertito.
Era un uomo straordinariamente bello; doveva avere superato i quarant’anni, a giudicare dall’aspetto; aveva lunghi capelli neri, un naso aquilino, guance larghe, una pelle abbronzata e occhi molto luminosi, acuti, scuri e penetranti. Disse che erano rimasti soltanto ventimila Choctaws, e che il loro numero diminuiva ogni giorno. Alcuni dei loro capi avevano dovuto adattarsi alle usanze dei bianchi, imparare ciò che sapevano gli europei, perché quella era l’unica possibilità per sopravvivere. Ma erano pochi; la maggior parte rimaneva fedele alle proprie tradizioni. Insistette su questo punto, ripetendo più volte che, se non avessero cercato di assimilarsi ai loro conquistatori, sarebbero stati spazzati via dal progresso della società civile.
Quando ci stringemmo la mano alla separazione, gli dissi che doveva assolutamente venire in Inghilterra, poiché desiderava tantissimo vedere quel paese; speravo di rivederlo lì un giorno, e potevo promettergli che sarebbe stato accolto bene e trattato con gentilezza. Evidentemente fu soddisfatto da queste parole, anche se rispose sorridendo e scuotendo la testa, dicendo che gli inglesi un tempo apprezzavano molto i “Red Men” quando avevano bisogno del loro aiuto, ma da allora non si erano più curati molto di loro.
Si congedò; tale e quale un nobile gentiluomo creato dalla >Natura, come l’avevo sempre visto. Si muoveva tra la gente sul barco, come una sorta di essere diverso dagli altri. Poco dopo mi inviò un ritratto litografico di sé; molto somigliante, anche se non proprio bellissimo. L’ho conservato con cura nella memoria del nostro breve incontro.
Non c’era nulla di molto interessante nel paesaggio del viaggio di quel giorno, che ci portò a mezzanotte a Louisville. Dormimmo all’House Galt, un hotel splendido; eravamo sistemati in modo davvero lussuoso, come se fossimo stati a Parigi, anziché centinaia di miglia oltre le Montagne Alleghane.
Poiché la >città non offriva oggetti di sufficiente interesse per trattenerci lungo il nostro cammino, decidemmo di proseguire il giorno seguente con un altro battello a vapore, il Fulton, e di raggiungerlo verso mattina, in una località chiamata Portland. Lì il viaggio sarebbe stato ritardato per qualche tempo a causa del passaggio attraverso un canale.
Dopo colazione, dedicammo il nostro tempo a fare un giro in città: le strade sono disposte ad angoli retti e sono piantate di alberi giovani; gli edifici, però, risultano fumosi e anneriti a causa dell’uso del carbone bituminoso. Un inglese, però, è abituato a questo aspetto e non ha alcuna intenzione di lamentarsene. Non sembrava esserci molto movimento; inoltre, alcuni edifici ancora incompleti facevano pensare che la città fosse stata costruita troppo rapidamente, e ora ne stesse subendo le conseguenze negative.
On our way to Portland, we passed a ‘Magistrate’s office,’ which amused me, as looking far more like a dame school than any police establishment: for this awful Institution was nothing but a little lazy, good-for-nothing front parlour, open to the street; wherein two or three figures (I presume the magistrate and his myrmidons) were basking in the sunshine, the very effigies of languor and repose. It was a perfect picture of justice retired from business for want of customers; her sword and scales sold off; napping comfortably with her legs upon the table.
Here, as elsewhere in these parts, the road was perfectly alive with pigs of all ages; lying about in every direction, fast asleep.; or grunting along in quest of hidden dainties. I had always a sneaking kindness for these odd animals, and found a constant source of amusement, when all others failed, in watching their proceedings. As we were riding along this morning, I observed a little incident between two youthful pigs, which was so very human as to be inexpressibly comical and grotesque at the time, though I dare say, in telling, it is tame enough.
One young gentleman (a very delicate porker with several straws sticking about his nose, betokening recent investigations in a dung-hill) was walking deliberately on, profoundly thinking, when suddenly his brother, who was lying in a miry hole unseen by him, rose up immediately before his startled eyes, ghostly with damp mud. Never was pig’s whole mass of blood so turned. He started back at least three feet, gazed for a moment, and then shot off as hard as he could go: his excessively little tail vibrating with speed and terror like a distracted pendulum. But before he had gone very far, he began to reason with himself as to the nature of this frightful appearance; and as he reasoned, he relaxed his speed by gradual degrees; until at last he stopped, and faced about. There was his brother, with the mud upon him glazing in the sun, yet staring out of the very same hole, perfectly amazed at his proceedings! He was no sooner assured of this; and he assured himself so carefully that one may almost say he shaded his eyes with his hand to see the better; than he came back at a round trot, pounced upon him, and summarily took off a piece of his tail; as a caution to him to be careful what he was about for the future, and never to play tricks with his family any more.
We found the steamboat in the canal, waiting for the slow process of getting through the lock, and went on board, where we shortly afterwards had a new kind of visitor in the person of a certain Kentucky Giant whose name is Porter, and who is of the moderate height of seven feet eight inches, in his stockings.
There never was a race of people who so completely gave the lie to history as these giants, or whom all the chroniclers have so cruelly libelled. Instead of roaring and ravaging about the world, constantly catering for their cannibal larders, and perpetually going to market in an unlawful manner, they are the meekest people in any man’s acquaintance: rather inclining to milk and vegetable diet, and bearing anything for a quiet life. So decidedly are amiability and mildness their characteristics, that I confess I look upon that youth who distinguished himself by the slaughter of these inoffensive persons, as a false-hearted brigand, who, pretending to philanthropic motives, was secretly influenced only by the wealth stored up within their castles, and the hope of plunder. And I lean the more to this opinion from finding that even the historian of those exploits, with all his partiality for his hero, is fain to admit that the slaughtered monsters in question were of a very innocent and simple turn; extremely guileless and ready of belief; lending a credulous ear to the most improbable tales; suffering themselves to be easily entrapped into pits; and even (as in the case of the Welsh Giant) with an excess of the hospitable politeness of a landlord, ripping themselves open, rather than hint at the possibility of their guests being versed in the vagabond arts of sleight-of-hand and hocus-pocus.
The Kentucky Giant was but another illustration of the truth of this position. He had a weakness in the region of the knees, and a trustfulness in his long face, which appealed even to five-feet nine for encouragement and support. He was only twenty-five years old, he said, and had grown recently, for it had been found necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles. At fifteen he was a short boy, and in those days his English father and his Irish mother had rather snubbed him, as being too small of stature to sustain the credit of the family. He added that his health had not been good, though it was better now; but short people are not wanting who whisper that he drinks too hard.
I understand he drives a hackney-coach, though how he does it, unless he stands on the footboard behind, and lies along the roof upon his chest, with his chin in the box, it would be difficult to comprehend. He brought his gun with him, as a curiosity.
Christened ‘The Little Rifle,’ and displayed outside a shop-window, it would make the fortune of any retail business in Holborn. When he had shown himself and talked a little while, he withdrew with his pocket-instrument, and went bobbing down the cabin, among men of six feet high and upwards, like a light-house walking among lamp-posts.
Within a few minutes afterwards, we were out of the canal, and in the Ohio river again.
The arrangements of the boat were like those of the Messenger, and the passengers were of the same order of people. We fed at the same times, on the same kind of viands, in the same dull manner, and with the same observances. The company appeared to be oppressed by the same tremendous concealments, and had as little capacity of enjoyment or light-heartedness. I never in my life did see such listless, heavy dulness as brooded over these meals: the very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the moment, wretched. Reading and writing on my knee, in our little cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to table; and was as glad to escape from it again, as if it had been a penance or a punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits forming a part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the fountain with Le Sage’s strolling player, and revel in their glad enjoyment: but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his Yahoo’s trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away; to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.
Durante il viaggio verso Portland, abbiamo superato un “Ufficio del Magistrato” che mi ha divertito molto: assomigliava molto di più a una scuola per signorine che a un vero ufficio di polizia. Quell’orribile istituzione non era altro che un piccolo salotto, pigro e inutile, aperto sulla strada; lì due o tre persone (presumo il magistrato e i suoi assistenti) si crogiolavano al sole, rappresentando perfettamente l’immagine della pigrizia e del riposo. Era davvero un ritratto perfetto della giustizia che, a causa della mancanza di clienti, aveva abbandonato il proprio lavoro; la sua _spada e le sue bilance erano state vendute. E lei si addormentava tranquillamente, con le gambe appoggiate sul tavolo.
Qui, come altrove in queste zone, la strada era piena di maiali di tutte le età: alcuni giacevano dappertutto, profondamente addormentati; altri grugnivano mentre cercavano qualche delizioso bocconcino nascosto. Ho sempre provato una sorta di affetto per questi strani animali e, quando tutto il resto non riusciva a divertirmi, osservarne le azioni rappresentava per me una fonte continua di ilarità. Questa mattina, mentre viaggiavamo, ho assistito a un piccolo episodio tra due maialini: la scena era così umana da risultare incredibilmente comica e. grottesca; anche se, devo ammetterlo, raccontandola sembra meno spettacolare.
Un giovane gentiluomo (un porcellino molto delicato, con diverse “pagliuzze” attaccate al naso, segno di recenti indagini in una collina di letame) camminava con aria pensierosa, assorto nei suoi pensieri, quando improvvisamente suo fratello, che giaceva in un buco fangoso e invisibile per lui, emerse davanti ai suoi occhi spaventati, coperto interamente di fango umido. Mai prima d’allora il corpo di un maiale era stato così ricoperto di fango. Indietreggiò di almeno tre piedi, rimase a fissarlo per un momento, poi scappò via a tutta velocità; la sua coda minuscola vibrava freneticamente per la paura. Ma dopo pochi metri iniziò a riflettere sulla natura di quell’apparizione spaventosa. E man mano che rifletteva, rallentò gradualmente il passo, fino a fermarsi del tutto. Lì c’era suo fratello, ancora fermo nello stesso buco, completamente stupito dalle sue azioni. Non appena ne fu certo – e lo fece con tale attenzione che quasi si schermò gli occhi con la mano per vedere meglio – tornò indietro di corsa, lo afferrò e gli strappò via un pezzo di coda. Come monito a stare più attento in futuro, e a non fare mai più scherzi alla sua famiglia.
Abbiamo trovato la barca a vapore nel canale, in attesa del lento processo di attraversamento della diga, e siamo saliti a bordo. Poco dopo, abbiamo avuto un nuovo tipo di “visitatore”: si trattava di un certo Porter, originario del Kentucky, alto circa sette piedi e otto pollici, comprese le calze.
Non è mai esistita una razza di persone che mettesse così completamente in ridicolo la storia come questi giganti, o che venisse così crudelmente diffamata da tutti gli storici. Invece di devastare il mondo, di soddisfare continuamente i loro bisogni cannibaleschi e di partecipare illegalmente al mercato, erano le persone più mite che si potessero incontrare: preferivano una dieta a base di latte e verdure e desideravano ardentemente vivere in pace. La loro gentilezza e dolcezza erano così evidenti che confesso di considerare quel giovane che si distinse per l’uccisione di queste persone innocue come un brigante senza cuore, il quale, sotto pretesti filantropici, era in realtà motivato soltanto dal desiderio di arricchirsi con i loro tesori e dalla speranza di saccheggiarli. Questa opinione si rafforza anche constatando che persino lo storico di quegli eventi, nonostante la sua parzialità nei confronti del suo eroe, è costretto ad ammettere che questi mostri uccisi erano persone estremamente innocenti e semplici, estremamente ingenui e facilmente creduloni, pronti a credere nelle storie più improbabili e capaci di essere facilmente ingannati. Persino nel caso del Gigante Gallese, la loro ospitalità era tale che si aprirono volontariamente in due, piuttosto che sospettare che i loro ospiti fossero esperti in trucchi e inganni.
Il Kentucky Giant non era altro che un’altra dimostrazione della .verità di questa teoria. Aveva una debolezza nella zona delle ginocchia, e quel suo viso lungo e sincero ispirava fiducia, tanto da essere in grado di incoraggiare e sostenere anche persone alte cinque piedi e nove pollici. Aveva solo venticinque anni, disse, e aveva appena iniziato a crescere, poiché era stato necessario allungargli le gambe dei suoi “indescrivibili” abiti. A quindici anni era un ragazzo basso, e in quei tempi suo padre inglese e sua madre irlandese lo trattavano con disprezzo, ritenendolo troppo piccolo per onorare il nome della famiglia. Aggiunse anche che la sua salute non era stata buona, sebbene ora fosse migliorata; tuttavia, non mancavano persone che mormorassero che bevesse troppo.
Capisco che guida una vettura a noleggio, ma come riesca a farlo. A meno che non stia in piedi sul sedile posteriore e si sdrai sul tetto, con il petto appoggiato al bordo del tetto e il mento dentro la cabina. È davvero difficile da immaginare. Ha portato con sé la sua pistola, solo per curiosità.
Chiamato “Il Piccolo Fucile” e esposto fuori dalla vetrina di un negozio, avrebbe fatto guadagnare una fortuna a qualsiasi attività commerciale al dettaglio a Holborn. Dopo essersi presentato e aver parlato per un po’, se ne andò con il suo strumento da tasca, muovendosi tra uomini alti sei piedi o più, come una piccola casa che cammina tra i lampioni.
Dopo pochi minuti, eravamo usciti dal canale e ci trovavamo di nuovo nel fiume Ohio.
L’arredamento della barca era simile a quello del “Messaggero”, e i passeggeri appartenevano alla stessa classe sociale. Mangiavamo alle stesse ore, lo stesso tipo di cibo, con la stessa monotonia e seguendo le stesse cerimonie. Sembrava che tutti fossimo oppressi dagli stessi segreti terribili, e avevamo entrambi la stessa scarsa capacità di goderci la vita o di essere spensierati. Non ho mai visto in tutta la mia vita una tale apatia e tristezza durante i pasti: solo il ricordo di quei momenti mi opprime ancora oggi, rendendomi infelice. Mentre leggevo o scrivevo nella nostra piccola cabina, temevo davvero l’arrivo dell’ora in cui ci si sarebbe riuniti a tavola; e ero altrettanto felice quando finalmente quella situazione terminava, come se fosse stata una penitenza o un castigo. Se la gioia e lo spirito positivo facessero parte di quei pasti, avrei potuto godermeli con piacere. Ma sedersi con tante altre persone soltanto per saziare la fame e la sete, mangiare in fretta e poi allontanarsi in silenzio, privare questi momenti sociali di tutto ciò che li rendesse veramente piacevoli. Questo è davvero contrario alla mia natura; credo sinceramente che il ricordo di quelle cene tristi rimarrà per sempre un incubo nella mia vita.
There was some relief in this boat, too, which there had not been in the other, for the captain (a blunt, good-natured fellow) had his handsome wife with him, who was disposed to be lively and agreeable, as were a few other lady-passengers who had their seats about us at the same end of the table. But nothing could have made head against the depressing influence of the general body. There was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere since the world began.
Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly as the time itself.
At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.
But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float upon the water’s top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool, like wounded snakes. The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.
For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide. When the nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the boat, knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be near at hand, and rings a bell beside him, which is the signal for the engine to be stopped: but always in the night this bell has work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders it no easy matter to remain in bed.
The decline of day here was very gorgeous; tingeing the firmament deeply with red and gold, up to the very keystone of the arch above us. As the sun went down behind the bank, the slightest blades of grass upon it seemed to become as distinctly visible as the arteries in the skeleton of a leaf; and when, as it slowly sank, the red and golden bars upon the water grew dimmer, and dimmer yet, as if they were sinking too; and all the glowing colours of departing day paled, inch by inch, before the sombre night; the scene became a thousand times more lonesome and more dreary than before, and all its influences darkened with the sky.
We drank the muddy water of this river while we were upon it. It is considered wholesome by the natives, and is something more opaque than gruel. I have seen water like it at the Filter-shops, but nowhere else.
On the fourth night after leaving Louisville, we reached St. Louis, and here I witnessed the conclusion of an incident, trifling enough in itself, but very pleasant to see, which had interested me during the whole journey.
There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-eyed, and fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long time with her sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St. Louis, in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords desire to be. The baby was born in her mother’s house; and she had not seen her husband (to whom she was now returning), for twelve months: having left him a month or two after their marriage.
C’era anche su questo battello un certo sollievo, che sull’altro era mancato, perché il capitano (un tipo schietto e bonario) aveva con sé la bella moglie, disposta a mostrarsi vivace e gradevole, come pure alcune altre passeggere che sedevano vicino a noi, allo stesso capo della tavola. Ma nulla avrebbe potuto tener testa all’influenza deprimente del corpo generale dei passeggeri. C’era in loro un magnetismo di tedio che avrebbe fiaccato il compagno più faceto che la terra abbia mai conosciuto. Uno scherzo sarebbe stato un delitto, e un sorriso si sarebbe spento in un orrore ghignante. Gente così mortalmente plumbea; una pesantezza tanto metodica, strascicata, stanca, insopportabile; una tale massa di indigestione animata riguardo a tutto ciò che fosse geniale, gioviale, franco, socievole o cordiale; mai, di certo, se ne radunò altrove una simile da quando il mondo è mondo.
Né il paesaggio, mentre ci avvicinavamo alla confluenza dei fiumi Ohio e Mississippi, aveva un influsso in alcun modo esaltante. Gli alberi erano stenti nella crescita; le rive basse e piatte; gli insediamenti e le capanne di tronchi più radi: i loro abitanti più smunti e miseri di quanti ne avessimo incontrati fino allora. Non c’erano canti di uccelli nell’aria, né profumi gradevoli, né luci e ombre mutevoli di nubi in rapida corsa. Ora dopo ora, il bagliore immutabile del cielo caldo e senza palpebre splendeva sugli stessi oggetti monotoni. Ora dopo ora, il fiume scorreva, stanco e lento come il tempo stesso.
Finalmente, la mattina del terzo giorno, giungemmo in un luogo tanto più desolato di quanti ne avessimo veduti, che i posti più sconsolati attraversati fino a quel momento erano, al confronto, pieni d’interesse. Alla confluenza dei due fiumi, su un terreno così piatto, basso e paludoso che in certe stagioni dell’anno viene inondato fino ai tetti delle case, si stende un vivaio di febbre, di malaria e di morte; vantato in Inghilterra come una miniera di Aurea Speranza, e oggetto di speculazioni, sulla fede di descrizioni mostruose, fino alla rovina di molta gente. Un tetro acquitrino, sul quale marciscono case costruite a metà: sgombrato qua e là per lo spazio di pochi metri; e brulicante, poi, di una vegetazione rigogliosa e malsana, alla cui ombra funesta i miseri vagabondi attirati fin qui languiscono, muoiono e lasciano le loro ossa; l’odioso Mississippi che gli gira intorno e vortica dinanzi, e che devia lungo il suo corso meridionale come un viscido mostro orribile a vedersi; un focolaio di malattie, un brutto sepolcro, una tomba non rallegrata da alcun barlume di promessa: un luogo senza una sola qualità, in terra o in aria o in acqua, che lo raccomandi: tale è questa lugubre Cairo.
Ma quali parole potranno descrivere il Mississippi, grande padre dei fiumi, che (sia lode al Cielo) non ha figlioletti simili a lui! Un enorme fossato, largo talvolta due o tre miglia, che scorre fango liquido a sei miglia all’ora: la sua corrente forte e spumeggiante ostruita e impedita ovunque da tronchi enormi e da interi alberi della foresta: ora attorcigliati insieme in grandi zattere, dai cui interstizi affiora una schiuma pigra e giuncosa, che galleggia sulla superficie dell’acqua; ora rotolanti oltre come corpi mostruosi, con le radici aggrovigliate simili a capelli arruffati; ora guizzando via a uno a uno come sanguisughe giganti; ora contorcendosi in tondo nel vortice di qualche piccolo gorgo, come serpenti feriti. Le rive basse, gli alberi nani, le paludi brulicanti di rane, le misere capanne rade e lontane fra loro, i loro abitanti pallidi e dalle guance incavate, il tempo caldissimo, le zanzare che penetrano in ogni fessura e crepa del battello, fango e melma su ogni cosa: nulla di piacevole nel suo aspetto, tranne gli innocui lampi che guizzano ogni notte sull’orizzonte oscuro.
Per due giorni faticammo a risalire questa corrente immonda, urtando di continuo contro il legname galleggiante, o fermandoci per evitare quegli ostacoli più pericolosi, gli snags o sawyers, che sono i tronchi nascosti di alberi le cui radici stanno sotto il livello dell’acqua. Quando le notti sono molto buie, la vedetta appostata a prua capisce dal frangersi dell’acqua se qualche grosso impedimento è vicino, e suona una campana che ha accanto, segnale perché la macchina venga fermata: ma sempre di notte questa campana ha da lavorare, e dopo ogni rintocco arriva un colpo che rende non facile restare a letto.
Il declinare del giorno era qui magnifico; tingeva profondamente il firmamento di rosso e d’oro, fin sulla chiave di volta dell’arco sopra di noi. Mentre il sole calava dietro la riva, i più esili fili d’erba che vi crescevano parevano diventare distintamente visibili come le nervature nello scheletro di una foglia; e quando, affondando lentamente, le sbarre rosse e dorate sull’acqua si facevano più fioche, e più fioche ancora, come se anch’esse sprofondassero; e tutti i colori ardenti del giorno morente impallidivano, pollice dopo pollice, davanti alla cupa notte; la scena diventava mille volte più solitaria e più desolata di prima, e ogni suo influsso si oscurava insieme al cielo.
Bevemmo l’acqua fangosa di questo fiume mentre vi navigavamo sopra. È considerata salubre dagli abitanti del luogo, ed è qualcosa di più opaco di una pappa d’avena. Ho visto acqua simile nei negozi di filtri, ma in nessun altro luogo.
La quarta notte dopo aver lasciato Louisville, giungemmo a St. Louis, e qui assistetti alla conclusione di un episodio, in sé abbastanza insignificante, ma assai piacevole a vedersi, che mi aveva interessato durante tutto il viaggio.
C’era a bordo una donnina, con un bimbetto; e tanto la donnina quanto il piccolo bambino erano allegri, di bell’aspetto, con occhi vivaci, e graziosi a vedersi. La donnina aveva trascorso un lungo tempo con la madre malata a New York, e aveva lasciato la sua casa di St. Louis in quella condizione in cui le signore che amano davvero i loro signori desiderano trovarsi. Il bambino era nato nella casa di sua madre; e lei non vedeva il marito (dal quale ora faceva ritorno) da dodici mesi: avendolo lasciato un mese o due dopo il loro matrimonio.
[Picture: The Little Wife]
Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope, and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this little woman was: and all day long she wondered whether ‘He’ would be at the wharf; and whether ‘He’ had got her letter; and whether, if she sent the baby ashore by somebody else, ‘He’ would know it, meeting it in the street: which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough, to the young mother. She was such an artless little creature; and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out all this matter clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she; and the captain (who heard all about it from his wife) was wondrous sly, I promise you: inquiring, every time we met at table, as in forgetfulness, whether she expected anybody to meet her at St. Louis, and whether she would want to go ashore the night we reached it (but he supposed she wouldn’t), and cutting many other dry jokes of that nature. There was one little weazen, dried-apple-faced old woman, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands in such circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a lap-dog) old enough to moralize on the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby, now and then, or laughing with the rest, when the little woman called it by its father’s name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him in the joy of her heart.
It was something of a blow to the little woman, that when we were within twenty miles of our destination, it became clearly necessary to put this baby to bed. But she got over it with the same good humour; tied a handkerchief round her head; and came out into the little gallery with the rest. Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by the single ones! and such peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest with!
At last, there were the lights of St. Louis, and here was the wharf, and those were the steps: and the little woman covering her face with her hands, and laughing (or seeming to laugh) more than ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up. I have no doubt that in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped her ears, lest she should hear ‘Him’ asking for her: but I did not see her do it.
Then, a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was not yet made fast, but was wandering about, among the other boats, to find a landing-place: and everybody looked for the husband: and nobody saw him: when, in the midst of us all—Heaven knows how she ever got there—there was the little woman clinging with both arms tight round the neck of a fine, good-looking, sturdy young fellow! and in a moment afterwards, there she was again, actually clapping her little hands for joy, as she dragged him through the small door of her small cabin, to look at the baby as he lay asleep!
We went to a large hotel, called the Planter’s House: built like an English hospital, with long passages and bare walls, and sky-lights above the room-doors for the free circulation of air. There were a great many boarders in it; and as many lights sparkled and glistened from the windows down into the street below, when we drove up, as if it had been illuminated on some occasion of rejoicing. It is an excellent house, and the proprietors have most bountiful notions of providing the creature comforts. Dining alone with my wife in our own room, one day, I counted fourteen dishes on the table at once.
In the old French portion of the town, the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and picturesque: being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries before the windows, approachable by stairs or rather ladders from the street. There are queer little barbers’ shops and drinking-houses too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements with blinking casements, such as may be seen in Flanders. Some of these ancient habitations, with high garret gable-windows perking into the roofs, have a kind of French shrug about them; and being lop-sided with age, appear to hold their heads askew, besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvements.
It is hardly necessary to say, that these consist of wharfs and warehouses, and new buildings in all directions; and of a great many vast plans which are still ‘progressing.’ Already, however, some very good houses, broad streets, and marble-fronted shops, have gone so far ahead as to be in a state of completion; and the town bids fair in a few years to improve considerably: though it is not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with Cincinnati.
The Roman Catholic religion, introduced here by the early French settlers, prevails extensively. Among the public institutions are a Jesuit college; a convent for ‘the Ladies of the Sacred Heart;’ and a large chapel attached to the college, which was in course of erection at the time of my visit, and was intended to be consecrated on the second of December in the next year. The architect of this building, is one of the reverend fathers of the school, and the works proceed under his sole direction. The organ will be sent from Belgium.
In addition to these establishments, there is a Roman Catholic cathedral, dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier; and a hospital, founded by the munificence of a deceased resident, who was a member of that church. It also sends missionaries from hence among the Indian tribes.
The Unitarian church is represented, in this remote place, as in most other parts of America, by a gentleman of great worth and excellence. The poor have good reason to remember and bless it; for it befriends them, and aids the cause of rational education, without any sectarian or selfish views. It is liberal in all its actions; of kind construction; and of wide benevolence.
There are three free-schools already erected, and in full operation in this city. A fourth is building, and will soon be opened.
No man ever admits the unhealthiness of the place he dwells in (unless he is going away from it), and I shall therefore, I have no doubt, be at issue with the inhabitants of St. Louis, in questioning the perfect salubrity of its climate, and in hinting that I think it must rather dispose to fever, in the summer and autumnal seasons. Just adding, that it is very hot, lies among great rivers, and has vast tracts of undrained swampy land around it, I leave the reader to form his own opinion.
As I had a great desire to see a Prairie before turning back from the furthest point of my wanderings; and as some gentlemen of the town had, in their hospitable consideration, an equal desire to gratify me; a day was fixed, before my departure, for an expedition to the Looking-Glass Prairie, which is within thirty miles of the town. Deeming it possible that my readers may not object to know what kind of thing such a gipsy party may be at that distance from home, and among what sort of objects it moves, I will describe the jaunt in another chapter.
La piccola moglie
Beh, di certo non c’era mai stata una donna così piena di >speranza, tenerezza, amore e ansia come questa giovane madre: per tutto il giorno si chiedeva se ‘Lui’ sarebbe arrivato al molo, se avesse ricevuto la sua lettera, e se, mandando il bambino a riva con qualcun altro, ‘Lui’ lo avrebbe riconosciuto per strada. Il che, considerando che non l’aveva mai nemmeno visto in vita sua, in teoria non sembrava molto probabile; ma per la giovane madre era più che possibile. Era davvero una creatura così ingenua, così piena di speranza e felicità. E raccontava tutto questo con tale sincerità che anche le altre passeggeresse ne erano profondamente commosse; il capitano, che veniva a sapere tutto dalla moglie, era davvero molto astuto: ogni volta che ci incontravamo a tavola, fingeva di chiedere, come per caso, se aspettasse qualcuno a St. Louis, o se volesse sbarcare quella sera stessa, e faceva anche molte altre battute del genere. C’era poi una vecchia signora dal viso rugoso, che approfittava dell’occasione per mettere in dubbio la fedeltà degli uomini in situazioni di lutto; c’era un’altra donna (con un cagnolino) abbastanza anziana da poter fare lezioni sulla fragilità dei sentimenti umani, ma non così vecchia da non prendersi cura del bambino, o da ridere insieme alle altre quando la giovane madre lo chiamava con il nome del padre e gli poneva tutte quelle domande stravaganti, piena di gioia.
Fu quasi un colpo per quella piccola donna: quando eravamo a soli venti miglia dal nostro destinazione, divenne chiaramente necessario mettere a letto quel bambino. Ma lei superò la situazione con lo stesso ottimo umorismo; si legò un fazzoletto intorno alla testa e uscì nella piccola veranda insieme agli altri. E poi, che “oracolo” divenne riguardo alle località! Che spirito scherzoso dimostrarono le signore sposate! Quanto affetto mostrarono quelle single! E quanti scoppi di risa suscitò lei stessa, quella donna che avrebbe preferito piangere piuttosto che ridere, a ogni battuta scherzosa.
Finalmente apparvero le luci di St. Louis; ecco il molo, e quelle erano le scale. Quella piccola donna, coprendosi il viso con le mani e ridendo (o sembrando ridere) più che mai, corse nella sua cabina e si chiuse dentro. Non ho alcun >dubbio che, nell’incostanza affascinante di tale eccitazione, si tappasse le orecchie per non sentire “lui” chiamarla. Ma non la vidi farlo.
Allora, una grande folla di persone si affrettò a salire a bordo; la barca, però, non era ancora ancorata e stava ancora vagando tra le altre imbarcazioni in cerca di un posto dove attraccare. Tutti cercavano il marito, ma nessuno lo vedeva. E poi, in mezzo a noi tutti – chissà come fosse riuscita ad arrivare lì – c’era quella piccola donna che si aggrappava con entrambe le braccia al collo di un giovane bello, robusto e gentile! Un attimo dopo, eccola di nuovo: batteva felicemente le manine mentre lo trascinava dentro la sua piccola cabina per mostrargli il bambino che dormiva.
Siamo andati in un grande hotel chiamato Planter’s House: costruito come un ospedale inglese, con lunghi corridoi e pareti spoglie, e lucernari sopra le porte delle stanze per garantire una circolazione d’aria ottimale. C’erano moltissimi ospiti; quando siamo arrivati, molte luci brillavano dalle finestre sulla strada sottostante, come se l’edificio fosse stato illuminato in occasione di qualche festa. È un hotel eccellente, e i proprietari si impegnano davvero molto nel fornire comodità ai clienti. Un giorno, mentre pranzavo da solo con mia moglie nella nostra stanza, ho contato quattordici piatti sul tavolo contemporaneamente.
Nella parte della città di antica origine francese, le strade sono strette e tortuose, e alcune case sono davvero caratteristiche e pittoresche: costruite in legno, con verande fatiscenti davanti alle finestre, accessibili tramite scale o, più spesso, scale a pioli dalla strada. In questo quartiere si trovano anche piccoli negozi di barbiere e osterie bizzarre; inoltre, ci sono molte vecchie abitazioni malandate, con finestre che lampeggiano al buio, proprio come si possono vedere in Fiandra. Alcune di queste antiche dimore, con alte finestre a timpano che sporgono sui tetti, hanno un aspetto davvero caratteristico; ingobbiate dal tempo, sembrano tenere la testa storta, e forse anche sogghignare, stupite dalle trasformazioni apportate dagli americani.
È quasi superfluo dire che questi complessi sono costituiti da moli, magazzini e nuovi edifici in tutte le direzioni; inoltre, ci sono moltissimi progetti ancora in fase di realizzazione. Tuttavia, già adesso alcune case molto belle, strade ampie e negozi con facciate in marmo sono quasi completati; nel giro di pochi anni la città potrà migliorare notevolmente, anche se probabilmente non riuscirà mai a competere, per quanto riguarda l’eleganza o la bellezza, con Cincinnati.
La religione cattolica romana, introdotta qui dai primi coloni francesi, è ampiamente diffusa. Tra le istituzioni pubbliche figurano un collegio gesuita, un convento delle “Signore del Sacro Cuore” e una grande cappella annessa al collegio; quest’ultima era in fase di costruzione al momento della mia visita ed era previsto che venisse consacrata il 2 dicembre dell’anno successivo. L’architetto di questo edificio è uno dei reverendi padri del collegio, e i lavori procedono sotto la sua unica direzione; l’organo verrà inviato dal Belgio.
Oltre a queste strutture, vi è una cattedrale cattolica romana, dedicata a San Francesco Saverio; inoltre, c’è un ospedale fondato grazie alla generosità di un ex residente che apparteneva a quella chiesa. Da qui vengono anche inviati missionari tra le tribù indigene.
La chiesa unitariana, in questo luogo remoto, come nella maggior parte delle altre regioni dell’America, è rappresentata da un gentiluomo di grande valore ed eccellenza. I poveri hanno tutte le ragioni per ricordarla e benedirla; poiché li sostiene e aiuta la causa di una educazione razionale, senza alcun atteggiamento settario o egoistico. È liberalissima nelle sue azioni, di carattere benevolo e di vasta portata.
Sono già stati costruiti tre istituti scolastici liberi, che sono attualmente in piena funzione in questa >città. Un quarto è in fase di costruzione e sarà aperto presto.
Nessun uomo ammette mai l’insalubrità del luogo in cui vive (a meno che non intenda lasciarlo), e quindi, senza alcun >dubbio, avrò delle discussioni con gli abitanti di St. Louis riguardo alla perfetta salubrità del suo clima, suggerendo che probabilmente favorisca lo sviluppo della febbre durante le stagioni estive e autunnali. Aggiungo soltanto che il clima è molto caldo, la città si trova tra grandi fiumi e circonda vaste aree di terra paludosa e non drenata; lascio quindi al lettore la libertà di formarsi una propria opinione.
Poiché avevo un grande desiderio di vedere la Prairie prima di tornare dal punto più lontano delle mie peregrinazioni; e poiché alcuni gentiluomini della città, per loro ospitalità, condividevano lo stesso desiderio di accontentarmi; fu fissato un giorno, prima della mia partenza, per un’escursione nella Looking-Glass Prairie, che si trova a trenta miglia dalla città. Ritenendo possibile che i miei lettori non si oppongano a conoscere che tipo di gruppo possa essere una compagnia di zingari a quella distanza da casa loro, e tra quali tipi di luoghi si muova, descriverò questa escursione in un altro capitolo.
CHAPTER XIII A JAUNT TO THE LOOKING-GLASS PRAIRIE AND BACK
I MAY premise that the word Prairie is variously pronounced paraaer, parearer, paroarer. The latter mode of pronunciation is perhaps the most in favour.
We were fourteen in all, and all young men: indeed it is a singular though very natural feature in the society of these distant settlements, that it is mainly composed of adventurous persons in the prime of life, and has very few grey heads among it. There were no ladies: the trip being a fatiguing one: and we were to start at five o’clock in the morning punctually.
I was called at four, that I might be certain of keeping nobody waiting; and having got some bread and milk for breakfast, threw up the window and looked down into the street, expecting to see the whole party busily astir, and great preparations going on below. But as everything was very quiet, and the street presented that hopeless aspect with which five o’clock in the morning is familiar elsewhere, I deemed it as well to go to bed again, and went accordingly.
I woke again at seven o’clock, and by that time the party had assembled, and were gathered round, one light carriage, with a very stout axletree; one something on wheels like an amateur carrier’s cart; one double phaeton of great antiquity and unearthly construction; one gig with a great hole in its back and a broken head; and one rider on horseback who was to go on before. I got into the first coach with three companions; the rest bestowed themselves in the other vehicles; two large baskets were made fast to the lightest; two large stone jars in wicker cases, technically known as demi-johns, were consigned to the ‘least rowdy’ of the party for safe-keeping; and the procession moved off to the ferryboat, in which it was to cross the river bodily, men, horses, carriages, and all, as the manner in these parts is.
We got over the river in due course, and mustered again before a little wooden box on wheels, hove down all aslant in a morass, with ‘MERCHANT TAILOR’ painted in very large letters over the door. Having settled the order of proceeding, and the road to be taken, we started off once more and began to make our way through an ill-favoured Black Hollow, called, less expressively, the American Bottom.
The previous day had been—not to say hot, for the term is weak and lukewarm in its power of conveying an idea of the temperature. The town had been on fire; in a blaze. But at night it had come on to rain in torrents, and all night long it had rained without cessation. We had a pair of very strong horses, but travelled at the rate of little more than a couple of miles an hour, through one unbroken slough of black mud and water. It had no variety but in depth. Now it was only half over the wheels, now it hid the axletree, and now the coach sank down in it almost to the windows. The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping of the frogs, who, with the pigs (a coarse, ugly breed, as unwholesome-looking as though they were the spontaneous growth of the country), had the whole scene to themselves. Here and there we passed a log hut: but the wretched cabins were wide apart and thinly scattered, for though the soil is very rich in this place, few people can exist in such a deadly atmosphere. On either side of the track, if it deserve the name, was the thick ‘bush;’ and everywhere was stagnant, slimy, rotten, filthy water.
As it is the custom in these parts to give a horse a gallon or so of cold water whenever he is in a foam with heat, we halted for that purpose, at a log inn in the wood, far removed from any other residence. It consisted of one room, bare-roofed and bare-walled of course, with a loft above. The ministering priest was a swarthy young savage, in a shirt of cotton print like bed-furniture, and a pair of ragged trousers. There were a couple of young boys, too, nearly naked, lying idle by the well; and they, and he, and the traveller at the inn, turned out to look at us.
The traveller was an old man with a grey gristly beard two inches long, a shaggy moustache of the same hue, and enormous eyebrows; which almost obscured his lazy, semi-drunken glance, as he stood regarding us with folded arms: poising himself alternately upon his toes and heels. On being addressed by one of the party, he drew nearer, and said, rubbing his chin (which scraped under his horny hand like fresh gravel beneath a nailed shoe), that he was from Delaware, and had lately bought a farm ‘down there,’ pointing into one of the marshes where the stunted trees were thickest. He was ‘going,’ he added, to St. Louis, to fetch his family, whom he had left behind; but he seemed in no great hurry to bring on these incumbrances, for when we moved away, he loitered back into the cabin, and was plainly bent on stopping there so long as his money lasted. He was a great politician of course, and explained his opinions at some length to one of our company; but I only remember that he concluded with two sentiments, one of which was, Somebody for ever; and the other, Blast everybody else! which is by no means a bad abstract of the general creed in these matters.
When the horses were swollen out to about twice their natural dimensions (there seems to be an idea here, that this kind of inflation improves their going), we went forward again, through mud and mire, and damp, and festering heat, and brake and bush, attended always by the music of the frogs and pigs, until nearly noon, when we halted at a place called Belleville.
Belleville was a small collection of wooden houses, huddled together in the very heart of the bush and swamp. Many of them had singularly bright doors of red and yellow; for the place had been lately visited by a travelling painter, ‘who got along,’ as I was told, ‘by eating his way.’ The criminal court was sitting, and was at that moment trying some criminals for horse-stealing: with whom it would most likely go hard: for live stock of all kinds being necessarily very much exposed in the woods, is held by the community in rather higher value than human life; and for this reason, juries generally make a point of finding all men indicted for cattle-stealing, guilty, whether or no.
CAPITOLO XIII
UN VIAGGIO NELLA PRERIA DEI “GLASS LOOKING” E TORNATO INDIETRO
Posso affermare che la parola “Prairie” venga pronunciata in modi diversi: paraaer, parearer, paroarer. Quest’ultimo modo di pronuncia è forse il più diffuso.
Eravamo in quattordici, tutti giovani uomini; infatti è una caratteristica singolare, sebbene molto naturale, nella società di queste lontane colonie: essa è composta principalmente da persone avventurose nel fiore degli anni, e vi sono pochissime persone anziane tra noi. Non c’erano donne; il viaggio era estenuante, e dovevamo partire puntualmente alle cinque del mattino.
Mi chiamarono alle quattro, affinché fossi sicuro di non far aspettare nessuno; dopo aver preso del pane e del latte per colazione, aprii la finestra e guardai giù in strada, aspettandomi di vedere tutto il gruppo impegnato nei preparativi. Ma poiché tutto era molto tranquillo, e la strada presentava quell’aspetto desolato che è tipico delle cinque del mattino altrove, decisi che fosse meglio andare a letto di nuovo e così feci.
Mi svegliai di nuovo alle sette in punto; a quell’ora il gruppo si era già riunito intorno a un carro leggero con un assale molto robusto, a un veicolo simile a un carretto da trasporto amatoriale, a un phaeton d’antichità e costruzione insolita, a una vettura con un grande buco sul retro e una ruota rotta, e a un cavaliere che avrebbe guidato la processione. Salii sul primo carro insieme a tre compagni; gli altri si sistemarono negli altri veicoli. Due grandi cesti furono fissati al carro più leggero; due grandi vasi di pietra, contenuti in casse di vimini, furono affidati alla persona “meno turbolenta” del gruppo affinché li custodisse con cura. La processione si avviò quindi verso la barca traghetto, con cui avremmo attraversato il fiume insieme a uomini, cavalli e carri, come è consuetudine in queste zone.
Riuscimmo a attraversare il >fiume in poco tempo, e ci riunimmo di nuovo davanti a una piccola scatola di legno su ruote, inclinata in modo precario in un pantano; sulla porta era dipinto a grandi lettere “MODISTA COMMERCIALE”. Dopo aver stabilito l’ordine di marcia e la strada da seguire, partimmo nuovamente e iniziammo ad addentrarci in una zona desolata chiamata Black Hollow, o, per essere meno poetici, l’“American Bottom”.
Il giorno precedente non si può certo definire caldo, poiché tale termine è troppo debole e insufficiente per esprimere appieno l’intensità della temperatura. La città era in fiamme; un incendio devastante aveva divampato ovunque. Ma di notte aveva iniziato a piovere a catene, e per tutta la notte il diluvio non si era mai interrotto. Avevamo due cavalli molto forti, ma procedevamo a una velocità di poco superiore ai due miglia all’ora, attraverso un’unica distesa continua di fango nero e acqua. L’acqua raggiungeva a malapena l’altezza delle ruote, a volte nascondeva completamente l’asse del carro, altre volte lo sommergeva quasi fino alle finestre. L’aria risuonava ovunque del forte canto delle rane; insieme ai maiali – una razza rozza e brutta, dall’aspetto decisamente malsano, come se fossero cresciuti spontaneamente in quel luogo – quelle creature avevano tutto per sé. Di tanto in tanto superavamo qualche capanna di legno; ma quelle misere abitazioni erano sparse molto lontane le une dalle altre, poiché, nonostante il terreno fosse estremamente fertile in quella zona, poche persone riuscivano a sopravvivere in un ambiente così letale. Su entrambi i lati della strada – se si può davvero definirla tale – cresceva una fitta boscaglia; ovunque c’era acqua stagnante, vischiosa, putrefatta e sporca.
Poiché in queste zone è consuetudine dare a un cavallo circa un gallone d’acqua fredda ogni volta che soffre di calore eccessivo, ci fermammo per farlo in una locanda di legno, lontana da qualsiasi altra abitazione. La locanda consisteva in una sola stanza, con il soffitto e le pareti spoglie; al piano di sopra c’era un sottotetto. Il prete che ci servì era un giovane selvaggio dalla pelle scura, vestito con una camicia a stampa di cotone simile a quella dei mobili da letto e un paio di pantaloni logori. C’erano anche due ragazzi, quasi nudi, sdraiati accanto alla fontana; loro, lui e l’altro viaggiatore presenti nella locanda ci osservarono attentamente.
