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PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY
ter this frail and fanciful population, and send them by shiploads on missions of civilization to our shores; in which case,
the bustle and animation and the brilliant display on the old
turnpike, spoken of familiarly as the “broad road,” will be
somewhat increased.
Grace however managed, by the exercise of a good individual taste, to come out of these shopping conflicts in good
order, — a handsome, well-dressed, charming woman, with
everybody’s best wishes for, and sympathy in, her happiness.
Lillie was summoned home by urgent messages from
her husband, calling her back to take her share in wedding
festivities.
She left willingly; for the fact is that her last conversation
with her cousin Harry had made the situation as uncomfortable to her as if he had unceremoniously deluged her with
a pailful of cold water.
There is a chilly, disagreeable kind of article, called common sense, which is of all things most repulsive and antipathetical to all petted creatures whose life has consisted in flattery. It is the kind of talk which sisters are very apt to hear
from brothers, and daughters from fathers and mothers,
when fathers and mothers do their duty by them; which sets
the world before them as it is, and not as it is painted by flatterers. Those women who prefer the society of gentlemen, and
who have the faculty of bewitching their senses, never are in
the way of hearing from this cold matter-of-fact region; for
them it really does not exist. Every phrase that meets their ear
is polished and softened, guarded and delicately turned, till
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there is not a particle of homely truth left in it. They pass their
time in a world of illusions; they demand these illusions of all
who approach them, as the sole condition of peace and favor.
All gentlemen, by a sort of instinct, recognize the woman who
lives by flattery, and give her her portion of meat in due season;
and thus some poor women are hopelessly buried, as suicides
used to be in Scotland, under a mountain of rubbish, to which
each passer-by adds one stone. It is only by some extraordinary power of circumstances that a man can be found to invade the sovereignty of a pretty woman with any disagreeable
tidings; or, as Junius says, “to instruct the throne in the language of truth.” Harry was brought up to this point only by
such a concurrence of circumstances. He was in love with another woman, — a ready cause for disenchantment. He was in
some sort a family connection; and he saw Lillie’s conduct at
last, therefore, through the plain, unvarnished medium of
common sense. Moreover, he felt a little pinched in his own
conscience by the view which Rose seemed to take of his
part in the matter, and, manlike, was strengthened in doing his
duty by being a little galled and annoyed at the woman whose
charms had tempted him into this dilemma. So he talked to
Lillie like a brother; or, in other words, made himself disagreeably explicit, — showed her her sins, and told her her duties as
a married woman. The charming fair ones who sentimentally
desire gentlemen to regard them as sisters do not bargain for
any of this sort of brotherly plainness; and yet they might do it
with great advantage. A brother, who is not a brother, stationed
near the ear of a fair friend, is commonly very careful not to
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compromise his position by telling unpleasant truths; but, on
the present occasion, Harry made a literal use of the brevet of
brotherhood which Lillie had bestowed on him, and talked to
her as the generality of real brothers talk to their sisters, using great plainness of speech. He withered all her poor little
trumpery array of hothouse flowers of sentiment, by treating
them as so much garbage, as all men know they are. He set before her the gravity and dignity of marriage, and her duties to
her husband. Last, and most unkind of all, he professed his
admiration of Rose Ferguson, his unworthiness of her, and his
determination to win her by a nobler and better life; and then
showed himself to be a stupid blunderer by exhorting Lillie to
make Rose her model, and seek to imitate her virtues.
Poor Lillie! the world looked dismal and dreary enough to
her.She shrunk within herself. Every thing was withered and
disenchanted. All her poor little stock of romance seemed to
her as disgusting as the withered flowers and crumpled finery
and half-melted ice-cream the morning after a ball.
In this state, when she got a warm, true letter from John,
who always grew tender and affectionate when she was long
away, couched in those terms of admiration and affection that
were soothing to her ear, she really longed to go back to him.
She shrunk from the dreary plainness of truth, and longed for
flattery and petting and caresses once more; and she wrote to
John an overflowingly tender letter, full of longings, which
brought him at once to her side, the most delighted of men.