Il viaggiatore era un vecchio con una barba grigia e ruvida lunga due pollici, un baffo folto dello stesso colore e sopracciglia enormi; queste ultime quasi oscuravano il suo sguardo pigro e semibrillo mentre ci fissava a braccia incrociate, alternando il peso del corpo sui talloni e sulle punte dei piedi. Quando uno di noi gli rivolse la parola, si avvicinò e, strofinandosi il mento – che sotto la sua mano callosa scivolava come ghiaia fresca sotto una scarpa chiodata – disse di essere originario del Delaware e di aver appena acquistato una fattoria “là giù”, indicando uno dei pantani dove gli alberi erano più fitti. Aggiunse che stava andando a St. Louis per prendere la sua famiglia, lasciata indietro; tuttavia non sembrava affatto ansioso di riportarla con sé, perché quando noi ci allontanammo, rimase nella capanna, chiaramente intenzionato a trattenersi lì finché gli sarebbero bastati i soldi. Naturalmente era un grande politico e spiegò dettagliatamente le sue opinioni a uno di noi; ricordo solo che concluse con due frasi: una recitava “Qualcuno per sempre”; l’altra, “Che vadano tutti al diavolo!”, il che rappresenta senz’altro un ottimo riassunto della sua filosofia in materia.
Quando i cavalli si erano ingrossati fino a raggiungere circa il doppio delle loro dimensioni naturali (sembra che ci sia un’idea alla base di questo fenomeno: che tale “inflazione” migliorasse la loro capacità di muoversi), proseguimmo il cammino, attraverso fango, paludi, umidità e calore opprimente, sempre accompagnati dal canto delle rane e dei maiali. Fino a quasi mezzogiorno, quando ci fermammo in un luogo chiamato Belleville.
Belleville era un piccolo insieme di case di legno, raggruppate nel cuore della boscaglia e delle paludi. Molte di esse avevano porte di colori vivaci, rosso e giallo; il luogo era stato infatti recentemente visitato da un pittore itinerante, che, a quanto mi fu detto, “si manteneva mangiando ciò che riusciva a ottenere”. In quel momento, la corte penale stava processando alcuni individui accusati di furto di cavalli: probabilmente si sarebbero presi provvedimenti severi contro di loro, poiché il bestiame, essendo esposto nelle foreste, era considerato dalla comunità molto più prezioso della vita umana. Per questo motivo, le giurie di solito si assicuravano che tutti gli imputati di furto di bestiame venissero dichiarati colpevoli, indipendentemente dai fatti.
The horses belonging to the bar, the judge, and witnesses, were tied to temporary racks set up roughly in the road; by which is to be understood, a forest path, nearly knee-deep in mud and slime.
There was an hotel in this place, which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half-kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time. The horseman had gone forward to have coffee and some eatables prepared, and they were by this time nearly ready. He had ordered ‘wheat-bread and chicken fixings,’ in preference to ‘corn-bread and common doings.’ The latter kind of rejection includes only pork and bacon. The former comprehends broiled ham, sausages, veal cutlets, steaks, and such other viands of that nature as may be supposed, by a tolerably wide poetical construction, ‘to fix’ a chicken comfortably in the digestive organs of any lady or gentleman.
On one of the door-posts at this inn, was a tin plate, whereon was inscribed in characters of gold, ‘Doctor Crocus;’ and on a sheet of paper, pasted up by the side of this plate, was a written announcement that Dr. Crocus would that evening deliver a lecture on Phrenology for the benefit of the Belleville public; at a charge, for admission, of so much a head.
Straying up-stairs, during the preparation of the chicken fixings, I happened to pass the doctor’s chamber; and as the door stood wide open, and the room was empty, I made bold to peep in.
It was a bare, unfurnished, comfortless room, with an unframed portrait hanging up at the head of the bed; a likeness, I take it, of the Doctor, for the forehead was fully displayed, and great stress was laid by the artist upon its phrenological developments. The bed itself was covered with an old patch-work counterpane. The room was destitute of carpet or of curtain. There was a damp fireplace without any stove, full of wood ashes; a chair, and a very small table; and on the last-named piece of furniture was displayed, in grand array, the doctor’s library, consisting of some half-dozen greasy old books.
Now, it certainly looked about the last apartment on the whole earth out of which any man would be likely to get anything to do him good. But the door, as I have said, stood coaxingly open, and plainly said in conjunction with the chair, the portrait, the table, and the books, ‘Walk in, gentlemen, walk in! Don’t be ill, gentlemen, when you may be well in no time. Doctor Crocus is here, gentlemen, the celebrated Dr. Crocus! Dr. Crocus has come all this way to cure you, gentlemen. If you haven’t heard of Dr. Crocus, it’s your fault, gentlemen, who live a little way out of the world here: not Dr. Crocus’s. Walk in, gentlemen, walk in!’
In the passage below, when I went down-stairs again, was Dr. Crocus himself. A crowd had flocked in from the Court House, and a voice from among them called out to the landlord, ‘Colonel! introduce Doctor Crocus.’
‘Mr. Dickens,’ says the colonel, ‘Doctor Crocus.’
Upon which Doctor Crocus, who is a tall, fine-looking Scotchman, but rather fierce and warlike in appearance for a professor of the peaceful art of healing, bursts out of the concourse with his right arm extended, and his chest thrown out as far as it will possibly come, and says:
‘Your countryman, sir!’
Whereupon Doctor Crocus and I shake hands; and Doctor Crocus looks as if I didn’t by any means realise his expectations, which, in a linen blouse, and a great straw hat, with a green ribbon, and no gloves, and my face and nose profusely ornamented with the stings of mosquitoes and the bites of bugs, it is very likely I did not.
‘Long in these parts, sir?’ says I.
‘Three or four months, sir,’ says the Doctor.
‘Do you think of soon returning to the old country?’ says I.
Doctor Crocus makes no verbal answer, but gives me an imploring look, which says so plainly ‘Will you ask me that again, a little louder, if you please?’ that I repeat the question.
‘Think of soon returning to the old country, sir!’ repeats the Doctor.
‘To the old country, sir,’ I rejoin.
Doctor Crocus looks round upon the crowd to observe the effect he produces, rubs his hands, and says, in a very loud voice:
‘Not yet awhile, sir, not yet. You won’t catch me at that just yet, sir. I am a little too fond of freedom for that, sir. Ha, ha! It’s not so easy for a man to tear himself from a free country such as this is, sir. Ha, ha! No, no! Ha, ha! None of that till one’s obliged to do it, sir. No, no!’
As Doctor Crocus says these latter words, he shakes his head, knowingly, and laughs again. Many of the bystanders shake their heads in concert with the doctor, and laugh too, and look at each other as much as to say, ‘A pretty bright and first-rate sort of chap is Crocus!’ and unless I am very much mistaken, a good many people went to the lecture that night, who never thought about phrenology, or about Doctor Crocus either, in all their lives before.
From Belleville, we went on, through the same desolate kind of waste, and constantly attended, without the interval of a moment, by the same music; until, at three o’clock in the afternoon, we halted once more at a village called Lebanon to inflate the horses again, and give them some corn besides: of which they stood much in need. Pending this ceremony, I walked into the village, where I met a full-sized dwelling-house coming down-hill at a round trot, drawn by a score or more of oxen.
The public-house was so very clean and good a one, that the managers of the jaunt resolved to return to it and put up there for the night, if possible. This course decided on, and the horses being well refreshed, we again pushed forward, and came upon the Prairie at sunset.
I cavalli appartenenti al giudice e ai testimoni furono legati a delle impalcature temporanee allestite lungo la strada, ovvero un sentiero nel bosco quasi completamente coperto di fango e melma.
In questo posto c’era un hotel che, come tutti gli hotel dell’America, disponeva di una grande sala da pranzo per i clienti. Era una strana costruzione, bassa e malconcia, metà stalla e metà cucina; il tavolo era coperto con un semplice tovagliolo di tela marrone, e lungo le pareti erano fissate lampade di latta per accendere le candele durante la cena. Il cavaliere era andato avanti a ordinare caffè e qualche cibo; a quell’ora quasi tutto era pronto. Aveva scelto “pane di grano e piatti a base di pollo”, invece del solito “pane di mais e cibi semplici”. Quest’ultimo tipo di menu includeva solo maiale e pancetta; il primo, invece, comprendeva prosciutto arrosto, salsicce, cotolette di vitello, bistecche e altre pietanze del genere che, con un po’ di fantasia poetica, si possono considerare adatte a “nutrire” comodamente gli organi digestivi di qualsiasi signora o signore.
Su uno dei pali della porta di questa locanda c’era una lastra di latta su cui era inciso in caratteri d’oro “Dottor Crocus”; accanto ad essa, attaccato con del carta, c’era un avviso che annunciava che il Dottor Crocus quella sera avrebbe tenuto una lezione di frenologia a beneficio del pubblico di Belleville; l’ingresso era a pagamento, al prezzo di una certa somma per ogni persona.
Salendo le scale per preparare gli ingredienti per il pollo, mi capitò di passare davanti alla stanza del dottore; poiché la porta era completamente aperta e la stanza vuota, decisi di dare un’occhiata all’interno.
Era una stanza spoglia, senza arredi, scomoda; all’estremità del letto era appeso un ritratto senza cornice. Immagino si trattasse del Dottore, poiché la fronte era completamente visibile, e l’artista aveva dato grande importanza alle caratteristiche frenologiche raffigurate in quel volto. Il letto stesso era coperto da una vecchia coperta patchwork. La stanza non aveva né tappeti né tende; c’era un camino umido, privo di stufa, pieno di cenere di legna; una sedia e un tavolino molto piccolo. Sul tavolino era esposta, in modo molto appariscente, la “biblioteca” del Dottore: si trattava di circa sei vecchi libri grassi e logori.
Ora, certamente sembrava l’ultimo appartamento al mondo da cui un uomo potesse aspettarsi qualcosa di positivo. Ma la porta, come ho detto, era aperta invitante, e insieme alla sedia, al ritratto, al tavolo e ai libri, sembrava dire chiaramente: “Entrate, signori, entrate! Non ammalatevi, signori, potreste stare benissimo in qualsiasi momento. Il dottor Crocus è qui, il famoso dottor Crocus! È venuto apposta per curarvi. Se non avete mai sentito parlare del dottor Crocus, la colpa è vostra, non sua. Entrate, signori, entrate!”
Nel passaggio seguente, quando scesi di nuovo le scale, c’era il dottor Crocus in persona. Una folla si era radunata dalla Corte della [Casa, e una voce tra loro chiamò l’affittuatore: “Colonnello! Presenti il dottor Crocus.”
“Signor Dickens,” dice il colonnello, “dottor Crocus.”
Allora il Dottor Crocus, che è un scozzese alto e di bell’aspetto, ma piuttosto feroce e bellicoso nell’aspetto per essere un professore dell’arte pacifica della guarigione, irrompe dalla folla con il braccio destro teso e il petto spinto in avanti quanto più possibile, e dice:
“Vostro connazionale, signore!”
A quel punto il Dottor Crocus e io ci stringemmo la mano; e il Dottor Crocus sembrava pensare che non avessi affatto soddisfatto le sue aspettative. Con una camicia di lino, un grande cappello di paglia con una corda verde, senza guanti, e con il viso e il naso coperti di punture di zanzare e morsi di insetti. È molto probabile che non abbia soddisfatto davvero le sue aspettative.
“Da molto tempo in queste zone, signore?” chiesi io.
“Tre o quattro mesi, signore,” dice il Dottore.
“Pensi di tornare presto nel tuo paese d’origine?” chiedo io.
Il Dottor Crocus non risponde a parole, ma mi lancia uno sguardo supplichevole che dice chiaramente: “Potresti ripetere la domanda, per favore, più ad alta voce?”, così io la ripeto.
“Pensate al ritorno presto nel vostro paese d’origine, signore!” ripete il Dottore.
“Nel vecchio paese, signore,” rispondo io.
Il Dottor Crocus guarda intorno alla folla per osservare l’effetto che ha prodotto, si strofina le mani e dice, a voce molto alta:
‘Non ancora, signore, non ancora. Non riuscirete ad acciuffarmi così facilmente, signore. Amo troppo la libertà per farlo, signore. Ahah! Non è affatto facile per un uomo separarsi da una nazione libera come questa. No, no! Solo quando si viene costretti a farlo, signore. No, no!’
Mentre il Dottor Crocus pronuncia queste ultime parole, scuote la testa con aria complice e ride di nuovo. Molti dei presenti scuotono la testa insieme a lui e ridono anch’essi, guardandosi l’un l’altro come per dire: “Che tipo davvero intelligente e eccezionale sia Crocus!” E, a meno che non mi sbagli di molto, molte persone sono andate a quella lezione quella notte, anche se in tutta la loro vita prima non avevano mai pensato né alla frenologia né al Dottor Crocus.
Da Belleville, proseguimmo attraverso lo stesso tipo di desolato territorio disabitato, e per tutto il tempo fummo accompagnati, senza un attimo di pausa, dalla stessa musica; fino a quando, alle tre del pomeriggio, ci fermammo nuovamente in un villaggio chiamato Lebanon per riempire d’aria i cavalli e dar loro anche del grano: ne avevano davvero bisogno. Mentre aspettavamo che questa operazione venisse eseguita, entrai nel villaggio, dove vidi una casa di dimensioni normali che scendeva la collina a un trotto regolare, trainata da una ventina di buoi.
La locanda pubblica era così pulita e accogliente che i gestori del viaggio decisero di tornarci e trascorrervi la notte, se possibile. Presa questa decisione e avendo i cavalli ben riposati, proseguimmo il nostro cammino e arrivammo nella prateria al tramonto.
It would be difficult to say why, or how—though it was possibly from having heard and read so much about it—but the effect on me was disappointment. Looking towards the setting sun, there lay, stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank; until it met the glowing sky, wherein it seemed to dip: mingling with its rich colours, and mellowing in its distant blue. There it lay, a tranquil sea or lake without water, if such a simile be admissible, with the day going down upon it: a few birds wheeling here and there: and solitude and silence reigning paramount around. But the grass was not yet high; there were bare black patches on the ground; and the few wild flowers that the eye could see, were poor and scanty. Great as the picture was, its very flatness and extent, which left nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest. I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken. It was lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony. I felt that in traversing the Prairies, I could never abandon myself to the scene, forgetful of all else; as I should do instinctively, were the heather underneath my feet, or an iron-bound coast beyond; but should often glance towards the distant and frequently-receding line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed. It is not a scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one, I think (at all events, as I saw it), to remember with much pleasure, or to covet the looking-on again, in after-life.
We encamped near a solitary log-house, for the sake of its water, and dined upon the plain. The baskets contained roast fowls, buffalo’s tongue (an exquisite dainty, by the way), ham, bread, cheese, and butter; biscuits, champagne, sherry; lemons and sugar for punch; and abundance of rough ice. The meal was delicious, and the entertainers were the soul of kindness and good humour. I have often recalled that cheerful party to my pleasant recollection since, and shall not easily forget, in junketings nearer home with friends of older date, my boon companions on the Prairie.
Returning to Lebanon that night, we lay at the little inn at which we had halted in the afternoon. In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind, in England.
Rising at five o’clock next morning, I took a walk about the village: none of the houses were strolling about to-day, but it was early for them yet, perhaps: and then amused myself by lounging in a kind of farm-yard behind the tavern, of which the leading features were, a strange jumble of rough sheds for stables; a rude colonnade, built as a cool place of summer resort; a deep well; a great earthen mound for keeping vegetables in, in winter time; and a pigeon-house, whose little apertures looked, as they do in all pigeon-houses, very much too small for the admission of the plump and swelling-breasted birds who were strutting about it, though they tried to get in never so hard. That interest exhausted, I took a survey of the inn’s two parlours, which were decorated with coloured prints of Washington, and President Madison, and of a white-faced young lady (much speckled by the flies), who held up her gold neck-chain for the admiration of the spectator, and informed all admiring comers that she was ‘Just Seventeen:’ although I should have thought her older. In the best room were two oil portraits of the kit-cat size, representing the landlord and his infant son; both looking as bold as lions, and staring out of the canvas with an intensity that would have been cheap at any price. They were painted, I think, by the artist who had touched up the Belleville doors with red and gold; for I seemed to recognise his style immediately.
After breakfast, we started to return by a different way from that which we had taken yesterday, and coming up at ten o’clock with an encampment of German emigrants carrying their goods in carts, who had made a rousing fire which they were just quitting, stopped there to refresh. And very pleasant the fire was; for, hot though it had been yesterday, it was quite cold to-day, and the wind blew keenly. Looming in the distance, as we rode along, was another of the ancient Indian burial-places, called The Monks’ Mound; in memory of a body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded a desolate convent there, many years ago, when there were no settlers within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the pernicious climate: in which lamentable fatality, few rational people will suppose, perhaps, that society experienced any very severe deprivation.
The track of to-day had the same features as the track of yesterday. There was the swamp, the bush, and the perpetual chorus of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth. Here and there, and frequently too, we encountered a solitary broken-down waggon, full of some new settler’s goods. It was a pitiful sight to see one of these vehicles deep in the mire; the axle-tree broken; the wheel lying idly by its side; the man gone miles away, to look for assistance; the woman seated among their wandering household gods with a baby at her breast, a picture of forlorn, dejected patience; the team of oxen crouching down mournfully in the mud, and breathing forth such clouds of vapour from their mouths and nostrils, that all the damp mist and fog around seemed to have come direct from them.
In due time we mustered once again before the merchant tailor’s, and having done so, crossed over to the city in the ferry-boat: passing, on the way, a spot called Bloody Island, the duelling-ground of St. Louis, and so designated in honour of the last fatal combat fought there, which was with pistols, breast to breast. Both combatants fell dead upon the ground; and possibly some rational people may think of them, as of the gloomy madmen on the Monks’ Mound, that they were no great loss to the community.
Sarebbe difficile dire il perché o il come, forse perché ne avevo sentito e letto così tanto, ma l’effetto che ebbe su di me fu delusione. Guardando verso il sole al tramonto, davanti ai miei occhi si estendeva un vasto spazio di terreno pianeggiante; interrotto soltanto da una sottile linea di alberi, appena visibili sul grande vuoto circostante, fino a confondersi con il cielo luminoso, dove sembravano immergersi, mescolandosi alle sue colorate sfumature e attenuandosi nel loro blu lontano. Lì si estendeva un “mare” o un “lago” tranquillo, ma privo di acqua, se tale paragone è permesso, con il sole che tramontava su di esso; pochi uccelli volavano qua e là, e solitudine e silenzio regnavano sovrani in quel luogo. Tuttavia l’erba non era ancora alta; c’erano zone nude e nere sul terreno; le poche piante selvatiche visibili erano povere e scarse. Per quanto magnifica fosse quella vista, la sua estensione sterminata, che lasciava poco spazio all’immaginazione, ne riduceva il fascino. Non provavo quella sensazione di libertà ed eccitazione che ispira una brughiera scozzese, né tantomeno le nostre campagne inglesi. Era un luogo solitario e selvaggio, ma opprimente nella sua desolata monotonia. Sentivo che, attraversando quelle praterie, non avrei mai potuto abbandonarmi completamente a quella scena, dimenticando tutto il resto, come avrei fatto istintivamente se sotto i miei piedi ci fosse stata erica o una costa circondata da scogliere, ma avrei spesso dovuto guardare verso quella linea lontana e sempre più distante all’orizzonte, desiderando che si avvicinasse e passasse. Non è un paesaggio da dimenticare, ma, a mio parere (almeno così come lo vidi), difficilmente merita di essere ricordato con piacere, né desidero rivederlo in una vita futura.
Ci accampammo vicino a una solitaria capanna di legno, per via dell’acqua che vi si trovava, e cenammo all’aperto. Le ceste contenevano polli arrostiti, lingua di bufalo (un delizioso manicaretto, tra l’altro), prosciutto, pane, formaggio e burro; biscotti, champagne, sherry; limoni e zucchero per preparare il punch; e abbondante ghiaccio grezzo. Il pasto fu delizioso, e gli ospiti erano davvero pieni di gentilezza e buon umore. Ho spesso ricordato quella piacevole compagnia da allora, e non dimenticherò facilmente le vacanze trascorse vicino a casa con vecchi amici, i miei compagni d’avventura sulle praterie.
Tornati in Libano quella notte, ci fermammo nell’osteria dove eravamo già stati nel pomeriggio. Per quanto riguarda la pulizia e il comfort, non avrebbe certo avuto nulla da invidiare a nessuna taverna inglese, di tipo casalingo, in Inghilterra.
Alzandomi alle cinque del mattino seguente, feci una passeggiata per il villaggio: nessuna delle case era aperta in quel giorno, ma era ancora troppo presto. Così mi divertii a gironzolare nel cortile dietro la taverna, dove si trovavano stalle mal costruite, una rozza colonnata destinata all’uso estivo, un pozzo profondo, un grande mucchio di terra per conservare le verdure in inverno. E anche un colombaio, il cui ingresso sembrava decisamente troppo stretto per i corpulenti uccelli che vi si aggiravano intorno. Una volta esaurito questo interesse, ispezionai le due sale della taverna: erano decorate con stampe colorate di Washington, del presidente Madison e di una giovane donna dal viso pallido (coperta di mosche); lei mostrava orgogliosamente il proprio collare d’oro agli sguardi ammirati dei clienti, dichiarando di avere “appena diciassette anni”. Anche se a me sembrava più vecchia. Nella stanza migliore c’erano due ritratti a olio, delle dimensioni di un gatto, raffiguranti il proprietario della taverna e suo figlio neonato; entrambi avevano un aspetto minaccioso, con sguardi intensi che sembravano davvero poco realistici. Penso fossero stati dipinti dallo stesso artista che aveva decorato le porte di Belleville con colori rossi e dorati. Riconobbi subito il suo stile.
Dopo colazione, iniziammo il ritorno per un percorso diverso da quello che avevamo seguito ieri. Verso le dieci di sera incontrammo un accampamento di emigranti tedeschi che trasportavano i loro beni su carri; avevano acceso un fuoco e stavano appena per speggerlo, quindi ci fermammo lì per riscaldarci. Il fuoco era davvero piacevole: sebbene il giorno prima facesse caldo, quel giorno faceva molto freddo e il vento soffiava forte. Mentre proseguivamo il nostro viaggio, in lontananza si intravedeva un altro antico luogo di sepoltura indiano, chiamato “La Tomba dei Monaci”; era così chiamato in memoria di un gruppo di fanatici appartenenti all’ordine di La Trappe che, molti anni fa, quando nelle vicinanze non c’erano insediamenti umani, fondarono lì un convento desolato. Tuttavia, tutti quei monaci furono spazzati via dal clima pernicioso della zona. In una tale tragica sorte, pochi individui razionali potrebbero ritenere che la società di allora abbia subito privazioni particolarmente gravi.
Il percorso di oggi presentava le stesse caratteristiche di quello di ieri: c’era la palude, i cespugli, e il costante canto delle rane; inoltre, crescita selvaggia e terra umida e malsana. Qui e lì, spesso anche, incontravamo carri rovinati, pieni di merci appartenenti a nuovi coloni. Era una vista davvero triste vedere uno di questi veicoli immerso nel fango: l’asse spezzato, la Ruota abbandonata sul lato, l’uomo lontano chilometri in cerca di aiuto, la donna seduta tra gli “dèi domestici” della sua famiglia errante, con un bambino al seno. Un esempio di pazienza disperata e sconfortata. I buoi, intanto, giacevano rannicchiati nel fango, emettendo nuvole di vapore dalle bocche e dal naso; sembrava che tutta la nebbia umida circostante provenisse direttamente da loro.
In due occasioni ci riunimmo nuovamente davanti al sarto mercante e, una volta fatto ciò, attraversammo la città con la barca traghetto; lungo il percorso passammo vicino a un luogo chiamato Bloody Island, il campo di duello di St. Louis, così denominato in onore dell’ultima battaglia mortale che vi ebbe luogo: uno scontro tra due avversari armati di pistole, faccia a faccia. Entrambi i combattenti morirono sul colpo; e forse alcune persone ragionevoli potrebbero considerarli, proprio come quei pazzi cupi sulla Tomba dei Monaci, come una perdita non troppo grave per la comunità.
CHAPTER XIV RETURN TO CINCINNATI. A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO SANDUSKY. SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE FALLS OF NIAGARA
AS I had a desire to travel through the interior of the state of Ohio, and to ‘strike the lakes,’ as the phrase is, at a small town called Sandusky, to which that route would conduct us on our way to Niagara, we had to return from St. Louis by the way we had come, and to retrace our former track as far as Cincinnati.
The day on which we were to take leave of St. Louis being very fine; and the steamboat, which was to have started I don’t know how early in the morning, postponing, for the third or fourth time, her departure until the afternoon; we rode forward to an old French village on the river, called properly Carondelet, and nicknamed Vide Poche, and arranged that the packet should call for us there.
The place consisted of a few poor cottages, and two or three public-houses; the state of whose larders certainly seemed to justify the second designation of the village, for there was nothing to eat in any of them. At length, however, by going back some half a mile or so, we found a solitary house where ham and coffee were procurable; and there we tarried to wait the advent of the boat, which would come in sight from the green before the door, a long way off.
It was a neat, unpretending village tavern, and we took our repast in a quaint little room with a bed in it, decorated with some old oil paintings, which in their time had probably done duty in a Catholic chapel or monastery. The fare was very good, and served with great cleanliness. The house was kept by a characteristic old couple, with whom we had a long talk, and who were perhaps a very good sample of that kind of people in the West.
The landlord was a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow (not so very old either, for he was but just turned sixty, I should think), who had been out with the militia in the last war with England, and had seen all kinds of service,—except a battle; and he had been very near seeing that, he added: very near. He had all his life been restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change; and was still the son of his old self: for if he had nothing to keep him at home, he said (slightly jerking his hat and his thumb towards the window of the room in which the old lady sat, as we stood talking in front of the house), he would clean up his musket, and be off to Texas to-morrow morning. He was one of the very many descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seem destined from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army: who gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering generation who succeed.
His wife was a domesticated, kind-hearted old soul, who had come with him, ‘from the queen city of the world,’ which, it seemed, was Philadelphia; but had no love for this Western country, and indeed had little reason to bear it any; having seen her children, one by one, die here of fever, in the full prime and beauty of their youth. Her heart was sore, she said, to think of them; and to talk on this theme, even to strangers, in that blighted place, so far from her old home, eased it somewhat, and became a melancholy pleasure.
The boat appearing towards evening, we bade adieu to the poor old lady and her vagrant spouse, and making for the nearest landing-place, were soon on board The Messenger again, in our old cabin, and steaming down the Mississippi.
If the coming up this river, slowly making head against the stream, be an irksome journey, the shooting down it with the turbid current is almost worse; for then the boat, proceeding at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles an hour, has to force its passage through a labyrinth of floating logs, which, in the dark, it is often impossible to see beforehand or avoid. All that night, the bell was never silent for five minutes at a time; and after every ring the vessel reeled again, sometimes beneath a single blow, sometimes beneath a dozen dealt in quick succession, the lightest of which seemed more than enough to beat in her frail keel, as though it had been pie-crust. Looking down upon the filthy river after dark, it seemed to be alive with monsters, as these black masses rolled upon the surface, or came starting up again, head first, when the boat, in ploughing her way among a shoal of such obstructions, drove a few among them for the moment under water. Sometimes the engine stopped during a long interval, and then before her and behind, and gathering close about her on all sides, were so many of these ill-favoured obstacles that she was fairly hemmed in; the centre of a floating island; and was constrained to pause until they parted, somewhere, as dark clouds will do before the wind, and opened by degrees a channel out.
In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there to take in wood, lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held together. It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted ‘Coffee House;’ that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi. But looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of seeing that intolerable river dragging its slimy length and ugly freight abruptly off towards New Orleans; and passing a yellow line which stretched across the current, were again upon the clear Ohio, never, I trust, to see the Mississippi more, saving in troubled dreams and nightmares. Leaving it for the company of its sparkling neighbour, was like the transition from pain to ease, or the awakening from a horrible vision to cheerful realities.
CAPITOLO XIV
RITORNO A CINCINNATI. Un viaggio in treno da quella >città a >Columbus, e poi a Sandusky. Attraverso il lago Erie, fino alle cascate del Niagara.
Poiché desideravo viaggiare nell’entroterra dello stato dell’Ohio e raggiungere i laghi, in una piccola città chiamata Sandusky – che si trovava lungo quella strada verso Niagara – fummo costretti a tornare da St. Louis percorrendo lo stesso itinerario di andata, ripercorrendo così la nostra precedente traiettoria fino a Cincinnati.
Il giorno in cui dovevamo lasciare Saint Louis era molto bello; e la nave a vapore, che avrebbe dovuto partire all’alba, rinviava per la terza o quarta volta la sua partenza fino al pomeriggio. Così ci recammo in un vecchio villaggio francese sul fiume, chiamato ufficialmente Carondelet e soprannominato “Vide Poche”, e concordammo che il battello postale venisse a prenderci lì.
Il posto consisteva in alcune povere capanne e due o tre osterie; lo stato delle loro dispenserie sembrava certamente giustificare la seconda denominazione del villaggio, poiché in nessuna di esse c’era nulla da mangiare. Alla fine, tuttavia, tornando indietro per circa mezzo miglio, trovammo una singola casa dove era possibile procurarsi prosciutto e caffè; lì rimanemmo ad aspettare l’arrivo della barca, che sarebbe apparsa in lontananza, dietro il verde che circondava la porta.
Era una graziosa taverna di villaggio, senza pretese; abbiamo mangiato in una piccola stanza accogliente, con un letto al suo interno, decorata da alcuni vecchi dipinti a olio che, probabilmente, un tempo erano stati utilizzati in una cappella cattolica o in un monastero. Il cibo era molto buono e servito con grande pulizia. La taverna era gestita da una caratteristica coppia anziana; abbiamo avuto una lunga conversazione con loro e probabilmente rappresentavano bene quel tipo di persone che si trovano nell’Ovest.
Il proprietario di casa era un vecchio uomo secco, duro e dal viso severo (non molto vecchio nemmeno, doveva aver appena compiuto sessant’anni); aveva partecipato alla milizia durante l’ultima guerra contro l’Inghilterra ed aveva sperimentato ogni tipo di situazione pericolosa, tranne che una battaglia; e aveva anche rischiato molto, aggiunse: molto. Per tutta la vita era stato irrequieto e sempre in movimento, con un desiderio irresistibile di cambiamento; ed era ancora lo stesso di quando era giovane: perché, se non ci fosse stata nulla che lo trattenesse a casa, disse (facendo dondolare leggermente il cappello e indicando con il pollice la finestra della stanza dove sedeva la vecchia signora, mentre noi parlavamo davanti alla casa), avrebbe pulito il suo fucile e sarebbe partito per il Texas la mattina seguente. Era uno di quei tanti discendenti di Caino propri di questo continente, che sembrano destinati fin dalla nascita a essere pionieri nell’immensa armata umana: persone che con gioia estendono ogni anno i confini di questa “armata”, lasciando alle loro spalle una casa dopo l’altra, e morendo infine, senza curarsi affatto che le loro tombe rimangano migliaia di chilometri indietro, abbandonate dalle generazioni successive.
Sua moglie era un’anima gentile e mite, che lo aveva seguito “dalla città regina del mondo”, che sembrava essere Filadelfia; ma non provava alcun affetto per questo paese occidentale, anzi non aveva quasi motivi per farlo: aveva visto i suoi figli morire uno dopo l’altro qui di febbre, nel pieno della loro giovinezza e bellezza. Il pensiero di loro le spezzava il cuore, diceva; ma parlare di questo argomento, anche con degli sconosciuti, in quel luogo desolato, così lontano dalla sua vecchia casa, le alleviava un po’ la sofferenza, e diventava quasi una sorta di triste piacere per lei.
La barca apparve verso sera; ci congedammo dalla povera vecchia signora e dal suo compagno senza fissa dimora, poi ci dirigemmo verso il porto più vicino. Presto fummo di nuovo a bordo del “Messenger”, nella nostra vecchia cabina, e ripartimmo lungo il Mississippi.
Se risalire questo fiume, lottando lentamente contro la corrente, rappresenta un viaggio noioso e faticoso, allora scenderlo lungo le sue acque torbide è quasi ancora peggio: in quel caso, la barca, che si muove a una velocità di dodici o quindici miglia all’ora, deve farsi strada attraverso un labirinto di tronchi galleggianti, che, al buio, spesso è impossibile vedere in anticipo o evitare. Per tutta la notte, il campanello non taceva mai per più di cinque minuti; e dopo ogni suono, la barca sobbalzava di nuovo: a volte a causa di un solo urto, altre volte di una dozzina di colpi consecutivi. Il più lieve di questi sembrava sufficiente per danneggiare gravemente il suo fragile scafo, come se fosse fatto di pasta frolla. Guardando verso il basso, nel fiume lurido e oscuro, sembrava che ci fossero mostri dappertutto: queste masse nere rotolavano sulla superficie o risalivano improvvisamente quando la barca, avanzando tra gli ostacoli, ne spingeva alcuni sott’acqua per un momento. A volte il motore si fermava per lunghi periodi; allora, davanti e dietro la barca, e su tutti i lati, si accumulavano così tanti di questi ostacoli che lei veniva letteralmente intrappolata. Era come essere al centro di un’isola galleggiante, costretta ad aspettare che quegli ostacoli si allontanassero, come le nuvole nere fanno davanti al vento, per poter proseguire il suo viaggio.
La mattina seguente, in tempo utile, riuscimmo di nuovo a scorgere quella detestabile palude chiamata Cairo; ci fermammo lì per raccogliere legna e ci sistemammo accanto a una barca le cui assi sembravano sul punto di rompersi. Era ancorata sulla riva, e sul suo fianco era dipinto “Coffee House”; suppongo che si trattasse del paradiso galleggiante verso cui la gente fuggiva in cerca di rifugio quando le loro case venivano sommerse per un mese o due dalle orribili acque del Mississippi. Ma guardando a sud da quel punto, potemmo constatare con soddisfazione che quel detestabile fiume trascinava via la sua melma e i suoi rifiuti verso New Orleans; superata una linea gialla che attraversava il corso d’acqua, ci trovammo di nuovo sul limpido Ohio. Non credo che rivedremo mai più il Mississippi, se non nei sogni o nelle incubazioni. Lasciarlo per la compagnia del suo vicino scintillante fu come passare dal dolore al sollievo, o svegliarsi da una visione orribile per ritrovarsi di fronte a realtà gioiose.
We arrived at Louisville on the fourth night, and gladly availed ourselves of its excellent hotel. Next day we went on in the Ben Franklin, a beautiful mail steamboat, and reached Cincinnati shortly after midnight. Being by this time nearly tired of sleeping upon shelves, we had remained awake to go ashore straightway; and groping a passage across the dark decks of other boats, and among labyrinths of engine-machinery and leaking casks of molasses, we reached the streets, knocked up the porter at the hotel where we had stayed before, and were, to our great joy, safely housed soon afterwards.
We rested but one day at Cincinnati, and then resumed our journey to Sandusky. As it comprised two varieties of stage-coach travelling, which, with those I have already glanced at, comprehend the main characteristics of this mode of transit in America, I will take the reader as our fellow-passenger, and pledge myself to perform the distance with all possible despatch.
Our place of destination in the first instance is Columbus. It is distant about a hundred and twenty miles from Cincinnati, but there is a macadamised road (rare blessing!) the whole way, and the rate of travelling upon it is six miles an hour.
We start at eight o’clock in the morning, in a great mail-coach, whose huge cheeks are so very ruddy and plethoric, that it appears to be troubled with a tendency of blood to the head. Dropsical it certainly is, for it will hold a dozen passengers inside. But, wonderful to add, it is very clean and bright, being nearly new; and rattles through the streets of Cincinnati gaily.
Our way lies through a beautiful country, richly cultivated, and luxuriant in its promise of an abundant harvest. Sometimes we pass a field where the strong bristling stalks of Indian corn look like a crop of walking-sticks, and sometimes an enclosure where the green wheat is springing up among a labyrinth of stumps; the primitive worm-fence is universal, and an ugly thing it is; but the farms are neatly kept, and, save for these differences, one might be travelling just now in Kent.
We often stop to water at a roadside inn, which is always dull and silent. The coachman dismounts and fills his bucket, and holds it to the horses’ heads. There is scarcely ever any one to help him; there are seldom any loungers standing round; and never any stable-company with jokes to crack. Sometimes, when we have changed our team, there is a difficulty in starting again, arising out of the prevalent mode of breaking a young horse: which is to catch him, harness him against his will, and put him in a stage-coach without further notice: but we get on somehow or other, after a great many kicks and a violent struggle; and jog on as before again.
Occasionally, when we stop to change, some two or three half-drunken loafers will come loitering out with their hands in their pockets, or will be seen kicking their heels in rocking-chairs, or lounging on the window-sill, or sitting on a rail within the colonnade: they have not often anything to say though, either to us or to each other, but sit there idly staring at the coach and horses. The landlord of the inn is usually among them, and seems, of all the party, to be the least connected with the business of the house. Indeed he is with reference to the tavern, what the driver is in relation to the coach and passengers: whatever happens in his sphere of action, he is quite indifferent, and perfectly easy in his mind.
The frequent change of coachmen works no change or variety in the coachman’s character. He is always dirty, sullen, and taciturn. If he be capable of smartness of any kind, moral or physical, he has a faculty of concealing it which is truly marvellous. He never speaks to you as you sit beside him on the box, and if you speak to him, he answers (if at all) in monosyllables. He points out nothing on the road, and seldom looks at anything: being, to all appearance, thoroughly weary of it and of existence generally. As to doing the honours of his coach, his business, as I have said, is with the horses. The coach follows because it is attached to them and goes on wheels: not because you are in it. Sometimes, towards the end of a long stage, he suddenly breaks out into a discordant fragment of an election song, but his face never sings along with him: it is only his voice, and not often that.
He always chews and always spits, and never encumbers himself with a pocket-handkerchief. The consequences to the box passenger, especially when the wind blows towards him, are not agreeable.
Whenever the coach stops, and you can hear the voices of the inside passengers; or whenever any bystander addresses them, or any one among them; or they address each other; you will hear one phrase repeated over and over and over again to the most extraordinary extent. It is an ordinary and unpromising phrase enough, being neither more nor less than ‘Yes, sir;’ but it is adapted to every variety of circumstance, and fills up every pause in the conversation. Thus:—
The time is one o’clock at noon. The scene, a place where we are to stay and dine, on this journey. The coach drives up to the door of an inn. The day is warm, and there are several idlers lingering about the tavern, and waiting for the public dinner. Among them, is a stout gentleman in a brown hat, swinging himself to and fro in a rocking-chair on the pavement.
As the coach stops, a gentleman in a straw hat looks out of the window:
STRAW HAT. (To the stout gentleman in the rocking-chair.) I reckon that’s Judge Jefferson, an’t it?
BROWN HAT. (Still swinging; speaking very slowly; and without any emotion whatever.) Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. Warm weather, Judge.
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. There was a snap of cold, last week.
Arrivammo a Louisville la quarta notte e ci godemmo con piacere dell’ottimo hotel che vi trovava. Il giorno seguente proseguimmo il nostro viaggio a bordo del bellissimo battello a vapore Ben Franklin, raggiungendo Cincinnati poco dopo mezzanotte. Essendo ormai stanchi di dormire su delle impalcature, rimanemmo svegli per scendere immediatamente a terra; dopo aver cercato a tentoni un passaggio attraverso i ponti bui degli altri battelli, tra labirinti di macchinari e barili di melassa che perdevano, raggiungemmo finalmente le strade. Bussammo al portiere dell’hotel in cui avevamo soggiornato in precedenza e, con grande gioia, fummo subito ospitati al sicuro.
Ci riposammo solo un giorno a Cincinnati, poi riprendemmo il nostro viaggio verso Sandusky. Poiché questo tipo di trasporto prevedeva l’uso di due diverse tipologie di carrozze, che, insieme a quelle già menzionate, rappresentano le caratteristiche principali di questo mezzo di trasporto in America, permetterò al lettore di considerarsi nostro compagno di viaggio e mi impegnerò a percorrere la distanza il più rapidamente possibile.
Il nostro primo punto di destinazione è Columbus. Si trova a circa centoventi miglia da Cincinnati, ma lungo tutto il percorso c’è una strada asfaltata (una vera benedizione!), e la velocità massima con cui si può viaggiare su di essa è di sei miglia all’ora.
Iniziamo alle otto in punto del mattino, su un grande treno postale il cui enorme telaio è così rosso e rigonfio da sembrare affetto da un’eccessiva tendenza al sanguinamento verso la testa. Di certo è “idropico”, visto che riesce a trasportare una dozzina di passeggeri all’interno; ma, cosa sorprendente, è anche molto pulito e luminoso, essendo quasi nuovo. E sfreccia allegramente per le strade di Cincinnati.
Il nostro percorso attraversa una bellissima regione, riccamente coltivata e rigogliosa di promesse di raccolti abbondanti. A volte passiamo per campi dove i robusti steli del mais sembrano mazzi di bastoni da passeggio; altre volte attraversiamo recinti in cui il grano verde spunta tra un labirinto di ceppi. I semplici recinzioni realizzati con filo spinato sono molto comuni, ma risultano davvero brutti a vedersi. Tuttavia, le fattorie sono ben curate, e, a parte queste differenze, si potrebbe quasi pensare di essere in Kent.
Spesso ci fermiamo per dissetarci in una locanda lungo la strada, un posto sempre noioso e silenzioso. Il cocchiere scende da cavallo, riempie il secchio e lo porta vicino alle teste dei cavalli. Raramente c’è qualcuno che lo aiuti; di solito non ci sono persone che stiano lì intorno a chiacchierare, né membri della compagnia di stallieri pronti a raccontare barzellette. A volte, dopo aver cambiato i cavalli, sorgono difficoltà nel ripartire a causa del modo comune in cui si procede: si afferra un giovane cavallo, lo si attacca al carro contro la sua volontà e lo si mette dentro senza dire una parola. Ma in qualche modo riusciamo comunque a partire, dopo molti calci e lotte violente; e poi continuiamo il nostro viaggio come prima.
Di tanto in tanto, quando ci fermiamo per cambiare, arrivano due o tre individui ubriachi a gironzolare con le mani in tasca; si possono anche vedere mentre battono i tacchi sulle poltrone a dondolo, sdraiati sul davanzale delle finestre o seduti sui parapetti della colonnata. Di solito non hanno nulla da dire, né a noi né tra loro, e se ne stanno lì a fissare oziosamente il carro e i cavalli. Il proprietario dell’osteria è spesso tra di loro, e sembra essere, di tutta la compagnia, quello meno coinvolto nelle attività dell’ostello. In effetti, rispetto alla taverna, lui ha lo stesso ruolo che il cocchiere ha riguardo al carro e ai passeggeri: non gli importa nulla di ciò che accade nel suo ambito di competenza, ed è completamente rilassato.
Il frequente cambio di cocchiere non apporta alcun cambiamento o varietà nel suo carattere. È sempre sporco, cupo e taciturno. Se possiede qualche forma di intelligenza, sia morale che fisica, possiede davvero una straordinaria capacità di nasconderla. Non ti parla mai mentre siedi accanto a lui sul sedile posteriore del carro; se provi a parlare con lui, risponde (se mai lo fa) con monosillabi. Non indica nulla lungo la strada e raramente guarda qualcosa: sembra davvero stanco di tutto, compresa l’esistenza stessa. Per quanto riguarda il suo compito principale, ovvero prendersi cura del carro, il suo interesse è rivolto esclusivamente ai cavalli; il carro segue semplicemente perché è attaccato a loro e si muove sulle ruote, non perché tu ci sia dentro. A volte, verso la fine di un lungo viaggio, inizia improvvisamente a cantare qualche frammento stonato di una canzone popolare, ma il suo viso non sembra mai partecipare a quel canto: è solo la sua voce a parlare, e anche quella raramente.
Lui mastica sempre e sputa sempre, e non si preoccupa mai di portare con sé un fazzoletto da tasca. Le conseguenze per il passeggero seduto accanto a lui, soprattutto quando il vento soffia nella sua direzione, non sono affatto piacevoli.
Ogni volta che l’autista si ferma e si possono sentire le voci dei passeggeri all’interno dell’auto; o ogni volta che qualche passante li parla, o uno di loro risponde a qualcun altro; o quando si scambiano commenti tra loro, si sente ripetere sempre la stessa frase, in modo estremamente frequente. Si tratta di una frase del tutto ordinaria e senza particolari significati: nient’altro che “Sì, signore”; ma viene adattata a ogni tipo di situazione e riempie ogni pausa nel dialogo. Ecco un esempio.
L’ora è le una di mattina, alle mezze. Il luogo in cui trascorreremo la notte e pranzeremo, durante questo viaggio. La carrozza si ferma davanti all’ingresso di un ostello. Fa caldo quel giorno, e diversi oziosi si attardano intorno alla taverna, aspettando il pasto pubblico. Tra loro c’è un signore robusto con un cappello marrone, che dondola avanti e indietro su una sedia a dondolo, sul marciapiede.
Mentre l’autobus si ferma, un signore con un cappello di paglia guarda fuori dalla finestra.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. (Al gentiluomo robusto nella sedia a dondolo.) Penso che sia il giudice Jefferson, vero?
CAPPELLO MARRONE. (Continua a dondolarsi; parla molto lentamente; e senza alcuna emozione.) Sì, signore.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. Tempo caldo, Giudice.
CAPPELLO MARRONE. Sì, signore.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. La scorsa settimana è arrivata un’improvvisa ondata di freddo.
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. Yes, sir.
A pause. They look at each other, very seriously.
STRAW HAT. I calculate you’ll have got through that case of the corporation, Judge, by this time, now?
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
STRAW HAT. How did the verdict go, sir?
BROWN HAT. For the defendant, sir.
STRAW HAT. (Interrogatively.) Yes, sir?
BROWN HAT. (Affirmatively.) Yes, sir.
BOTH. (Musingly, as each gazes down the street.) Yes, sir.
Another pause. They look at each other again, still more seriously than before.
BROWN HAT. This coach is rather behind its time to-day, I guess.
STRAW HAT. (Doubtingly.) Yes, sir.
BROWN HAT. (Looking at his watch.) Yes, sir; nigh upon two hours.
STRAW HAT. (Raising his eyebrows in very great surprise.) Yes, sir!
BROWN HAT. (Decisively, as he puts up his watch.) Yes, sir.
ALL THE OTHER INSIDE PASSENGERS. (Among themselves.) Yes, sir.
COACHMAN. (In a very surly tone.) No it an’t.
STRAW HAT. (To the coachman.) Well, I don’t know, sir. We were a pretty tall time coming that last fifteen mile. That’s a fact.
The coachman making no reply, and plainly declining to enter into any controversy on a subject so far removed from his sympathies and feelings, another passenger says, ‘Yes, sir;’ and the gentleman in the straw hat in acknowledgment of his courtesy, says ‘Yes, sir,’ to him, in return. The straw hat then inquires of the brown hat, whether that coach in which he (the straw hat) then sits, is not a new one? To which the brown hat again makes answer, ‘Yes, sir.’
STRAW HAT. I thought so. Pretty loud smell of varnish, sir?
BROWN HAT. Yes, sir.
ALL THE OTHER INSIDE PASSENGERS. Yes, sir.
BROWN HAT. (To the company in general.) Yes, sir.
The conversational powers of the company having been by this time pretty heavily taxed, the straw hat opens the door and gets out; and all the rest alight also. We dine soon afterwards with the boarders in the house, and have nothing to drink but tea and coffee. As they are both very bad and the water is worse, I ask for brandy; but it is a Temperance Hotel, and spirits are not to be had for love or money. This preposterous forcing of unpleasant drinks down the reluctant throats of travellers is not at all uncommon in America, but I never discovered that the scruples of such wincing landlords induced them to preserve any unusually nice balance between the quality of their fare, and their scale of charges: on the contrary, I rather suspected them of diminishing the one and exalting the other, by way of recompense for the loss of their profit on the sale of spirituous liquors. After all, perhaps, the plainest course for persons of such tender consciences, would be, a total abstinence from tavern-keeping.
Dinner over, we get into another vehicle which is ready at the door (for the coach has been changed in the interval), and resume our journey; which continues through the same kind of country until evening, when we come to the town where we are to stop for tea and supper; and having delivered the mail bags at the Post-office, ride through the usual wide street, lined with the usual stores and houses (the drapers always having hung up at their door, by way of sign, a piece of bright red cloth), to the hotel where this meal is prepared. There being many boarders here, we sit down, a large party, and a very melancholy one as usual. But there is a buxom hostess at the head of the table, and opposite, a simple Welsh schoolmaster with his wife and child; who came here, on a speculation of greater promise than performance, to teach the classics: and they are sufficient subjects of interest until the meal is over, and another coach is ready. In it we go on once more, lighted by a bright moon, until midnight; when we stop to change the coach again, and remain for half an hour or so in a miserable room, with a blurred lithograph of Washington over the smoky fire-place, and a mighty jug of cold water on the table: to which refreshment the moody passengers do so apply themselves that they would seem to be, one and all, keen patients of Dr. Sangrado. Among them is a very little boy, who chews tobacco like a very big one; and a droning gentleman, who talks arithmetically and statistically on all subjects, from poetry downwards; and who always speaks in the same key, with exactly the same emphasis, and with very grave deliberation. He came outside just now, and told me how that the uncle of a certain young lady who had been spirited away and married by a certain captain, lived in these parts; and how this uncle was so valiant and ferocious that he shouldn’t wonder if he were to follow the said captain to England, ‘and shoot him down in the street wherever he found him;’ in the feasibility of which strong measure I, being for the moment rather prone to contradiction, from feeling half asleep and very tired, declined to acquiesce: assuring him that if the uncle did resort to it, or gratified any other little whim of the like nature, he would find himself one morning prematurely throttled at the Old Bailey: and that he would do well to make his will before he went, as he would certainly want it before he had been in Britain very long.
On we go, all night, and by-and-by the day begins to break, and presently the first cheerful rays of the warm sun come slanting on us brightly. It sheds its light upon a miserable waste of sodden grass, and dull trees, and squalid huts, whose aspect is forlorn and grievous in the last degree. A very desert in the wood, whose growth of green is dank and noxious like that upon the top of standing water: where poisonous fungus grows in the rare footprint on the oozy ground, and sprouts like witches’ coral, from the crevices in the cabin wall and floor; it is a hideous thing to lie upon the very threshold of a city. But it was purchased years ago, and as the owner cannot be discovered, the State has been unable to reclaim it. So there it remains, in the midst of cultivation and improvement, like ground accursed, and made obscene and rank by some great crime.
CAPPELLO MARRONE. Sì, signore.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. Sì, signore.
Una pausa. Si guardano l’un l’altro, con grande serietà.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. Immagino che ormai abbiate risolto quella questione legata alla società, giudice, vero?
CAPPELLO MARRONE. Sì, signore.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. Com’è andata la sentenza, signore?
CAPPELLO MARRONE. Per l’imputato, signore.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. (Con tono interrogativo.) Sì, signore?
CAPPELLO MARRONE. (Affermativamente.) Sì, signore.
ENTRAMBI. (In silenzio, mentre ognuno guarda giù per la strada.) Sì, signore.
Un’altra pausa. Si guardano di nuovo, ancora più seriamente di prima.
CAPPELLO MARRONE. Credo che questo allenatore sia piuttosto indietro rispetto ai tempi odierni.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. (Con esitazione.) Sì, signore.
CAPPELLO MARRONE. (Guardando l’orologio.) Sì, signore; quasi due ore.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. (Alzando le sopracciglia con grande sorpresa.) Sì, signore!
CAPPELLO MARRONE. (Con decisione, mentre si mette l’orologio al polso.) Sì, signore.
TUTTI GLI ALTRI PASSAGGERI A BORDO. (Tra di loro.) Sì, signore.
COACHMAN. (Con un tono molto scortese.) No, non è così.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. (Al cocchiere.) Beh, non so, signore. Negli ultimi quindici miglia abbiamo viaggiato a una velocità abbastanza alta. È un fatto.
Il cocchiere, non rispondendo e rifiutando chiaramente di entrare in alcuna controversia su un argomento così lontano dai suoi interessi e sentimenti, un altro passeggero dice: “Sì, signore”; e il gentiluomo con il cappello di paglia, in segno di ringraziamento per la sua cortesia, risponde anch’egli: “Sì, signore”. A quel punto, il gentiluomo con il cappello di paglia chiede al passeggero con il cappello marrone se quella carrozza su cui si trova non sia nuova; a questa domanda, l’altro risponde nuovamente: “Sì, signore”.
CAPPELLO DI CANNA. Già me lo aspettavo. Un odore piuttosto forte di vernice, signore.
CAPPELLO MARRONE. Sì, signore.
TUTTI GLI ALTRI PASSAGGERI A BORDO. Sì, signore.
CAPPELLO MARRONE. (Alla compagnia in generale.) Sì, signore.
A questo momento, le capacità conviviali di quell’azienda erano ormai state notevolmente compromesse; il “cappello di paglia” aprì la porta e ne uscì. E tutti gli altri seguirono il suo esempio. Poco dopo cenammo con gli ospiti dell’ostello, ma non avevamo nulla da bere se non tè e caffè. Poiché entrambi erano di scarsa qualità e l’acqua ancora peggiore, chiesi del brandy. Ma si trattava di un “Ostello della Temperanza”: gli alcolici non venivano serviti né per amore né per denaro. Questo modo assurdo di costringere i viaggiatori a ingoiare bevande sgradevoli contro la loro volontà è piuttosto comune in America, ma non ho mai notato che le remore di tali proprietari ostelli li spingessero a mantenere un equilibrio ragionevole tra qualità del cibo e tariffe. Anzi, sospettavo proprio il contrario: che riducessero la qualità del cibo per aumentare le tariffe, come compensazione per la perdita di guadagno derivante dalla vendita di alcolici. Dopotutto, forse l’unica soluzione per persone con coscienze così sensibili sarebbe astenersi completamente dall’attività di gestione di ostelli.
Dopo cena, saliamo su un altro veicolo che ci aspetta davanti alla porta (poiché durante l’intervallo il treno è stato sostituito), e riprendiamo il nostro Viaggio, che prosegue attraverso lo stesso tipo di paesaggio fino a sera, quando arriviamo in una città dove faremo tappa per il tè e la cena. Dopo aver consegnato i sacchi postali all’ufficio postale, proseguiamo lungo la solita strada larga, fiancheggiata dai soliti negozi e case (i negozi di abbigliamento hanno sempre appeso alla porta, come segno distintivo, un pezzo di stoffa rossa brillante), fino all’hotel dove ci verrà preparato il pasto. Poiché qui soggiornano molti viaggiatori, ci sediamo tutti insieme, formando un gruppo piuttosto numeroso, e, come al solito, molto melancolico. Alla testa del tavolo c’è una padrona di casa robusta; di fronte a lei, un semplice insegnante gallese con sua moglie e il loro bambino; questi sono venuti qui nella speranza di ottenere risultati migliori di quelli effettivamente raggiunti, nel tentativo di insegnare i classici. Sono soggetti di interesse sufficiente fino a quando non finiamo di mangiare e non arriva un altro treno. Saliamo su di esso, illuminati dalla luce brillante della luna, fino a mezzanotte; poi ci fermiamo di nuovo per cambiare veicolo, e rimaniamo per circa mezz’ora in una stanza squallida, con un ritratto di Washington appeso sopra il caminetto fumoso, e una grande giara d’acqua fredda sul tavolo. Tutti i passeggeri si servono di queste bevande con tale avidità che sembrano davvero pazienti disposti a sopportare qualsiasi cosa. Tra loro c’è un bambino molto piccolo che mastica tabacco come se fosse molto grande; e un signore noioso che parla in modo monotono di aritmetica e statistica su ogni argomento, dalla poesia in giù. Parla sempre nello stesso tono, con lo stesso accento e con estrema -serietà. Poco fa è uscito e mi ha raccontato che lo zio di una certa giovane donna che era stata rapita e sposata da un certo capitano viveva in queste zone. E che questo zio fosse così coraggioso e feroce che non avrebbe dovuto sorprendersi se avesse seguito quel capitano in Inghilterra per “ucciderlo per strada, ovunque lo trovasse”. Riguardo alla fattibilità di un simile atto, io, essendo in quel momento piuttosto propenso a contraddire, e sentendomi mezzo addormentato e molto stanco, ho rifiutato di concordare con lui. Gli ho assicurato che se lo zio avesse davvero compiuto un simile atto, o soddisfatto qualche altro capriccio del genere, si sarebbe trovato una mattina strangolato all’Old Bailey. E che gli sarebbe stato meglio fare testamento prima di partire, visto che sicuramente ne avrebbe avuto bisogno dopo essere arrivato in Inghilterra da poco.
Andiamo avanti, per tutta la notte, e poco a poco l’alba inizia ad apparire; presto i primi raggi gioiosi del caldo sole ci illuminano. La sua luce cade su un desolato ammasso di erba umida, alberi tristi e capanne squallide, il cui aspetto è estremamente desolato e deprimente. Un vero deserto all’interno della foresta, dove la vegetazione verde appare umida e velenosa, proprio come quella che cresce sulle superfici d’acqua stagnante; funghi velenosi prosperano sui rari passi lasciati nell’humus del terreno, spuntando dalle fessure delle pareti e dei pavimenti delle capanne. È orribile dover dormire proprio sulla soglia di una città del genere. Ma quella terra è stata acquistata anni fa; poiché il proprietario non può essere rintracciato, lo Stato non è riuscito a riprenderla in possesso. E così rimane lì, nel mezzo di aree coltivate e migliorate, come un terreno maledetto, reso osceno e disgustoso da qualche grave crimine commesso in passato.
We reached Columbus shortly before seven o’clock, and stayed there, to refresh, that day and night: having excellent apartments in a very large unfinished hotel called the Neill House, which were richly fitted with the polished wood of the black walnut, and opened on a handsome portico and stone verandah, like rooms in some Italian mansion. The town is clean and pretty, and of course is ‘going to be’ much larger. It is the seat of the State legislature of Ohio, and lays claim, in consequence, to some consideration and importance.
There being no stage-coach next day, upon the road we wished to take, I hired ‘an extra,’ at a reasonable charge to carry us to Tiffin; a small town from whence there is a railroad to Sandusky. This extra was an ordinary four-horse stage-coach, such as I have described, changing horses and drivers, as the stage-coach would, but was exclusively our own for the journey. To ensure our having horses at the proper stations, and being incommoded by no strangers, the proprietors sent an agent on the box, who was to accompany us the whole way through; and thus attended, and bearing with us, besides, a hamper full of savoury cold meats, and fruit, and wine, we started off again in high spirits, at half-past six o’clock next morning, very much delighted to be by ourselves, and disposed to enjoy even the roughest journey.
It was well for us, that we were in this humour, for the road we went over that day, was certainly enough to have shaken tempers that were not resolutely at Set Fair, down to some inches below Stormy. At one time we were all flung together in a heap at the bottom of the coach, and at another we were crushing our heads against the roof. Now, one side was down deep in the mire, and we were holding on to the other. Now, the coach was lying on the tails of the two wheelers; and now it was rearing up in the air, in a frantic state, with all four horses standing on the top of an insurmountable eminence, looking coolly back at it, as though they would say ‘Unharness us. It can’t be done.’ The drivers on these roads, who certainly get over the ground in a manner which is quite miraculous, so twist and turn the team about in forcing a passage, corkscrew fashion, through the bogs and swamps, that it was quite a common circumstance on looking out of the window, to see the coachman with the ends of a pair of reins in his hands, apparently driving nothing, or playing at horses, and the leaders staring at one unexpectedly from the back of the coach, as if they had some idea of getting up behind. A great portion of the way was over what is called a corduroy road, which is made by throwing trunks of trees into a marsh, and leaving them to settle there. The very slightest of the jolts with which the ponderous carriage fell from log to log, was enough, it seemed, to have dislocated all the bones in the human body. It would be impossible to experience a similar set of sensations, in any other circumstances, unless perhaps in attempting to go up to the top of St. Paul’s in an omnibus. Never, never once, that day, was the coach in any position, attitude, or kind of motion to which we are accustomed in coaches. Never did it make the smallest approach to one’s experience of the proceedings of any sort of vehicle that goes on wheels.
Still, it was a fine day, and the temperature was delicious, and though we had left Summer behind us in the west, and were fast leaving Spring, we were moving towards Niagara and home. We alighted in a pleasant wood towards the middle of the day, dined on a fallen tree, and leaving our best fragments with a cottager, and our worst with the pigs (who swarm in this part of the country like grains of sand on the sea-shore, to the great comfort of our commissariat in Canada), we went forward again, gaily.
As night came on, the track grew narrower and narrower, until at last it so lost itself among the trees, that the driver seemed to find his way by instinct. We had the comfort of knowing, at least, that there was no danger of his falling asleep, for every now and then a wheel would strike against an unseen stump with such a jerk, that he was fain to hold on pretty tight and pretty quick, to keep himself upon the box. Nor was there any reason to dread the least danger from furious driving, inasmuch as over that broken ground the horses had enough to do to walk; as to shying, there was no room for that; and a herd of wild elephants could not have run away in such a wood, with such a coach at their heels. So we stumbled along, quite satisfied.
These stumps of trees are a curious feature in American travelling. The varying illusions they present to the unaccustomed eye as it grows dark, are quite astonishing in their number and reality. Now, there is a Grecian urn erected in the centre of a lonely field; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb; now a very commonplace old gentleman in a white waistcoat, with a thumb thrust into each arm-hole of his coat; now a student poring on a book; now a crouching negro; now, a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man; a hunch-back throwing off his cloak and stepping forth into the light. They were often as entertaining to me as so many glasses in a magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bidding, but seemed to force themselves upon me, whether I would or no; and strange to say, I sometimes recognised in them counterparts of figures once familiar to me in pictures attached to childish books, forgotten long ago.
It soon became too dark, however, even for this amusement, and the trees were so close together that their dry branches rattled against the coach on either side, and obliged us all to keep our heads within. It lightened too, for three whole hours; each flash being very bright, and blue, and long; and as the vivid streaks came darting in among the crowded branches, and the thunder rolled gloomily above the tree tops, one could scarcely help thinking that there were better neighbourhoods at such a time than thick woods afforded.
Arrivammo a Columbus poco prima delle sette di sera e rimanemmo lì per rilassarci, sia quel giorno che quella notte: disponevamo di ottimi appartamenti in un grande hotel ancora incompleto chiamato Neill House, arredati con legno lucido di noce nera; gli ambienti si affacciavano su un bel portico e una veranda in pietra, proprio come le stanze di qualche dimora italiana. La città è pulita e graziosa, e sicuramente diventerà molto più grande in futuro. È la sede del parlamento dello stato dell’Ohio, quindi gode di notevole considerazione e importanza.
Non essendoci alcun treno postale il giorno seguente sulla strada che volevamo prendere, assunsi un veicolo aggiuntivo a un prezzo ragionevole per portarci fino a Tiffin, una piccola città da cui partiva la ferrovia per Sandusky. Questo veicolo aggiuntivo era un normale treno postale a quattro cavalli, simile a quello che avevo descritto; cambiava cavalli e conducenti lungo il percorso, ma apparteneva esclusivamente a noi per l’intera durata del viaggio. Per assicurarci che avessimo i cavalli alle stazioni giuste e non fossimo disturbati da estranei, i proprietari inviarono un agente a bordo del veicolo, che ci accompagnò per tutto il tragitto; inoltre, portava con sé anche un cesto pieno di carne fredda saporita, frutta e vino. Così, alle sei e mezza del mattino seguente, partimmo di nuovo con buon umore, molto felici di essere soli e pronti ad apprezzare anche il viaggio più difficile.
Fu davvero una fortuna per noi trovarci in quello stato d’animo, perché il percorso che facemmo quel giorno era sicuramente sufficiente a far perdere la pazienza anche a persone che non fossero state particolarmente calme. A un certo punto fummo tutti spinti insieme sul fondo della carrozza; in un altro momento ci sbattevamo la testa contro il soffitto. A volte la carrozza rimaneva intrappolata nel fango, e noi cercavamo disperatamente di non cadere. Altre volte si sollevava in aria, con tutti e quattro i cavalli in cima a un ostacolo insormontabile, che sembravano dire: “Sciolgeteci. È impossibile procedere”. I conducenti su queste strade, che riescono davvero a superare ogni ostacolo in modi incredibili, girano e contorcono il tiro dei cavalli in modo così frenetico, attraverso paludi e stagni, che era abbastanza comune vedere dal finestrino il conducente con le redini in mano, come se non stesse guidando affatto. I cavalli, intanto, sembravano avere l’intenzione di “alzarsi” da dietro la carrozza. Gran parte del percorso era costituita da quella che viene chiamata strada di corduroy: si trattava semplicemente di tronchi d’albero gettati in un pantano e lasciati lì a depositarsi. Il minimo sobbalzo causato dai tronchi bastava, a quanto pare, per slogare tutte le ossa del corpo umano. Sarebbe impossibile provare sensazioni simili in altre circostanze. Forse solo cercando di salire in cima a St. Paul’s con un omnibus. Quel giorno, la carrozza non assunse mai nessuna delle posizioni o movimenti a cui siamo abituati quando viaggiamo in carrozza. Mai una volta seguì il normale andamento di qualsiasi veicolo a ruote.
Comunque, era una bella giornata e la temperatura era piacevole; anche se avevamo lasciato l’Estate alle nostre spalle a ovest e stavamo rapidamente lasciando l’Primavera, ci dirigevamo verso Niagara e >casa. Ci fermammo in un bel bosco a metà giornata, pranzammo su un albero caduto; lasciammo i nostri cibi migliori a un contadino e quelli peggiori ai maiali (che in questa zona del paese sono tantissimi, come granelli di sabbia sulla riva del mare, il che fu di grande aiuto per il nostro approvvigionamento in Canada). Poi ripartimmo, felici.
Con l’arrivo della notte, il sentiero diventava sempre più stretto, fino a quando alla fine scomparve completamente tra gli alberi; sembrava che il conducente trovasse la strada soltanto per istinto. Avevamo almeno la certezza che non ci fosse rischio che si addormentasse, perché di tanto in tanto una delle ruote urtava contro un tronco nascosto, facendolo sobbalzare così forte che il conducente doveva tenersi saldamente alla barra del carro per non cadere. Non c’era nemmeno il rischio di incidenti a causa di una guida troppo frenetica: in quel terreno accidentato, i cavalli avevano già abbastanza difficoltà a camminare; quanto al fatto che potessero spaventarsi e scappare, in un bosco del genere, con un carro che li inseguiva, non avrebbero avuto alcuna possibilità di fuga. Così proseguimmo il nostro viaggio, piuttosto soddisfatti.
Questi tronchi d’albero rappresentano una caratteristica curiosa del paesaggio americano durante i viaggi notturni. Le varie illusioni che offrono all’occhio non abituato, al calare dell’oscurità, sono davvero sorprendenti per numero e realismo. A volte appare un vaso greco eretto in mezzo a un campo desolato; altre volte una donna che piange accanto a una tomba; ancora, un anziano signore dall’aspetto molto comune, con una camicia bianca e il pollice infilato nelle maniche del cappotto. A volte un studente immerso nella lettura di un libro, altre volte un negro accovacciato. Oppure un cavallo, un cane, un cannone, un uomo armato. O ancora un gobbo che si toglie il mantello e emerge alla luce. Spesso queste illusioni mi divertivano molto, proprio come tanti occhiali in una lanterna magica; mai però assumevano la forma che desideravo io, ma sembravano imporsi su di me, a mio piacimento o meno. E stranamente, a volte riconoscevo in esse figure che un tempo avevo visto in libri per bambini, ormai da tempo dimenticate.
Tuttavia, presto diventò troppo buio anche per questo divertimento; inoltre, gli alberi erano così vicini tra loro che i loro rami secchi sbattevano contro il carro su entrambi i lati, costringendoci tutti a tenere la testa bassa. Poi fece di nuovo luce, per ben tre ore consecutive: ogni lampo era molto intenso, di colore blu e durava a lungo. Mentre quelle luci vivide si insinuavano tra i rami fitti e il tuono rimbombava cupamente sopra le cime degli alberi, era difficile non pensare che in momenti del genere ci fossero luoghi più adatti per stare, rispetto a fitte foreste.
At length, between ten and eleven o’clock at night, a few feeble lights appeared in the distance, and Upper Sandusky, an Indian village, where we were to stay till morning, lay before us.
They were gone to bed at the log Inn, which was the only house of entertainment in the place, but soon answered to our knocking, and got some tea for us in a sort of kitchen or common room, tapestried with old newspapers, pasted against the wall. The bed-chamber to which my wife and I were shown, was a large, low, ghostly room; with a quantity of withered branches on the hearth, and two doors without any fastening, opposite to each other, both opening on the black night and wild country, and so contrived, that one of them always blew the other open: a novelty in domestic architecture, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which I was somewhat disconcerted to have forced on my attention after getting into bed, as I had a considerable sum in gold for our travelling expenses, in my dressing-case. Some of the luggage, however, piled against the panels, soon settled this difficulty, and my sleep would not have been very much affected that night, I believe, though it had failed to do so.
My Boston friend climbed up to bed, somewhere in the roof, where another guest was already snoring hugely. But being bitten beyond his power of endurance, he turned out again, and fled for shelter to the coach, which was airing itself in front of the house. This was not a very politic step, as it turned out; for the pigs scenting him, and looking upon the coach as a kind of pie with some manner of meat inside, grunted round it so hideously, that he was afraid to come out again, and lay there shivering, till morning. Nor was it possible to warm him, when he did come out, by means of a glass of brandy: for in Indian villages, the legislature, with a very good and wise intention, forbids the sale of spirits by tavern keepers. The precaution, however, is quite inefficacious, for the Indians never fail to procure liquor of a worse kind, at a dearer price, from travelling pedlars.
It is a settlement of the Wyandot Indians who inhabit this place. Among the company at breakfast was a mild old gentleman, who had been for many years employed by the United States Government in conducting negotiations with the Indians, and who had just concluded a treaty with these people by which they bound themselves, in consideration of a certain annual sum, to remove next year to some land provided for them, west of the Mississippi, and a little way beyond St. Louis. He gave me a moving account of their strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular to the burial-places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them. He had witnessed many such removals, and always with pain, though he knew that they departed for their own good. The question whether this tribe should go or stay, had been discussed among them a day or two before, in a hut erected for the purpose, the logs of which still lay upon the ground before the inn. When the speaking was done, the ayes and noes were ranged on opposite sides, and every male adult voted in his turn. The moment the result was known, the minority (a large one) cheerfully yielded to the rest, and withdrew all kind of opposition.
We met some of these poor Indians afterwards, riding on shaggy ponies. They were so like the meaner sort of gipsies, that if I could have seen any of them in England, I should have concluded, as a matter of course, that they belonged to that wandering and restless people.
Leaving this town directly after breakfast, we pushed forward again, over a rather worse road than yesterday, if possible, and arrived about noon at Tiffin, where we parted with the extra. At two o’clock we took the railroad; the travelling on which was very slow, its construction being indifferent, and the ground wet and marshy; and arrived at Sandusky in time to dine that evening. We put up at a comfortable little hotel on the brink of Lake Erie, lay there that night, and had no choice but to wait there next day, until a steamboat bound for Buffalo appeared. The town, which was sluggish and uninteresting enough, was something like the back of an English watering-place, out of the season.
Our host, who was very attentive and anxious to make us comfortable, was a handsome middle-aged man, who had come to this town from New England, in which part of the country he was ‘raised.’ When I say that he constantly walked in and out of the room with his hat on; and stopped to converse in the same free-and-easy state; and lay down on our sofa, and pulled his newspaper out of his pocket, and read it at his ease; I merely mention these traits as characteristic of the country: not at all as being matter of complaint, or as having been disagreeable to me. I should undoubtedly be offended by such proceedings at home, because there they are not the custom, and where they are not, they would be impertinencies; but in America, the only desire of a good-natured fellow of this kind, is to treat his guests hospitably and well; and I had no more right, and I can truly say no more disposition, to measure his conduct by our English rule and standard, than I had to quarrel with him for not being of the exact stature which would qualify him for admission into the Queen’s grenadier guards. As little inclination had I to find fault with a funny old lady who was an upper domestic in this establishment, and who, when she came to wait upon us at any meal, sat herself down comfortably in the most convenient chair, and producing a large pin to pick her teeth with, remained performing that ceremony, and steadfastly regarding us meanwhile with much gravity and composure (now and then pressing us to eat a little more), until it was time to clear away. It was enough for us, that whatever we wished done was done with great civility and readiness, and a desire to oblige, not only here, but everywhere else; and that all our wants were, in general, zealously anticipated.
Finalmente, tra le dieci e le undici di ore di notte, alcune deboli luci apparvero in lontananza; davanti a noi si estendeva Upper Sandusky, un villaggio indiano dove avremmo soggiornato fino al mattino.
Erano andati a letto all’ostello in legno, l’unica struttura ricreativa della zona, ma presto risposero al nostro bussare e ci prepararono del tè in una sorta di cucina o sala comune, tappezzata con vecchi giornali incollati alle pareti. La camera da letto a cui furono accompagnate mia moglie e io era grande, bassa e piuttosto spettrale; sul camino c’erano molte rametti secchi, e due porte prive di qualsiasi chiusura si trovavano una di fronte all’altra, entrambe dando sulla notte buia e selvaggia del luogo. Erano disposte in modo tale che una delle due porte si aprisse sempre automaticamente quando l’altra veniva chiusa. Una stranezza nell’architettura domestica che non ricordavo di aver mai visto prima, e che mi causò un certo imbarazzo quando me ne resi conto, soprattutto perché nel mio bagaglio c’era una notevole somma in oro per le spese del viaggio. Tuttavia, parte dei bagagli ammucchiati contro le pareti risolse presto questo problema. E credo che quella notte il mio sonno non ne sia stato molto influenzato, anche se forse avrebbe potuto esserlo.
Il mio amico di Boston salì sul tetto, in un angolo dove un altro ospite stava già russando rumorosamente. Ma poiché fu morso da qualcosa al di là delle sue capacità di resistenza, dovette scendere di nuovo e cercare rifugio nell’ carrozza, che si trovava all’aperto davanti alla casa. Questa decisione si rivelò però poco saggia: i maiali, avvertendo il suo odore e considerando l’ carrozza come una sorta di “torta” contenente carne, iniziarono a grugnire intorno ad essa in modo così spaventoso che lui non osava più uscire e rimase lì tremante fino al mattino. Nemmeno un bicchiere di brandy riuscì a riscaldarlo quando finalmente uscì. Poiché nei villaggi indiani, per motivi molto saggi e giusti, è vietata la vendita di alcolici dai tavernieri. Tuttavia questa misura precauzionale risulta del tutto inefficace: gli indigeni riescono comunque a procurarsi alcol di scarsa qualità a prezzi più elevati, tramite mercanti itineranti.
È un insediamento degli Indiani Wyandot che abitano questa zona. Tra coloro che partecipavano a colazione c’era un gentiluomo anziano e mite, che da molti anni lavorava per il Governo degli Stati Uniti nelle negoziazioni con gli Indiani; aveva appena concluso un trattato con queste persone, secondo cui questi si impegnavano, in cambio di una certa somma annuale, a trasferirsi l’anno seguente in una terra loro assegnata, a ovest del Mississippi, poco oltre St. Louis. Mi raccontò con commozione della forte attaccamento di questi Indiani ai luoghi dove avevano trascorso la loro infanzia, in particolare ai luoghi di sepoltura dei loro parenti, e della loro grande riluttanza ad abbandonarli. Aveva assistito a molte di queste trasferenze, sempre con dolore, sebbene sapesse che si trattava di una scelta fatta per il loro bene. La questione se questa tribù dovesse andarsene o rimanere era stata discussa tra di loro un giorno o due prima, in una capanna appositamente costruita per l’occasione; i tronchi utilizzati per la sua costruzione giacevano ancora a terra davanti all’osteria. Una volta terminata la discussione, i voti a favore e contro furono disposti su lati opposti, e ogni adulto maschio votò a turno. Non appena fu conosciuto il risultato, la minoranza (che era numerosa) acconsentì felicemente alla decisione della maggioranza, ritirando qualsiasi obiezione avesse espresso.
In seguito incontrammo alcuni di questi poveri indiani, che cavalcavano pony pelosi. Assomigliavano molto ai tipi più umili dei gitani; se li avessi visti in Inghilterra, avrei sicuramente concluso, senza pensarci due volte, che appartenevano a quel popolo errante e inquieto.
Lasciando questa città subito dopo colazione, proseguimmo il nostro viaggio su una strada ancora peggiore di ieri, e arrivammo verso mattina a Tiffin, dove ci separammo dal personale aggiuntivo. Alle due ore prendemmo il treno; il viaggio fu molto lento a causa della scarsa qualità delle strutture ferroviarie e del terreno umido e paludoso; arrivammo a Sandusky in tempo per cena quella sera. Ci sistemammo in un piccolo hotel confortevole sulle rive del Lago Erie, trascorremmo lì la notte e non ebbero altra scelta se non aspettare il giorno seguente fino all’arrivo di una nave a vapore diretta a Buffalo. La città, piuttosto noiosa e poco attraente, assomigliava alla parte posteriore di una località balneare inglese fuori stagione.
Il nostro ospite, molto attento e desideroso di farci sentire a nostro agio, era un affascinante uomo di mezza età che era venuto in questa città dalla Nuova Inghilterra, dove era cresciuto. Quando dico che entrava e usciva continuamente dalla stanza con il cappello in testa, che si fermava a chiacchierare con noi in modo disinvolto, che si sdraiava sul nostro divano, tirava fuori il giornale dalla tasca e lo leggeva tranquillamente, intendo semplicemente indicare questi comportamenti come tipici di quella regione. Non certo per lamentarmene o perché mi siano risultati sgradevoli. Senza dubbio, un simile comportamento mi offenderebbe a casa, perché lì non è considerato appropriato; ma in America, l’unico scopo di una persona gentile come lui è quello di accogliere gli ospiti con ospitalità e cortesia. Non ho alcun diritto, e onestamente nessuna intenzione, di giudicare il suo comportamento secondo le nostre regole inglesi; tanto meno ho motivo di lamentarmi del fatto che non corrisponda esattamente agli standard richiesti per entrare nelle guardie della Regina. Altrettanto poco avrei motivo di criticare una simpatica vecchietta che lavorava in questa casa: quando veniva a servirci durante i pasti, si sedeva comodamente nella sedia più adatta, tirava fuori un grosso pettine per pulirsi i denti e continuava a farlo con grande tranquillità, osservandoci intanto con serietà e gentilezza. A volte ci incoraggiava persino a mangiare di più. Per noi era sufficiente che tutto ciò che desideravamo venisse fatto con grande cortesia e disponibilità, con un reale impegno da parte dell’ospite a soddisfare ogni nostra esigenza, non solo lì, ma ovunque altro.
We were taking an early dinner at this house, on the day after our arrival, which was Sunday, when a steamboat came in sight, and presently touched at the wharf. As she proved to be on her way to Buffalo, we hurried on board with all speed, and soon left Sandusky far behind us.
She was a large vessel of five hundred tons, and handsomely fitted up, though with high-pressure engines; which always conveyed that kind of feeling to me, which I should be likely to experience, I think, if I had lodgings on the first-floor of a powder-mill. She was laden with flour, some casks of which commodity were stored upon the deck. The captain coming up to have a little conversation, and to introduce a friend, seated himself astride of one of these barrels, like a Bacchus of private life; and pulling a great clasp-knife out of his pocket, began to ‘whittle’ it as he talked, by paring thin slices off the edges. And he whittled with such industry and hearty good will, that but for his being called away very soon, it must have disappeared bodily, and left nothing in its place but grist and shavings.
After calling at one or two flat places, with low dams stretching out into the lake, whereon were stumpy lighthouses, like windmills without sails, the whole looking like a Dutch vignette, we came at midnight to Cleveland, where we lay all night, and until nine o’clock next morning.
I entertained quite a curiosity in reference to this place, from having seen at Sandusky a specimen of its literature in the shape of a newspaper, which was very strong indeed upon the subject of Lord Ashburton’s recent arrival at Washington, to adjust the points in dispute between the United States Government and Great Britain: informing its readers that as America had ‘whipped’ England in her infancy, and whipped her again in her youth, so it was clearly necessary that she must whip her once again in her maturity; and pledging its credit to all True Americans, that if Mr. Webster did his duty in the approaching negotiations, and sent the English Lord home again in double quick time, they should, within two years, sing ‘Yankee Doodle in Hyde Park, and Hail Columbia in the scarlet courts of Westminster!’ I found it a pretty town, and had the satisfaction of beholding the outside of the office of the journal from which I have just quoted. I did not enjoy the delight of seeing the wit who indited the paragraph in question, but I have no doubt he is a prodigious man in his way, and held in high repute by a select circle.
There was a gentleman on board, to whom, as I unintentionally learned through the thin partition which divided our state-room from the cabin in which he and his wife conversed together, I was unwittingly the occasion of very great uneasiness. I don’t know why or wherefore, but I appeared to run in his mind perpetually, and to dissatisfy him very much. First of all I heard him say: and the most ludicrous part of the business was, that he said it in my very ear, and could not have communicated more directly with me, if he had leaned upon my shoulder, and whispered me: ‘Boz is on board still, my dear.’ After a considerable pause, he added, complainingly, ‘Boz keeps himself very close;’ which was true enough, for I was not very well, and was lying down, with a book. I thought he had done with me after this, but I was deceived; for a long interval having elapsed, during which I imagine him to have been turning restlessly from side to side, and trying to go to sleep; he broke out again, with ‘I suppose that Boz will be writing a book by-and-by, and putting all our names in it!’ at which imaginary consequence of being on board a boat with Boz, he groaned, and became silent.
We called at the town of Erie, at eight o’clock that night, and lay there an hour. Between five and six next morning, we arrived at Buffalo, where we breakfasted; and being too near the Great Falls to wait patiently anywhere else, we set off by the train, the same morning at nine o’clock, to Niagara.
It was a miserable day; chilly and raw; a damp mist falling; and the trees in that northern region quite bare and wintry. Whenever the train halted, I listened for the roar; and was constantly straining my eyes in the direction where I knew the Falls must be, from seeing the river rolling on towards them; every moment expecting to behold the spray. Within a few minutes of our stopping, not before, I saw two great white clouds rising up slowly and majestically from the depths of the earth. That was all. At length we alighted: and then for the first time, I heard the mighty rush of water, and felt the ground tremble underneath my feet.
The bank is very steep, and was slippery with rain, and half-melted ice. I hardly know how I got down, but I was soon at the bottom, and climbing, with two English officers who were crossing and had joined me, over some broken rocks, deafened by the noise, half-blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. We were at the foot of the American Fall. I could see an immense torrent of water tearing headlong down from some great height, but had no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity.
When we were seated in the little ferry-boat, and were crossing the swollen river immediately before both cataracts, I began to feel what it was: but I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked—Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-green water!—that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.
Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind, tranquillity, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.
Il giorno dopo il nostro arrivo, che era una domenica, stavamo consumando una cena anticipata in questa casa quando apparve un battello a vapore che presto attraccò al molo. Poiché si dirigeva verso Buffalo, salimmo a bordo il più rapidamente possibile e ben presto lasciammo Sandusky alle nostre spalle.
Era una nave di grandi dimensioni, lunga cinquecento tonnellate, e molto ben attrezzata; tuttavia era dotata di motori ad alta pressione. Quei motori mi suscitavano sempre la stessa sensazione che probabilmente proverei se abitassi al primo piano di una fabbrica di polvere da sparo. La nave trasportava farina: alcuni barili di questa merce erano conservati sul ponte. Il capitano venne a chiacchierare un po’ e presentò un amico; si sedette sopra uno di quei barili, come un Bacco della vita privata. Poi tirò fuori dal taschino un grande coltello da tasca e iniziò a “raschiarne” i bordi, tagliando strisce sottili. Lavorava con tale impegno e buona volontà che, se non fosse stato chiamato via subito, quel barile sarebbe sicuramente scomparso del tutto, lasciando al suo posto solo farina e schegge.
Dopo aver visitato uno o due luoghi situati lungo le rive del lago, dove si trovavano piccole dighe e torri di segnalazione tozze, simili a mulini a vento senza vele, tutto il paesaggio ricordava una vignetta olandese, arrivammo a Cleveland a mezzanotte e rimanemmo lì per tutta la notte, fino alle nove del mattino seguente.
Ero piuttosto curioso riguardo a questo posto: avevo infatti visto a Sandusky un esempio della sua letteratura, sotto forma di un giornale che trattava ampiamente dell’arrivo recente di Lord Ashburton a Washington, al fine di chiarire le questioni in disputa tra il governo degli Stati Uniti e la Gran Bretagna. Il giornale informava i suoi lettori che, poiché l’America aveva “sconfitto” l’Inghilterra quando questa era ancora giovane, e l’aveva nuovamente sconfitta in età matura, era chiaramente necessario che lo facesse ancora una volta; inoltre prometteva ai propri lettori che, se il signor Webster avesse adempiuto al proprio dovere nelle negoziazioni imminenti e avesse fatto ritornare l’inglese Lord a casa “in doppio tempo”, entro due anni si sarebbe potuti cantare “Yankee Doodle” nel Hyde Park e acclamare la Columbia nei cortili rossi di Westminster! Ho trovato la città piuttosto interessante e ho avuto il piacere di vedere l’esterno dell’ufficio del giornale da cui ho appena citato. Non ho avuto la fortuna di incontrare l’autore di quel paragrafo, ma non ho alcun >dubbio che sia una persona straordinaria nel suo campo e molto stimata da un ristretto circolo di persone.
C’era un gentiluomo a bordo; di lui, per caso, e attraverso la sottile parete che separava la nostra cabina dalla cabina dove lui e sua moglie conversavano, venni a sapere che avevo causato in lui una grande agitazione. Non so perché, ma sembravo non uscire mai dai suoi pensieri, il che lo rendeva molto insoddisfatto. Prima di tutto, lo sentii dire. E la cosa più ridicola era che lo disse proprio all’orecchio mio; non avrebbe potuto comunicare con me in modo più diretto nemmeno se si fosse appoggiato alla mia spalla e mi avesse sussurrato: “Boz è ancora a bordo, caro”. Dopo una lunga pausa, aggiunse, con tono lamentoso: “Boz si tiene sempre molto in disparte, ”, il che era vero, visto che non stavo molto bene e ero sdraiata con un libro in mano. Pensai che avesse finito di parlare di me, ma mi sbagliavo; dopo un lungo silenzio, durante il quale immagino si sia girato continuamente da una parte all’altra cercando di addormentarsi, riprese a dire: “Suppongo che Boz, prima o poi, scriverà un libro e ci metterà tutti i nostri nomi dentro, ”, e di fronte a questa immaginaria conseguenza del fatto di trovarsi su una barca con Boz, sospirò e rimase in silenzio.
Arrivammo nella città di Erie alle otto di ore quella notte e rimanemmo lì per un’ora. Tra le cinque e le sei del mattino seguente arrivammo a Buffalo, dove facemmo colazione; essendo troppo vicini alle Grandi Cascate per aspettare pazientemente in qualche altro posto, partimmo con il treno, quella stessa mattina alle nove di ore, diretti verso Niagara.