When Lillie cried in his arms, and told him that she found
New York perfectly hateful; when she declaimed on the heart-
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HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
lessness of fashionable life, and longed to go with him to their
quiet home, — she was tolerably in earnest; and John was perfectly enchanted.
Poor John! Was he a muff, a spoon? We think not. We understand well that there is not a woman among our readers
who has the slightest patience with Lillie, and that the most of
them are half out of patience with John for his enduring tenderness towards her.
But men were born and organized by nature to be the protectors of women; and, generally speaking, the stronger and
more thoroughly manly a man is, the more he has of what
phrenologists call the “pet organ,” — the disposition which
makes him the charmed servant of what is weak and dependent. John had a great share of this quality. He was made to
be a protector. He loved to protect; he loved every thing that
was helpless and weak, — young animals, young children, and
delicate women.
He was a romantic adorer of womanhood, as a sort of divine mystery, — a never-ending poem; and when his wife was
long enough away from him to give scope for imagination to
work, when she no longer annoyed him with the friction of
the sharp little edges of her cold and selfish nature, he was
able to see her once more in the ideal light of first love. After
all, she was his wife; and in that one word, to a good man, is
every thing holy and sacred. He longed to believe in her and
trust her wholly; and now that Grace was going from him, to
belong to another, Lillie was more than ever his dependence.
On the whole, if we must admit that John was weak, he was
weak where strong and noble natures may most gracefully be
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so, — weak through disinterestedness, faith, and the disposition to make the best of the wife he had chosen.
And so Lillie came home; and there was festivity and rejoicing. Grace found herself floated into matrimony on a tide
bringing gifts and tokens of remembrance from everybody
that had ever known her; for all were delighted with this opportunity of testifying a sense of her worth, and every hand
was ready to help ring her wedding bells.
CHAPTER XXVI
MOTHERHOOD
It is supposed by some that to become a mother is of itself
a healing and saving dispensation; that of course the reign of
selfishness ends, and the reign of better things begins, with
the commencement of maternity.
But old things do not pass away and all things become
new by any such rapid process of conversion. A whole life
spent in self-seeking and self-pleasing is no preparation for
the most august and austere of woman’s sufferings and duties;
and it is not to be wondered at if the untrained, untaught, and
self-indulgent shrink from this ordeal, as Lillie did.
The next spring, while the gables of the new cottage on
Elm Street were looking picturesquely through the blossoming cherry-trees, and the smoke was curling up from the chimneys where Grace and her husband were cosily settled down
together, there came to John’s house another little Lillie.
The little creature came in terror and trembling. For
the mother had trifled fearfully with the great laws of her being before its birth; and the very shadow of death hung over
her at the time the little new life began.
Lillie’s mother, now a widow, was sent for, and by this
event installed as a fixture in her daughter’s dwelling; and for
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weeks the sympathies of all the neighborhood were concentrated upon the sufferer. Flowers and fruits were left daily at
the door. Every one was forward in offering those kindly attentions which spring up so gracefully in rural neighborhoods.
Everybody was interested for her.She was little and pretty and
suffering; and people even forgot to blame her for the levities
that had made her present trial more severe. As to John, he
watched over her day and night with anxious assiduity, forgetting every fault and foible.She was now more than the wife of
his youth; she was the mother of his child, enthroned and glorified in his eyes by the wonderful and mysterious experiences
which had given this new little treasure to their dwelling.
To say the truth, Lillie was too sick and suffering for sentiment. It requires a certain amount of bodily strength and
soundness to feel emotions of love; and, for a long time, the little
Lillie had to be banished from the mother’s apartment, as she
lay weary in her darkened room, with only a consciousness of
a varied succession of disagreeables and discomforts. Her general impression about herself was, that she was a much abused
and most unfortunate woman; and that all that could ever be
done by the utmost devotion of everybody in the house was insufficient to make up for such trials as had come upon her.
A nursing mother was found for the little Lillie in the person of a goodly Irish woman, fair, fat, and loving; and the real
mother had none of those awakening influences, from the resting of the little head in her bosom, and the pressure of the little
helpless fingers, which magnetize into existence the blessed
power of love.