Era una giornata miserabile: fredda e umida; una nebbia densa cadeva dal cielo, e gli alberi di quella regione settentrionale erano completamente spogli e invernali. Ogni volta che il treno si fermava, ascoltavo attentamente per captare quel fragore assordante; fissavo costantemente la direzione in cui sapevo che si trovavano le cascate, osservando il fiume che scorreva verso di loro. Aspettavo con ansia di vedere quelle gocce d’acqua schizzare in aria. Solo pochi minuti dopo la nostra fermata vidi due grandi nuvole bianche sollevarsi lentamente e maestosamente dalle profondità della terra. Ecco tutto. Alla fine scendemmo dal treno; e fu allora, per la prima volta, che udii il potente fragore dell’acqua e sentii il terreno tremare sotto i miei piedi.
La pendenza era molto ripida; il terreno era scivoloso a causa della pioggia e del ghiaccio parzialmente sciolto. Non so proprio come sia riuscito a scendere, ma in breve mi trovai in fondo alla valle. Insieme a due ufficiali inglesi che stavano attraversando la zona e si erano uniti a me, risalimmo lungo alcune rocce frantumate. Il rumore era assordante, il getto d’acqua ci accecava quasi completamente e eravamo bagnati fino alla pelle. Ci trovavamo ai piedi della Cascata Americana: vedevo un enorme torrente d’acqua scorrere giù da una grande altezza, ma non riuscivo a distinguere alcuna forma precisa o dettaglio riguardo alla sua conformazione. Solo un’immensità indistinta.
Quando ci sedemmo sulla piccola barca da traghetto e stavamo attraversando il gonfio >fiume proprio prima delle due cascate, cominciai a capire cosa stesse accadendo; ma ero come stordito, incapace di comprendere la grandezza di quella scena. Fu solo quando arrivai su Table Rock e vidi. Oh mio Dio, quell’imponente cascata di acqua verde brillante!, che tutto mi colpì con tutta la sua forza e maestosità.
Allora, quando mi resi conto di quanto fossi vicino al mio Creatore, l’effetto immediato e duraturo di quell’incredibile spettacolo fu la Pace: pace interiore, tranquillità, ricordi sereni dei defunti, pensieri profondi sulla Felicità Eterna. Nessuna tristezza, nessun terrore. Il Niagara divenne all’istante un simbolo di Bellezza; rimase impresso nel mio cuore, immutabile e indelebile, fino a quando i suoi “batimenti” non cessarono per sempre.
Oh, how the strife and trouble of daily life receded from my view, and lessened in the distance, during the ten memorable days we passed on that Enchanted Ground! What voices spoke from out the thundering water; what faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon me from its gleaming depths; what Heavenly promise glistened in those angels’ tears, the drops of many hues, that showered around, and twined themselves about the gorgeous arches which the changing rainbows made!
I never stirred in all that time from the Canadian side, whither I had gone at first. I never crossed the river again; for I knew there were people on the other shore, and in such a place it is natural to shun strange company. To wander to and fro all day, and see the cataracts from all points of view; to stand upon the edge of the great Horse-Shoe Fall, marking the hurried water gathering strength as it approached the verge, yet seeming, too, to pause before it shot into the gulf below; to gaze from the river’s level up at the torrent as it came streaming down; to climb the neighbouring heights and watch it through the trees, and see the wreathing water in the rapids hurrying on to take its fearful plunge; to linger in the shadow of the solemn rocks three miles below; watching the river as, stirred by no visible cause, it heaved and eddied and awoke the echoes, being troubled yet, far down beneath the surface, by its giant leap; to have Niagara before me, lighted by the sun and by the moon, red in the day’s decline, and grey as evening slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, and wake up in the night and hear its ceaseless voice: this was enough.
I think in every quiet season now, still do those waters roll and leap, and roar and tumble, all day long; still are the rainbows spanning them, a hundred feet below. Still, when the sun is on them, do they shine and glow like molten gold. Still, when the day is gloomy, do they fall like snow, or seem to crumble away like the front of a great chalk cliff, or roll down the rock like dense white smoke. But always does the mighty stream appear to die as it comes down, and always from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid: which has haunted this place with the same dread solemnity since Darkness brooded on the deep, and that first flood before the Deluge—Light—came rushing on Creation at the word of God.
Oh, come le lotte e i problemi della vita di tutti i giorni si allontanarono dalla mia vista, diventando sempre più piccoli man mano che il tempo passava, durante quei dieci giorni indimenticabili trascorsi in quel Luogo Incantevole! Quali voci provenivano da quelle acque tumultuose; quali volti, ormai scomparsi dalla terra, mi osservavano dalle sue profondità scintillanti; quale promessa celestiale brillava nelle lacrime di quegli angeli, quelle gocce dai mille colori che piovevano intorno a me e si avvolgevano intorno alle magnifiche arcate create dagli arcobaleni!
Per tutto quel tempo, non mi sono mai mosso dalla sponda canadese, dove ero arrivato all’inizio. Non ho più attraversato il fiume; sapevo che c’erano persone dall’altra parte, e in un posto del genere è naturale evitare la compagnia degli estranei. Vagabondare avanti e indietro per tutto il giorno, osservare le cascate da tutti gli angoli possibili; stare in piedi sul bordo delle imponenti cascate del Horse-Shoe Fall, vedere l’acqua che si raccoglieva con forza prima di precipitare nel baratro sottostante, ma che sembrava anche fermarsi un attimo prima di tuffarsi; guardare dall’alto il torrente che scorreva giù; salire sulle colline vicine e osservarlo tra gli alberi, vedere l’acqua che si avvolgeva nei vortici delle rapide mentre continuava la sua corsa verso il basso. Rimanere nell’ombra delle maestose rocce situate tre miglia più in basso; osservare il fiume che, senza alcuna causa visibile, si agitava e sollevava spruzzi d’acqua, risvegliando gli echi. Tutto questo era sufficiente.
Penso che in ogni stagione tranquilla, ancora oggi quelle acque si agitino e si sollevino, ruggiscano e si precipitino giù per tutto il giorno; ancora oggi i arcobaleni si estendono sopra di loro, a centinaia di piedi di distanza. Ancora oggi, quando il sole le illumina, brillano e scintillano come oro fuso; ancora oggi, quando il cielo è cupo, sembrano cadere come neve, oppure si dissolvono come la superficie di una vasta scogliera di gesso, o scorrono giù lungo le rocce come denso fumo bianco. Ma sempre quel potente fiume sembra “morire” mentre discende, e sempre dalla sua insondabile profondità emerge quell’enorme “fantasma” di spruzzi e nebbia che non si placa mai: un fenomeno che ha spaventato quest’area con la stessa solenne terribilità fin da quando l’Oscurità avvolgeva le profondità marine, e fin dalla prima inondazione precedente al Diluvio, quando la Luce, per volontà di Dio, si riversò sulla Creazione.
CHAPTER XV IN CANADA; TORONTO; KINGSTON; MONTREAL; QUEBEC; ST. JOHN’S. IN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN; LEBANON; THE SHAKER VILLAGE; WEST POINT
I WISH to abstain from instituting any comparison, or drawing any parallel whatever, between the social features of the United States and those of the British Possessions in Canada. For this reason, I shall confine myself to a very brief account of our journeyings in the latter territory.
But before I leave Niagara, I must advert to one disgusting circumstance which can hardly have escaped the observation of any decent traveller who has visited the Falls.
On Table Rock, there is a cottage belonging to a Guide, where little relics of the place are sold, and where visitors register their names in a book kept for the purpose. On the wall of the room in which a great many of these volumes are preserved, the following request is posted: ‘Visitors will please not copy nor extract the remarks and poetical effusions from the registers and albums kept here.’
But for this intimation, I should have let them lie upon the tables on which they were strewn with careful negligence, like books in a drawing-room: being quite satisfied with the stupendous silliness of certain stanzas with an anti-climax at the end of each, which were framed and hung up on the wall. Curious, however, after reading this announcement, to see what kind of morsels were so carefully preserved, I turned a few leaves, and found them scrawled all over with the vilest and the filthiest ribaldry that ever human hogs delighted in.
It is humiliating enough to know that there are among men brutes so obscene and worthless, that they can delight in laying their miserable profanations upon the very steps of Nature’s greatest altar. But that these should be hoarded up for the delight of their fellow-swine, and kept in a public place where any eyes may see them, is a disgrace to the English language in which they are written (though I hope few of these entries have been made by Englishmen), and a reproach to the English side, on which they are preserved.
The quarters of our soldiers at Niagara, are finely and airily situated. Some of them are large detached houses on the plain above the Falls, which were originally designed for hotels; and in the evening time, when the women and children were leaning over the balconies watching the men as they played at ball and other games upon the grass before the door, they often presented a little picture of cheerfulness and animation which made it quite a pleasure to pass that way.
At any garrisoned point where the line of demarcation between one country and another is so very narrow as at Niagara, desertion from the ranks can scarcely fail to be of frequent occurrence: and it may be reasonably supposed that when the soldiers entertain the wildest and maddest hopes of the fortune and independence that await them on the other side, the impulse to play traitor, which such a place suggests to dishonest minds, is not weakened. But it very rarely happens that the men who do desert, are happy or contented afterwards; and many instances have been known in which they have confessed their grievous disappointment, and their earnest desire to return to their old service if they could but be assured of pardon, or lenient treatment. Many of their comrades, notwithstanding, do the like, from time to time; and instances of loss of life in the effort to cross the river with this object, are far from being uncommon. Several men were drowned in the attempt to swim across, not long ago; and one, who had the madness to trust himself upon a table as a raft, was swept down to the whirlpool, where his mangled body eddied round and round some days.
I am inclined to think that the noise of the Falls is very much exaggerated; and this will appear the more probable when the depth of the great basin in which the water is received, is taken into account. At no time during our stay there, was the wind at all high or boisterous, but we never heard them, three miles off, even at the very quiet time of sunset, though we often tried.
Queenston, at which place the steamboats start for Toronto (or I should rather say at which place they call, for their wharf is at Lewiston, on the opposite shore), is situated in a delicious valley, through which the Niagara river, in colour a very deep green, pursues its course. It is approached by a road that takes its winding way among the heights by which the town is sheltered; and seen from this point is extremely beautiful and picturesque. On the most conspicuous of these heights stood a monument erected by the Provincial Legislature in memory of General Brock, who was slain in a battle with the American forces, after having won the victory. Some vagabond, supposed to be a fellow of the name of Lett, who is now, or who lately was, in prison as a felon, blew up this monument two years ago, and it is now a melancholy ruin, with a long fragment of iron railing hanging dejectedly from its top, and waving to and fro like a wild ivy branch or broken vine stem. It is of much higher importance than it may seem, that this statue should be repaired at the public cost, as it ought to have been long ago. Firstly, because it is beneath the dignity of England to allow a memorial raised in honour of one of her defenders, to remain in this condition, on the very spot where he died. Secondly, because the sight of it in its present state, and the recollection of the unpunished outrage which brought it to this pass, is not very likely to soothe down border feelings among English subjects here, or compose their border quarrels and dislikes.
I was standing on the wharf at this place, watching the passengers embarking in a steamboat which preceded that whose coming we awaited, and participating in the anxiety with which a sergeant’s wife was collecting her few goods together—keeping one distracted eye hard upon the porters, who were hurrying them on board, and the other on a hoopless washing-tub for which, as being the most utterly worthless of all her movables, she seemed to entertain particular affection—when three or four soldiers with a recruit came up and went on board.
CAPITOLO XV
In Canada: Toronto, Kingston, Montreal, Québec, St. John’s; di nuovo negli Stati Uniti; Libano, il villaggio dei “Shakers”, West Point.
Desidero astenermi dal stabilire qualsiasi tipo di paragone o di analogia tra le caratteristiche sociali degli Stati Uniti e quelle delle colonie britanniche in Canada. Per questo motivo, mi limiterò a fornire una descrizione molto breve dei nostri viaggi in quel territorio.
Ma prima di lasciare Niagara, devo menzionare una circostanza disgustosa che difficilmente è sfuggita all’attenzione di qualsiasi viaggiatore perbene che abbia visitato le cascate.
Su Table Rock c’è una capanna appartenente a un guida turistico, dove si vendono piccoli ricordi del luogo e dove i visitatori registrano il proprio nome in un libro apposito. Sulla parete della stanza in cui sono conservati molti di questi volumi è affisso il seguente avviso: “I visitatori si preghino di non copiare né estrarre le osservazioni e gli scritti poetici presenti nei registri e negli album qui conservati.”
Se non fosse stato per questa indicazione, avrei lasciato che rimanessero sulle tavole dove erano sparsi con curiosa negligenza, come libri in un salotto: ero del tutto soddisfatto dell’assurdità estrema di alcune strofe, ognuna delle quali terminava con un anticlimax; queste strofe erano state incorniciate e appese al muro. Tuttavia, dopo aver letto questo annuncio, mi incuriosì sapere di che genere di testi si trattasse; sfogliai alcune pagine e scoprii che erano piene di oscenità e volgarità di ogni sorta, di quelle che solo gli esseri umani più depravati potrebbero apprezzare.
È già abbastanza umiliante sapere che tra gli uomini esistono individui così osceni e senza valore da trovare piacere nel compiere atti profani proprio ai piedi dell’altare più grande della Natura. Ma il fatto che tali cose vengano accumulate per il divertimento dei loro simili, e conservate in luoghi pubblici accessibili a tutti, rappresenta una vergogna per la lingua inglese in cui sono scritte (anche se >spero che poche di queste annotazioni siano state fatte da inglesi), nonché un rimprovero per il popolo inglese che le ha conservate.
Le caserme dei nostri soldati a Niagara sono situate in posizioni eleganti e areate. Alcune di esse sono grandi case isolate situate sulla pianura sopra le cascate; originariamente progettate come hotel, la sera, quando donne e bambini si affacciavano dai balconi per osservare gli uomini che giocavano a pallone o ad altri giochi sull’erba davanti alle porte, offrivano spesso un quadro di allegria e vivacità che rendeva davvero piacevole passare da quella parte.
In qualsiasi punto di guarnigione in cui il confine tra due paesi sia estremamente stretto, come nel caso del Niagara, le diserzioni sono praticamente inevitabili. Si può ragionevolmente supporre che, quando i soldati nutrono speranze folli e irrealistiche riguardo alla fortuna e all’indipendenza che li attendono dall’altra parte del confine, l’impulso a tradire, che un luogo del genere suscita in persone disoneste, non diminuisca affatto. Tuttavia, è molto raro che coloro che commettono diserzione riescano in seguito ad essere felici o soddisfatti; molti di loro hanno confessato la propria profonda delusione e il proprio sincero desiderio di tornare al servizio militare, purché potessero essere assicurati di essere perdonati o trattati con clemenza. Nonostante ciò, molti dei loro compagni fanno lo stesso, di tanto in tanto; inoltre, non sono affatto rari i casi in cui le persone perdono la vita nel tentativo di attraversare il fiume per raggiungere l’altra sponda con questo scopo. Di recente, diversi uomini sono annegati nel tentativo di nuotare; uno, che ha avuto la follia di affidarsi a un tavolo come zattera, è stato trascinato verso il vortice, dove il suo corpo dilaniato è rimasto a girare in tondo per diversi giorni.
Sono incline a pensare che il rumore delle cascate sia molto esagerato; e questa ipotesi diventa ancora più plausibile se si tiene conto della profondità dell’ampio bacino in cui le acque si raccolgono. Durante tutto il nostro soggiorno lì, il vento non fu mai particolarmente forte o rumoroso, ma non riuscimmo mai a sentirlo, nonostante ci provassimo spesso, nemmeno nei momenti più tranquilli, come al tramonto, a tre miglia di distanza.
Queenston, da dove partono i battelli a vapore per Toronto (o meglio dire, dove fermano, poiché il loro molo si trova a Lewiston, sulla sponda opposta), è situata in una deliziosa valle attraverso la quale il fiume Niagara, di un colore verde molto scuro, scorre lungo il suo corso. Si raggiunge tramite una strada che serpeggia tra le alture che proteggono la città; vista da questo punto, appare estremamente bella e pittoresca. Sulla più evidente di queste alture sorgeva un monumento eretto dal Parlamento provinciale in memoria del generale Brock, ucciso in battaglia contro le forze americane dopo aver ottenuto la vittoria. Due anni fa, un vagabondo di nome Lett – che ora si trova o si trovava recentemente in prigione per reati gravi – fece esplodere questo monumento; oggi non è altro che una triste rovina, con un lungo pezzo di ringhiera di ferro penzolante dalla sua sommità, ondeggiando avanti e indietro come un ramo di edera selvatica o un tralcio spezzato. È di estrema importanza che questo monumento venga riparato a spese pubbliche, come avrebbe dovuto essere fatto da tempo. Prima di tutto, perché non è degno dell’Inghilterra permettere che un memoriale eretto in onore di uno dei suoi difensori rimanga in queste condizioni, proprio nel luogo dove egli morì. In secondo luogo, perché la vista di questo monumento nello stato attuale, e il ricordo dell’oltraggio impunito che lo ha ridotto a questa condizione, non sono certo in grado di placare gli animi ostili tra i sudditi inglesi di queste regioni, né di risolvere le loro dispute e i loro dissidi.
Stavo in piedi sul molo, osservando i passeggeri che salivano su una nave a vapore che precedeva quella la cui arrivo aspettavamo con ansia; partecipavo anche all’agitazione di una moglie di sergente, impegnata a raccogliere le sue poche cose: teneva un occhio fisso sui portatori che le aiutavano a salire a bordo, e l’altro su una lavandina senza cerchi, per la quale, essendo considerata l’oggetto più inutile tra tutti i suoi beni, sembrava provare un affetto particolare. In quel momento, tre o quattro soldati insieme a un nuovo recluta si avvicinarono e salirono a bordo.
The recruit was a likely young fellow enough, strongly built and well made, but by no means sober: indeed he had all the air of a man who had been more or less drunk for some days. He carried a small bundle over his shoulder, slung at the end of a walking-stick, and had a short pipe in his mouth. He was as dusty and dirty as recruits usually are, and his shoes betokened that he had travelled on foot some distance, but he was in a very jocose state, and shook hands with this soldier, and clapped that one on the back, and talked and laughed continually, like a roaring idle dog as he was.
The soldiers rather laughed at this blade than with him: seeming to say, as they stood straightening their canes in their hands, and looking coolly at him over their glazed stocks, ‘Go on, my boy, while you may! you’ll know better by-and-by:’ when suddenly the novice, who had been backing towards the gangway in his noisy merriment, fell overboard before their eyes, and splashed heavily down into the river between the vessel and the dock.
I never saw such a good thing as the change that came over these soldiers in an instant. Almost before the man was down, their professional manner, their stiffness and constraint, were gone, and they were filled with the most violent energy. In less time than is required to tell it, they had him out again, feet first, with the tails of his coat flapping over his eyes, everything about him hanging the wrong way, and the water streaming off at every thread in his threadbare dress. But the moment they set him upright and found that he was none the worse, they were soldiers again, looking over their glazed stocks more composedly than ever.
The half-sobered recruit glanced round for a moment, as if his first impulse were to express some gratitude for his preservation, but seeing them with this air of total unconcern, and having his wet pipe presented to him with an oath by the soldier who had been by far the most anxious of the party, he stuck it in his mouth, thrust his hands into his moist pockets, and without even shaking the water off his clothes, walked on board whistling; not to say as if nothing had happened, but as if he had meant to do it, and it had been a perfect success.
Our steamboat came up directly this had left the wharf, and soon bore us to the mouth of the Niagara; where the stars and stripes of America flutter on one side and the Union Jack of England on the other: and so narrow is the space between them that the sentinels in either fort can often hear the watchword of the other country given. Thence we emerged on Lake Ontario, an inland sea; and by half-past six o’clock were at Toronto.
The country round this town being very flat, is bare of scenic interest; but the town itself is full of life and motion, bustle, business, and improvement. The streets are well paved, and lighted with gas; the houses are large and good; the shops excellent. Many of them have a display of goods in their windows, such as may be seen in thriving county towns in England; and there are some which would do no discredit to the metropolis itself. There is a good stone prison here; and there are, besides, a handsome church, a court-house, public offices, many commodious private residences, and a government observatory for noting and recording the magnetic variations. In the College of Upper Canada, which is one of the public establishments of the city, a sound education in every department of polite learning can be had, at a very moderate expense: the annual charge for the instruction of each pupil, not exceeding nine pounds sterling. It has pretty good endowments in the way of land, and is a valuable and useful institution.
The first stone of a new college had been laid but a few days before, by the Governor General. It will be a handsome, spacious edifice, approached by a long avenue, which is already planted and made available as a public walk. The town is well adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons, for the footways in the thoroughfares which lie beyond the principal street, are planked like floors, and kept in very good and clean repair.
It is a matter of deep regret that political differences should have run high in this place, and led to most discreditable and disgraceful results. It is not long since guns were discharged from a window in this town at the successful candidates in an election, and the coachman of one of them was actually shot in the body, though not dangerously wounded. But one man was killed on the same occasion; and from the very window whence he received his death, the very flag which shielded his murderer (not only in the commission of his crime, but from its consequences), was displayed again on the occasion of the public ceremony performed by the Governor General, to which I have just adverted. Of all the colours in the rainbow, there is but one which could be so employed: I need not say that flag was orange.
The time of leaving Toronto for Kingston is noon. By eight o’clock next morning, the traveller is at the end of his journey, which is performed by steamboat upon Lake Ontario, calling at Port Hope and Coburg, the latter a cheerful, thriving little town. Vast quantities of flour form the chief item in the freight of these vessels. We had no fewer than one thousand and eighty barrels on board, between Coburg and Kingston.
The latter place, which is now the seat of government in Canada, is a very poor town, rendered still poorer in the appearance of its market-place by the ravages of a recent fire. Indeed, it may be said of Kingston, that one half of it appears to be burnt down, and the other half not to be built up. The Government House is neither elegant nor commodious, yet it is almost the only house of any importance in the neighbourhood.
Il recluta era un giovane piuttosto attraente, di corporatura robusta e ben fatto, ma assolutamente non sobrio: aveva proprio l’aspetto di uno che fosse stato più o meno ubriaco per diversi giorni. Portava sulle spalle un piccolo fagotto legato all’estremità di un bastone da passeggio, e aveva una corta pipa in bocca. Era coperto di polvere e sporco come di solito sono i recluti; le sue scarpe indicavano che aveva percorso a piedi una certa distanza, ma era in uno stato di grande allegria: stringeva la mano a questo soldato, dava pacche sulla schiena a quello, parlava e rideva senza sosta, proprio come un cane indolente e chiassoso.
I soldati ridevano piuttosto di questa lama che con lui; sembrava che dicessero, mentre si raddrizzavano con i loro bastoni in mano e lo guardavano freddamente attraverso le impugnature lucide: “Vai pure, ragazzo, finché puoi! Più tardi capirai meglio.” Improvvisamente, il novizio, che fino ad allora si era allontanato verso la passerella tra risate e schiamazzi, cadde in acqua davanti ai loro occhi, immergendosi con un forte tonfo nel fiume tra la nave e il molo.
Non avevo mai visto nulla di così bello come il cambiamento che avvenne in quei soldati in un istante. Quasi prima ancora che l’uomo cadesse a terra, la loro professionalità, la loro rigidità e la loro formalità scomparvero completamente; furono invasi da una forza incredibile. In meno tempo di quanto ci voglia per dirlo, lo rimisero in piedi, con le code del suo cappotto che gli coprivano gli occhi, tutto il suo abito logoro bagnato d’acqua. Ma non appena lo raddrizzarono e si accorsero che non era affatto peggiorato, tornarono a essere soldati, guardandosi intorno con maggiore compostezza che mai prima.
Il recluto, ancora semi-sbronzo, guardò intorno per un momento, come se il suo primo impulso fosse quello di esprimere gratitudine per essere stato salvato; ma vedendoli con quell’aria di totale indifferenza, e dopo che gli fu offerta la pipa ancora umida dal soldato che fino ad allora era stato l’unico veramente preoccupato per lui, se la mise in bocca, infilò le mani nelle tasche bagnate e, senza nemmeno scuotersi l’acqua di dosso, salì a bordo fischiettando; non si può dire che facesse finta che nulla fosse successo, ma piuttosto che avesse davvero intenzione di farlo, e che il tutto fosse stato un perfetto successo.
Il nostro battello a vapore arrivò subito dopo che aveva lasciato il molo e ci portò presto alla foce del Niagara; lì sventolavano le stelle e le strisce di America da un lato e la bandiera dell’Unione d’Inghilterra dall’altro: lo spazio tra loro era così stretto che i sentinelli di entrambe le fortezze riuscivano spesso a sentire il grido di battaglia dell’altra nazione. Da lì proseguimmo verso il Lago Ontario, un mare interno; alle sei e mezza del pomeriggio arrivammo a Toronto.
La campagna intorno a questa città è molto piatta e priva di attrazioni paesaggistiche; ma la città stessa è piena di vita, movimento, affari e sviluppo. Le strade sono ben lastricate e illuminate a gas; le case sono grandi e confortevoli; i negozi sono eccellenti. Molti di loro espongono i propri prodotti alle vetrine, proprio come avviene nelle fiorenti città di contea in Inghilterra; alcuni di questi negozi non farebbero certo vergogna nemmeno alla metropoli stessa. Qui c’è anche una buona prigione in pietra; inoltre, ci sono una bella chiesa, un palazzo di giustizia, uffici pubblici, molte residenze private confortevoli e un osservatorio governativo per registrare le variazioni magnetiche. Nel College of Upper Canada, uno degli istituti pubblici della città, è possibile ricevere una solida educazione in tutti i campi dell’apprendimento umano a un costo molto moderato: la retta annuale per ogni studente non supera le nove sterline sterline. Il college dispone anche di buone risorse in termini di terreni ed è davvero un’istituzione preziosa e utile.
La prima pietra di un nuovo college era stata posata pochi giorni prima dal Governatore Generale. Sarà un edificio imponente e spazioso, raggiungibile attraverso una lunga alameda già piantumata e aperta al pubblico come passeggiata. La città è ben adatta per fare attività fisica in tutte le stagioni, poiché i marciapiedi presenti nelle strade secondarie, che si estendono oltre la via principale, sono pavimentati e mantenuti in ottimo stato di conservazione.
È motivo di profondo rammarico che le differenze politiche siano dovute raggiungere livelli così elevati in questo luogo, portando a risultati tanto disonorevoli e vergognosi. Non è passato molto tempo da quando, in questa città, delle armi furono sparate da una finestra contro i candidati vincenti di un’elezione; il cocchiere di uno di loro fu addirittura colpito al -corpo, sebbene le ferite non fossero gravi. Tuttavia, in quell’occasione morì una persona; e proprio dalla stessa finestra da cui ricevette la morte, fu di nuovo esposta la -bandiera che aveva protetto il suo assassino – non solo durante la commissione del crimine, ma anche dalle sue conseguenze. Questa bandiera fu mostrata nuovamente durante la cerimonia pubblica tenuta dal Governatore Generale, di cui ho appena parlato. Tra tutti i colori dell’arcobaleno, c’è solo uno che potrebbe essere utilizzato in questo modo. Non occorre dire che quella bandiera era arancione.
L’orario di partenza da Toronto per Kingston è mezzogiorno. Entro le otto del giorno successivo, il viaggiatore raggiungerà la fine della sua viaggio, che si svolge in battello a vapore sul Lago Ontario, con soste a Port Hope e Coburg; quest’ultima è una piccola città allegra e prospera. Grandi quantità di farina costituiscono l’oggetto principale del carico di questi mezzi navali; noi ne trasportavamo ben milleottanta barili, tra Coburg e Kingston.
Quel luogo, che oggi è la sede del governo in Canada, è una città molto povera; il suo aspetto, soprattutto quello della piazza del mercato, è ulteriormente peggiorato a causa dei danni causati da un recente incendio. Si può davvero dire che metà di Kingston sembri essere stata distrutta dal fuoco, mentre l’altra metà non è ancora stata ricostruita. L’Palazzo del governo non è né elegante né confortevole, eppure rappresenta quasi l’unica struttura di qualche rilievo nella zona.
There is an admirable jail here, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated, in every respect. The men were employed as shoemakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and stonecutters; and in building a new prison, which was pretty far advanced towards completion. The female prisoners were occupied in needlework. Among them was a beautiful girl of twenty, who had been there nearly three years. She acted as bearer of secret despatches for the self-styled Patriots on Navy Island, during the Canadian Insurrection: sometimes dressing as a girl, and carrying them in her stays; sometimes attiring herself as a boy, and secreting them in the lining of her hat. In the latter character she always rode as a boy would, which was nothing to her, for she could govern any horse that any man could ride, and could drive four-in-hand with the best whip in those parts. Setting forth on one of her patriotic missions, she appropriated to herself the first horse she could lay her hands on; and this offence had brought her where I saw her. She had quite a lovely face, though, as the reader may suppose from this sketch of her history, there was a lurking devil in her bright eye, which looked out pretty sharply from between her prison bars.
There is a bomb-proof fort here of great strength, which occupies a bold position, and is capable, doubtless, of doing good service; though the town is much too close upon the frontier to be long held, I should imagine, for its present purpose in troubled times. There is also a small navy-yard, where a couple of Government steamboats were building, and getting on vigorously.
We left Kingston for Montreal on the tenth of May, at half-past nine in the morning, and proceeded in a steamboat down the St. Lawrence river. The beauty of this noble stream at almost any point, but especially in the commencement of this journey when it winds its way among the thousand Islands, can hardly be imagined. The number and constant successions of these islands, all green and richly wooded; their fluctuating sizes, some so large that for half an hour together one among them will appear as the opposite bank of the river, and some so small that they are mere dimples on its broad bosom; their infinite variety of shapes; and the numberless combinations of beautiful forms which the trees growing on them present: all form a picture fraught with uncommon interest and pleasure.
In the afternoon we shot down some rapids where the river boiled and bubbled strangely, and where the force and headlong violence of the current were tremendous. At seven o’clock we reached Dickenson’s Landing, whence travellers proceed for two or three hours by stage-coach: the navigation of the river being rendered so dangerous and difficult in the interval, by rapids, that steamboats do not make the passage. The number and length of those portages, over which the roads are bad, and the travelling slow, render the way between the towns of Montreal and Kingston, somewhat tedious.
Our course lay over a wide, uninclosed tract of country at a little distance from the river-side, whence the bright warning lights on the dangerous parts of the St. Lawrence shone vividly. The night was dark and raw, and the way dreary enough. It was nearly ten o’clock when we reached the wharf where the next steamboat lay; and went on board, and to bed.
She lay there all night, and started as soon as it was day. The morning was ushered in by a violent thunderstorm, and was very wet, but gradually improved and brightened up. Going on deck after breakfast, I was amazed to see floating down with the stream, a most gigantic raft, with some thirty or forty wooden houses upon it, and at least as many flag-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street. I saw many of these rafts afterwards, but never one so large. All the timber, or ‘lumber,’ as it is called in America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner. When the raft reaches its place of destination, it is broken up; the materials are sold; and the boatmen return for more.
At eight we landed again, and travelled by a stage-coach for four hours through a pleasant and well-cultivated country, perfectly French in every respect: in the appearance of the cottages; the air, language, and dress of the peasantry; the sign-boards on the shops and taverns: and the Virgin’s shrines, and crosses, by the wayside. Nearly every common labourer and boy, though he had no shoes to his feet, wore round his waist a sash of some bright colour: generally red: and the women, who were working in the fields and gardens, and doing all kinds of husbandry, wore, one and all, great flat straw hats with most capacious brims. There were Catholic Priests and Sisters of Charity in the village streets; and images of the Saviour at the corners of cross-roads, and in other public places.
At noon we went on board another steamboat, and reached the village of Lachine, nine miles from Montreal, by three o’clock. There, we left the river, and went on by land.
Montreal is pleasantly situated on the margin of the St. Lawrence, and is backed by some bold heights, about which there are charming rides and drives. The streets are generally narrow and irregular, as in most French towns of any age; but in the more modern parts of the city, they are wide and airy. They display a great variety of very good shops; and both in the town and suburbs there are many excellent private dwellings. The granite quays are remarkable for their beauty, solidity, and extent.
There is a very large Catholic cathedral here, recently erected with two tall spires, of which one is yet unfinished. In the open space in front of this edifice, stands a solitary, grim-looking, square brick tower, which has a quaint and remarkable appearance, and which the wiseacres of the place have consequently determined to pull down immediately. The Government House is very superior to that at Kingston, and the town is full of life and bustle. In one of the suburbs is a plank road—not footpath—five or six miles long, and a famous road it is too. All the rides in the vicinity were made doubly interesting by the bursting out of spring, which is here so rapid, that it is but a day’s leap from barren winter, to the blooming youth of summer.
Qui c’è una prigione davvero ammirevole: ben gestita e regolamentata in ogni dettaglio. Gli uomini venivano impiegati come calzolai, fabbricanti di corde, fabbri, sarti, carpentieri e scalpellini; inoltre, si stava costruendo una nuova prigione, che era già molto avanti nella fase di completamento. Le prigioniere si dedicavano al lavoro a maglia. Tra loro c’era una bellissima ragazza di vent’anni, che vi era reclusa da quasi tre anni. Durante l’Insurrezione Canadese, lei fungeva da messaggera segreta per i cosiddetti “Patrioti” dell’Isola della Marina: a volte si travestiva da ragazza e nascondeva i messaggi all’interno del proprio corsetto; altre volte si vestiva da ragazzo e li nascondeva nella fodera del cappello. Quando viaggiava in questo ruolo, cavalcava come un ragazzo, il che non le rappresentava alcun problema, poiché riusciva a domare qualsiasi cavallo fosse in grado di essere montato da un uomo, e sapeva anche guidarli a quattro mani con la migliore frusta della zona. Durante una delle sue missioni “patriottiche”, si appropriò del primo cavallo che le capitò sotto mano. Questo reato fu la causa per cui si trovava lì dove la vidi. Aveva un viso davvero incantevole; tuttavia, come si può intuire da questo ritratto della sua storia, nei suoi occhi brillanti si nascondeva un demone, uno spirito malvagio che spuntava fuori con grande intensità attraverso le sbarre della sua prigione.
Qui c’è una fortezza antibomba di grande potenza, situata in una posizione strategica e senza dubbio in grado di svolgere un ruolo importante; anche se la città si trova troppo vicina al confine per poter essere difesa a lungo, penso che possa comunque essere utile in tempi turbolenti. C’è anche un piccolo cantiere navale, dove stanno venendo costruiti alcuni vapori governativi, e i lavori procedono con ritmo sostenuto.
Abbiamo lasciato Kingston per Montreal il dieci maggio, alle nove e mezza del mattino, e siamo proseguiti in battello a vapore lungo il fiume San Lorenzo. La bellezza di questo nobile corso d’acqua, in quasi ogni punto, ma soprattutto all’inizio di questo viaggio, quando serpeggia tra migliaia di isole, è difficile da immaginare. Il numero e la continua successione di queste isole, tutte verdi e ricoperte da fitti boschi; le loro dimensioni variabili – alcune così grandi da sembrare, per mezz’ora, l’altra riva del fiume; altre così piccole da apparire soltanto come piccole increspature sul suo ampio corso d’acqua; la loro infinita varietà di forme; e le innumerevoli combinazioni di bellezze offerte dagli alberi che vi crescono, tutto ciò compone un quadro straordinariamente affascinante e piacevole da osservare.
Nel pomeriggio abbiamo attraversato alcune rapide in cui il fiume bolliva e sobbolliva in modo strano, e dove la forza e la violenza delle correnti erano enormi. Alle sette di sera siamo arrivati a Dickenson’s Landing, da dove i viaggiatori proseguono per due o tre ore in diligenza: il tratto del fiume è infatti così pericoloso e difficile a causa delle rapide che le navi a vapore non lo attraversano. Il numero e la lunghezza di questi tratti, uniti alle cattive condizioni delle strade e alla lentezza dei viaggi, rendono il percorso tra Montreal e Kingston piuttosto noioso.
Il nostro percorso attraversava un vasto tratto di terra aperta, a poca distanza dalla riva del fiume; da lì i luminosi segnali di avvertimento presenti nelle zone pericolose del San Lorenzo brillavano intensamente. La notte era buia e fredda, e il cammino piuttosto desolato. Erano quasi le dieci quando arrivammo al molo dove si trovava la prossima nave a vapore; salimmo a bordo e andammo a letto.
Rimase sdraiata lì per tutta la notte e si alzò non appena fece giorno. La mattina iniziò con un violento temporale; il tempo era molto umido, ma gradualmente migliorò e si schiarì. Uscendo sul ponte dopo colazione, fui sorpreso di vedere scivolare lungo il fiume una zattera gigantesca, su cui c’erano circa trenta o quaranta case di legno, nonché almeno altrettanti alberi maestri con bandiere, tanto che sembrava davvero una strada marittima. Ne vidi molte altre in seguito, ma nessuna così grande. Tutta la legna, o “lumber”, come viene chiamata in America, che viene trasportata lungo il fiume San Lorenzo, viene spedita proprio in questo modo. Quando la zattera arriva a destinazione, viene smantellata; i materiali vengono venduti e i barcaioli tornano a raccogliere altra legna.
Alle otto atterrammo di nuovo e viaggiammo per quattro ore in una diligenza attraverso una regione piacevole e ben coltivata, perfettamente tipica della Francia: nell’aspetto delle casette, nell’aria, nella lingua e nel vestire dei contadini, negli cartelli delle botteghe e delle taverne, nonché nelle cappelle dedicate alla Vergine e nelle croci lungo i sentieri. Quasi ogni lavoratore comune e ragazzo, anche se senza scarpe, portava intorno alla vita una cintura di colore vivace, solitamente rosso; le donne, che lavoravano nei campi e nei giardini svolgendo ogni tipo di attività agricola, indossavano tutte grandi cappelli di paglia con bordi ampi. Nelle strade del villaggio si vedevano preti cattolici e suore di Carità; agli angoli delle strade e in altri luoghi pubblici c’erano immagini del Salvatore.
Alle mezzogiorno salimmo su un altro battello a vapore e arrivammo al villaggio di Lachine, situato a nove miglia da Montreal, entro le tre di mattina. Lì lasciammo il fiume e proseguimmo via terra.
Montreal si trova in una posizione piacevole, sulle rive del fiume San Lorenzo, e è circondata da alcune imponenti alture dalle quali si possono effettuare incantevoli escursioni in auto. Le strade sono generalmente strette e irregolari, come nella maggior parte delle città francesi di qualsiasi epoca; ma nelle zone più moderne della città sono ampie e ariose. Sono presenti molte ottime negozi, sia in centro che nei sobborghi, e numerose residenze private di grande pregio. I moli in granito si distinguono per la loro bellezza, solidità ed estensione.
Qui si trova una molto grande cattedrale cattolica, costruita di recente con due alte guglie, di cui una non è ancora stata completata. Nello spazio aperto davanti a questo edificio sorge una solitaria torre quadrata in mattoni, dall’aspetto cupo e insolito; per questo i saputelli del posto hanno deciso immediatamente di demolirla. L’Palazzo del Governo è molto più imponente di quello di Kingston, e la città è piena di vita e movimento. In uno dei sobborghi c’è una strada in assi lunga cinque o sei miglia, una strada davvero famosa. Tutte le escursioni nella zona diventavano ancora più interessanti grazie alla comparsa improvvisa delle sorgenti: qui l’acqua sgorga con tale forza che, in un solo giorno, si passa dall’arida inverno all’esplosione di vita della primavera.
The steamboats to Quebec perform the journey in the night; that is to say, they leave Montreal at six in the evening, and arrive at Quebec at six next morning. We made this excursion during our stay in Montreal (which exceeded a fortnight), and were charmed by its interest and beauty.
The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America: its giddy heights; its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air; its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn: is at once unique and lasting.
It is a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a traveller can recall. Apart from the realities of this most picturesque city, there are associations clustering about it which would make a desert rich in interest. The dangerous precipice along whose rocky front, Wolfe and his brave companions climbed to glory; the Plains of Abraham, where he received his mortal wound; the fortress so chivalrously defended by Montcalm; and his soldier’s grave, dug for him while yet alive, by the bursting of a shell; are not the least among them, or among the gallant incidents of history. That is a noble Monument too, and worthy of two great nations, which perpetuates the memory of both brave generals, and on which their names are jointly written.
The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of the Old Government House, and from the Citadel, that its surpassing beauty lies. The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of gables, roofs, and chimney tops in the old hilly town immediately at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spiders’ webs against the light, while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy mariners become so many puppets; all this, framed by a sunken window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within, forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures that the eye can rest upon.
In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it) to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger on one of these steamboats, and mingling with the concourse, see and hear them unobserved.
The vessel in which we returned from Quebec to Montreal was crowded with them, and at night they spread their beds between decks (those who had beds, at least), and slept so close and thick about our cabin door, that the passage to and fro was quite blocked up. They were nearly all English; from Gloucestershire the greater part; and had had a long winter-passage out; but it was wonderful to see how clean the children had been kept, and how untiring in their love and self-denial all the poor parents were.
Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is very much harder for the poor to be virtuous than it is for the rich; and the good that is in them, shines the brighter for it. In many a noble mansion lives a man, the best of husbands and of fathers, whose private worth in both capacities is justly lauded to the skies. But bring him here, upon this crowded deck. Strip from his fair young wife her silken dress and jewels, unbind her braided hair, stamp early wrinkles on her brow, pinch her pale cheek with care and much privation, array her faded form in coarsely patched attire, let there be nothing but his love to set her forth or deck her out, and you shall put it to the proof indeed. So change his station in the world, that he shall see in those young things who climb about his knee: not records of his wealth and name: but little wrestlers with him for his daily bread; so many poachers on his scanty meal; so many units to divide his every sum of comfort, and farther to reduce its small amount. In lieu of the endearments of childhood in its sweetest aspect, heap upon him all its pains and wants, its sicknesses and ills, its fretfulness, caprice, and querulous endurance: let its prattle be, not of engaging infant fancies, but of cold, and thirst, and hunger: and if his fatherly affection outlive all this, and he be patient, watchful, tender; careful of his children’s lives, and mindful always of their joys and sorrows; then send him back to Parliament, and Pulpit, and to Quarter Sessions, and when he hears fine talk of the depravity of those who live from hand to mouth, and labour hard to do it, let him speak up, as one who knows, and tell those holders forth that they, by parallel with such a class, should be High Angels in their daily lives, and lay but humble siege to Heaven at last.
Which of us shall say what he would be, if such realities, with small relief or change all through his days, were his! Looking round upon these people: far from home, houseless, indigent, wandering, weary with travel and hard living: and seeing how patiently they nursed and tended their young children: how they consulted ever their wants first, then half supplied their own; what gentle ministers of hope and faith the women were; how the men profited by their example; and how very, very seldom even a moment’s petulance or harsh complaint broke out among them: I felt a stronger love and honour of my kind come glowing on my heart, and wished to God there had been many Atheists in the better part of human nature there, to read this simple lesson in the book of Life.
I battelli a vapore per il Québec compiono il viaggio di notte; in altre parole, partono da Montreal alle sei di sera e arrivano a Québec alle sei del mattino seguente. Abbiamo fatto questo viaggio durante la nostra permanenza a Montreal (che è durata oltre quindici giorni) ed siamo rimasti affascinati dalla sua interesse e dalla sua bellezza.
L’impressione che questo “Gibilterra dell’America” suscita nel visitatore – le sue altezze vertiginose, la sua cittadella come sospesa nell’aria, le sue strade ripide e i suoi ingressi imponenti, nonché i paesaggi splendidi che si aprono ad ogni svolta – è al contempo unica e indelebile.
È un luogo che non si dovrebbe dimenticare, né confondere con altri luoghi, né modificare nemmeno per un istante nella serie di immagini che un viaggiatore può ricordare. Oltre alle realtà di questa città così pittoresca, esistono associazioni legate a essa che renderebbero anche il deserto stesso ricco di interesse. Il pericoloso dirupo lungo il quale Wolfe e i suoi coraggiosi compagni scalarono per raggiungere la gloria; le Pianure di Abramo, dove ricevette la sua ferita mortale; la fortezza difesa con tanta cavalleria da Montcalm; e la sua tomba, scavata mentre era ancora in vita a causa dell’esplosione di un proiettile, non sono certo tra gli elementi meno significativi, né tra i momenti gloriosi della storia. Anche questo è un monumento nobile, degno di due grandi nazioni, che perpetua la memoria di entrambi questi valorosi generali e su cui i loro nomi sono scritti insieme.
La città è ricca di istituzioni pubbliche, chiese cattoliche e organizzazioni benefiche, ma è soprattutto dal punto di vista del sito dell’antica Casa del Governo e della Cittadella che si rivela la sua straordinaria bellezza. L’immensa distesa di campi e foreste, montagne e acqua, che si estende davanti ai nostri occhi, con migliaia di villaggi canadesi che appaiono come lunghe strisce bianche, simili a vene nel paesaggio; la variegata complessità di tetti, grondaie e ciminiere della vecchia città collinare alle nostre porte; il bellissimo fiume San Lorenzo che scintilla al sole; e le piccole imbarcazioni sotto le rocce da cui si guarda: i loro alberi maestri, visti contro la luce, sembrano ragnatele; i barili e le botti sulle loro coperte diventano come giocattoli, mentre i marinai impegnati appaiono come pupazzi. Tutto ciò, incorniciato da una sorta di “finestra” immersa nella fortezza e osservato dalla stanza in ombra al suo interno, forma uno dei paesaggi più splendidi e affascinanti che l’occhio possa ammirare.
Nella primavera di quell’anno, un gran numero di emigranti appena arrivati dall’Inghilterra o dall’Irlanda attraversava il territorio tra Québec e Montreal per dirigersi verso le zone interne del Canada e le nuove colonie. Se passeggiare al mattino lungo il molo di Montreal può rivelarsi un’attività piacevole (come spesso mi è capitato), osservarli radunati in centinaia sui moli pubblici, intorno ai loro bagagli e alle loro casse, è davvero molto interessante. Ancora più affascinante è essere loro compagni di viaggio su uno di questi vapori, mescolarsi tra la folla e osservarli senza essere visti.
La nave con cui tornammo da Québec a Montreal era piena di loro; di notte stesero i loro letti tra i vari ponti (almeno quelli che ne avevano uno), dormendo così vicini alla porta della nostra cabina che il passaggio venne completamente bloccato. Erano quasi tutti inglesi, per lo più provenienti dal Gloucestershire; avevano trascorso un lungo inverno all’estero. Ma era davvero meraviglioso vedere quanto fossero puliti i bambini, e quanto fossero instancabili nell’amore e nella autoimmolazione di quei poveri genitori.
Per quanto possiamo cantare, e continueremo a farlo fino alla fine di tutti i tempi, è molto più difficile per i poveri essere virtuosi rispetto ai ricchi; e la bontà che è in loro risplende ancora più intensamente per questo motivo. In molte nobili dimore vive un uomo, il miglior marito e padre che ci sia: le sue qualità personali vengono giustamente lodate in ogni ambito. Ma portatelo qui, su questa affollata piattaforma. Togliete alla sua bella moglie abiti di seta e gioielli, sciogliete i suoi capelli intrecciati, procuratele rughe precoci sulla fronte, strizzate le sue guance pallide a causa della povertà. Vestitela con abiti logori e rattoppati; lasciate che solo il suo amore possa renderla bella. Allora potrete veramente mettere alla prova questa situazione. Cambiatele completamente la condizione sociale, in modo che veda in quei bambini che gli si aggrappano alle ginocchia non i segni della sua ricchezza e del suo nome, ma persone che lottano con lui per il proprio pane quotidiano. Che molti siano a competere con lui per le sue scarse risorse. E che tutto ciò riduca ulteriormente la quantità di comfort di cui dispone. Al posto delle tenerezze dell’infanzia, fate sì che affronti tutte le sue sofferenze, le malattie, l’irascibilità, i capricci. Che il suo parlare non riguardi più fantasie infantili, ma fame, sete e privazioni. E se il suo amore paterno sopravviverà a tutto questo, se sarà paziente, attento e premuroso verso i suoi figli. Se si preoccuperà sempre della loro felicità e delle loro sofferenze. Allora rimandatelo al Parlamento, all’altare, alle udienze giudiziarie. E quando sentirà parlare con disprezzo di coloro che vivono giorno dopo giorno con fatica, lasciatelo intervenire come qualcuno che ne sa qualcosa. E dica loro che, se si comportassero allo stesso modo, dovrebbero essere considerati angeli nel loro quotidiano. E che alla fine potrebbero persino “assediare il Cielo” con le loro azioni.
Chi di noi potrebbe dire quale sarebbe stato il loro destino se, nella loro vita quotidiana, queste realtà fossero cambiate anche solo leggermente? Guardando queste persone: lontane da casa, senza fissa dimora, povere, in viaggio costante e con una vita difficile, vedendo come prendessero cura dei propri bambini con tanta pazienza, come mettessero sempre le loro esigenze al primo posto prima di pensare alle proprie, vedendo quanto fossero gentili e piene di speranza e fede queste donne, quanto gli uomini traggessero beneficio dal loro esempio, e come raramente si verificassero momenti di irritazione o lamentele aspre tra di loro, provai un sentimento ancora più forte di amore e rispetto per la mia stessa specie; e desiderai che in quelle zone della natura umana ci fossero stati molti “atei”, affinché potessero imparare questa semplice lezione dalla vita stessa.
We left Montreal for New York again, on the thirtieth of May, crossing to La Prairie, on the opposite shore of the St. Lawrence, in a steamboat; we then took the railroad to St. John’s, which is on the brink of Lake Champlain. Our last greeting in Canada was from the English officers in the pleasant barracks at that place (a class of gentlemen who had made every hour of our visit memorable by their hospitality and friendship); and with ‘Rule Britannia’ sounding in our ears, soon left it far behind.
But Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my remembrance. Few Englishmen are prepared to find it what it is. Advancing quietly; old differences settling down, and being fast forgotten; public feeling and private enterprise alike in a sound and wholesome state; nothing of flush or fever in its system, but health and vigour throbbing in its steady pulse: it is full of hope and promise. To me—who had been accustomed to think of it as something left behind in the strides of advancing society, as something neglected and forgotten, slumbering and wasting in its sleep—the demand for labour and the rates of wages; the busy quays of Montreal; the vessels taking in their cargoes, and discharging them; the amount of shipping in the different ports; the commerce, roads, and public works, all made to last; the respectability and character of the public journals; and the amount of rational comfort and happiness which honest industry may earn: were very great surprises. The steamboats on the lakes, in their conveniences, cleanliness, and safety; in the gentlemanly character and bearing of their captains; and in the politeness and perfect comfort of their social regulations; are unsurpassed even by the famous Scotch vessels, deservedly so much esteemed at home. The inns are usually bad; because the custom of boarding at hotels is not so general here as in the States, and the British officers, who form a large portion of the society of every town, live chiefly at the regimental messes: but in every other respect, the traveller in Canada will find as good provision for his comfort as in any place I know.
There is one American boat—the vessel which carried us on Lake Champlain, from St. John’s to Whitehall—which I praise very highly, but no more than it deserves, when I say that it is superior even to that in which we went from Queenston to Toronto, or to that in which we travelled from the latter place to Kingston, or I have no doubt I may add to any other in the world. This steamboat, which is called the Burlington, is a perfectly exquisite achievement of neatness, elegance, and order. The decks are drawing-rooms; the cabins are boudoirs, choicely furnished and adorned with prints, pictures, and musical instruments; every nook and corner in the vessel is a perfect curiosity of graceful comfort and beautiful contrivance. Captain Sherman, her commander, to whose ingenuity and excellent taste these results are solely attributable, has bravely and worthily distinguished himself on more than one trying occasion: not least among them, in having the moral courage to carry British troops, at a time (during the Canadian rebellion) when no other conveyance was open to them. He and his vessel are held in universal respect, both by his own countrymen and ours; and no man ever enjoyed the popular esteem, who, in his sphere of action, won and wore it better than this gentleman.
By means of this floating palace we were soon in the United States again, and called that evening at Burlington; a pretty town, where we lay an hour or so. We reached Whitehall, where we were to disembark, at six next morning; and might have done so earlier, but that these steamboats lie by for some hours in the night, in consequence of the lake becoming very narrow at that part of the journey, and difficult of navigation in the dark. Its width is so contracted at one point, indeed, that they are obliged to warp round by means of a rope.
After breakfasting at Whitehall, we took the stage-coach for Albany: a large and busy town, where we arrived between five and six o’clock that afternoon; after a very hot day’s journey, for we were now in the height of summer again. At seven we started for New York on board a great North River steamboat, which was so crowded with passengers that the upper deck was like the box lobby of a theatre between the pieces, and the lower one like Tottenham Court Road on a Saturday night. But we slept soundly, notwithstanding, and soon after five o’clock next morning reached New York.
Tarrying here, only that day and night, to recruit after our late fatigues, we started off once more upon our last journey in America. We had yet five days to spare before embarking for England, and I had a great desire to see ‘the Shaker Village,’ which is peopled by a religious sect from whom it takes its name.
To this end, we went up the North River again, as far as the town of Hudson, and there hired an extra to carry us to Lebanon, thirty miles distant: and of course another and a different Lebanon from that village where I slept on the night of the Prairie trip.
The country through which the road meandered, was rich and beautiful; the weather very fine; and for many miles the Kaatskill mountains, where Rip Van Winkle and the ghostly Dutchmen played at ninepins one memorable gusty afternoon, towered in the blue distance, like stately clouds. At one point, as we ascended a steep hill, athwart whose base a railroad, yet constructing, took its course, we came upon an Irish colony. With means at hand of building decent cabins, it was wonderful to see how clumsy, rough, and wretched, its hovels were. The best were poor protection from the weather the worst let in the wind and rain through wide breaches in the roofs of sodden grass, and in the walls of mud; some had neither door nor window; some had nearly fallen down, and were imperfectly propped up by stakes and poles; all were ruinous and filthy. Hideously ugly old women and very buxom young ones, pigs, dogs, men, children, babies, pots, kettles, dung-hills, vile refuse, rank straw, and standing water, all wallowing together in an inseparable heap, composed the furniture of every dark and dirty hut.
Lasciammo Montreal per tornare a New York il trentesimo maggio; attraversammo La Prairie, sulla sponda opposta del fiume St. Lawrence, su una nave a vapore, e poi prendemmo il treno per St. John’s, che si trova sulle rive del lago Champlain. L’ultimo saluto in Canada ci venne dai ufficiali inglesi presenti nelle piacevoli caserme di quella località: un gruppo di gentiluomini i quali avevano reso ogni momento della nostra visita indimenticabile grazie alla loro ospitalità e amicizia. Con “Rule Britannia” che risuonava nelle nostre orecchie, presto lasciammo quel luogo alle nostre spalle.
Ma il Canada ha sempre occupato, e continuerà sempre a occupare, un posto di primo piano nella mia memoria. Pochi inglesi sono disposti ad apprezzarlo davvero per ciò che è. Sviluppa silenziosamente; vecchie divergenze si risolvono e vengono rapidamente dimenticate; sentimenti pubblici ed iniziative private sono entrambi in uno stato sano e solido; non c’è nulla di eccessivo o frenetico nel suo funzionamento, ma solo salute e vigore che pulsano nel suo sistema: è pieno di speranza e promesse. Per me – che ero abituato a considerarlo qualcosa lasciato indietro dal progresso della società, qualcosa di trascurato e dimenticato, che dormiva e si deteriorava nel suo “sonno” – le esigenze di lavoro e i salari; i porti affollati di Montreal; le navi che caricavano e scaricavano merci; l’intensità del traffico navale nei vari porti; il commercio, le strade e le opere pubbliche, tutte progettate per durare a lungo; la rispettabilità e la qualità dei giornali pubblici; nonché il livello di comfort e felicità che un lavoro onesto può garantire: tutto questo rappresentava grandi sorprese. I battelli a vapore sui laghi, per comodità, pulizia e sicurezza; per l’educazione e il comportamento rispettabile dei loro capitani; e per la cortesia e la perfetta organizzazione delle loro regole sociali, non sono affatto inferiori ai famosi battelli scozzesi, tanto apprezzati nel loro paese. Gli ostelli di solito non sono molto buoni; perché qui non è così diffusa l’abitudine di soggiornare in hotel come negli Stati Uniti, e gli ufficiali britannici, che costituiscono una parte importante della società di ogni città, vivono principalmente nelle mense dei reggimenti. Ma in tutti gli altri aspetti, il viaggiatore in Canada troverà le stesse comodità di cui dispone ovunque io conosca.
C’è una sola barca americana – quella che ci ha trasportato sul lago Champlain, da St. John’s a Whitehall – che lodo molto, ma solo quanto merita; posso dire senza alcun dubbio che è superiore persino a quelle con cui siamo viaggiati da Queenston a Toronto, o da quest’ultima località a Kingston. Questa nave a vapore, chiamata Burlington, rappresenta un esempio perfetto di pulizia, eleganza e ordine. I ponti sono come salotti; le cabine sono come boudoir, arredate con cura e decorate con stampe, quadri e strumenti musicali; ogni angolo della nave è un esempio di comodità raffinata e ingegnose soluzioni tecnologiche. Il capitano Sherman, il suo comandante, la cui ingegnosità e ottimo gusto sono all’origine di questi risultati, si è distinto in più occasioni difficili; soprattutto per aver avuto il coraggio morale di trasportare truppe britanniche in un momento (durante la rivolta canadese) in cui nessun altro mezzo di trasporto era disponibile. Lui e la sua nave sono rispettati da tutti, sia dai suoi connazionali che dai nostri; nessuno ha mai goduto di tale stima popolare nel proprio campo d’azione quanto questo gentiluomo.
Grazie a questo palazzo galleggiante, poco dopo ci trovammo di nuovo negli Stati Uniti e quella sera facemmo tappa a Burlington: una bella città dove rimanemmo per un’ora circa. Arrivammo a Whitehall, il luogo in cui avremmo dovuto sbarcare, la mattina seguente alle sei; avremmo potuto farlo anche prima, ma questi battelli a vapore sostano per alcune ore di notte, poiché in quella parte del viaggio il lago diventa molto stretto e la navigazione è difficile al buio. In un certo punto, la larghezza del lago si riduce talmente che i battelli sono costretti a deviare utilizzando una corda.
Dopo colazione a Whitehall, prendemmo la diligenza per Albany: una grande e affollata città, dove arrivammo tra le cinque e le sei di quella sera; dopo un viaggio molto caldo, poiché eravamo nuovamente nel pieno dell’estate. Alle sette partimmo per New York a bordo di un grande piroscafo del North River, così affollato da rendere il ponte superiore simile all’atrio di un teatro durante l’intervallo, e il ponte inferiore come Tottenham Court Road in una sera di sabato. Tuttavia dormimmo bene e, poco dopo le cinque del mattino seguente, arrivammo a New York.
Rimasti qui solo per quel giorno e quella notte, per reclutare nuove persone dopo le nostre lunghe fatiche, ripartimmo ancora una volta per il nostro ultimo viaggio in America. Avevamo ancora cinque giorni a disposizione prima di imbarcarci per l’Inghilterra, e avevo un grande desiderio di visitare “la Villaggio degli Shaker”, abitata da una setta religiosa da cui prende il nome.
A questo scopo, risalimmo nuovamente il Fiume del Nord, fino alla città di Hudson, dove assumemmo un altro viaggiatore per portarci a Lebanon, situata a trenta miglia di distanza: naturalmente si trattava di un altro Lebanon, diverso da quel villaggio in cui avevo dormito la notte del viaggio attraverso la prateria.
Il paese attraverso cui serpeggiava la strada era ricco e bello; il clima molto piacevole; per molti chilometri i monti Kaatskill, dove Rip Van Winkle e quegli spettrali olandesi giocarono a bowling in un pomeriggio ventoso e indimenticabile, si ergevano all’orizzonte, simili a maestosi nuvole. In un certo punto, mentre salivamo una ripida collina, attraverso la cui base passava una ferrovia ancora in costruzione, incontrammo una colonia irlandese. Nonostante disponessero dei mezzi necessari per costruire capanne decenti, era sorprendente vedere quanto fossero goffe, rozze e misere quelle abitazioni. Le migliori offrivano una scarsa protezione dal maltempo; le peggiori lasciavano entrare vento e pioggia attraverso ampie fessure nei tetti di erba bagnata e nelle pareti di fango; alcune non avevano né porte né finestre; altre erano quasi crollate e venivano tenute in piedi solo da pali e steli; tutte erano in rovina e sporche. Orribilmente brutte vecchie donne, giovani donne molto formose, maiali, cani, uomini, bambini, neonati, pentole, padelle, mucchi di letame, rifiuti disgustosi, paglia marcia e acqua stagnante, tutto mescolato insieme, costituiva l’“arredamento” di ogni capanna buia e sporca.
Between nine and ten o’clock at night, we arrived at Lebanon which is renowned for its warm baths, and for a great hotel, well adapted, I have no doubt, to the gregarious taste of those seekers after health or pleasure who repair here, but inexpressibly comfortless to me. We were shown into an immense apartment, lighted by two dim candles, called the drawing-room: from which there was a descent by a flight of steps, to another vast desert, called the dining-room: our bed-chambers were among certain long rows of little white-washed cells, which opened from either side of a dreary passage; and were so like rooms in a prison that I half expected to be locked up when I went to bed, and listened involuntarily for the turning of the key on the outside. There need be baths somewhere in the neighbourhood, for the other washing arrangements were on as limited a scale as I ever saw, even in America: indeed, these bedrooms were so very bare of even such common luxuries as chairs, that I should say they were not provided with enough of anything, but that I bethink myself of our having been most bountifully bitten all night.
The house is very pleasantly situated, however, and we had a good breakfast. That done, we went to visit our place of destination, which was some two miles off, and the way to which was soon indicated by a finger-post, whereon was painted, ‘To the Shaker Village.’
As we rode along, we passed a party of Shakers, who were at work upon the road; who wore the broadest of all broad-brimmed hats; and were in all visible respects such very wooden men, that I felt about as much sympathy for them, and as much interest in them, as if they had been so many figure-heads of ships. Presently we came to the beginning of the village, and alighting at the door of a house where the Shaker manufactures are sold, and which is the headquarters of the elders, requested permission to see the Shaker worship.
Pending the conveyance of this request to some person in authority, we walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if it broke the grim silence reluctantly, and under protest. Ranged against the wall were six or eight stiff, high-backed chairs, and they partook so strongly of the general grimness that one would much rather have sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to any of them.
Presently, there stalked into this apartment, a grim old Shaker, with eyes as hard, and dull, and cold, as the great round metal buttons on his coat and waistcoat; a sort of calm goblin. Being informed of our desire, he produced a newspaper wherein the body of elders, whereof he was a member, had advertised but a few days before, that in consequence of certain unseemly interruptions which their worship had received from strangers, their chapel was closed to the public for the space of one year.
As nothing was to be urged in opposition to this reasonable arrangement, we requested leave to make some trifling purchases of Shaker goods; which was grimly conceded. We accordingly repaired to a store in the same house and on the opposite side of the passage, where the stock was presided over by something alive in a russet case, which the elder said was a woman; and which I suppose was a woman, though I should not have suspected it.
On the opposite side of the road was their place of worship: a cool, clean edifice of wood, with large windows and green blinds: like a spacious summer-house. As there was no getting into this place, and nothing was to be done but walk up and down, and look at it and the other buildings in the village (which were chiefly of wood, painted a dark red like English barns, and composed of many stories like English factories), I have nothing to communicate to the reader, beyond the scanty results I gleaned the while our purchases were making.
These people are called Shakers from their peculiar form of adoration, which consists of a dance, performed by the men and women of all ages, who arrange themselves for that purpose in opposite parties: the men first divesting themselves of their hats and coats, which they gravely hang against the wall before they begin; and tying a ribbon round their shirt-sleeves, as though they were going to be bled. They accompany themselves with a droning, humming noise, and dance until they are quite exhausted, alternately advancing and retiring in a preposterous sort of trot. The effect is said to be unspeakably absurd: and if I may judge from a print of this ceremony which I have in my possession; and which I am informed by those who have visited the chapel, is perfectly accurate; it must be infinitely grotesque.
They are governed by a woman, and her rule is understood to be absolute, though she has the assistance of a council of elders. She lives, it is said, in strict seclusion, in certain rooms above the chapel, and is never shown to profane eyes. If she at all resemble the lady who presided over the store, it is a great charity to keep her as close as possible, and I cannot too strongly express my perfect concurrence in this benevolent proceeding.
All the possessions and revenues of the settlement are thrown into a common stock, which is managed by the elders. As they have made converts among people who were well to do in the world, and are frugal and thrifty, it is understood that this fund prospers: the more especially as they have made large purchases of land. Nor is this at Lebanon the only Shaker settlement: there are, I think, at least, three others.
They are good farmers, and all their produce is eagerly purchased and highly esteemed. ‘Shaker seeds,’ ‘Shaker herbs,’ and ‘Shaker distilled waters,’ are commonly announced for sale in the shops of towns and cities. They are good breeders of cattle, and are kind and merciful to the brute creation. Consequently, Shaker beasts seldom fail to find a ready market.
Tra le nove e le dieci di ore di notte, arrivammo in Libano, che è famoso per le sue terme calde e per un ottimo hotel, ben adatto, senza dubbio, ai gusti sociali di coloro che vi si recano in cerca di salute o divertimento. Ma per me fu indescrivibilmente sgradevole. Ci mostrarono un immenso appartamento, illuminato da due candele deboli; da lì si scendeva per una serie di gradini verso un’altra vasta stanza, chiamata sala da pranzo. Le nostre camere da letto si trovavano tra lunghe file di piccole stanze bianche, situate su entrambi i lati di un corridoio desolato; assomigliavano così tanto a celle in una prigione che per un attimo temetti di essere chiusa a chiave prima di andare a letto. Ascoltavo involontariamente se si sentisse girare la chiave dall’esterno. Dovevano esserci delle terme nelle vicinanze, perché le altre strutture per il lavaggio erano estremamente limitate. Anzi, quelle camere da letto erano così spoglie che mancavano persino oggetti di uso quotidiano come le sedie. Direi che non ci fosse nulla di sufficiente. Ma poi pensai che, forse, quella notte fossimo stati davvero “generosamente” viziati.
La casa si trova in una posizione molto piacevole; inoltre, abbiamo fatto una buona colazione. Dopo averlo fatto, siamo andati a visitare la nostra destinazione, che distava circa due miglia; il percorso era presto indicato da un cartello su cui era scritto: “Verso Shaker Village”.
Mentre viaggiavamo, incontrammo un gruppo di Quaccheri che stavano lavorando sulla strada; indossavano i cappelli a tesa larga più ampi di tutti e, sotto ogni aspetto visibile, sembravano persone molto rigide e inanimate; per questo provavo verso di loro ben poco interesse o simpatia, come se fossero soltanto delle figure decorative su una nave. Poco dopo arrivammo all’inizio del villaggio e, scendendo davanti a una casa dove venivano venduti i prodotti dei Quaccheri e che fungeva anche da quartier generale degli anziani della comunità, chiedemmo il permesso di assistere al loro rito religioso.
In attesa che questa richiesta venisse inoltrata a qualcuno con autorità, entrammo in una stanza cupa e tetra: diversi cappelli scuri erano appesi a ganci altrettanto cupi, mentre l’orario veniva indicato da un orologio grigio e lugubre che emetteva ogni ticchettio con evidente difficoltà, come se riluttasse a rompere il silenzio circostante. Lungo la parete erano allineate sei o otto sedie rigide e dallo schienale alto; sembrava davvero meglio sedersi per terra piuttosto che dover utilizzare una qualsiasi di quelle sedie.
In quel momento, entrò in questo appartamento un vecchio Shaker dall’aspetto cupo; i suoi occhi erano duri, spenti e freddi, proprio come i grandi bottoni metallici rotondi sul suo cappotto e gilet. Una sorta di folletto calmo. Dopo essere stato informato del nostro -desiderio, ci mostrò un giornale nel quale il gruppo di anziani di cui faceva parte aveva annunciato, pochi giorni prima, che a causa di alcune interruzioni indecorose subite durante le loro riunioni da parte di estranei, la loro cappella sarebbe rimasta chiusa al pubblico per un anno.
Poiché non c’era nulla che potesse opporsi a questo ragionevole accordo, chiedemmo il permesso di effettuare alcune piccole acquisti di prodotti Shaker; ciò fu acconsentito senza esitazioni. Ci recammo quindi in un negozio situato nella stessa casa, dall’altra parte del corridoio, dove le merci erano gestite da qualcosa di “vivo” all’interno di una scatola marrone; l’anziano disse che si trattava di una donna. E suppongo davvero che fosse una donna, anche se non me lo sarei mai aspettato.
Dall’altra parte della strada si trovava il loro luogo di culto: un edificio in legno fresco e pulito, con grandi finestre e tende verdi; sembrava una spaziosa casa estiva. Poiché non era possibile entrare in quel luogo e non c’era nulla da fare se non camminarci intorno, osservandolo insieme alle altre costruzioni del villaggio (che erano per lo più in legno, dipinte di un rosso scuro come i granai inglesi e composte da molti piani, come le fabbriche inglesi), non ho nulla da comunicare al lettore, se non i pochi informazioni che ho raccolto durante il tempo in cui facevamo le nostre compere.
Queste persone vengono chiamate “Shakers” a causa della loro particolare forma di adorazione: si tratta di una danza eseguita da uomini e donne di tutte le età, i quali si dispongono in due gruppi opposti per lo scopo. Prima, gli uomini si tolgono cappelli e cappotti, che appendono con solennità al muro prima di iniziare; inoltre, si legano un nastro intorno alle maniche della camicia, come se stessero per essere sanguinati. Si accompagnano con un suono monotono e continuo, danzando fino a quando non sono completamente esausti, avanzando e arretrando alternativamente in un movimento assurdo. L’effetto complessivo è descritto come incredibilmente grottesco; se posso giudicare da una stampa di questa cerimonia che possiedo, e che mi sono state fornite informazioni da persone che hanno visitato la chiesetta, sembra essere assolutamente fedele alla realtà, quindi deve essere davvero infinitamente grotesco.
Sono governati da una donna, e si ritiene che il suo potere sia assoluto, sebbene abbia l’aiuto di un consiglio di anziani. Si dice che viva in rigoroso isolamento, in alcune stanze sopra la cappella, e che non venga mai mostrata agli occhi profani. Se lei assomiglia anche solo un po’ alla signora che un tempo gestiva il negozio, è davvero una grande bontà tenerla il più vicina possibile; non posso esprimere abbastanza forte la mia piena approvazione di questa azione benevola.
Tutti i beni e i ricavi della comunità vengono messi in un fondo comune, gestito dagli anziani. Poiché hanno convertito persone che, in origine, non erano particolarmente propense a seguire le loro credenze, e poiché sono persone frugali e parsimoniose, si può dire che questo fondo prosperi; soprattutto considerando che hanno effettuato acquisti di terreni su larga scala. Inoltre, questo non è l’unico insediamento degli Shaker in Libano: ne esistono, credo, almeno altri tre.
Sono ottimi agricoltori, e tutti i loro prodotti vengono acquistati con grande entusiasmo e apprezzati molto. I “semi di Shaker”, le “erbe di Shaker” e le “acque distillate di Shaker” sono spesso in vendita nei negozi delle città e dei paesi. Sono anche ottimi allevatori di bovini, e trattano con gentilezza e compassione tutte le creature viventi. Di conseguenza, gli animali allevati dai membri del gruppo Shaker raramente trovano difficoltà a trovare un mercato pronto ad acquistarli.
They eat and drink together, after the Spartan model, at a great public table. There is no union of the sexes, and every Shaker, male and female, is devoted to a life of celibacy. Rumour has been busy upon this theme, but here again I must refer to the lady of the store, and say, that if many of the sister Shakers resemble her, I treat all such slander as bearing on its face the strongest marks of wild improbability. But that they take as proselytes, persons so young that they cannot know their own minds, and cannot possess much strength of resolution in this or any other respect, I can assert from my own observation of the extreme juvenility of certain youthful Shakers whom I saw at work among the party on the road.
They are said to be good drivers of bargains, but to be honest and just in their transactions, and even in horse-dealing to resist those thievish tendencies which would seem, for some undiscovered reason, to be almost inseparable from that branch of traffic. In all matters they hold their own course quietly, live in their gloomy, silent commonwealth, and show little desire to interfere with other people.
This is well enough, but nevertheless I cannot, I confess, incline towards the Shakers; view them with much favour, or extend towards them any very lenient construction. I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave: that odious spirit which, if it could have had full scope and sway upon the earth, must have blasted and made barren the imaginations of the greatest men, and left them, in their power of raising up enduring images before their fellow-creatures yet unborn, no better than the beasts: that, in these very broad-brimmed hats and very sombre coats—in stiff-necked, solemn-visaged piety, in short, no matter what its garb, whether it have cropped hair as in a Shaker village, or long nails as in a Hindoo temple—I recognise the worst among the enemies of Heaven and Earth, who turn the water at the marriage feasts of this poor world, not into wine, but gall. And if there must be people vowed to crush the harmless fancies and the love of innocent delights and gaieties, which are a part of human nature: as much a part of it as any other love or hope that is our common portion: let them, for me, stand openly revealed among the ribald and licentious; the very idiots know that they are not on the Immortal road, and will despise them, and avoid them readily.
Leaving the Shaker village with a hearty dislike of the old Shakers, and a hearty pity for the young ones: tempered by the strong probability of their running away as they grow older and wiser, which they not uncommonly do: we returned to Lebanon, and so to Hudson, by the way we had come upon the previous day. There, we took the steamboat down the North River towards New York, but stopped, some four hours’ journey short of it, at West Point, where we remained that night, and all next day, and next night too.
In this beautiful place: the fairest among the fair and lovely Highlands of the North River: shut in by deep green heights and ruined forts, and looking down upon the distant town of Newburgh, along a glittering path of sunlit water, with here and there a skiff, whose white sail often bends on some new tack as sudden flaws of wind come down upon her from the gullies in the hills: hemmed in, besides, all round with memories of Washington, and events of the revolutionary war: is the Military School of America.
It could not stand on more appropriate ground, and any ground more beautiful can hardly be. The course of education is severe, but well devised, and manly. Through June, July, and August, the young men encamp upon the spacious plain whereon the college stands; and all the year their military exercises are performed there, daily. The term of study at this institution, which the State requires from all cadets, is four years; but, whether it be from the rigid nature of the discipline, or the national impatience of restraint, or both causes combined, not more than half the number who begin their studies here, ever remain to finish them.
The number of cadets being about equal to that of the members of Congress, one is sent here from every Congressional district: its member influencing the selection. Commissions in the service are distributed on the same principle. The dwellings of the various Professors are beautifully situated; and there is a most excellent hotel for strangers, though it has the two drawbacks of being a total abstinence house (wines and spirits being forbidden to the students), and of serving the public meals at rather uncomfortable hours: to wit, breakfast at seven, dinner at one, and supper at sunset.
The beauty and freshness of this calm retreat, in the very dawn and greenness of summer—it was then the beginning of June—were exquisite indeed. Leaving it upon the sixth, and returning to New York, to embark for England on the succeeding day, I was glad to think that among the last memorable beauties which had glided past us, and softened in the bright perspective, were those whose pictures, traced by no common hand, are fresh in most men’s minds; not easily to grow old, or fade beneath the dust of Time: the Kaatskill Mountains, Sleepy Hollow, and the Tappaan Zee.
Mangiano e bevono insieme, seguendo il modello spartano, attorno a un grande tavolo pubblico. Non esiste alcuna unione tra i sessi, e ogni membro dei Fratelli Shaker, sia uomo che donna, si impegna in una vita di celibato. Si sono diffuse molte voci al riguardo, ma ancora una volta devo fare riferimento a quella signora del negozio: se molti membri delle donne Shaker le assomigliano, considero tutte queste calunnie estremamente improbabili. Tuttavia, è vero che assumono come proseliti persone così giovani da non essere in grado di comprendere chiaramente le proprie intenzioni, né di possedere una forte determinazione, in questo o in qualsiasi altro ambito. Posso affermarlo sulla base della mia osservazione diretta: ho visto infatti alcuni giovani membri dei Fratelli Shaker lavorare insieme al gruppo lungo la strada.
Si dice che siano ottimi negoziatori quando si tratta di affari vantaggiosi, ma onestamente, sia nelle loro transazioni commerciali che nel commercio di cavalli, riescono a resistere a quelle tendenze ladresche che, per qualche motivo ancora non chiarito, sembrano essere quasi inseparabili da quel settore d’attività. In ogni situazione, seguono tranquillamente la loro strada, vivono nella loro comunità oscura e silenziosa, e mostrano poco desiderio di interferire con gli altri.
Questo è abbastanza buono, ma comunque non posso, devo confessarlo, inclinarmi a favore dei Quakers; non posso considerarli con molta simpatia, né concedere loro alcuna giustificazione. Odio profondamente quel cattivo spirito, indipendentemente dal gruppo o dalla setta a cui appartenga: uno spirito che priva la vita delle sue grazie salutari, deruba la gioventù dei suoi piaceri innocenti, toglie alla maturità e all’età i loro ornamenti più belli, trasformando l’esistenza in un sentiero angusto verso la morte. Quel spirito odioso, se avesse potuto agire liberamente sulla terra, avrebbe distrutto le immaginazioni degli uomini più grandi, rendendoli, nella loro capacità di creare immagini durature davanti ai loro simili ancora non nati, non migliori delle bestie. Quegli individui, con i loro cappelli larghi e i loro abiti scuri, con quella pietà rigida e solenne, qualunque sia il loro aspetto esteriore – che abbiano i capelli corti come nei villaggi dei Quakers o le unghie lunghe come nei templi indù – rappresentano per me i peggiori nemici del cielo e della terra. Essi trasformano l’acqua delle feste nuziali di questo mondo in veleno, invece che in vino. E se proprio devono esserci persone decise a soffocare le fantasie innocenti e l’amore per i piaceri gioiosi che fanno parte della natura umana – tanto quanto qualsiasi altro sentimento o speranza che sia comune a tutti noi – allora che stiano apertamente tra i rozzi e i licenziosi. Anche gli idioti capiscono che non sono sulla strada dell’immortalità, e li disprezzeranno e li eviteranno facilmente.
Lasciando il villaggio degli Shaker con un profondo disgusto per quegli anziani e con sincera compassione per i giovani, ma tenendo presente la forte probabilità che, crescendo e diventando più saggi, scappassero, cosa che spesso accadeva, tornammo a Lebanon e da lì a Hudson, seguendo lo stesso itinerario dell’indomani. Lì prendemmo la nave a vapore lungo il North River verso New York, ma ci fermammo a circa quattro ore di distanza, a West Point, dove rimanemmo quella notte, l’intero giorno successivo, e anche la notte seguente.
In questo bellissimo luogo: il più incantevole tra le splendide Highlands del Nord, circondato da alte montagne verdi e rovine di fortezze, con vista sulla lontana città di Newburgh lungo un sentiero luminoso di acque solcate dal sole; dove di tanto in tanto si intravede una barca a vela bianca che piega improvvisamente sotto la spinta di raffiche di vento provenienti dalle gole delle colline. Qui, circondato da ricordi legati a Washington e agli eventi della guerra d’indipendenza, si trova la Scuola Militare dell’America.
Non avrebbe potuto trovare terreno più adatto; e difficilmente esiste un terreno più bello di questo. Il percorso dell’educazione è severo, ma ben concepito e degno di un uomo. Per tutto giugno, luglio e agosto, i giovani si accampano sulla vasta pianura su cui sorge l’università; e per tutto l’anno vi si svolgono quotidianamente gli esercizi militari. La durata degli studi in questa istituzione, obbligatoria per tutti i cadetti richiesto dallo Stato, è di quattro anni; tuttavia, sia a causa della rigida natura della disciplina, che dell’impazienza nazionale verso le restrizioni, o forse per entrambi questi motivi, non più della metà di coloro che iniziano qui i loro studi riesce a portarli a termine.
Il numero dei cadetti è più o meno uguale a quello dei membri del Congresso; quindi, da ogni distretto congressuale viene inviato qui un rappresentante che influisce sulla selezione dei candidati. Anche le commissioni all’interno dell’esercito vengono assegnate secondo lo stesso principio. Gli alloggi dei vari professori sono situati in luoghi molto belli; inoltre, c’è un ottimo hotel per gli ospiti esterni, sebbene presenti due svantaggi: da un lato, è un istituto di assoluta astinenza (vini e alcolici sono vietati agli studenti), dall’altro, i pasti per il pubblico vengono serviti in orari piuttosto scomodi: colazione alle sette, cena all’una e cena serale al tramonto.
La bellezza e la freschezza di questo tranquillo rifugio, nella primissima alba e nel verde rigoglioso dell’estate – era allora l’inizio di giugno – erano davvero incantevoli. Lasciandolo il sesto giorno e tornando a New York per imbarcarmi per l’Inghilterra il giorno seguente, fui felice di pensare che tra le ultime bellezze indimenticabili che ci erano sfiorate e si erano impresse nella nostra memoria, vi fossero quelle rappresentate da paesaggi i cui contorni, tracciati da mani non comuni, rimangono vividi nella mente della maggior parte delle persone; paesaggi che difficilmente invecchiano o sbiadiscono sotto la polvere del tempo: le montagne Kaatskill, Sleepy Hollow e il Tappaan Zee.
CHAPTER XVI THE PASSAGE HOME
I NEVER had so much interest before, and very likely I shall never have so much interest again, in the state of the wind, as on the long-looked-for morning of Tuesday the Seventh of June. Some nautical authority had told me a day or two previous, ‘anything with west in it, will do;’ so when I darted out of bed at daylight, and throwing up the window, was saluted by a lively breeze from the north-west which had sprung up in the night, it came upon me so freshly, rustling with so many happy associations, that I conceived upon the spot a special regard for all airs blowing from that quarter of the compass, which I shall cherish, I dare say, until my own wind has breathed its last frail puff, and withdrawn itself for ever from the mortal calendar.
The pilot had not been slow to take advantage of this favourable weather, and the ship which yesterday had been in such a crowded dock that she might have retired from trade for good and all, for any chance she seemed to have of going to sea, was now full sixteen miles away. A gallant sight she was, when we, fast gaining on her in a steamboat, saw her in the distance riding at anchor: her tall masts pointing up in graceful lines against the sky, and every rope and spar expressed in delicate and thread-like outline: gallant, too, when, we being all aboard, the anchor came up to the sturdy chorus ‘Cheerily men, oh cheerily!’ and she followed proudly in the towing steamboat’s wake: but bravest and most gallant of all, when the tow-rope being cast adrift, the canvas fluttered from her masts, and spreading her white wings she soared away upon her free and solitary course.
In the after cabin we were only fifteen passengers in all, and the greater part were from Canada, where some of us had known each other. The night was rough and squally, so were the next two days, but they flew by quickly, and we were soon as cheerful and snug a party, with an honest, manly-hearted captain at our head, as ever came to the resolution of being mutually agreeable, on land or water.
We breakfasted at eight, lunched at twelve, dined at three, and took our tea at half-past seven. We had abundance of amusements, and dinner was not the least among them: firstly, for its own sake; secondly, because of its extraordinary length: its duration, inclusive of all the long pauses between the courses, being seldom less than two hours and a half; which was a subject of never-failing entertainment. By way of beguiling the tediousness of these banquets, a select association was formed at the lower end of the table, below the mast, to whose distinguished president modesty forbids me to make any further allusion, which, being a very hilarious and jovial institution, was (prejudice apart) in high favour with the rest of the community, and particularly with a black steward, who lived for three weeks in a broad grin at the marvellous humour of these incorporated worthies.
Then, we had chess for those who played it, whist, cribbage, books, backgammon, and shovelboard. In all weathers, fair or foul, calm or windy, we were every one on deck, walking up and down in pairs, lying in the boats, leaning over the side, or chatting in a lazy group together. We had no lack of music, for one played the accordion, another the violin, and another (who usually began at six o’clock A.M.) the key-bugle: the combined effect of which instruments, when they all played different tunes in different parts of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of each other, as they sometimes did (everybody being intensely satisfied with his own performance), was sublimely hideous.
When all these means of entertainment failed, a sail would heave in sight: looming, perhaps, the very spirit of a ship, in the misty distance, or passing us so close that through our glasses we could see the people on her decks, and easily make out her name, and whither she was bound. For hours together we could watch the dolphins and porpoises as they rolled and leaped and dived around the vessel; or those small creatures ever on the wing, the Mother Carey’s chickens, which had borne us company from New York bay, and for a whole fortnight fluttered about the vessel’s stern. For some days we had a dead calm, or very light winds, during which the crew amused themselves with fishing, and hooked an unlucky dolphin, who expired, in all his rainbow colours, on the deck: an event of such importance in our barren calendar, that afterwards we dated from the dolphin, and made the day on which he died, an era.
Besides all this, when we were five or six days out, there began to be much talk of icebergs, of which wandering islands an unusual number had been seen by the vessels that had come into New York a day or two before we left that port, and of whose dangerous neighbourhood we were warned by the sudden coldness of the weather, and the sinking of the mercury in the barometer. While these tokens lasted, a double look-out was kept, and many dismal tales were whispered after dark, of ships that had struck upon the ice and gone down in the night; but the wind obliging us to hold a southward course, we saw none of them, and the weather soon grew bright and warm again.
The observation every day at noon, and the subsequent working of the vessel’s course, was, as may be supposed, a feature in our lives of paramount importance; nor were there wanting (as there never are) sagacious doubters of the captain’s calculations, who, so soon as his back was turned, would, in the absence of compasses, measure the chart with bits of string, and ends of pocket-handkerchiefs, and points of snuffers, and clearly prove him to be wrong by an odd thousand miles or so. It was very edifying to see these unbelievers shake their heads and frown, and hear them hold forth strongly upon navigation: not that they knew anything about it, but that they always mistrusted the captain in calm weather, or when the wind was adverse. Indeed, the mercury itself is not so variable as this class of passengers, whom you will see, when the ship is going nobly through the water, quite pale with admiration, swearing that the captain beats all captains ever known, and even hinting at subscriptions for a piece of plate; and who, next morning, when the breeze has lulled, and all the sails hang useless in the idle air, shake their despondent heads again, and say, with screwed-up lips, they hope that captain is a sailor—but they shrewdly doubt him.
CAPITOLO XVI
IL PASSAGGIO A CASA
Non avevo mai provato un tale interesse prima, e molto probabilmente non lo proverò mai più, per lo stato del vento, come quella mattina tanto attesa del martedì 7 giugno. Un giorno o due prima, qualcuno esperto di navigazione mi aveva detto: “Qualsiasi vento proveniente da ovest andrà bene”; quindi, quando mi alzai di scatto dal letto all’alba e aprii la finestra, fui accolto da una brezza vivace proveniente da nord-ovest che si era levata durante la notte. Quella brezza mi colpì con tale freschezza, accompagnata da tante piacevoli associazioni, che decisi all’istante di riservare un particolare affetto a tutti i venti che soffiano da quella direzione. Un affetto che, oserei dire, manterrò per sempre, fino a quando anche il mio stesso vento non esalerà l’ultimo suo debole respiro e si ritirerà per sempre dal calendario umano.