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HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
She had wasted in years of fashionable folly, and in a life
led only for excitement and self-gratification, all the womanly power, all the capability of motherly giving and motherly
loving that are the glory of womanhood. Kathleen, the whitearmed, the gentle-bosomed, had all the simple pleasures,
the tendernesses, the poetry of motherhood; while poor,
faded, fretful Lillie had all the prose — the sad, hard, weary
prose — of sickness and pain, unglorified by love.
John did not well know what to do with himself in Lillie’s darkened room; where it seemed to him he was always in
the way, always doing something wrong; where his feet always
seemed too large and heavy, and his voice too loud; and where
he was sure, in his anxious desire to be still and gentle, to upset
something, or bring about some general catastrophe, and to go
out feeling more like a criminal than ever.
The mother and the nurse, stationed there like a pair of
chief mourners, spoke in tones which experienced feminine
experts seem to keep for occasions like these, and which, as
Hawthorne has said, give an effect as if the voice had been
dyed black. It was a comfort and relief to pass from the funeral
gloom to the little pink-ruffled chamber among the cherrytrees, where the birds were singing and the summer breezes blowing, and the pretty Kathleen was crooning her Irish
songs, and invoking the holy virgin and all the saints to bless
the “darlin’” baby.
“An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em, sir.”
“An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em to a house, sir; the angels comes down wid ’em. We can’t see ’em, sir; but, bless the darlin’, she can. And she smiles in her sleep when she sees ’em.”
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Rose and Grace came often to this bower with kisses and
gifts and offerings, like a pair of nice fairy godmothers. They
hung over the pretty little waxen miracle as she opened her
great blue eyes with a silent, mysterious wonder; but, alas! all
these delicious moments, this artless love of the new baby life,
was not for the mother.She was not strong enough to enjoy
it. Its cries made her nervous; and so she kept the uncheered
solitude of her room without the blessing of the little angel.
People may mourn in lugubrious phrase about the Irish
blood in our country. For our own part, we think the rich, tender, motherly nature of the Irish girl an element a thousand
times more hopeful in our population than the faded, washedout indifferentism of fashionable women, who have danced and
flirted away all their womanly attributes, till there is neither
warmth nor richness nor maternal fulness left in them, — mere
paper-dolls, without milk in their bosoms or blood in their
veins. Give us rich, tender, warm-hearted Bridgets and Kathleens, whose instincts teach them the real poetry of motherhood; who can love unto death, and bear trials and pains cheerfully for the joy that is set before them. We are not afraid for
the republican citizens that such mothers will bear to us. They
are the ones that will come to high places in our land, and that
will possess the earth by right of the strongest.
Motherhood, to the woman who has lived only to be petted, and to be herself the centre of all things, is a virtual dethronement. Something weaker, fairer, more delicate than
herself comes, — something for her to serve and to care for
more than herself.
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HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
It would sometimes seem as if motherhood were a lovely
artifice of the great Father, to wean the heart from selfishness by a peaceful and gradual process. The babe is self in another form. It is so interwoven and identified with the mother’s life, that she passes by almost insensible gradations from
herself to it; and day by day the distinctive love of self wanes
as the child-love waxes, filling the heart with a thousand new
springs of tenderness.
But that this benignant transformation of nature may be
perfected, it must be wrought out in Nature’s own way. Any artificial arrangement that takes the child away from the mother interrupts that wonderful system of contrivances whereby
the mother’s nature and being shade off into that of the child,
and her heart enlarges to a new and heavenly power of loving.
When Lillie was sufficiently recovered to be fond of
any thing, she found in her lovely baby only a new toy, —
a source of pride and pleasure, and a charming occasion for
the display of new devices of millinery. But she found Newport indispensable that summer to the re-establishment of her
strength. “And really,” she said, “the baby would be so much
better off quietly at home with mamma and Kathleen. The fact
is,” she said, “she quite disregards me.She cries after Kathleen
if I take her; so that it’s quite provoking.”
And so Lillie, free and unencumbered, had her gay season at Newport with the Follingsbees, and the Simpkinses, and
the Tompkinses, and all the rest of the nice people, who have
nothing to do but enjoy themselves; and everybody flattered
her by being incredulous that one so young and charming
could possibly be a mother.
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