Il pilota non aveva esitato a sfruttare questo tempo favorevole; la nave che ieri si trovava in un porto così affollato da poter quasi cessare definitivamente le sue attività commerciali, ora si trovava a sedici miglia di distanza. Era davvero uno spettacolo imponente: mentre noi la raggiungevamo rapidamente su una nave a vapore, la vedevamo all’orizzonte, ferma in porto; i suoi alti alberi si ergevano con grazia contro il cielo, e ogni corda e pennone risaltavano con contorni delicati e sottili. Ancora più imponente fu quando, una volta tutti a bordo, l’ancora fu sollevata, accompagnata dal coro entusiasta “Cheerily men, oh cheerily!”, e la nave seguì orgogliosamente la scia della nave a vapore che la trascinava. Ma il momento più spettacolare fu quando la fune di rimorchio si allentò, le vele si aprirono e la nave, come se spiegasse le sue ali bianche, prese il volo lungo la sua rotta libera e solitaria.
Nella cabina posteriore c’erano in totale soltanto quindici passeggeri, e la maggior parte di loro proveniva dal Canada, dove alcuni di noi si conoscevano già. La notte fu turbolenta e tempestosa, così come i due giorni successivi; tuttavia trascorsero rapidamente, e presto ci trovammo di nuovo in un’atmosfera allegra e confortevole, sotto la guida di un capitano onesto e dal cuore nobile. Come sempre, avevamo deciso di comportarci in modo cordiale l’uno con l’altro, sia sulla terra che sull’acqua.
Pranzammo alle otto, mangiammo il pranzo alle dodici, cenammo alle tre e bevemmo il tè alle sette e mezza. Avevamo molte distrazioni, e la cena non era certo la meno importante tra queste: innanzitutto per se stessa; in secondo luogo, a causa della sua durata eccezionale: il tempo necessario per consumarla, comprese tutte le lunghe pause tra i piatti, era raramente inferiore a due ore e mezza; questo rappresentava sempre un motivo di divertimento. Per alleviare la noia di questi banchetti, venne formato un gruppo selezionato seduto nella parte inferiore del tavolo, sotto l’albero maestro; il suo presidente, per modestia, non mi permette di fare ulteriori riferimenti a lui. Questo gruppo, molto allegro e divertente, era molto apprezzato da tutti, soprattutto da un cameriere nero che, per tre settimane intere, continuò a sorridere ampiamente davanti all’eccezionale umorismo di questi membri del gruppo.
Poi, per coloro che lo volevano, c’erano partite a scacchi, whist, cribbage, libri, backgammon e shovelboard. In ogni condizione meteorologica, buona o cattiva, calma o ventosa, eravamo tutti sul ponte: camminavamo avanti e indietro in coppie, ci sdraiavamo nelle barche, ci appoggiavamo al bordo o chiacchieravamo in gruppi rilassati. Non mancava mai la musica: uno suonava l’accompagnamento, un altro il violino, e un terzo (che di solito iniziava alle sei del mattino) la tromba a tastiera; l’effetto combinato di questi strumenti, quando suonavano melodie diverse in parti diverse della nave, nello stesso momento e a portata d’orecchio gli uni degli altri – come spesso accadeva, poiché tutti erano estremamente soddisfatti delle proprie performance – era, sublimemente orribile.
Quando tutti questi mezzi di intrattenimento fallivano, appariva all’orizzonte una vela: forse l’anima stessa di una nave, nella nebbiosa distanza, o che ci passava così vicina da permetterci, attraverso i nostri occhiali, di vedere le persone sul suo ponte, di riconoscere facilmente il suo nome e la destinazione verso cui era diretta. Per ore intere potevamo osservare i delfini e i porcospini che si rotolavano, saltavano e tuffavano intorno alla nave; o quelle piccole creature alate, i “polli di Mother Carey”, che ci avevano accompagnato dalla baia di New York e per un intero quindici giorni volteggiavano intorno alla poppa della nave. Per alcuni giorni regnava la calma assoluta o soffiavano venti molto leggeri; in quei momenti l’equipaggio si divertiva a pescare, catturando un sfortunato delfino che, con tutti i suoi colori arcobaleno, moriva sul ponte. Un evento così importante nel nostro “calendario desolato” che, in seguito, cominciammo a datarlo in base alla morte di quel delfino, e considerammo il giorno della sua scomparsa come l’inizio di una nuova era.
Oltre a tutto ciò, quando mancavano ancora cinque o sei giorni al nostro arrivo, iniziarono a circolare molte voci riguardo agli iceberg: un numero insolitamente alto di queste isole erranti era stato avvistato dalle navi che erano entrate a New York uno o due giorni prima della nostra partenza. Il repentino peggioramento del tempo e il calo della colonnina di mercurio nel barometro ci avevano avvertito del pericolo rappresentato da tali iceberg. Finché queste condizioni meteorologiche persistettero, fu mantenuta un’attenta vigilanza; al calare della notte si diffusero molte storie tragiche riguardo a navi che si erano schiantate contro gli iceberg e affondate nella notte. Tuttavia, poiché il vento ci costringeva a mantenere una rotta verso sud, non ne incontrammo alcuna; inoltre, il tempo presto tornò sereno e caldo.
L’osservazione quotidiana alle mezzogiorni, nonché l’individuazione successiva della rotta da seguire per la nave, rappresentavano, come si può immaginare, un aspetto di fondamentale importanza nelle nostre vite. Non mancavano certo (come mai potrebbero mancare) persone sagge e scettiche nei confronti dei calcoli del capitano; queste, non appena lui si allontanava, utilizzavano pezzi di corda, estremità di fazzoletti da tasca o punte di naso per misurare la mappa, dimostrando chiaramente che i suoi calcoli erano errati, di un’intera migliaia di miglia, più o meno. Era davvero istruttivo vedere questi scettici scuotere la testa e aggrottare la fronte, mentre esponevano con forza le loro opinioni sulla navigazione, anche se in realtà non ne sapevano assolutamente nulla. Si fidavano del capitano soltanto quando il tempo era sereno o quando il vento soffiava a favore. Del resto, nemmeno il mercurio è così imprevedibile come questa categoria di passeggeri: li si vede, infatti, quando la nave procede senza problemi attraverso le acque, ammirarla profondamente, giurare che il capitano supera tutti quelli conosciuti, e persino proporre di contribuire economicamente per un trofeo in suo onore. Ma il giorno dopo, quando la brezza si placa e tutte le vele rimangono inutilmente sospese nell’aria immobile, scuotono di nuovo la testa con disperazione, dicendo con labbra contratte che, forse il capitano è davvero un bravo marinaio, ma continuano comunque a dubitarne.
It even became an occupation in the calm, to wonder when the wind would spring up in the favourable quarter, where, it was clearly shown by all the rules and precedents, it ought to have sprung up long ago. The first mate, who whistled for it zealously, was much respected for his perseverance, and was regarded even by the unbelievers as a first-rate sailor. Many gloomy looks would be cast upward through the cabin skylights at the flapping sails while dinner was in progress; and some, growing bold in ruefulness, predicted that we should land about the middle of July. There are always on board ship, a Sanguine One, and a Despondent One. The latter character carried it hollow at this period of the voyage, and triumphed over the Sanguine One at every meal, by inquiring where he supposed the Great Western (which left New York a week after us) was now: and where he supposed the ‘Cunard’ steam-packet was now: and what he thought of sailing vessels, as compared with steamships now: and so beset his life with pestilent attacks of that kind, that he too was obliged to affect despondency, for very peace and quietude.
These were additions to the list of entertaining incidents, but there was still another source of interest. We carried in the steerage nearly a hundred passengers: a little world of poverty: and as we came to know individuals among them by sight, from looking down upon the deck where they took the air in the daytime, and cooked their food, and very often ate it too, we became curious to know their histories, and with what expectations they had gone out to America, and on what errands they were going home, and what their circumstances were. The information we got on these heads from the carpenter, who had charge of these people, was often of the strangest kind. Some of them had been in America but three days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home. Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had hardly rags to cover them; others had no food, and lived upon the charity of the rest: and one man, it was discovered nearly at the end of the voyage, not before—for he kept his secret close, and did not court compassion—had had no sustenance whatever but the bones and scraps of fat he took from the plates used in the after-cabin dinner, when they were put out to be washed.
The whole system of shipping and conveying these unfortunate persons, is one that stands in need of thorough revision. If any class deserve to be protected and assisted by the Government, it is that class who are banished from their native land in search of the bare means of subsistence. All that could be done for these poor people by the great compassion and humanity of the captain and officers was done, but they require much more. The law is bound, at least upon the English side, to see that too many of them are not put on board one ship: and that their accommodations are decent: not demoralising, and profligate. It is bound, too, in common humanity, to declare that no man shall be taken on board without his stock of provisions being previously inspected by some proper officer, and pronounced moderately sufficient for his support upon the voyage. It is bound to provide, or to require that there be provided, a medical attendant; whereas in these ships there are none, though sickness of adults, and deaths of children, on the passage, are matters of the very commonest occurrence. Above all it is the duty of any Government, be it monarchy or republic, to interpose and put an end to that system by which a firm of traders in emigrants purchase of the owners the whole ’tween-decks of a ship, and send on board as many wretched people as they can lay hold of, on any terms they can get, without the smallest reference to the conveniences of the steerage, the number of berths, the slightest separation of the sexes, or anything but their own immediate profit. Nor is even this the worst of the vicious system: for, certain crimping agents of these houses, who have a percentage on all the passengers they inveigle, are constantly travelling about those districts where poverty and discontent are rife, and tempting the credulous into more misery, by holding out monstrous inducements to emigration which can never be realised.
The history of every family we had on board was pretty much the same. After hoarding up, and borrowing, and begging, and selling everything to pay the passage, they had gone out to New York, expecting to find its streets paved with gold; and had found them paved with very hard and very real stones. Enterprise was dull; labourers were not wanted; jobs of work were to be got, but the payment was not. They were coming back, even poorer than they went. One of them was carrying an open letter from a young English artisan, who had been in New York a fortnight, to a friend near Manchester, whom he strongly urged to follow him. One of the officers brought it to me as a curiosity. ‘This is the country, Jem,’ said the writer. ‘I like America. There is no despotism here; that’s the great thing. Employment of all sorts is going a-begging, and wages are capital. You have only to choose a trade, Jem, and be it. I haven’t made choice of one yet, but I shall soon. At present I haven’t quite made up my mind whether to be a carpenter—or a tailor.’
There was yet another kind of passenger, and but one more, who, in the calm and the light winds, was a constant theme of conversation and observation among us. This was an English sailor, a smart, thorough-built, English man-of-war’s-man from his hat to his shoes, who was serving in the American navy, and having got leave of absence was on his way home to see his friends. When he presented himself to take and pay for his passage, it had been suggested to him that being an able seaman he might as well work it and save the money, but this piece of advice he very indignantly rejected: saying, ‘He’d be damned but for once he’d go aboard ship, as a gentleman.’ Accordingly, they took his money, but he no sooner came aboard, than he stowed his kit in the forecastle, arranged to mess with the crew, and the very first time the hands were turned up, went aloft like a cat, before anybody. And all through the passage there he was, first at the braces, outermost on the yards, perpetually lending a hand everywhere, but always with a sober dignity in his manner, and a sober grin on his face, which plainly said, ‘I do it as a gentleman. For my own pleasure, mind you!’
Diventò persino un’occupazione, in quei momenti di tranquillità, meravigliarsi quando il vento “sorgeva” nella direzione prevista da tutte le regole e i precedenti. Il primo marinaio che si impegnò con zelo nell’osservare questo fenomeno fu molto rispettato per la sua perseveranza; persino gli scettici lo consideravano un eccellente navigatore. Durante i pasti, molte occhiate cupe venivano rivolte verso le vele che si agitavano al vento. Alcuni, diventando sempre più pessimisti, predicevano che saremmo sbarcati intorno a metà luglio. Su ogni nave ci sono sempre qualcuno ottimista e qualcuno disperato. In quel periodo del viaggio, il tipo disperato dominava la situazione: a ogni pasto chiedeva al marinaio ottimista dove pensasse che si trovasse il Great Western (che aveva lasciato New York una settimana dopo di noi), dove fosse il transatlantico Cunard, e cosa pensasse delle navi a vela rispetto ai piroscafi. Con queste continue domande, riusciva sempre a far sì che anche l’ottimista assumesse un atteggiamento scoraggiato. Per mantenere la pace e la tranquillità a bordo, entrambi erano costretti a fingere di essere disperati.
Questi erano semplicemente altri episodi divertenti da aggiungere alla lista degli avvenimenti interessanti, ma c’era ancora un altro aspetto che suscitava curiosità. A bordo del nostro vascello viaggiavano quasi cento passeggeri: un piccolo mondo di povertà. Man mano che iniziammo a conoscere alcuni di loro, osservandoli dal ponte dove trascorrevano le giornate – respirando l’aria fresca, cucinando il cibo e spesso mangiandolo direttamente lì – diventammo curiosi di sapere la loro storia, quali aspettative li avevano spinti ad andare in America, quale fosse lo scopo del loro viaggio verso casa e in che condizioni si trovassero. Le informazioni che raccogliemmo su di loro dal carpentiere, incaricato di prendersi cura di loro, erano spesso delle più strane: alcuni di quei passeggeri avevano trascorso soltanto tre giorni in America, altri appena tre mesi; alcuni erano partiti proprio con il viaggio precedente dello stesso navio su cui ora stavano tornando a casa. Alcuni avevano venduto i propri vestiti per pagare la traversata, e ormai non avevano più nulla addosso se non stracci; altri non avevano cibo e vivevano della carità degli altri passeggeri. E uno di loro, scoperto quasi alla fine del viaggio – perché aveva tenuto il segreto per sé, senza cercare compassione da nessuno – non aveva assunto cibo alcuno se non le ossa e i resti di grasso rimasti nei piatti utilizzati durante i pasti nella cabina posteriore, dopo che venivano lavati.
L’intero sistema di trasporto e deportazione di queste sfortunate persone necessita di una revisione approfondita. Se esiste qualche classe che meriti davvero la protezione e l’aiuto del Governo, questa è sicuramente quella costretta ad abbandonare la propria terra natale alla ricerca dei mezzi essenziali per sopravvivere. Tutto ciò che il grande cuore umano e la compassione del capitano e dell’equipaggio potevano fare per queste persone povere è stato fatto, ma loro hanno bisogno di molto di più. La legge, almeno da parte inglese, deve garantire che non vengano imbarcate troppe di queste persone su una singola nave; inoltre, le condizioni di viaggio devono essere dignitose, senza elementi demoralizzanti o sprechi. È anche dovere della comune umanità assicurarsi che nessuno venga imbarcato senza che le sue provviste siano preventivamente ispezionate da un funzionario competente e ritenute sufficienti per il suo sostentamento durante il viaggio. Inoltre, deve essere previsto l’impiego di personale medico; invece su queste navi non ce n’è alcuno, nonostante malattie degli adulti e decessi di bambini siano eventi assai frequenti durante il viaggio. Soprattutto, è dovere di qualsiasi Governo, sia monarchico che repubblicano, intervenire per porre fine a questo sistema secondo cui alcune compagnie commerciali acquistano l’intero spazio intermedio delle navi e imbarcano quante più persone possibili, a qualsiasi prezzo, senza minimamente considerare le condizioni di vita a bordo, il numero dei letti disponibili o la separazione tra i sessi, ma soltanto il proprio profitto immediato. E nemmeno questo rappresenta il peggio di questo sistema disumano: infatti, alcuni agenti delle suddette compagnie, che ricevono una percentuale su tutti i passeggeri che inducono ad emigrare, viaggiano costantemente nelle zone dove la povertà e lo scontento sono diffusi, attirando le persone ingenui con promesse di un futuro migliore che in realtà non possono mai essere mantenute.
La storia di ogni famiglia che avevamo a bordo era più o meno la stessa. Dopo aver accumulato, preso in prestito, chiesto l’elemosina e venduto tutto ciò che possedevano per pagare il viaggio, erano partiti per New York, aspettandosi di trovare le sue strade lastricate d’oro; invece le avevano trovate lastricate di pietre dure e reali. L’attività economica era stagnante; non c’era bisogno di lavoratori; si trovavano posti di lavoro, ma non veniva pagato nulla. Tornavano indietro, persino più poveri di quando erano partiti. Uno di loro portava con sé una lettera aperta di un giovane artigiano inglese che era stato a New York per due settimane; nella lettera esortava vivamente un amico vicino a Manchester ad andare con lui. Uno degli ufficiali me la mostrò, trovandola curiosa. “Ecco il paese, Jem,” scriveva l’autore della lettera. “Mi piace America. Qui non c’è dispotismo; questa è la cosa più importante. Ci sono opportunità di lavoro di ogni tipo, e i salari sono decenti. Devi solo scegliere una professione, Jem. Io ancora non l’ho deciso: forse diventerò un falegname, o un sarto.”
C’era ancora un altro tipo di passeggero, e soltanto uno, che, nella calma e nelle brezze leggere, costituiva sempre argomento di conversazione e osservazione tra di noi. Si trattava di un marinaio inglese, un uomo intelligente, ben strutturato, tipico rappresentante dei marinai britannici, dall’abbigliamento fino ai piedi; prestava servizio nella marina americana e, avendo ottenuto una licenza, era in viaggio verso casa per rivedere i suoi amici. Quando si presentò per pagare il proprio passaggio, gli fu suggerito che, essendo un abile marinaio, avrebbe potuto lavorare e risparmiare quei soldi, ma lui rifiutò con grande indignazione questa proposta, dicendo: “Non permetterò mai che mi si consideri diversamente da come mi considero io stesso: sono un gentiluomo, e come tale agirò”. Così, loro accettarono i suoi soldi; ma non appena salì a bordo, sistemò le sue cose nella parte anteriore della nave, iniziò a socializzare con l’equipaggio e, non appena fu il momento di mettersi al lavoro, salì sul ponte come un gatto, prima ancora che chiunque altro potesse farlo. Per tutto il viaggio, fu sempre impegnato: lavorava ai bracci delle vele, si occupava dei pennoni. Era sempre pronto ad aiutare tutti, ma con una dignità sobria e un sorriso sereno sul viso, come a dire chiaramente: “Lo faccio perché sono un gentiluomo. E per il mio piacere personale, naturalmente”.
At length and at last, the promised wind came up in right good earnest, and away we went before it, with every stitch of canvas set, slashing through the water nobly. There was a grandeur in the motion of the splendid ship, as overshadowed by her mass of sails, she rode at a furious pace upon the waves, which filled one with an indescribable sense of pride and exultation. As she plunged into a foaming valley, how I loved to see the green waves, bordered deep with white, come rushing on astern, to buoy her upward at their pleasure, and curl about her as she stooped again, but always own her for their haughty mistress still! On, on we flew, with changing lights upon the water, being now in the blessed region of fleecy skies; a bright sun lighting us by day, and a bright moon by night; the vane pointing directly homeward, alike the truthful index to the favouring wind and to our cheerful hearts; until at sunrise, one fair Monday morning—the twenty-seventh of June, I shall not easily forget the day—there lay before us, old Cape Clear, God bless it, showing, in the mist of early morning, like a cloud: the brightest and most welcome cloud, to us, that ever hid the face of Heaven’s fallen sister—Home.
Dim speck as it was in the wide prospect, it made the sunrise a more cheerful sight, and gave to it that sort of human interest which it seems to want at sea. There, as elsewhere, the return of day is inseparable from some sense of renewed hope and gladness; but the light shining on the dreary waste of water, and showing it in all its vast extent of loneliness, presents a solemn spectacle, which even night, veiling it in darkness and uncertainty, does not surpass. The rising of the moon is more in keeping with the solitary ocean; and has an air of melancholy grandeur, which in its soft and gentle influence, seems to comfort while it saddens. I recollect when I was a very young child having a fancy that the reflection of the moon in water was a path to Heaven, trodden by the spirits of good people on their way to God; and this old feeling often came over me again, when I watched it on a tranquil night at sea.
The wind was very light on this same Monday morning, but it was still in the right quarter, and so, by slow degrees, we left Cape Clear behind, and sailed along within sight of the coast of Ireland. And how merry we all were, and how loyal to the George Washington, and how full of mutual congratulations, and how venturesome in predicting the exact hour at which we should arrive at Liverpool, may be easily imagined and readily understood. Also, how heartily we drank the captain’s health that day at dinner; and how restless we became about packing up: and how two or three of the most sanguine spirits rejected the idea of going to bed at all that night as something it was not worth while to do, so near the shore, but went nevertheless, and slept soundly; and how to be so near our journey’s end, was like a pleasant dream, from which one feared to wake.
The friendly breeze freshened again next day, and on we went once more before it gallantly: descrying now and then an English ship going homeward under shortened sail, while we, with every inch of canvas crowded on, dashed gaily past, and left her far behind. Towards evening, the weather turned hazy, with a drizzling rain; and soon became so thick, that we sailed, as it were, in a cloud. Still we swept onward like a phantom ship, and many an eager eye glanced up to where the Look-out on the mast kept watch for Holyhead.
At length his long-expected cry was heard, and at the same moment there shone out from the haze and mist ahead, a gleaming light, which presently was gone, and soon returned, and soon was gone again. Whenever it came back, the eyes of all on board, brightened and sparkled like itself: and there we all stood, watching this revolving light upon the rock at Holyhead, and praising it for its brightness and its friendly warning, and lauding it, in short, above all other signal lights that ever were displayed, until it once more glimmered faintly in the distance, far behind us.
Then, it was time to fire a gun, for a pilot; and almost before its smoke had cleared away, a little boat with a light at her masthead came bearing down upon us, through the darkness, swiftly. And presently, our sails being backed, she ran alongside; and the hoarse pilot, wrapped and muffled in pea-coats and shawls to the very bridge of his weather-ploughed-up nose, stood bodily among us on the deck. And I think if that pilot had wanted to borrow fifty pounds for an indefinite period on no security, we should have engaged to lend it to him, among us, before his boat had dropped astern, or (which is the same thing) before every scrap of news in the paper he brought with him had become the common property of all on board.
We turned in pretty late that night, and turned out pretty early next morning. By six o’clock we clustered on the deck, prepared to go ashore; and looked upon the spires, and roofs, and smoke, of Liverpool. By eight we all sat down in one of its Hotels, to eat and drink together for the last time. And by nine we had shaken hands all round, and broken up our social company for ever.
The country, by the railroad, seemed, as we rattled through it, like a luxuriant garden. The beauty of the fields (so small they looked!), the hedge-rows, and the trees; the pretty cottages, the beds of flowers, the old churchyards, the antique houses, and every well-known object; the exquisite delights of that one journey, crowding in the short compass of a summer’s day, the joy of many years, with the winding up with Home and all that makes it dear; no tongue can tell, or pen of mine describe.
Finalmente, il promesso vento arrivò davvero, e noi partimmo sotto di esso, con tutte le vele spiegate, fendendo nobilmente l’acqua. La maestosa nave, avvolta nella sua vasta superficie di vele, avanzava a grande velocità sulle onde, suscitando in noi un indescrivibile senso di orgoglio e gioia. Quando si tuffava nelle onde schiumose, amavo vedere le onde verdi, bordate di bianco, che la spingevano verso l’alto con forza, avvolgendola mentre si abbassava di nuovo, ma lei rimaneva sempre la loro padrona orgogliosa! Avanti, avanti, i colori dell’acqua cambiavano continuamente: durante il giorno ci illuminava un sole splendente, e di notte una luna luminosa. La bussola indicava direttamente verso casa, come un segno certo della favorevole vento e del nostro buon umore. Fino a quando, una bella mattina di lunedì – il ventisettesimo giugno – non apparve davanti a noi l’antico Capo Clear. Che Dio lo benedica! Appariva nella nebbia del mattino, come una nuvola. La nuvola più luminosa e gradita per noi, che mai aveva nascosto il volto della “sorella caduta” del Cielo. Casa.
Quella piccola macchia, nel vasto panorama, rendeva l’alba ancora più gioiosa e le conferiva quel senso di umana commozione che sembra essere proprio necessario in mare. Lì, come altrove, il ritorno del giorno è indissolubilmente legato a un senso di rinnovata speranza e felicità; ma la luce che illumina quella desolata distesa d’acqua, mostrandone tutta la vastità e la solitudine, crea uno spettacolo solenne che nemmeno la notte, avvolgendola nell’oscurità e nell’incertezza, riesce a superare. L’alba della luna si addice meglio all’oceano solitario; ha un’aria di melanconica ma maestosa che, con il suo effetto dolce e gentile, sembra consolare pur rattristando. Ricordo quando ero molto piccolo: avevo l’idea che il riflesso della luna sull’acqua fosse un sentiero verso il Cielo, percorso dagli spiriti delle persone buone sul loro cammino verso Dio; questo vecchio sentimento ritornava spesso in me quando la osservavo in una tranquilla notte in mare.
Quel lunedì mattina il vento era molto leggero, ma proveniva ancora dalla direzione giusta; così, poco a poco, lasciammo alle nostre spalle Capo Clear e proseguimmo la navigazione con la costa dell’Irlanda sempre in vista. Che felici eravamo tutti, quanto fedeli al “George Washington”, quante congratulazioni ci scambiammo a vicenda, e quanto eravamo ansiosi di conoscere l’ora esatta in cui saremmo arrivati a Liverpool. Tutto questo può essere facilmente immaginato e compreso. Inoltre, quanto calorosamente brindammo quel giorno alla salute del capitano a cena; quanto diventammo irrequieti nell’impacchettare i nostri bagagli; e come due o tre di noi, tra quelli più entusiasti, rifiutarono l’idea di andare a letto quella notte, considerandola inutile così vicini alla meta. Eppure ci coricammo lo stesso e dormimmo profondamente. Essere così vicini alla fine del nostro viaggio era come trovarsi in un bel sogno dal quale non si voleva svegliare.
La brezza fresca soffiò di nuovo il giorno seguente, e noi ripartimmo ancora una volta. Ora, di tanto in tanto, scorgevamo navi inglesi che tornavano a casa con le vele ridotte; noi, invece, con tutte le vele spiegate, le superavamo velocemente, lasciandole molto indietro. Verso sera, il tempo si fece nebbioso e iniziò a piovere leggermente; presto la nebbia divenne così fitta che sembrava di navigare all’interno di una nuvola. Tuttavia, continuammo ad avanzare velocemente, come una nave fantasma. Molti occhi curiosi guardavano in alto, dove l’uomo di vedetta sul albero teneva d’occhio la destinazione: Holyhead.
Finalmente si udì il suo grido tanto atteso; nello stesso istante, dalla nebbia e dalla foschia davanti a noi apparve una luce scintillante che per un momento scomparve, poi tornò ad illuminare il cielo, per scomparire di nuovo poco dopo. Ogni volta che riappariva, gli occhi di tutti a bordo si illuminavano e brillavano come lei stessa; noi restavamo lì a osservare quella luce che ruotava sopra le rocce di Holyhead, lodandone la luminosità e il suo significato “amichevole”, considerandola senza dubbio superiore a qualsiasi altro segnale luminoso mai esistito. Fino a quando, infine, non scomparve nuovamente nella distanza, lontano dietro di noi.
Era arrivato il momento di sparare un colpo di cannone per avvisare i piloti; e quasi prima che il fumo si disperdesse, una piccola barca con una luce sulla punta dell’albero ci raggiunse velocemente attraverso l’oscurità. Poco dopo, le nostre vele furono ammainate e la barca accostò al nostro fianco; il pilota, avvolto in cappotti e sciarpe fino al naso, si trovò improvvisamente tra di noi sul ponte. Penso che, se quel pilota avesse voluto prendere in prestito cinquanta sterline per un periodo indeterminato senza alcuna garanzia, noi gliel’avremmo prestate all’istante, prima ancora che la sua barca si allontanasse, o, prima ancora che ogni notizia che portava con sé diventasse di proprietà comune di tutti a bordo.
Quella notte ci siamo ritirati abbastanza tardi, e il giorno dopo ci siamo alzati molto presto. Alle sei di mattina ci siamo radunati sul ponte, pronti a sbarcare; abbiamo ammirato le guglie, i tetti e il fumo di Liverpool. Alle otto ci siamo seduti in uno degli hotel della città per mangiare e bere insieme, per l’ultima volta. Alle nove ci siamo salutati tutti e abbiamo rotto per sempre quel legame sociale.
Il paese, lungo la ferrovia, sembrava, mentre lo attraversavamo velocemente, un rigoglioso giardino. La bellezza dei campi (così piccoli da sembrare minuscoli!), delle siepi e degli alberi; le graziose casette, i giardini pieni di fiori, gli antichi cimiteri, le case d’epoca, e ogni altro elemento familiare e caro a chi vi abita; tutte queste meraviglie, racchiuse nel breve arco di una giornata estiva, rappresentavano la gioia di molti anni. La felicità di tornare a Casa e a tutto ciò che la rende così preziosa. Nessuna parola può descriverle, nessuna penna riesce a renderle giustizia.
CHAPTER XVII SLAVERY
THE upholders of slavery in America—of the atrocities of which system, I shall not write one word for which I have not had ample proof and warrant—may be divided into three great classes.
The first, are those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle, who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught: dangers which however distant they may be, or howsoever tardy in their coming on, are as certain to fall upon its guilty head, as is the Day of Judgment.
The second, consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards: who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject, and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority, and unassailed by any human power; who, when they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun Alraschid in his angry robe of scarlet.
The third, and not the least numerous or influential, is composed of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, and cannot brook an equal; of that class whose Republicanism means, ‘I will not tolerate a man above me: and of those below, none must approach too near;’ whose pride, in a land where voluntary servitude is shunned as a disgrace, must be ministered to by slaves; and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in negro wrongs.
It has been sometimes urged that, in the unavailing efforts which have been made to advance the cause of Human Freedom in the republic of America (strange cause for history to treat of!), sufficient regard has not been had to the existence of the first class of persons; and it has been contended that they are hardly used, in being confounded with the second. This is, no doubt, the case; noble instances of pecuniary and personal sacrifice have already had their growth among them; and it is much to be regretted that the gulf between them and the advocates of emancipation should have been widened and deepened by any means: the rather, as there are, beyond dispute, among these slave-owners, many kind masters who are tender in the exercise of their unnatural power. Still, it is to be feared that this injustice is inseparable from the state of things with which humanity and truth are called upon to deal. Slavery is not a whit the more endurable because some hearts are to be found which can partially resist its hardening influences; nor can the indignant tide of honest wrath stand still, because in its onward course it overwhelms a few who are comparatively innocent, among a host of guilty.
The ground most commonly taken by these better men among the advocates of slavery, is this: ‘It is a bad system; and for myself I would willingly get rid of it, if I could; most willingly. But it is not so bad, as you in England take it to be. You are deceived by the representations of the emancipationists. The greater part of my slaves are much attached to me. You will say that I do not allow them to be severely treated; but I will put it to you whether you believe that it can be a general practice to treat them inhumanly, when it would impair their value, and would be obviously against the interests of their masters.’
Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder? No. All these are roads to ruin. And why, then, do men tread them? Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind. Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!
But again: this class, together with that last one I have named, the miserable aristocracy spawned of a false republic, lift up their voices and exclaim ‘Public opinion is all-sufficient to prevent such cruelty as you denounce.’ Public opinion! Why, public opinion in the slave States is slavery, is it not? Public opinion, in the slave States, has delivered the slaves over, to the gentle mercies of their masters. Public opinion has made the laws, and denied the slaves legislative protection. Public opinion has knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and shielded the murderer. Public opinion threatens the abolitionist with death, if he venture to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East. Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis; and public opinion has to this day maintained upon the bench that estimable judge who charged the jury, impanelled there to try his murderers, that their most horrid deed was an act of public opinion, and being so, must not be punished by the laws the public sentiment had made. Public opinion hailed this doctrine with a howl of wild applause, and set the prisoners free, to walk the city, men of mark, and influence, and station, as they had been before.
CAPITOLO XVII
SCHIAVITÚ
I sostenitori della schiavitù in America – coloro che sono responsabili delle atrocità commesse da questo sistema, di cui non scriverò nemmeno una parola senza disporre di prove e motivazioni sufficienti – possono essere divisi in tre grandi categorie.
I primi sono quegli proprietari di “bestiame umano” più moderati e razionali, che ne hanno assunto il possesso considerandoli semplicemente un mezzo di scambio nel loro commercio; tuttavia riconoscono la terribile >natura di questa istituzione in astratto e comprendono i pericoli che essa rappresenta per la società: pericoli che, per quanto lontani possano essere o quanto ritardati nel manifestarsi, sono certi di colpire coloro che ne sono responsabili, proprio come il Giorno del Giudizio è inevitabile.
Il secondo gruppo è composto da tutti quegli proprietari, allevatori, utenti, acquirenti e venditori di schiavi che, fino a quando questo sistema crudele non avrà trovato la sua fine sanguinosa, continueranno ad possederli, allevarli, utilizzarli, comprarli e venderli a tutti i costi; quegli che ostinatamente negano l’orrore di questo sistema, nonostante una quantità di prove mai vista prima in merito ad alcun altro argomento, e alle quali contribuisce quotidianamente anche l’esperienza concreta delle persone; quegli che, in questo o in qualsiasi altro momento, sarebbero felici di trascinare America in una guerra, civile o straniera, purché l’unico scopo fosse quello di affermare il loro diritto di perpetuare la schiavitù, di frustare, lavorare e torturare gli schiavi senza alcuna opposizione da parte delle autorità umane o dei poteri terreni; quegli che, quando parlano di Libertà, intendono in realtà la libertà di opprimere il proprio prossimo, di essere selvaggi, spietati e crudeli; e di cui ogni uomo, nel contesto della repubblica America, rappresenta un despota più esigente, più severo e meno responsabile del califfo Harun al-Rashid nei suoi abiti rossi di furia.
Il terzo gruppo, non meno numeroso e influente degli altri, è composto da tutte quelle persone dalla delicata gentilezza che non riescono a sopportare la presenza di qualcuno superiore a loro, né tollerano l’uguaglianza; da coloro il cui “repubblicanesimo” si traduce nel rifiuto di accettare un uomo al proprio livello, e dal rifiuto che chi è al loro di sotto si avvicini troppo; persone la cui orgoglio, in una terra dove la schiavitù volontaria è considerata una vergogna, deve essere alimentato dagli schiavi stessi; e il cui diritto inalienabile può crescere soltanto attraverso gli ingiustizi subiti dai neri.
Si è talvolta sostenuto che, negli sforzi vani compiuti per promuovere la causa della libertà umana nella repubblica dell’America (strano argomento su cui la storia si sia soffermata!), non sia stata data sufficiente attenzione alla condizione delle prime classi sociali; inoltre, si è affermato che queste vengano spesso confuse con le seconde. Senza dubbio, questa è la realtà: esistono infatti nobili esempi di sacrifici finanziari e personali da parte di questi individui; è davvero spiacevole che il divario tra loro e i sostenitori dell’emancipazione sia stato ampliato e approfondito con qualsiasi mezzo possibile. Tuttavia, non si può negare che, tra questi proprietari di schiavi, vi siano molti padroni gentili che esercitano il loro potere in modo compassionevole. Nonostante ciò, temiamo che questa ingiustizia sia intrinseca allo stato delle cose con cui l’umanità e la verità sono costrette a confrontarsi. La schiavitù non diventa affatto più tollerabile solo perché esistono persone capaci di resistere, in parte, ai suoi effetti negativi; né può l’indignazione legittima fermarsi, poiché nel suo corso travolge anche alcuni individui relativamente innocenti, tra molti colpevoli.
Il argomento più comunemente utilizzato da questi individui tra i sostenitori della schiavitù è il seguente: “È un sistema brutto; personalmente lo eliminerei volentieri, se potessi. Molto volentieri. Ma non è così brutto come voi in Inghilterra credete. Siete ingannati dalle dichiarazioni degli abolizionisti. La maggior parte dei miei schiavi mi è molto affezionata. Direte che non permetto che vengano trattati con crudeltà. Ma vi chiedo: ritenete davvero possibile trattarli in modo disumano, quando ciò diminuirebbe il loro valore e andrebbe chiaramente contro gli interessi dei loro padroni?”
È forse nell’interesse di un uomo rubare, giocare d’azzardo, rovinarsi la salute e le facoltà mentali con l’alcolismo, mentire, giurare il falso, nutrire odio, cercare vendette disperate o commettere omicidi? No. Tutti questi comportamenti portano alla rovina. Allora perché gli uomini li adottano? Perché tali inclinazioni fanno parte delle qualità vili dell’umanità. Ognuno di voi, amici della schiavitù, cancellate dal catalogo dei sentimenti umani la lussuria brutale, la crudeltà e l’abuso del potere irresponsabile (tra tutte le tentazioni terrene, queste sono le più difficili da resistere). Solo allora potremo chiederci se sia davvero nell’interesse di un padrone frustare e mutilare gli schiavi, su cui ha un controllo assoluto, sulla loro vita e sulle loro membra!
Ma ancora una volta: questa classe, insieme all’ultima che ho menzionato – quella misera aristocrazia nata da una falsa repubblica – alza la voce e esclama: “L’opinione pubblica è più che sufficiente per impedire crudeltà del genere”. L’opinione pubblica! Ma in realtà, nelle Stati schiavisti, l’opinione pubblica non è altro che lo schiavitù, non è vero? L’opinione pubblica ha consegnato gli schiavi alle gentili “misericordie” dei loro padroni; ha stabilito le leggi e negato agli schiavi qualsiasi protezione legislativa. L’opinione pubblica ha preparato fruste, arroventato i ferri per marchiare, caricato le armi, e protetto gli assassini. L’opinione pubblica minaccia di morte chi osa propugnare l’abolizionismo se si avventura nel Sud; e lo trascina, con una corda attorno alla vita, in pieno mezzogiorno, attraverso le prime città dell’Est. In pochi anni, l’opinione pubblica ha fatto bruciare vivo uno schiavo davanti a un fuoco lento, nella città di St. Louis; e ancora oggi mantiene al suo fianco quel rispettabile giudice che ha incaricato la giuria di processare gli assassini, sostenendo che il loro atto più orribile fosse in realtà un atto dell’opinione pubblica, e quindi non dovesse essere punito dalle leggi stesse create da quel sentimento popolare. L’opinione pubblica ha acclamato questa dottrina con urla di entusiasmo, e ha liberato i prigionieri, permettendo loro di tornare in città come persone influenti e rispettabili, proprio come prima.
Public opinion! what class of men have an immense preponderance over the rest of the community, in their power of representing public opinion in the legislature? the slave-owners. They send from their twelve States one hundred members, while the fourteen free States, with a free population nearly double, return but a hundred and forty-two. Before whom do the presidential candidates bow down the most humbly, on whom do they fawn the most fondly, and for whose tastes do they cater the most assiduously in their servile protestations? The slave-owners always.
Public opinion! hear the public opinion of the free South, as expressed by its own members in the House of Representatives at Washington. ‘I have a great respect for the chair,’ quoth North Carolina, ‘I have a great respect for the chair as an officer of the house, and a great respect for him personally; nothing but that respect prevents me from rushing to the table and tearing that petition which has just been presented for the abolition of slavery in the district of Columbia, to pieces.’—‘I warn the abolitionists,’ says South Carolina, ‘ignorant, infuriated barbarians as they are, that if chance shall throw any of them into our hands, he may expect a felon’s death.’—‘Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South Carolina,’ cries a third; mild Carolina’s colleague; ‘and if we can catch him, we will try him, and notwithstanding the interference of all the governments on earth, including the Federal government, we will HANG him.’
Public opinion has made this law.—It has declared that in Washington, in that city which takes its name from the father of American liberty, any justice of the peace may bind with fetters any negro passing down the street and thrust him into jail: no offence on the black man’s part is necessary. The justice says, ‘I choose to think this man a runaway:’ and locks him up. Public opinion impowers the man of law when this is done, to advertise the negro in the newspapers, warning his owner to come and claim him, or he will be sold to pay the jail fees. But supposing he is a free black, and has no owner, it may naturally be presumed that he is set at liberty. No: HE IS SOLD TO RECOMPENSE HIS JAILER. This has been done again, and again, and again. He has no means of proving his freedom; has no adviser, messenger, or assistance of any sort or kind; no investigation into his case is made, or inquiry instituted. He, a free man, who may have served for years, and bought his liberty, is thrown into jail on no process, for no crime, and on no pretence of crime: and is sold to pay the jail fees. This seems incredible, even of America, but it is the law.
Public opinion is deferred to, in such cases as the following: which is headed in the newspapers:—
‘Interesting Law-Case.
‘An interesting case is now on trial in the Supreme Court, arising out of the following facts. A gentleman residing in Maryland had allowed an aged pair of his slaves, substantial though not legal freedom for several years. While thus living, a daughter was born to them, who grew up in the same liberty, until she married a free negro, and went with him to reside in Pennsylvania. They had several children, and lived unmolested until the original owner died, when his heir attempted to regain them; but the magistrate before whom they were brought, decided that he had no jurisdiction in the case. The owner seized the woman and her children in the night, and carried them to Maryland.’
‘Cash for negroes,’ ‘cash for negroes,’ ‘cash for negroes,’ is the heading of advertisements in great capitals down the long columns of the crowded journals. Woodcuts of a runaway negro with manacled hands, crouching beneath a bluff pursuer in top boots, who, having caught him, grasps him by the throat, agreeably diversify the pleasant text. The leading article protests against ‘that abominable and hellish doctrine of abolition, which is repugnant alike to every law of God and nature.’ The delicate mamma, who smiles her acquiescence in this sprightly writing as she reads the paper in her cool piazza, quiets her youngest child who clings about her skirts, by promising the boy ‘a whip to beat the little niggers with.’—But the negroes, little and big, are protected by public opinion.
Let us try this public opinion by another test, which is important in three points of view: first, as showing how desperately timid of the public opinion slave-owners are, in their delicate descriptions of fugitive slaves in widely circulated newspapers; secondly, as showing how perfectly contented the slaves are, and how very seldom they run away; thirdly, as exhibiting their entire freedom from scar, or blemish, or any mark of cruel infliction, as their pictures are drawn, not by lying abolitionists, but by their own truthful masters.
The following are a few specimens of the advertisements in the public papers. It is only four years since the oldest among them appeared; and others of the same nature continue to be published every day, in shoals.
‘Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down.’
‘Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on her right leg.’
‘Ran away, the negro Manuel. Much marked with irons.’
‘Ran away, the negress Fanny. Had on an iron band about her neck.’
‘Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar with “De Lampert” engraved on it.’
‘Ran away, the negro Hown. Has a ring of iron on his left foot. Also, Grise, his wife, having a ring and chain on the left leg.’
‘Ran away, a negro boy named James. Said boy was ironed when he left me.’
‘Committed to jail, a man who calls his name John. He has a clog of iron on his right foot which will weigh four or five pounds.’
L’opinione pubblica! Quale classe di persone ha un’enorme influenza sugli altri membri della comunità, nel loro ruolo di rappresentare l’opinione pubblica nei organi legislativi? I proprietari di schiavi. Essi inviano, dai loro dodici Stati, cento membri del parlamento, mentre i quattordici Stati liberi, con una popolazione quasi )doppia, ne inviano soltanto centoquarantadue. Di fronte a chi si inchinano più umilmente i candidati presidenziali, a chi mostrano maggior adorazione e per i gusti di chi si sforzano con maggiore impegno nelle loro servili lusinghe? Sempre dei proprietari di schiavi.
L’opinione pubblica! Ascoltate l’opinione del libero Sud, espressa dai suoi stessi rappresentanti nella Casa dei Rappresentanti a Washington. “Ho grande rispetto per il presidente”, disse la Carolina del Nord, “grande rispetto come funzionario della Casa, e grande rispetto per lui personalmente; solo questo rispetto mi impedisce di correre al tavolo e strappare in pezzi quella petizione presentata appena ora per l’abolizione della )schiavitù nel distretto di Columbia”. “Avverto gli abolizionisti”, disse la Carolina del Sud, “ignoranti e furiosi barbari come sono, se per caso uno di loro dovesse cadere nelle nostre mani, può aspettarsi la morte dei criminali”. “Lasciate che un abolizionista entri nei confini della Carolina del Sud”, gridò un terzo rappresentante; “e se riusciremo a catturarlo, lo processeremo, e nonostante l’intervento di tutti i governi del mondo, compreso quello federale, LO PENZIEREMO”.
L’opinione pubblica ha reso questa legge effettiva: essa stabilisce che a Washington, in quella città che prende il nome dal padre della libertà americana, qualsiasi giudice di pace possa incatenare un negro che passi per strada e gettarlo in prigione; non è necessario che il nero commetta alcun reato. Il giudice decide semplicemente: “Ritengo quest’uomo un fuggitivo”, e lo imprigiona. Quando ciò avviene, l’opinione pubblica dà al funzionario legale il potere di annunciare pubblicamente la presenza del negro sui giornali, avvertendo il suo proprietario di venire a reclamarlo, altrimenti verrà venduto per pagare le spese della prigione. Ma se si tratta di un nero libero che non ha alcun proprietario, si potrebbe naturalmente pensare che sia stato rilasciato. No: viene venduto per compensare il carceriere. Questo è accaduto più e più volte. Il nero non ha alcun mezzo per dimostrare la propria libertà; non dispone di consiglieri, messaggeri o qualsiasi tipo di aiuto; non viene effettuata alcuna indagine sul suo caso. Lui, un uomo libero che forse ha servito per anni e ha pagato con il proprio lavoro per ottenere la libertà, viene gettato in prigione senza alcun processo, senza alcun reato, e poi venduto per pagare le spese della detenzione. Questo sembra incredibile, persino in America, ma è pur sempre la legge.
In casi del genere, l’opinione pubblica viene ascoltata; ne sono esempi quelli riportati sui giornali.
“Un caso legale interessante.”
Un caso interessante è attualmente in corso di giudizio presso la Corte Suprema; esso sorge dalle seguenti circostanze. Un gentiluomo residente nel Maryland aveva concesso, per diversi anni, una sorta di libertà non ufficiale ma effettiva a una coppia di suoi schiavi anziani. Durante questo periodo, loro nacque una figlia che crebbe nella stessa condizione di libertà; in seguito, la ragazza sposò un negro libero e andò ad abitare in Pennsylvania con lui. La coppia ebbe diversi figli e visse senza problemi fino alla morte del proprietario originale; allora il suo erede tentò di riprendere possesso degli schiavi, ma il magistrato a cui fu portata la questione decise che non aveva giurisdizione su quel caso. Il proprietario sequestrò quindi la donna e i suoi figli durante la notte e li portò nel Maryland.
“Denaro per i neri”, “denaro per i neri”, “denaro per i neri”: è il titolo di annunci scritti in grandi lettere lungo le colonne dei giornali affollati. Incisioni xilografiche di un nero fuggitivo, con le mani incatenate, accovacciato sotto un inseguitore con stivali alti che, dopo averlo catturato, lo afferra per la gola, arricchiscono piacevolmente il contenuto di questi annunci. L’articolo di fondo si scaglia contro “quella abominabile e infernale dottrina dell’abolizionismo, che è contraria a ogni legge di Dio e della natura”. La delicata mamma, che sorride approvando queste pagine mentre legge il giornale nella sua fresca piazza, tranquillizza il suo più piccolo figlio, che le si attacca alle gonne, promettendogli “una frusta con cui picchiare quei piccoli neri”. Ma i neri, grandi e piccoli, sono protetti dall’opinione pubblica.
Proviamo a verificare questa opinione pubblica attraverso un altro test, che è importante da tre punti di vista: innanzitutto, per dimostrare quanto siano disperatamente timidi i proprietari di schiavi riguardo alle descrizioni dei fuggiaschi, presentate in giornali ampiamente diffusi; in secondo luogo, per mostrare quanto siano perfettamente soddisfatti gli schiavi stessi e quanto raramente scappino; infine, per evidenziare la loro totale libertà da qualsiasi segno di crudeltà o sofferenza, poiché le loro immagini vengono disegnate non da falsi abolizionisti, ma dai loro stessi padroni onesti e veritieri.
Ecco alcuni esempi di annunci pubblicati sui giornali. Il più vecchio di essi è apparso soltanto quattro anni fa; altri, dello stesso tipo, continuano ad essere pubblicati ogni giorno, in gran numero.
“Fuggita via, la negra Caroline. Indossava un collare con una punta rivolta verso il basso.”
“Fuggita via, una donna nera, Betsy. Aveva una sbarra di ferro sulla gamba destra.”
“Fuggito, il nero Manuel. Molto segnato dalle catene.”
“Fanny la negra è fuggita. Aveva un cerchio di ferro intorno al collo.”
“È scappato via, un ragazzo nero di circa dodici anni. Aveva al collo un collare di catena con inciso ‘De Lampert’.”
“È scappato, quel nero Hown. Ha un anello di ferro al piede sinistro; inoltre, Grise, sua moglie, ha un anello e una catena alla gamba sinistra.”
“È scappato, un ragazzo nero di nome James. Quando se n’è andato, indossava ancora i vestiti stirati.”
“Condannato al carcere, un uomo che si chiama John. Ha un peso di ferro attaccato al piede destro, che pesa circa quattro o cinque libbre.”
‘Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myra. Has several marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet.’
‘Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.’
‘Ran away, a negro man named Henry; his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.’
‘One hundred dollars reward, for a negro fellow, Pompey, 40 years old. He is branded on the left jaw.’
‘Committed to jail, a negro man. Has no toes on the left foot.’
‘Ran away, a negro woman named Rachel. Has lost all her toes except the large one.’
‘Ran away, Sam. He was shot a short time since through the hand, and has several shots in his left arm and side.’
‘Ran away, my negro man Dennis. Said negro has been shot in the left arm between the shoulder and elbow, which has paralysed the left hand.’
‘Ran away, my negro man named Simon. He has been shot badly, in his back and right arm.’
‘Ran away, a negro named Arthur. Has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.’
‘Twenty-five dollars reward for my man Isaac. He has a scar on his forehead, caused by a blow; and one on his back, made by a shot from a pistol.’
‘Ran away, a negro girl called Mary. Has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A is branded on her cheek and forehead.’
‘Ran away, negro Ben. Has a scar on his right hand; his thumb and forefinger being injured by being shot last fall. A part of the bone came out. He has also one or two large scars on his back and hips.’
‘Detained at the jail, a mulatto, named Tom. Has a scar on the right cheek, and appears to have been burned with powder on the face.’
‘Ran away, a negro man named Ned. Three of his fingers are drawn into the palm of his hand by a cut. Has a scar on the back of his neck, nearly half round, done by a knife.’
‘Was committed to jail, a negro man. Says his name is Josiah. His back very much scarred by the whip; and branded on the thigh and hips in three or four places, thus (J M). The rim of his right ear has been bit or cut off.’
‘Fifty dollars reward, for my fellow Edward. He has a scar on the corner of his mouth, two cuts on and under his arm, and the letter E on his arm.’
‘Ran away, negro boy Ellie. Has a scar on one of his arms from the bite of a dog.’
‘Ran away, from the plantation of James Surgette, the following negroes: Randal, has one ear cropped; Bob, has lost one eye; Kentucky Tom, has one jaw broken.’
‘Ran away, Anthony. One of his ears cut off, and his left hand cut with an axe.’
‘Fifty dollars reward for the negro Jim Blake. Has a piece cut out of each ear, and the middle finger of the left hand cut off to the second joint.’
‘Ran away, a negro woman named Maria. Has a scar on one side of her cheek, by a cut. Some scars on her back.’
‘Ran away, the Mulatto wench Mary. Has a cut on the left arm, a scar on the left shoulder, and two upper teeth missing.’
I should say, perhaps, in explanation of this latter piece of description, that among the other blessings which public opinion secures to the negroes, is the common practice of violently punching out their teeth. To make them wear iron collars by day and night, and to worry them with dogs, are practices almost too ordinary to deserve mention.
‘Ran away, my man Fountain. Has holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead, has been shot in the hind part of his legs, and is marked on the back with the whip.’
‘Two hundred and fifty dollars reward for my negro man Jim. He is much marked with shot in his right thigh. The shot entered on the outside, halfway between the hip and knee joints.’
‘Brought to jail, John. Left ear cropt.’
‘Taken up, a negro man. Is very much scarred about the face and body, and has the left ear bit off.’
‘Ran away, a black girl, named Mary. Has a scar on her cheek, and the end of one of her toes cut off.’
‘Ran away, my Mulatto woman, Judy. She has had her right arm broke.’
‘Ran away, my negro man, Levi. His left hand has been burnt, and I think the end of his forefinger is off.’
‘Ran away, a negro man, NAMED WASHINGTON. Has lost a part of his middle finger, and the end of his little finger.’
‘Twenty-five dollars reward for my man John. The tip of his nose is bit off.’
‘Twenty-five dollars reward for the negro slave, Sally. Walks as though crippled in the back.’
‘Ran away, Joe Dennis. Has a small notch in one of his ears.’
‘Ran away, negro boy, Jack. Has a small crop out of his left ear.’
‘Ran away, a negro man, named Ivory. Has a small piece cut out of the top of each ear.’
While upon the subject of ears, I may observe that a distinguished abolitionist in New York once received a negro’s ear, which had been cut off close to the head, in a general post letter. It was forwarded by the free and independent gentleman who had caused it to be amputated, with a polite request that he would place the specimen in his ‘collection.’
I could enlarge this catalogue with broken arms, and broken legs, and gashed flesh, and missing teeth, and lacerated backs, and bites of dogs, and brands of red-hot irons innumerable: but as my readers will be sufficiently sickened and repelled already, I will turn to another branch of the subject.
These advertisements, of which a similar collection might be made for every year, and month, and week, and day; and which are coolly read in families as things of course, and as a part of the current news and small-talk; will serve to show how very much the slaves profit by public opinion, and how tender it is in their behalf. But it may be worth while to inquire how the slave-owners, and the class of society to which great numbers of them belong, defer to public opinion in their conduct, not to their slaves but to each other; how they are accustomed to restrain their passions; what their bearing is among themselves; whether they are fierce or gentle; whether their social customs be brutal, sanguinary, and violent, or bear the impress of civilisation and refinement.
“Trattenuta nella prigione di polizia, la donna nera Myra presenta diverse tracce di percosse e ha le caviglie legate con ferri.”
“Se n’è andata via, con una donna di colore e due bambini. Qualche giorno prima che partisse, le ho bruciato il lato sinistro del viso con un ferro caldo. Ho cercato di formare la lettera ‘M’.”
“È scappato: si chiama Henry, è un uomo di colore; gli manca l’occhio sinistro, ha delle cicatrici causate da un pugnale sul braccio sinistro e sotto di esso, inoltre è pieno di cicatrici lasciate dal frustino.”
“Cento dollari di ricompensa per un uomo di colore, Pompey, di 40 anni. Ha il marchio sulla mandibola sinistra.”
“Condannato al carcere: un uomo di colore che non ha le dita dei piedi sinistri.”
“Fuggita: una donna nera di nome Rachel. Le sono rimasti solo il dito grande dei piedi.”
“È scappato, Sam. È stato colpito poco tempo fa al braccio destro e ha diverse ferite anche al braccio sinistro e sul fianco.”
“È scappato, il mio uomo nero Dennis. Ha detto che gli hanno sparato al braccio sinistro, tra la spalla e il gomito, il che lo ha paralizzato completamente.”
“È scappato, il mio uomo nero di nome Simon. È stato gravemente ferito: alla schiena e al braccio destro.”
“È scappato, un nero di nome Arthur. Ha una cicatrice considerevole sul petto e su entrambe le braccia, causata da un coltello; ama parlare molto della bontà di Dio.”
“Venticinque dollari di ricompensa per il mio uomo Isaac. Ha una cicatrice sulla fronte, causata da un colpo; e un’altra sulla schiena, provocata da un proiettile sparato con una >pistola.”
“È scappata via, una ragazza nera di nome Mary. Ha una piccola cicatrice sopra l’occhio, molti denti mancanti; sulla guancia e sulla fronte le è stato marchiato la lettera ‘A’.”
“È scappato, il nero Ben. Ha una cicatrice sulla mano destra; il pollice e l’indice sono stati feriti da un colpo di arma da fuoco lo scorso autunno; parte dell’osso è uscita. Ha anche una o due grandi cicatrici sulla schiena e sulle cosce.”
“Trattenuto in prigione, un mulatto di nome Tom. Ha una cicatrice sulla guancia destra e sembra essere stato bruciato con della polvere sul viso.”
“È scappato: si chiama Ned ed è un uomo di colore. Tre dei suoi dita sono uniti alla palma della mano a causa di una ferita. Ha anche una cicatrice sul retro del collo, quasi semicircolare, causata da un coltello.”
“È stato messo in prigione: un uomo di colore. Si chiama Josiah. La sua schiena è molto segnata dalle frustate; sulle cosce e sui fianchi ci sono marchi incisi in tre o quattro punti, così (J M). Il bordo del suo orecchio destro è stato morso o tagliato via.”
“Cinquanta dollari di ricompensa per il mio compagno Edward. Ha una cicatrice all’angolo della bocca, due tagli sopra e sotto il braccio, e la lettera ‘E’ sul braccio.”
“È scappato via, il ragazzo nero Ellie. Ha una cicatrice su un braccio causata dal morso di un cane.”
“Sono fuggiti dalla piantagione di James Surgette i seguenti neri: Randal, che ha un orecchio mozzato; Bob, che ha perso un occhio; Kentucky Tom, che ha una mascella rotta.”
“È scappato, Anthony. Gli hanno tagliato un orecchio e gli hanno ferito la mano sinistra con un’ascia.”
“Cinquanta dollari di ricompensa per il nero Jim Blake. Gli sono stati tagliati un pezzo da ognuna delle orecchie e il dito medio della mano sinistra fino al secondo giunto.”
“È scappata con una donna nera di nome Maria. Ha una cicatrice su un lato della guancia, causata da un taglio; ha anche alcune cicatrici sulla schiena.”
“È scappata, quella donna mulatta Mary. Ha un taglio sul braccio sinistro, una cicatrice sulla spalla sinistra e due denti superiori mancanti.”
Forse dovrei spiegare questo ultimo aspetto della descrizione dicendo che, tra le altre “benedizioni” che l’opinione pubblica garantisce ai neri, c’è la pratica comune di romper loro violentemente i denti. Farli indossare collari di ferro sia di giorno che di notte, e tormentarli con i >cani, sono pratiche così ordinarie da non meritare nemmeno menzione.
“È scappato, il mio uomo Fountain. Ha buchi alle orecchie, una cicatrice sul lato destro della fronte, è stato colpito alla parte posteriore delle gambe e ha dei segni lasciati dal frustino sulla schiena.”
“Duecentocinquanta dollari di ricompensa per il mio uomo nero Jim. Ha diverse ferite da colpi d’arma da fuoco sulla coscia destra; i proiettili sono entrati dall’esterno, a metà strada tra l’anca e il ginocchio.”
“Portato in prigione, John. L’orecchio sinistro gli è stato mozzato.”
“Catturato, un uomo di colore. Ha molte ferite sul viso e sul corpo, e gli è stata mozzata l’orecchio sinistra.”
“È scappata, una ragazza nera di nome Mary. Ha una cicatrice sulla guancia e la punta di uno dei suoi piedi è stata tagliata via.”
“È scappata, la mia donna mulatta, Judy. Le hanno rotto il braccio destro.”
“È scappato, il mio uomo nero, Levi. Gli hanno bruciato la mano sinistra, e penso che l’estremità del suo dito mignolo sia stata distrutta.”
“È scappato: si tratta di un uomo nero di nome Washington. Gli è stata persa una parte del dito medio e la punta del mignolo.”
“Venticinque dollari di ricompensa per il mio uomo John. Gli è stato tagliato un pezzo del naso.”
“Venticinque dollari di ricompensa per la schiava nera Sally. Cammina come se avesse le gambe paralizzate.”
“È scappato, Joe Dennis. Ha un piccolo taglio in uno degli orecchi.”
“È scappato via, ragazzo nero. Jack. Gli manca un pezzetto dall’orecchio sinistro.”
“È scappato, un uomo di colore di nome Ivory. Ha un piccolo taglio sulla parte superiore di entrambe le orecchie.”
Parlando di orecchie, posso ricordare che un noto abolizionista di New York ricevette una volta, in una lettera postale ordinaria, un’orecchia nera tagliata vicino alla testa. La ricevette da quel gentiluomo libero e indipendente che ne aveva ordinato l’amputazione, accompagnandola con una cortese richiesta affinché la inserisse nella sua “collezione”.
Potrei ampliare questo catalogo con braccia rotte, gambe spezzate, carne lacerata, denti mancanti, schiene ferite e morsi di >cani, oltre a innumerevoli segni lasciati da ferri arroventati. Ma poiché i miei lettori saranno sicuramente già sufficientemente disgustati e repelliti da tutto ciò, passerò a un altro argomento.
Questi annunci, di cui si potrebbe compilare una raccolta simile per ogni anno, mese, settimana e giorno; e che vengono letti con indifferenza dalle famiglie come qualcosa di ovvio, come parte delle notizie attuali e dei pettegolezzi quotidiani; dimostrano quanto i proprietari di schiavi traggano vantaggio dall’opinione pubblica e quanto questa sia favorevole nei loro confronti. Tuttavia, potrebbe essere interessante indagare su come i proprietari di schiavi, e la classe sociale a cui appartengono in gran numero, tengano conto dell’opinione pubblica nel proprio comportamento, non verso i propri schiavi ma tra di loro; come siano abituati a reprimere le proprie passioni; quale sia il loro atteggiamento reciproco; se siano persone feroci o gentili; e se le loro usanze sociali siano brutali, sanguinarie e violente, oppure riflettano i valori della civiltà e della raffinatezza.
That we may have no partial evidence from abolitionists in this inquiry, either, I will once more turn to their own newspapers, and I will confine myself, this time, to a selection from paragraphs which appeared from day to day, during my visit to America, and which refer to occurrences happening while I was there. The italics in these extracts, as in the foregoing, are my own.
These cases did not ALL occur, it will be seen, in territory actually belonging to legalised Slave States, though most, and those the very worst among them did, as their counterparts constantly do; but the position of the scenes of action in reference to places immediately at hand, where slavery is the law; and the strong resemblance between that class of outrages and the rest; lead to the just presumption that the character of the parties concerned was formed in slave districts, and brutalised by slave customs.
‘Horrible Tragedy.
‘By a slip from The Southport Telegraph, Wisconsin, we learn that the Hon. Charles C. P. Arndt, Member of the Council for Brown county, was shot dead on the floor of the Council chamber, by James R. Vinyard, Member from Grant county. The affair grew out of a nomination for Sheriff of Grant county. Mr. E. S. Baker was nominated and supported by Mr. Arndt. This nomination was opposed by Vinyard, who wanted the appointment to vest in his own brother. In the course of debate, the deceased made some statements which Vinyard pronounced false, and made use of violent and insulting language, dealing largely in personalities, to which Mr. A. made no reply. After the adjournment, Mr. A. stepped up to Vinyard, and requested him to retract, which he refused to do, repeating the offensive words. Mr. Arndt then made a blow at Vinyard, who stepped back a pace, drew a pistol, and shot him dead.
‘The issue appears to have been provoked on the part of Vinyard, who was determined at all hazards to defeat the appointment of Baker, and who, himself defeated, turned his ire and revenge upon the unfortunate Arndt.’
‘The Wisconsin Tragedy.
Public indignation runs high in the territory of Wisconsin, in relation to the murder of C. C. P. Arndt, in the Legislative Hall of the Territory. Meetings have been held in different counties of Wisconsin, denouncing the practice of secretly bearing arms in the Legislative chambers of the country. We have seen the account of the expulsion of James R. Vinyard, the perpetrator of the bloody deed, and are amazed to hear, that, after this expulsion by those who saw Vinyard kill Mr. Arndt in the presence of his aged father, who was on a visit to see his son, little dreaming that he was to witness his murder, Judge Dunn has discharged Vinyard on bail. The Miners’ Free Press speaks in terms of merited rebuke at the outrage upon the feelings of the people of Wisconsin. Vinyard was within arm’s length of Mr. Arndt, when he took such deadly aim at him, that he never spoke. Vinyard might at pleasure, being so near, have only wounded him, but he chose to kill him.’
‘Murder.
By a letter in a St. Louis paper of the ‘4th, we notice a terrible outrage at Burlington, Iowa. A Mr. Bridgman having had a difficulty with a citizen of the place, Mr. Ross; a brother-in-law of the latter provided himself with one of Colt’s revolving pistols, met Mr. B. in the street, and discharged the contents of five of the barrels at him: each shot taking effect. Mr. B., though horribly wounded, and dying, returned the fire, and killed Ross on the spot.’
‘Terrible Death of Robert Potter.
‘From the “Caddo Gazette,” of the 12th inst., we learn the frightful death of Colonel Robert Potter… . He was beset in his house by an enemy, named Rose. He sprang from his couch, seized his gun, and, in his night-clothes, rushed from the house. For about two hundred yards his speed seemed to defy his pursuers; but, getting entangled in a thicket, he was captured. Rose told him that he intended to act a generous part, and give him a chance for his life. He then told Potter he might run, and he should not be interrupted till he reached a certain distance. Potter started at the word of command, and before a gun was fired he had reached the lake. His first impulse was to jump in the water and dive for it, which he did. Rose was close behind him, and formed his men on the bank ready to shoot him as he rose. In a few seconds he came up to breathe; and scarce had his head reached the surface of the water when it was completely riddled with the shot of their guns, and he sunk, to rise no more!’
‘Murder in Arkansas.
‘We understand that a severe rencontre came off a few days since in the Seneca Nation, between Mr. Loose, the sub-agent of the mixed band of the Senecas, Quapaw, and Shawnees, and Mr. James Gillespie, of the mercantile firm of Thomas G. Allison and Co., of Maysville, Benton, County Ark, in which the latter was slain with a bowie-knife. Some difficulty had for some time existed between the parties. It is said that Major Gillespie brought on the attack with a cane. A severe conflict ensued, during which two pistols were fired by Gillespie and one by Loose. Loose then stabbed Gillespie with one of those never-failing weapons, a bowie-knife. The death of Major G. is much regretted, as he was a liberal-minded and energetic man. Since the above was in type, we have learned that Major Allison has stated to some of our citizens in town that Mr. Loose gave the first blow. We forbear to give any particulars, as the matter will be the subject of judicial investigation.’
Affinché in questa indagine non abbiamo prove parziali provenienti dagli abolizionisti, mi rivolgerò ancora una volta ai loro stessi giornali e mi limiterò, questa volta, a selezionare passaggi apparsi giorno dopo giorno durante la mia visita in America e che riguardano eventi avvenuti mentre ero lì. Gli caratteri in grassetto in questi estratti, come nei precedenti, sono stati aggiunti da me.
Questi casi non si sono verificati tutti nei territori che appartengono effettivamente agli Stati schiavisti legalizzati; tuttavia la maggior parte di essi, e soprattutto i peggiori tra questi, si sono realmente svolti lì, proprio come avviene costantemente nelle regioni dove la schiavitù è legge. Inoltre, la posizione dei luoghi in cui si sono verificati questi atti, in relazione a zone immediatamente vicine dove la schiavitù è ancora in vigore, e la forte somiglianza tra questo tipo di crimini e gli altri, portano alla legittima ipotesi che il carattere delle persone coinvolte sia stato plasmato nelle aree schiaviste e abituato alle pratiche brutali tipiche di quella società.
“Tragedia orribile.”
Secondo un errore di stampa del The Southport Telegraph del Wisconsin, si apprende che l’onorevole Charles C. P. Arndt, membro del consiglio della contea di Brown, è stato ucciso sul pavimento dell’aula del consiglio da James R. Vinyard, membro della contea di Grant. L’incidente è scaturito da una candidatura a sceriffo della contea di Grant: il signor E. S. Baker era stato nominato e sostenuto dal signor Arndt, ma questa candidatura è stata ostacolata da Vinyard, che desiderava che l’incarico fosse assegnato a suo fratello. Durante le discussioni, il defunto ha fatto alcune dichiarazioni che Vinyard ha definito false, utilizzando un linguaggio violento e offensivo; il signor Arndt non ha replicato. Dopo la sospensione della seduta, si è avvicinato a Vinyard chiedendogli di ritrattare le sue affermazioni, ma quest’ultimo si è rifiutato, ripetendo le parole offensive. A quel punto il signor Arndt ha colpito Vinyard, che si è allontanato di un passo, ha estratto una pistola e lo ha ucciso.
Il problema sembra essere stato provocato da Vinyard, il quale era determinato a tutto per impedire l’insediamento di Baker; essendo stato lui stesso sconfitto, ha rivolto la sua rabbia e la sua vendetta contro l’infortunato Arndt.
“La tragedia del Wisconsin”.
L’indignazione pubblica è molto alta nel territorio del Wisconsin riguardo all’omicidio di C. C. P. Arndt, avvenuto nell’Aula Legislativa del territorio. Sono state tenute riunioni in diversi distretti del Wisconsin per denunciare “la pratica di portare armi segretamente nelle aule legislative del paese”. Abbiamo appreso della cacciata di James R. Vinyard, l’autore dell’atto criminoso, e siamo stupiti nel sentire che, dopo questa espulsione da parte delle persone che hanno visto Vinyard uccidere il signor Arndt davanti al padre anziano di quest’ultimo – che era venuto a trovare suo figlio senza sospettare di assistere al suo omicidio – il giudice Dunn abbia rilasciato Vinyard su cauzione. Il “Miners’ Free Press” esprime “un rimprovero meritato” per questa offesa ai sentimenti del popolo del Wisconsin. Vinyard si trovava a distanza ravvicinata dal signor Arndt quando ha preso la mira così letale da non lasciargli nemmeno il tempo di parlare; avrebbe potuto facilmente ferirlo, ma ha scelto di ucciderlo.
“Omicidio.”
Attraverso una lettera pubblicata il 4 in un giornale di St. Louis, veniamo a conoscenza di un terribile atto di violenza avvenuto a Burlington, nell’Iowa. Un certo signor Bridgman aveva avuto un dissidio con un cittadino del luogo, il signor Ross; un cognato di quest’ultimo si procurò una pistola a tamburo rotante della marca Colt e, incontrando il signor Bridgman in strada, sparò cinque colpi contro di lui, tutti andati a segno. Il signor Bridgman, sebbene gravemente ferito e sull’orlo della morte, riuscì a contraccambiare il fuoco e uccise Ross sul posto.
“La terribile morte di Robert Potter”.
Dalla “Caddo Gazette”, del 12° giorno, apprendiamo della terribile morte del colonnello Robert Potter. Fu assalito nella sua casa da un nemico di nome Rose. Si alzò di scatto dal divano, afferrò la pistola e, in abiti da notte, fuggì dalla casa. Per circa duecento metri sembrò sfidare i suoi inseguitori; ma, impigliandosi in un cespuglio, fu catturato. Rose gli disse che intendeva comportarsi generosamente e dargli una possibilità di salvezza. Gli promise quindi che avrebbe potuto fuggire senza essere interrotto fino a quando non avesse raggiunto una certa distanza. Potter obbedì all’istante; prima ancora che qualcuno sparasse, era già arrivato al lago. Il suo primo impulso fu tuffarsi nell’acqua; Rose lo seguiva da vicino e fece schierare i suoi uomini sulla riva pronti a sparargli non appena fosse riemerso. In pochi secondi riemerse per respirare. Ma appena la sua testa emerse dalla superficie dell’acqua, fu immediatamente colpito da numerosi proiettili e affondò, senza mai più risalire in superficie.
“Omicidio in Arkansas”.
‘Si è verificato un grave scontro alcuni giorni fa nella Nazione Seneca, tra il signor Loose, subagente del gruppo misto di Senecas, Quapaw e Shawnees, e il signor James Gillespie, dell’azienda commerciale Thomas G. Allison and Co. di Maysville, contea di Benton, Arkansas. Nel corso dello scontro il signor Gillespie fu ucciso con un coltello da caccia. In precedenza esistevano già alcuni dissidi tra le due parti; si dice che il maggiore Gillespie abbia scatenato l’attacco utilizzando un bastone. Ne seguì un violento conflitto: Gillespie sparò due volte con la pistola, mentre Loose una volta. Successivamente Loose pugnalò Gillespie con quel tipo di arma sempre efficace, il coltello da caccia. La morte del maggiore G. è molto rimpianta, poiché era una persona dal carattere aperto e energico. Poiché l’informazione ci è stata fornita per iscritto, abbiamo appreso che il maggiore Allison ha dichiarato ad alcuni dei nostri cittadini che fu il signor Loose a sferrare il primo attacco. Ci asteniamo dal fornire ulteriori dettagli, poiché la questione è oggetto di indagini giudiziarie.’
‘Foul Deed.
The steamer Thames, just from Missouri river, brought us a handbill, offering a reward of 500 dollars, for the person who assassinated Lilburn W. Baggs, late Governor of this State, at Independence, on the night of the 6th inst. Governor Baggs, it is stated in a written memorandum, was not dead, but mortally wounded.
‘Since the above was written, we received a note from the clerk of the Thames, giving the following particulars. Gov. Baggs was shot by some villain on Friday, 6th inst., in the evening, while sitting in a room in his own house in Independence. His son, a boy, hearing a report, ran into the room, and found the Governor sitting in his chair, with his jaw fallen down, and his head leaning back; on discovering the injury done to his father, he gave the alarm. Foot tracks were found in the garden below the window, and a pistol picked up supposed to have been overloaded, and thrown from the hand of the scoundrel who fired it. Three buck shots of a heavy load, took effect; one going through his mouth, one into the brain, and another probably in or near the brain; all going into the back part of the neck and head. The Governor was still alive on the morning of the 7th; but no hopes for his recovery by his friends, and but slight hopes from his physicians.
‘A man was suspected, and the Sheriff most probably has possession of him by this time.
‘The pistol was one of a pair stolen some days previous from a baker in Independence, and the legal authorities have the description of the other.’
‘Rencontre.
‘An unfortunate affair took place on Friday evening in Chatres Street, in which one of our most respectable citizens received a dangerous wound, from a poignard, in the abdomen. From the Bee (New Orleans) of yesterday, we learn the following particulars. It appears that an article was published in the French side of the paper on Monday last, containing some strictures on the Artillery Battalion for firing their guns on Sunday morning, in answer to those from the Ontario and Woodbury, and thereby much alarm was caused to the families of those persons who were out all night preserving the peace of the city. Major C. Gally, Commander of the battalion, resenting this, called at the office and demanded the author’s name; that of Mr. P. Arpin was given to him, who was absent at the time. Some angry words then passed with one of the proprietors, and a challenge followed; the friends of both parties tried to arrange the affair, but failed to do so. On Friday evening, about seven o’clock, Major Gally met Mr. P. Arpin in Chatres Street, and accosted him. “Are you Mr. Arpin?”
‘“Yes, sir.”
‘“Then I have to tell you that you are a—” (applying an appropriate epithet).
‘“I shall remind you of your words, sir.”
‘“But I have said I would break my cane on your shoulders.”
‘“I know it, but I have not yet received the blow.”
‘At these words, Major Gally, having a cane in his hands, struck Mr. Arpin across the face, and the latter drew a poignard from his pocket and stabbed Major Gally in the abdomen.
‘Fears are entertained that the wound will be mortal. We understand that Mr. Arpin has given security for his appearance at the Criminal Court to answer the charge.’
‘Affray in Mississippi.
‘On the 27th ult., in an affray near Carthage, Leake county, Mississippi, between James Cottingham and John Wilburn, the latter was shot by the former, and so horribly wounded, that there was no hope of his recovery. On the 2nd instant, there was an affray at Carthage between A. C. Sharkey and George Goff, in which the latter was shot, and thought mortally wounded. Sharkey delivered himself up to the authorities, but changed his mind and escaped!’
‘Personal Encounter.
‘An encounter took place in Sparta, a few days since, between the barkeeper of an hotel, and a man named Bury. It appears that Bury had become somewhat noisy, and that the barkeeper, determined to preserve order, had threatened to shoot Bury, whereupon Bury drew a pistol and shot the barkeeper down. He was not dead at the last accounts, but slight hopes were entertained of his recovery.’
‘Duel.
‘The clerk of the steamboat Tribune informs us that another duel was fought on Tuesday last, by Mr. Robbins, a bank officer in Vicksburg, and Mr. Fall, the editor of the Vicksburg Sentinel. According to the arrangement, the parties had six pistols each, which, after the word “Fire!” they were to discharge as fast as they pleased. Fall fired two pistols without effect. Mr. Robbins’ first shot took effect in Fall’s thigh, who fell, and was unable to continue the combat.’
‘Affray in Clarke County.
‘An unfortunate affray occurred in Clarke county (MO.), near Waterloo, on Tuesday the 19th ult., which originated in settling the partnership concerns of Messrs. M‘Kane and M‘Allister, who had been engaged in the business of distilling, and resulted in the death of the latter, who was shot down by Mr. M‘Kane, because of his attempting to take possession of seven barrels of whiskey, the property of M‘Kane, which had been knocked off to M‘Allister at a sheriff’s sale at one dollar per barrel. M‘Kane immediately fled and at the latest dates had not been taken.
‘This unfortunate affray caused considerable excitement in the neighbourhood, as both the parties were men with large families depending upon them and stood well in the community.’
“Un atto spregevole.”
La nave a vapore Thames, appena arrivata dal fiume Missouri, ci portò un volantino che offriva una ricompensa di 500 dollari a chi avesse assassinato Lilburn W. Baggs, ex governatore di questo Stato, a Independence, la notte del 6 di questo mese. Secondo un memorandum scritto, il governatore Baggs non era morto, ma gravemente ferito.
Dall’epoca in cui è stato scritto quanto sopra, abbiamo ricevuto una nota dal segretario del Thames che fornisce i seguenti dettagli: il governatore Baggs fu ucciso da qualche scellerato venerdì 6 di questa settimana, alla sera, mentre si trovava in una stanza della sua stessa casa a Independence. Suo figlio, un ragazzo, sentendo il rumore, corse nella stanza e trovò il governatore seduto sulla sedia, con la mascella abbassata e la testa reclinata all’indietro; scoperto l’incidente, chiamò immediatamente aiuto. Nel giardino sotto la finestra furono trovate tracce di passi, e fu raccolta una pistola che si ritiene fosse stata caricata in modo eccessivo e gettata dal colpevole. Tre proiettili pesanti lo colpirono: uno gli attraversò la bocca, un altro entrò nel cervello e un terzo probabilmente raggiunse anch’esso il cervello; tutti andarono nella parte posteriore del collo e della testa. Il governatore era ancora vivo la mattina del 7; tuttavia, né i suoi amici né i medici nutrivano grandi speranze per la sua guarigione.
Un uomo è sospettato di essere il colpevole, e molto probabilmente il Capitano della Polizia lo ha già in custodia a quest’ora.
‘La >pistola faceva parte di una coppia rubata alcuni giorni prima a un panettiere di Independence; le autorità legali dispongono anche della descrizione dell’altra pistola.’
“Incontro”.
“Un sfortunato incidente è avvenuto venerdì sera in Chatres Street: uno dei nostri cittadini più rispettabili ha riportato una grave ferita causata da un pugnale all’addome. Dal giornale ‘The Bee’ di New Orleans apprendiamo i seguenti dettagli. A quanto pare, lunedì scorso era stato pubblicato un articolo sul lato francese del giornale che conteneva critiche severe nei confronti del Battaglione d’Artiglieria per aver sparato le loro armi domenica mattina, in risposta alle accuse provenienti da Ontario e Woodbury; questo ha causato grande allarme nelle famiglie di coloro che avevano trascorso l’intera notte a mantenere la pace nella città. Il maggiore C. Gally, comandante del battaglione, offeso da queste critiche, si recò negli uffici del giornale per chiedere il nome dell’autore dell’articolo; gli fu fornito quello di Mr. P. Arpin, che in quel momento non era presente. Successivamente scambiarono alcune parole aggressive e ne seguì una sfida; gli amici di entrambe le parti tentarono di mediare, ma senza successo. Venerdì sera, verso le sette, il maggiore Gally incontrò nuovamente Mr. P. Arpin in Chatres Street e gli si avvicinò. ‘Lei è davvero Mr. Arpin?’”
“Sì, signore.”
“Allora devo dirvi che siete un, ” (utilizzando l’appellativo appropriato).
“Vi ricorderò le vostre parole, signore.”
“Ma ho detto che avrei spezzato il mio bastone sulle tue spalle.”
“Lo so, ma non ho ancora ricevuto il colpo.”
A queste parole, il Maggiore Gally, che aveva un bastone in mano, colpì il signor Arpin in faccia; quest’ultimo, quindi, estrasse un pugnale dalla tasca e pugnalò il Maggiore Gally all’addome.
Si teme che la ferita possa rivelarsi mortale. Comprendiamo che il signor Arpin abbia fornito garanzie per presentarsi in tribunale penale per rispondere all’accusa.
“Rissa nel Mississippi”.
Il 27 dello scorso mese, durante una rissa vicino a Carthage, nella contea di Leake, Mississippi, tra James Cottingham e John Wilburn, quest’ultimo fu colpito da un proiettile sparato dal primo e rimase gravemente ferito al punto che non vi era alcuna >speranza di guarigione. Il 2 dello stesso mese ebbe luogo un’altra rissa a Carthage tra A. C. Sharkey e George Goff; in quell’occasione George Goff fu colpito da un proiettile ed era considerato mortalmente ferito. Sharkey si consegnò alle autorità, ma poi cambiò idea e fuggì!
‘Incontro Personale.’
Qualche giorno fa, a Sparta, ebbe luogo un incontro tra il barista di un hotel e un uomo di nome Bury. Sembra che Bury avesse iniziato ad essere piuttosto rumoroso; il barista, deciso a mantenere l’ordine, aveva minacciato di sparargli. A quel punto Bury estrasse una pistola e uccise il barista. Secondo le ultime notizie, non è morto, ma ci sono ancora piccole speranze che possa riprendersi.
“Duello”.
Il commesso della nave a vapore Tribune ci informa che martedì scorso si è svolto un altro duello tra il signor Robbins, funzionario di banca a Vicksburg, e il signor Fall, redattore del Vicksburg Sentinel. Secondo gli accordi presi, entrambi i contendenti disponevano di sei pistole ciascuno; al segnale “Fuoco!”, avrebbero dovuto sparare il più velocemente possibile. Fall sparò due colpi senza successo; il primo proiettile di Robbins colpì la coscia di Fall, che cadde a terra e non fu in grado di continuare il combattimento.
“Rissa nella contea di Clarke”.
“Un infelice scontro è avvenuto nella contea di Clarke (MO.), vicino a Waterloo, martedì 19 dello scorso mese. L’incidente è scaturito dalla necessità di risolvere questioni legate alla partnership tra i signori M‘Kane e M‘Allister, che si occupavano della produzione di whisky. Alla fine, il signor M‘Allister è morto: è stato ucciso dal signor M‘Kane perché aveva tentato di impossessarsi di sette barili di whisky appartenenti a M‘Kane, che erano stati venduti a M‘Allister in un’asta pubblica per un dollaro al barile. M‘Kane è fuggito immediatamente e, fino ad oggi, non è stato ancora catturato.”
“Questo sfortunato incidente causò notevole agitazione nel quartiere, poiché entrambe le parti erano uomini con numerose famiglie che dipendevano da loro e godevano di una buona reputazione nella comunità.”
I will quote but one more paragraph, which, by reason of its monstrous absurdity, may be a relief to these atrocious deeds.
‘Affair of Honour.
‘We have just heard the particulars of a meeting which took place on Six Mile Island, on Tuesday, between two young bloods of our city: Samuel Thurston, aged fifteen, and William Hine, aged thirteen years. They were attended by young gentlemen of the same age. The weapons used on the occasion, were a couple of Dickson’s best rifles; the distance, thirty yards. They took one fire, without any damage being sustained by either party, except the ball of Thurston’s gun passing through the crown of Hine’s hat. Through the intercession of the Board of Honour, the challenge was withdrawn, and the difference amicably adjusted.’
If the reader will picture to himself the kind of Board of Honour which amicably adjusted the difference between these two little boys, who in any other part of the world would have been amicably adjusted on two porters’ backs and soundly flogged with birchen rods, he will be possessed, no doubt, with as strong a sense of its ludicrous character, as that which sets me laughing whenever its image rises up before me.
Now, I appeal to every human mind, imbued with the commonest of common sense, and the commonest of common humanity; to all dispassionate, reasoning creatures, of any shade of opinion; and ask, with these revolting evidences of the state of society which exists in and about the slave districts of America before them, can they have a doubt of the real condition of the slave, or can they for a moment make a compromise between the institution or any of its flagrant, fearful features, and their own just consciences? Will they say of any tale of cruelty and horror, however aggravated in degree, that it is improbable, when they can turn to the public prints, and, running, read such signs as these, laid before them by the men who rule the slaves: in their own acts and under their own hands?
Do we not know that the worst deformity and ugliness of slavery are at once the cause and the effect of the reckless license taken by these freeborn outlaws? Do we not know that the man who has been born and bred among its wrongs; who has seen in his childhood husbands obliged at the word of command to flog their wives; women, indecently compelled to hold up their own garments that men might lay the heavier stripes upon their legs, driven and harried by brutal overseers in their time of travail, and becoming mothers on the field of toil, under the very lash itself; who has read in youth, and seen his virgin sisters read, descriptions of runaway men and women, and their disfigured persons, which could not be published elsewhere, of so much stock upon a farm, or at a show of beasts:—do we not know that that man, whenever his wrath is kindled up, will be a brutal savage? Do we not know that as he is a coward in his domestic life, stalking among his shrinking men and women slaves armed with his heavy whip, so he will be a coward out of doors, and carrying cowards’ weapons hidden in his breast, will shoot men down and stab them when he quarrels? And if our reason did not teach us this and much beyond; if we were such idiots as to close our eyes to that fine mode of training which rears up such men; should we not know that they who among their equals stab and pistol in the legislative halls, and in the counting-house, and on the marketplace, and in all the elsewhere peaceful pursuits of life, must be to their dependants, even though they were free servants, so many merciless and unrelenting tyrants?
What! shall we declaim against the ignorant peasantry of Ireland, and mince the matter when these American taskmasters are in question? Shall we cry shame on the brutality of those who hamstring cattle: and spare the lights of Freedom upon earth who notch the ears of men and women, cut pleasant posies in the shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face, rack their poetic fancies for liveries of mutilation which their slaves shall wear for life and carry to the grave, breaking living limbs as did the soldiery who mocked and slew the Saviour of the world, and set defenceless creatures up for targets! Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practised on each other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of Christian men! Shall we, so long as these things last, exult above the scattered remnants of that race, and triumph in the white enjoyment of their possessions? Rather, for me, restore the forest and the Indian village; in lieu of stars and stripes, let some poor feather flutter in the breeze; replace the streets and squares by wigwams; and though the death-song of a hundred haughty warriors fill the air, it will be music to the shriek of one unhappy slave.
On one theme, which is commonly before our eyes, and in respect of which our national character is changing fast, let the plain Truth be spoken, and let us not, like dastards, beat about the bush by hinting at the Spaniard and the fierce Italian. When knives are drawn by Englishmen in conflict let it be said and known: ‘We owe this change to Republican Slavery. These are the weapons of Freedom. With sharp points and edges such as these, Liberty in America hews and hacks her slaves; or, failing that pursuit, her sons devote them to a better use, and turn them on each other.’
Citerò un altro paragrafo soltanto; per via della sua assurda mostruosità, potrebbe rappresentare una sorta di sollievo rispetto a queste atroci azioni.
“Una questione d’onore.”
Abbiamo appena ascoltato i dettagli di un incontro avvenuto martedì sull’Isola di Six Mile tra due giovani della nostra >città: Samuel Thurston, di quindici anni, e William Hine, di tredici anni. Erano accompagnati da altri giovani della stessa età. Le armi utilizzate nell’occasione erano un paio dei migliori fucili prodotti da Dickson; la distanza tra i due contendenti era di trenta metri. Si scambiarono un solo colpo, senza che nessuna delle due parti riportasse danni, ad eccezione del proiettile sparato da Thurston che passò attraverso il cappello di Hine. Grazie all’intervento del Consiglio d’Onore, la sfida fu ritirata e la questione venne risolta in modo amichevole.
Se il lettore si immagina quel tipo di “Consiglio d’Onore” che risolse amichevolmente la disputa tra questi due bambini, i quali in qualsiasi altro luogo del mondo sarebbero stati risolti con una bella battuta e qualche frustata, allora non avrà alcun dubbio riguardo al carattere assurdo di tale comportamento. Proprio come me, che scoppio a ridere ogni volta che ne penso.
Ora, mi rivolgo a ogni mente umana, imbevuta del più elementare buon senso e della più basilare umanità; a tutte le creature razionali e disinteressate, di qualsiasi orientamento politico; e chiedo: di fronte a queste evidenze schiette dello stato sociale che regna nelle zone dove si praticano la schiavitù in America, possono ancora avere il minimo dubbio sulla vera condizione degli schiavi, o possono anche solo per un momento cercare di trovare un compromesso tra questa istituzione e le sue caratteristiche più flagranti e orribili, e la loro stessa coscienza giusta? Diranno forse che qualsiasi racconto di crudeltà e orrore, per quanto grave possa essere, è improbabile, quando possono consultare i giornali pubblici e leggere testimonianze dirette da parte delle persone che governano gli schiavi, nelle loro stesse azioni e con le loro stesse mani?
Non sappiamo forse che la peggiore deformità e bruttezza della schiavitù sono al contempo causa ed effetto della licenza sfrenata di questi fuorilegge nati liberi? Non sappiamo forse che l’uomo che è cresciuto in mezzo ai mali della schiavitù; che ha visto nella sua infanzia mariti costretti, con un semplice comando, a frustare le loro mogli; donne costrette in modo indecente ad alzare i propri vestiti affinché gli uomini potessero infliggere loro colpi ancora più violenti; che è stato spinto e perseguitato da crudeli sorveglianti durante il suo lavoro, e che è diventato madre sul campo di fatica, sotto lo stesso flagello; che ha letto, in giovane età, descrizioni di uomini e donne fuggiti dalla schiavitù, e delle loro persone deformate – descrizioni che non potrebbero mai essere pubblicate altrove, ma che sono così comuni nelle piantagioni o nei spettacoli di animali – non sappiamo forse che un tale uomo, quando la sua rabbia si accende, diventa un selvaggio crudele? Non sappiamo forse che, proprio perché è codardo nella vita domestica, aggirandosi tra i suoi schiavi tremanti armato del suo pesante frustino, sarà anche codardo all’esterno, portando con sé armi nascoste nel petto, e ucciderà e pugnalerà le persone quando litiga? E se la nostra ragione non ci insegnasse tutto questo, e molto di più; se fossimo così stupidi da chiudere gli occhi su questo “metodo di addestramento” che produce uomini del genere. Non dovremmo forse sapere che coloro che, tra i loro simili, pugnalano e sparano nelle aule legislative, nei luoghi di lavoro, nei mercati, e in tutte le altre attività pacifiche della vita, devono essere per i loro dipendenti – anche se questi fossero servi liberi – tanti tiranni spietati e implacabili?
Che cosa! Dovremmo forse denunciare l’ignoranza della gente comune d’Irlanda e sottovalutare la gravità dei problemi quando si tratta di questi tiranni americani? Dovremmo forse deplorare la brutalità di coloro che mutilano gli esseri umani, ma risparmiare attenzione a coloro che segnano le orecchie delle donne e degli uomini, incide figure orribili sulla loro carne viva, imparano a scrivere con “penne” di ferro rovente sul viso umano, e si inventano modi sempre più crudeli per tormentare i propri schiavi, costringendoli a portare tali segni per tutta la vita fino alla tomba? Dovremmo forse commuoverci davanti alle leggende sui supplizi inflitti dagli indigeni pagani, mentre sorridiamo delle crudeltà dei cristiani? E dovremmo davvero gioire del declino di quella razza, godendoci i beni che le sono rimasti? Preferisco, piuttosto, che vengano ripristinati la foresta e i villaggi indigeni; che al posto delle stelle e delle strisce sventolino povere piume nel vento; che le strade e le piazze vengano sostituite da capanne di legno; e che, anche se nell’aria risuonasse il canto della morte di centinaia di guerrieri arroganti, quella musica fosse in realtà un conforto per gli schiavi infelici.
Su un tema che ci è costantemente davanti agli occhi e riguardo al quale il nostro carattere nazionale sta cambiando rapidamente, permettiamo che venga detta la semplice verità; non evitiamo, come codardi, di affrontare l’argomento direttamente, senza alludere in modo vago allo spagnolo o all’italiano. Quando gli inglesi estraggono le armi nel corso di un conflitto, che si dica e si sappia chiaramente: “Questo cambiamento lo dobbiamo alla Repubblica e alla schiavitù”. Queste sono le armi della Libertà; con punte e bordi affilati come questi, la Libertà in America colpisce i suoi “schiavi”; e se ciò non fosse possibile, i suoi figli ne fanno un uso migliore, rivolgendole gli uni contro gli altri.
CHAPTER XVIII CONCLUDING REMARKS
THERE are many passages in this book, where I have been at some pains to resist the temptation of troubling my readers with my own deductions and conclusions: preferring that they should judge for themselves, from such premises as I have laid before them. My only object in the outset, was, to carry them with me faithfully wheresoever I went: and that task I have discharged.
But I may be pardoned, if on such a theme as the general character of the American people, and the general character of their social system, as presented to a stranger’s eyes, I desire to express my own opinions in a few words, before I bring these volumes to a close.
They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends. I never was so won upon, as by this class; never yielded up my full confidence and esteem so readily and pleasurably, as to them; never can make again, in half a year, so many friends for whom I seem to entertain the regard of half a life.
These qualities are natural, I implicitly believe, to the whole people. That they are, however, sadly sapped and blighted in their growth among the mass; and that there are influences at work which endanger them still more, and give but little present promise of their healthy restoration; is a truth that ought to be told.
It is an essential part of every national character to pique itself mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its wisdom from their very exaggeration. One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence.
‘You carry,’ says the stranger, ‘this jealousy and distrust into every transaction of public life. By repelling worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates for the suffrage, who, in their very act, disgrace your Institutions and your people’s choice. It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this, because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in your acknowledgments, or he remiss in his deserts. Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed. You will strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence, however fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow a whole caravan of camels, if they be laden with unworthy doubts and mean suspicions. Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the governed, among you?’
The answer is invariably the same: ‘There’s freedom of opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached. That’s how our people come to be suspicious.’
Another prominent feature is the love of ‘smart’ dealing: which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter; though it has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a century. The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its or his observance of the golden rule, ‘Do as you would be done by,’ but are considered with reference to their smartness. I recollect, on both occasions of our passing that ill-fated Cairo on the Mississippi, remarking on the bad effects such gross deceits must have when they exploded, in generating a want of confidence abroad, and discouraging foreign investment: but I was given to understand that this was a very smart scheme by which a deal of money had been made: and that its smartest feature was, that they forgot these things abroad, in a very short time, and speculated again, as freely as ever. The following dialogue I have held a hundred times: ‘Is it not a very disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your Citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he not?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘A convicted liar?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And he is utterly dishonourable, debased, and profligate?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘In the name of wonder, then, what is his merit?’ ‘Well, sir, he is a smart man.’
In like manner, all kinds of deficient and impolitic usages are referred to the national love of trade; though, oddly enough, it would be a weighty charge against a foreigner that he regarded the Americans as a trading people. The love of trade is assigned as a reason for that comfortless custom, so very prevalent in country towns, of married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty public meals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain for ever unprotected ‘For we are a trading people, and don’t care for poetry:’ though we do, by the way, profess to be very proud of our poets: while healthful amusements, cheerful means of recreation, and wholesome fancies, must fade before the stern utilitarian joys of trade.
Capitolo XVIII
Note conclusive
In questo libro ci sono molti passaggi in cui ho fatto grande sforzo per resistere alla tentazione di complicare la lettura dei miei lettori con le mie stesse deduzioni e conclusioni; preferivo che fossero loro a giudicare, partendo dalle premesse che avevo fornito. Il mio unico obiettivo all’inizio era quello di accompagnarli fedelmente ovunque andassi. E quell’obiettivo l’ho raggiunto.
Ma si può perdonarmi se, su un argomento come il carattere generale del popolo americano e il carattere generale del loro sistema sociale, così come presentati agli occhi di uno straniero, desidero esprimere le mie opinioni in poche parole prima di concludere questi volumi.
Per natura, sono franchi, coraggiosi, cordiali, ospitalieri e affettuosi. L’educazione e la raffinatezza sembrano soltanto esaltare il calore del loro cuore e il loro entusiasmo appassionato; ed è proprio la possesso di queste qualità, in misura eccezionale, che rende un americano colto uno degli amici più affascinanti e generosi. Non sono mai stato così conquistato da nessun altro gruppo di persone; non ho mai concesso loro tutta la mia fiducia e stima con tanta facilità e piacere; e non riuscirò mai, in sei mesi, a fare nuovi amici per i quali provi un affetto paragonabile a quello che ho nutrito per metà della mia vita.
Queste qualità, credo implicitamente, siano naturali per tutto il popolo. Tuttavia, purtroppo, vengono erose e danneggiate nel loro sviluppo tra le masse; inoltre, ci sono forze che agiscono in modo da metterle ancora più a rischio, offrendo poche speranze per un loro ripristino sano. Questa è una verità che deve essere detta.
È parte essenziale di ogni carattere nazionale il fatto che si soffermi con particolare attenzione sui propri difetti, e che tragga indicazioni della propria virtù o saggezza proprio da tali esagerazioni. Un grande difetto nella mentalità comune dell’America, e fonte di innumerevoli mali, è la diffusa sfiducia verso gli altri. Eppure il cittadino americano si vanta proprio di questo atteggiamento, anche quando è abbastanza oggettivo da rendersi conto dei danni che causa; anzi, spesso lo cita, nonostante le proprie ragionevoli obiezioni, come esempio della grande saggezza e acutezza del popolo americano, nonché della sua superiorità in astuzia e indipendenza.
“Portate con voi,” dice lo sconosciuto, “questo invidia e questo sfiducia in ogni attività della vita pubblica. Allontanando gli uomini meritevoli dalle vostre assemblee legislative, avete creato una classe di candidati al suffragio che, con le loro stesse azioni, disonorano le vostre istituzioni e la scelta del vostro popolo. Siete diventati così incostanti e propensi ai cambiamenti che la vostra inaffidabilità è diventata quasi un proverbio: non appena stabilite un idolo, lo abbattete immediatamente in pezzi; questo perché, non appena ricompensate qualcuno per i suoi meriti, iniziate subito a dubitare di lui, semplicemente perché è stato premiato. E vi affrettate poi a cercare motivi per ritenere che la vostra gratitudine sia stata eccessiva o che le sue azioni non siano all’altezza delle aspettative. Chiunque raggiunga una posizione elevata tra di voi, dal Presidente in giù, può considerare quel momento come l’inizio del suo declino: qualsiasi menzogna stampata, anche se palesemente contraria al carattere e alle azioni di una persona, viene immediatamente creduta da voi, a causa della vostra sfiducia. Preferite perdere qualcosa che possa rappresentare un simbolo di fiducia e lealtà, anche se conquistato onestamente e meritatamente; ma accetterete facilmente cose piene di dubbi e sospetti meschini. Pensate davvero che questo sia giusto, o che possa elevare il carattere dei governanti e dei sudditi tra di voi?”
La risposta è sempre la stessa: “Qui c’è la libertà di opinione, capisci? Ognuno pensa per sé, e non dobbiamo essere facilmente influenzati. È per questo che il nostro popolo diventa sospettoso.”
Un’altra caratteristica distintiva è l’amore per le pratiche “intelligenti” nel comportamento commerciale: queste pratiche mascherano molte truffe e gravi violazioni della fiducia altrui; molte frodi, sia pubbliche che private; e permettono a molti individui disonesti di presentarsi tra i migliori, quando in realtà meriterebbero solo disprezzo. Tuttavia, questa astuzia non è rimasta senza conseguenze negative: negli ultimi anni ha danneggiato molto più la credibilità pubblica e ridotto le risorse disponibili di quanto potrebbe aver fatto, anche se in modo avventato, l’onestà sincera in un secolo intero. I meriti di una speculazione fallita, di un fallimento o di un individuo disonesto non vengono valutati in base al rispetto della regola d’oro “Fai agli altri ciò che vorresti fosse fatto a te”, ma piuttosto in relazione alla loro abilità nel manipolare le situazioni. Ricordo che, nelle due occasioni in cui abbiamo attraversato quella sfortunata località sul Mississippi, abbiamo commentato gli effetti negativi di tali truffe: generavano una mancanza di fiducia all’estero e scoraggiavano gli investimenti stranieri. Tuttavia, ci è stato detto che si trattava di un piano molto “intelligente”, grazie al quale era stato guadagnato molto denaro; la caratteristica più notevole di questo piano era proprio il fatto che coloro che lo avevano ideato dimenticavano rapidamente gli effetti negativi delle loro azioni all’estero e continuavano a speculare con la stessa libertà di sempre. Ecco un dialogo che ho sentito centinaia di volte: “Non è forse una circostanza molto vergognosa il fatto che un individuo del genere possa accumulare grandi ricchezze con mezzi così infami e odiosi, e che, nonostante tutti i crimini che ha commesso, venga tollerato e addirittura incoraggiato dai vostri cittadini? Non rappresenta forse un pericolo pubblico?” “Sì, signore.” “Un bugiardo condannato?” “Sì, signore.” “È stato picchiato, ammanettato e frustato?” “Sì, signore.” “E inoltre è completamente disonesto, decadente e dissoluto?” “Sì, signore.” “Allora, per l’amor del cielo, qual è il suo merito?” “Beh, signore, è un uomo molto astuto.”
Allo stesso modo, ogni sorta di abitudini difettose e inadeguate vengono attribuite all’amore nazionale per il commercio; tuttavia, stranamente, considerare gli americani un popolo dedito al commercio rappresenterebbe un grave rimprovero contro di loro. Questo “amore” per il commercio viene addotto come motivo di quella consuetudine così diffusa nelle città di provincia: persone sposate che vivono in hotel, senza una propria casa dove riscaldarsi, e che si incontrano raramente, dalla mattina presto fino a tarda notte, se non durante i rapidi pasti pubblici. L’amore per il commercio è anche la ragione per cui la letteratura dell’America rimarrà per sempre priva di protezione: “Perché siamo un popolo dedito al commercio, e non ci interessiamo alla poesia”; sebbene, a dire il vero, professiamo di essere molto orgogliosi dei nostri poeti. Mentre divertimenti salutari, modi allegri per il tempo libero e fantasie sane devono inevitabilmente cedere il posto alle severe gioie utilitaristiche del commercio.
These three characteristics are strongly presented at every turn, full in the stranger’s view. But, the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.
Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides: but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year, it must and will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.
Among the herd of journals which are published in the States, there are some, the reader scarcely need be told, of character and credit. From personal intercourse with accomplished gentlemen connected with publications of this class, I have derived both pleasure and profit. But the name of these is Few, and of the others Legion; and the influence of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison of the bad.
Among the gentry of America; among the well-informed and moderate: in the learned professions; at the bar and on the bench: there is, as there can be, but one opinion, in reference to the vicious character of these infamous journals. It is sometimes contended—I will not say strangely, for it is natural to seek excuses for such a disgrace—that their influence is not so great as a visitor would suppose. I must be pardoned for saying that there is no warrant for this plea, and that every fact and circumstance tends directly to the opposite conclusion.
When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, without first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from its attacks; when any social confidence is left unbroken by it, or any tie of social decency and honour is held in the least regard; when any man in that free country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, without humble reference to a censorship which, for its rampant ignorance and base dishonesty, he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; when those who most acutely feel its infamy and the reproach it casts upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare to set their heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all men: then, I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their manly senses. But while that Press has its evil eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state, from a president to a postman; while, with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not read at all; so long must its odium be upon the country’s head, and so long must the evil it works, be plainly visible in the Republic.
To those who are accustomed to the leading English journals, or to the respectable journals of the Continent of Europe; to those who are accustomed to anything else in print and paper; it would be impossible, without an amount of extract for which I have neither space nor inclination, to convey an adequate idea of this frightful engine in America. But if any man desire confirmation of my statement on this head, let him repair to any place in this city of London, where scattered numbers of these publications are to be found; and there, let him form his own opinion. {206}
It would be well, there can be no doubt, for the American people as a whole, if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more. It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful. But here, I think the general remonstrance, ‘we are a new country,’ which is so often advanced as an excuse for defects which are quite unjustifiable, as being, of right, only the slow growth of an old one, may be very reasonably urged: and I yet hope to hear of there being some other national amusement in the United States, besides newspaper politics.
They certainly are not a humorous people, and their temperament always impressed me is being of a dull and gloomy character. In shrewdness of remark, and a certain cast-iron quaintness, the Yankees, or people of New England, unquestionably take the lead; as they do in most other evidences of intelligence. But in travelling about, out of the large cities—as I have remarked in former parts of these volumes—I was quite oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business: which was so general and unvarying, that at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me, at the last. Such defects as are perceptible in the national manners, seem, to me, to be referable, in a great degree, to this cause: which has generated a dull, sullen persistence in coarse usages, and rejected the graces of life as undeserving of attention. There is no doubt that Washington, who was always most scrupulous and exact on points of ceremony, perceived the tendency towards this mistake, even in his time, and did his utmost to correct it.
I cannot hold with other writers on these subjects that the prevalence of various forms of dissent in America, is in any way attributable to the non-existence there of an established church: indeed, I think the temper of the people, if it admitted of such an Institution being founded amongst them, would lead them to desert it, as a matter of course, merely because it was established. But, supposing it to exist, I doubt its probable efficacy in summoning the wandering sheep to one great fold, simply because of the immense amount of dissent which prevails at home; and because I do not find in America any one form of religion with which we in Europe, or even in England, are unacquainted. Dissenters resort thither in great numbers, as other people do, simply because it is a land of resort; and great settlements of them are founded, because ground can be purchased, and towns and villages reared, where there were none of the human creation before. But even the Shakers emigrated from England; our country is not unknown to Mr. Joseph Smith, the apostle of Mormonism, or to his benighted disciples; I have beheld religious scenes myself in some of our populous towns which can hardly be surpassed by an American camp-meeting; and I am not aware that any instance of superstitious imposture on the one hand, and superstitious credulity on the other, has had its origin in the United States, which we cannot more than parallel by the precedents of Mrs. Southcote, Mary Tofts the rabbit-breeder, or even Mr. Thorn of Canterbury: which latter case arose, some time after the dark ages had passed away.
Queste tre caratteristiche si manifestano con forza in ogni momento, agli occhi dello straniero. Tuttavia, la malvagia crescita dell’America ha radici ancora più complesse; le sue “ fibre” si estendono profondamente nella sua stampa licenziosa.
Si possono costruire scuole a est, ovest, nord e sud; si può insegnare ai giovani e formare gli insegnanti, e così via, con migliaia e migliaia di persone coinvolte in questo processo; i college possono prosperare, le chiese possono essere piene zepe di fedeli, la temperanza può diffondersi, e la conoscenza può avanzare in ogni ambito: ma finché la stampa giornalistica dell’America rimarrà nello stato di degrado attuale o vicino ad esso, qualsiasi significativo miglioramento morale in quel paese sarà impossibile. Anno dopo anno, le cose continueranno a peggiorare; anno dopo anno, il tono dell’opinione pubblica scenderà sempre di più; anno dopo anno, il Congresso e il Senato perderanno sempre di più importanza agli occhi delle persone oneste; e anno dopo anno, la memoria dei grandi padri della Rivoluzione verrà sempre più offesa dal comportamento degenerato del loro “figlio” corrotto.
Tra la moltitudine di riviste pubblicate negli Stati Uniti, ce ne sono alcune, di cui al lettore basta poco per rendersi conto del loro valore e della loro affidabilità. Dalla frequentazione personale con gentiluomini competenti impegnati in questa attività editoriale, ho tratto sia piacere che benefici. Tuttavia, il numero di queste riviste è esiguo rispetto alle altre; inoltre, l’influenza delle buone pubblicazioni è del tutto insufficiente a contrastare l’“avvelenamento morale” prodotto da quelle cattive.
Tra la gente benevola di America; tra coloro che sono ben informati e moderati; nelle professioni intellettuali; negli ambienti legali, esiste, come è inevitabile, un’unica opinione riguardo al carattere pernicioso di questi famigerati giornali. A volte si sostiene – non dirò che in modo strano, poiché è naturale cercare scuse per una tale vergogna – che la loro influenza non sia così grande come si potrebbe pensare. Devo essere perdonato se affermo che questa argomentazione non ha alcun fondamento e che ogni fatto e circostanza portano direttamente alla conclusione opposta.
Quando qualsiasi uomo, indipendentemente dal suo livello intellettuale o caratteriale, può raggiungere qualsiasi posizione di rilievo pubblico in America, senza prima umiliarsi e inchinarsi davanti a questo “mostro” della depravazione; quando qualsiasi forma di eccellenza personale è al sicuro dalle sue aggressioni; quando qualsiasi legame basato sulla decenza sociale e sull’onore viene rispettato; quando in quel paese libero ogni uomo ha la libertà di pensare e di esprimersi senza subire censure, che per la loro ignoranza e disonestà è profondamente odiosa e disprezzata; quando coloro che più sentono l’infamia di tale sistema e ne denunciano apertamente gli effetti osano contrastarlo pubblicamente davanti a tutti, allora crederò che il suo potere stia diminuendo e che le persone stiano tornando a ragionare con lucidità. Ma finché quella stampa continua ad avere il suo “occhio malvagio” in ogni casa e la sua influenza su ogni aspetto della vita pubblica, dal presidente al postino; finché utilizza solo calunnie volgari come strumento di diffusione, rimanendo l’unica fonte di informazione per una vasta parte della popolazione che non ha altro modo di ricevere notizie; finché il suo odio grava sulla nazione e i suoi effetti negativi sono evidenti in tutto il Paese, allora il suo potere continuerà ad essere pericoloso.
Per coloro che sono abituati alle principali riviste inglesi o alle rispettabili pubblicazioni del continente europeo; per chi è abituato a qualsiasi altro tipo di stampa e carta; sarebbe impossibile, senza una serie di estratti per i quali non ho né spazio né voglia di scrivere, dare un’idea adeguata di questo terribile mezzo di trasporto presente in America. Ma se qualcuno desidera conferma delle mie affermazioni in merito, si rechi in qualsiasi luogo di questa città di )Londra, dove si possono trovare alcune copie di queste pubblicazioni; e lì possa formarsi la propria opinione. {206}
Sarebbe bene, non ci possono essere dubbi al riguardo; per il popolo americano nel suo complesso, infatti, sarebbe positivo se amasse di meno la Realtà e un po’ di più l’Ideale. Sarebbe anche bene se ci fossero maggiori incoraggiamenti alla leggerezza d’animo e alla gioia, nonché una maggiore valorizzazione di ciò che è bello, anche se non estremamente e direttamente utile. Tuttavia, ritengo che il motivo comunemente addotto – “siamo un paese nuovo” – possa essere giustificato per difendere difetti del tutto ingiustificabili, poiché rappresentano semplicemente la lenta crescita di un vecchio Paese. Eppure spero ancora che negli Stati Uniti esistano altre forme di divertimento nazionale, oltre alla politica sui giornali.
Di certo non sono una gente umoristica, e il loro temperamento mi ha sempre colpito per la sua natura noiosa e cupa. Per quanto riguarda l’acume nel commentare e una certa stranezza caratteristica, i Yankees, o gli abitanti del New England, indubbiamente sono in vantaggio; lo stesso vale per la maggior parte delle altre manifestazioni di intelligenza. Tuttavia, viaggiando al di fuori delle grandi città – come ho già osservato in parti precedenti di questi volumi – sono stato profondamente oppresso dall’atmosfera dominante di serietà e melancolia che caratterizza la vita quotidiana: questa atmosfera era così diffusa e costante che, in ogni nuova città che visitavo, sembrava di incontrare sempre le stesse persone che avevo lasciato alle mie spalle. Tali difetti nei comportamenti nazionali, a mio parere, sono in gran parte dovuti a questa causa: un atteggiamento cupo e ostinato verso le abitudini volgari, unito al rifiuto delle grazie della vita come qualcosa di indegno di attenzione. Non c’è >dubbio che Washington, sempre molto scrupoloso e attento ai dettagli cerimoniali, avesse percepito questa tendenza già ai suoi tempi e abbia fatto del suo meglio per correggerla.
Non posso concordare con altri scrittori su questi argomenti nel ritenere che la diffusione di varie forme di dissenso in America possa essere in qualche modo attribuita all’assenza, in quel paese, di una chiesa stabilita: anzi, credo che il carattere del popolo americano, se avesse permesso la fondazione di un tale istituto tra di loro, lo avrebbe abbandonato senza esitazione, semplicemente perché esisteva. Ma anche ammettendo che una chiesa del genere esistesse, dubito fortemente della sua efficacia nel riunire le persone divise in fazioni diverse, soprattutto considerando l’enorme quantità di dissenso diffusa in quel paese; inoltre, non trovo negli Stati Uniti alcuna forma di religione che noi in Europa, o addirittura in Inghilterra, non conosciamo. I dissidenti vi si recano in gran numero, proprio perché si tratta di una terra di rifugio; inoltre, lì vengono fondate numerose comunità, poiché è possibile acquistare terreni e costruire città e villaggi dove prima non esisteva nulla. Ma persino i Quaker emigrarono dall’Inghilterra; il nostro paese non è sconosciuto a Mr. Joseph Smith, l’apostolo del Mormonismo, né ai suoi discepoli. Ho personalmente assistito in alcune delle nostre città popolose a scene religiose che difficilmente possono essere superate da quelle di un raduno evangelico americano; inoltre, non conosco alcun esempio di frodi superstiziose da un lato o di credulità superstiziosa dall’altro che abbia avuto origine negli Stati Uniti, casi che potremmo soltanto paragonare a quelli di Mrs. Southcote, Mary Tofts la allevatrice di conigli, o persino di Mr. Thorn di Canterbury: quest’ultimo caso, del resto, si verificò molto dopo la fine dell’epoca medievale.
The Republican Institutions of America undoubtedly lead the people to assert their self-respect and their equality; but a traveller is bound to bear those Institutions in his mind, and not hastily to resent the near approach of a class of strangers, who, at home, would keep aloof. This characteristic, when it was tinctured with no foolish pride, and stopped short of no honest service, never offended me; and I very seldom, if ever, experienced its rude or unbecoming display. Once or twice it was comically developed, as in the following case; but this was an amusing incident, and not the rule, or near it.
I wanted a pair of boots at a certain town, for I had none to travel in, but those with the memorable cork soles, which were much too hot for the fiery decks of a steamboat. I therefore sent a message to an artist in boots, importing, with my compliments, that I should be happy to see him, if he would do me the polite favour to call. He very kindly returned for answer, that he would ‘look round’ at six o’clock that evening.
I was lying on the sofa, with a book and a wine-glass, at about that time, when the door opened, and a gentleman in a stiff cravat, within a year or two on either side of thirty, entered, in his hat and gloves; walked up to the looking-glass; arranged his hair; took off his gloves; slowly produced a measure from the uttermost depths of his coat-pocket; and requested me, in a languid tone, to ‘unfix’ my straps. I complied, but looked with some curiosity at his hat, which was still upon his head. It might have been that, or it might have been the heat—but he took it off. Then, he sat himself down on a chair opposite to me; rested an arm on each knee; and, leaning forward very much, took from the ground, by a great effort, the specimen of metropolitan workmanship which I had just pulled off: whistling, pleasantly, as he did so. He turned it over and over; surveyed it with a contempt no language can express; and inquired if I wished him to fix me a boot like that? I courteously replied, that provided the boots were large enough, I would leave the rest to him; that if convenient and practicable, I should not object to their bearing some resemblance to the model then before him; but that I would be entirely guided by, and would beg to leave the whole subject to, his judgment and discretion. ‘You an’t partickler, about this scoop in the heel, I suppose then?’ says he: ‘we don’t foller that, here.’ I repeated my last observation. He looked at himself in the glass again; went closer to it to dash a grain or two of dust out of the corner of his eye; and settled his cravat. All this time, my leg and foot were in the air. ‘Nearly ready, sir?’ I inquired. ‘Well, pretty nigh,’ he said; ‘keep steady.’ I kept as steady as I could, both in foot and face; and having by this time got the dust out, and found his pencil-case, he measured me, and made the necessary notes. When he had finished, he fell into his old attitude, and taking up the boot again, mused for some time. ‘And this,’ he said, at last, ‘is an English boot, is it? This is a London boot, eh?’ ‘That, sir,’ I replied, ‘is a London boot.’ He mused over it again, after the manner of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull; nodded his head, as who should say, ‘I pity the Institutions that led to the production of this boot!’; rose; put up his pencil, notes, and paper—glancing at himself in the glass, all the time—put on his hat—drew on his gloves very slowly; and finally walked out. When he had been gone about a minute, the door reopened, and his hat and his head reappeared. He looked round the room, and at the boot again, which was still lying on the floor; appeared thoughtful for a minute; and then said ‘Well, good arternoon.’ ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said I: and that was the end of the interview.
There is but one other head on which I wish to offer a remark; and that has reference to the public health. In so vast a country, where there are thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared, and on every rood of which, vegetable decomposition is annually taking place; where there are so many great rivers, and such opposite varieties of climate; there cannot fail to be a great amount of sickness at certain seasons. But I may venture to say, after conversing with many members of the medical profession in America, that I am not singular in the opinion that much of the disease which does prevail, might be avoided, if a few common precautions were observed. Greater means of personal cleanliness, are indispensable to this end; the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must be changed; the gentler sex must go more wisely clad, and take more healthful exercise; and in the latter clause, the males must be included also. Above all, in public institutions, and throughout the whole of every town and city, the system of ventilation, and drainage, and removal of impurities requires to be thoroughly revised. There is no local Legislature in America which may not study Mr. Chadwick’s excellent Report upon the Sanitary Condition of our Labouring Classes, with immense advantage.
I HAVE now arrived at the close of this book. I have little reason to believe, from certain warnings I have had since I returned to England, that it will be tenderly or favourably received by the American people; and as I have written the Truth in relation to the mass of those who form their judgments and express their opinions, it will be seen that I have no desire to court, by any adventitious means, the popular applause.
It is enough for me, to know, that what I have set down in these pages, cannot cost me a single friend on the other side of the Atlantic, who is, in anything, deserving of the name. For the rest, I put my trust, implicitly, in the spirit in which they have been conceived and penned; and I can bide my time.
Le istituzioni repubblicane dell’America indubbiamente aiutano le persone a affermare il loro rispetto di sé e la loro uguaglianza; tuttavia, un viaggiatore è tenuto a considerare queste istituzioni in modo oggettivo, senza pregiudicare troppo rapidamente l’avvicinamento di persone che, nella propria patria, si terrebbero probabilmente alla larga. Questo aspetto, quando non è accompagnato da un’ingenua orgogliosità e non si spinge fino a comportamenti scortesi o inappropriati, non mi ha mai offeso; anzi, molto raramente ho avuto modo di osservarne manifestazioni offensive. Una o due volte si è presentato in modo comico, come nel seguente esempio; ma si trattava soltanto di episodi divertenti, e non certo della regola generale.
Volevo un paio di stivali in una certa città, poiché non ne avevo nessuno per viaggiare; ma quegli con le suole di sughero, erano troppo caldi per i ponti bollenti delle navi a vapore. Così inviai un messaggio a un artista specializzato in stivali, ringraziandolo e dicendogli che sarei stato felice di incontrarlo, se avesse avuto la gentilezza di venire da me. Lui rispose molto gentilmente che sarebbe passato alle sei di quella sera per “dare un’occhiata”.
Ero sdraiato sul divano, con un libro e un bicchiere di vino, più o meno in quel momento, quando la porta si aprì ed entrò un signore con una cravatta rigida, tra i trenta e i trentadue anni, con cappello e guanti; si avvicinò allo specchio, sistemò i capelli, si tolse i guanti, estrasse lentamente qualcosa dal profondo della tasca del suo cappotto e, con tono languido, mi chiese di “allentare” le mie cinghie. Obbedii, ma osservai con curiosità il suo cappello, che era ancora sul suo capo. Forse per quel motivo, o forse a causa del caldo, se lo tolse. Poi si sedette su una sedia di fronte a me, appoggiò un braccio su ogni ginocchio e, chinandosi molto in avanti, con grande sforzo raccolse il prodotto dell’artigianato metropolitano che avevo appena “raccattato” dal pavimento. Mentre lo faceva, cantava allegramente. Lo girò e rigirò, lo esaminò con un disprezzo indescrivibile e mi chiese se volessi che mi facessero una scarpa simile. Risposi cortesemente che, purché le scarpe fossero abbastanza grandi, avrei lasciato tutto il resto a lui; che, se fosse stato possibile e pratico, non avrei obiettato se assomigliassero al modello davanti a me. Ma che mi sarei affidato completamente al suo giudizio e alla sua discrezione. “Non sei troppo esigente riguardo a quella ‘scavatura’ nella suola, vero?”, disse lui, “Qui non seguiamo quelle mode, ” Ripetei la mia osservazione precedente. Si guardò di nuovo allo specchio, si avvicinò ancora per eliminare un granello di polvere dall’angolo dell’occhio e sistemò di nuovo la cravatta. Durante tutto questo tempo, la mia gamba e il mio piede erano sospesi in aria, “Quasi pronto, signore?”, chiesi. “Beh, quasi, ”, rispose lui; “stai fermo.” Cercai di rimanere fermo il più possibile. Dopo aver rimosso tutta la polvere e trovato il suo portapenne, mi misurò e prese le note necessarie. Quando finì, riprese la sua solita posizione, prese di nuovo la scarpa e rimase a riflettere per un po’, “E questa, ”, disse infine, “è una scarpa inglese, vero? Una scarpa londinese, ” “Sì, signore”, risposi. La esaminò di nuovo, come Hamlet avrebbe fatto con il cranio di Yorick. Annuì, come se dicesse: “Poveri gli istituti che hanno portato alla produzione di questa scarpa, ” Poi si alzò, mise via il portapenne, le note e i fogli. Si guardò di nuovo allo specchio, indossò il cappello, infilò lentamente i guanti. E finalmente se ne andò. Dopo circa un minuto, la porta si aprì di nuovo. Il suo cappello e la sua testa ricomparvero. Guardò intorno nella stanza, poi di nuovo la scarpa, che era ancora sul pavimento. Sembrò pensieroso per un momento. Poi disse: “Beh, buon pomeriggio, ” “Buon pomeriggio, signore”, risposi. E così finì l’incontro.
Esiste un’altra questione riguardo alla quale desidero fare una osservazione; e questa riguarda la salute pubblica. In un paese così vasto, dove ci sono migliaia di milioni di acri di terra ancora incolta e non utilizzata, e dove ogni anno avviene la decomposizione dei materiali organici; dove ci sono tanti grandi fiumi e climi così diversi tra loro; è inevitabile che in alcune stagioni si verifichino molte malattie. Tuttavia, dopo aver parlato con molti membri della professione medica in America, oso affermare che non sono l’unico a ritenere che gran parte delle malattie che si diffondono potrebbe essere evitata se si adottassero alcune semplici precauzioni. Sono indispensabili maggiori misure di igiene personale; è necessario cambiare l’abitudine di ingerire in fretta grandi quantità di cibo animale tre volte al giorno e poi tornare immediatamente alle attività sedentarie dopo ogni pasto; il sesso femminile deve vestirsi in modo più appropriato e praticare esercizi fisici più salutari; e lo stesso vale per gli uomini. Soprattutto, nelle istituzioni pubbliche e in tutte le città, è necessario revisionare completamente i sistemi di ventilazione, drenaggio e eliminazione delle impurità. In America non esiste alcun organo legislativo locale che non possa trarre grandi benefici dallo studio del eccellente Rapporto di Mr. Chadwick sulla condizione sanitaria delle nostre classi lavoratrici.
Sono ora giunto alla fine di questo libro. Dalle avvertenze che ho ricevuto dopo il mio ritorno in Inghilterra, non ho molte ragioni per credere che venga accolto con favore dal popolo americano; e poiché ho scritto la Verità riguardo alle opinioni della maggior parte delle persone che formano i loro giudizi e esprimono le loro idee, è evidente che non ho alcun desiderio di cercare, con mezzi artificiosi, l’approvazione del pubblico.
Mi basta sapere che ciò che ho scritto in queste pagine non mi costerà nemmeno un solo amico dall’altra parte dell’Atlantico, qualcuno che sia davvero degno di questo nome. Per il resto, confido implicitamente nello spirito con cui queste parole sono state concepite e scritte; e aspetterò pazientemente il mio tempo per vedere cosa ne sarà.
I have made no reference to my reception, nor have I suffered it to influence me in what I have written; for, in either case, I should have offered but a sorry acknowledgment, compared with that I bear within my breast, towards those partial readers of my former books, across the Water, who met me with an open hand, and not with one that closed upon an iron muzzle.
THE END
POSTSCRIPT
AT a Public Dinner given to me on Saturday the 18th of April, 1868, in the City of New York, by two hundred representatives of the Press of the United States of America, I made the following observations among others:
‘So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might have been contented with troubling you no further from my present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side,—changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first. And this brings me to a point on which I have, ever since I landed in the United States last November, observed a strict silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, but in reference to which I will, with your good leave, take you into my confidence now. Even the Press, being human, may be sometimes mistaken or misinformed, and I rather think that I have in one or two rare instances observed its information to be not strictly accurate with reference to myself. Indeed, I have, now and again, been more surprised by printed news that I have read of myself, than by any printed news that I have ever read in my present state of existence. Thus, the vigour and perseverance with which I have for some months past been collecting materials for, and hammering away at, a new book on America has much astonished me; seeing that all that time my declaration has been perfectly well known to my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, that no consideration on earth would induce me to write one. But what I have intended, what I have resolved upon (and this is the confidence I seek to place in you) is, on my return to England, in my own person, in my own journal, to bear, for the behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes in this country as I have hinted at to-night. Also, to record that wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America. And this I will do and cause to be done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it as an act of plain justice and honour.’
I said these words with the greatest earnestness that I could lay upon them, and I repeat them in print here with equal earnestness. So long as this book shall last, I hope that they will form a part of it, and will be fairly read as inseparable from my experiences and impressions of America.
CHARLES DICKENS.
May, 1868.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
FOOTNOTES
{1} This Project Gutenberg eText contains just American Notes. Pictures from Italy is also available from Project Gutenberg as a separate eText.—DP.
{206} NOTE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION.—Or let him refer to an able, and perfectly truthful article, in The Foreign Quarterly Review, published in the present month of October; to which my attention has been attracted, since these sheets have been passing through the press. He will find some specimens there, by no means remarkable to any man who has been in America, but sufficiently striking to one who has not.
Non ho fatto alcuna menzione alla mia accoglienza, né ho permesso che essa influenzasse ciò che ho scritto; perché in entrambi i casi, avrei offerto soltanto un ringraziamento insignificante, rispetto a quello che provo nel mio cuore per quei lettori dei miei libri precedenti, al di là dell’fiume, che mi hanno accolto con apertura e generosità, e non con ostilità o rifiuto.
La fine
Postfazione
Durante un banchetto pubblico organizzato in mio onore sabato 18 aprile 1868 nella città di New York, da duecento rappresentanti della stampa degli Stati Uniti d’America, ho fatto, tra le altre cose, le seguenti osservazioni:
“La mia voce è stata molto sentita in questi ultimi tempi in questo paese; quindi avrei potuto accontentarmi di non disturbarvi ulteriormente da dove mi trovo attualmente, se non fosse per un dovere che mi impongo ora, non solo qui ma in ogni occasione appropriata, ovunque e qualunque essa sia, di esprimere il mio profondo ringraziamento per la seconda opportunità che mi è stata data in America, e di testimoniare onestamente sulla generosità e magnanimità della nazione. Inoltre, desidero dichiarare quanto sia rimasto sorpreso dai cambiamenti straordinari che ho osservato intorno a me: cambiamenti morali, fisici, nella quantità di terra sottomessa e popolata, nell’ascesa di nuove città immense, nel rapido sviluppo di quelle più antiche fino al punto di renderle quasi irriconoscibili, nei miglioramenti delle condizioni di vita, nella stampa – senza la quale nessun progresso sarebbe possibile ovunque. Non sono nemmeno così arrogante da pensare che in venticinque anni io stesso non abbia cambiato, e che non ci fosse nulla da imparare o da correggere rispetto a quanto avevo visto la prima volta qui. E questo mi porta a un argomento su cui ho mantenuto un rigoroso silenzio fin dal mio arrivo negli Stati Uniti lo scorso novembre; sebbene a volte abbia avuto il desiderio di romperlo, ora, con il vostro permesso, vi confiderò ciò che ho nel cuore. Anche la stampa, essendo umana, può a volte sbagliare o essere informata erroneamente; credo infatti di aver notato in un paio di occasioni che le informazioni riguardanti me non fossero del tutto accurate. Spesso, anzi, sono rimasto più sorpreso dalle notizie su di me pubblicate sui giornali rispetto a quanto avessi effettivamente vissuto fino ad allora. Per questo motivo, la determinazione e l’impegno con cui negli ultimi mesi ho raccolto materiale per scrivere un nuovo libro sull’America mi hanno davvero sorpreso; visto che, in tutto quel tempo, i miei editori su entrambi gli attici dell’Atlantico erano perfettamente a conoscenza di ciò che stavo facendo, e nessuna considerazione al mondo mi avrebbe spinto a scrivere un altro libro. Quello che intendo fare, quello che ho deciso (e questa è la confidenza che desidero condividere con voi) è, al mio ritorno in Inghilterra, di testimoniare personalmente, attraverso il mio diario, ai miei connazionali dei cambiamenti straordinari avvenuti in questo paese. Desidero anche registrare che ovunque io sia stato, nei luoghi più piccoli così come nei più grandi, sono stato accolto con una cortesia, delicatezza, gentilezza e ospitalità senza pari; inoltre, il rispetto per la mia privacy, dovuto alla natura della mia attività e allo stato della mia salute, è stato sempre immenso. Questo testimone, finché vivrò e finché i miei discendenti avranno diritti legali sui miei libri, verrà ripubblicato come appendice in ogni copia di quei due volumi nei quali ho parlato dell’America. E farò questo non solo per amore e gratitudine, ma perché ritengo che sia un atto di giustizia e onore.”
Ho detto queste parole con la massima sincerità di cui ero capace, e le ripeto qui in stampa con lo stesso impegno. Finché questo libro esisterà, >spero che facciano parte di esso e vengano lette come elementi inseparabili dalle mie esperienze e impressioni riguardo all’America.
CARLO DICKENS.
5 maggio, 1868.
Stampato da
William Closes and Sons, Limited,
Londra e Beccles.
Note a piè di pagina
{1} This Project Gutenberg eText contains just American Notes. Pictures from Italy is also available from Project Gutenberg as a separate eText.—DP.
{206} NOTA ALLA EDIZIONE ORIGINALE.—Oppure possa fare riferimento a un articolo competente e assolutamente veritiero, pubblicato su The Foreign Quarterly Review nel mese di ottobre corrente; l’attenzione mia è stata attirata su di esso mentre queste pagine erano in fase di stampa. Vi troverà alcuni esempi che, per chi ha viaggiato in America, non sono affatto notevoli, ma che possono risultare piuttosto significativi per chi invece non ci è mai stato.