Mose Evans : a simple statement of the singular facts of his case

Front matter

(Itjxiu & Hoik .mow

FROM THE

BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY

II

The sturdiest Faith is born of deepest Doubt; No Victory so complete as refluent Rout; Blood blendeth best with blood in battle poured ; What hands so clasp as those which drop the sword ?

In a week after the General's first allusion to the matter Mrs. Throop and their daughter made the formal call ; after due return of which we did take tea with General Throop and his household.

" They thoroughly like you, Henry," my wife said to me after both events. " General Throop knows a genuine gentleman when he sees him, and by the instinct of a gentleman. Agnes and myself were, in an instant, as if we had parted only yesterday at the convent. And a true woman knows a true woman too. I have never met a woman — my mother died when I was an infant — to compare with Agnes Throop ! "

Let me record it frankly just here : besides my dear wife, Agnes Throop is to me the woman best worth knowing of all the race. I hardly understand more of her style of beauty than I do of her dress, material and cut ; but I know there was a peculiar loveliness in her — which I will not mar by attempting to describe — as indescribable as is the violet-characteristic of a violet, making that flower to differ — shall we say from a dahlia ? for my wife is a brunette. Mrs. General Throop is a partial explanation of her daughter.

I understood all my wife told me of her as we were dressing to go there to tea, in the first half an hour after we were in the old-fashioned parlor. It is down stairs, as I write, curiously carved marble mantel and all. If I live — it is Helen's suggestion — till that next anniversary, I intend to have that same mantel carefully taken down, packed, and sent. But never mind about that just now.

It was in the cool of an early autumn, and Mrs. Throop was standing beside the mantel the evening we took tea there for the first time, when General Throop introduced me. Dressed in black, jet cross upon her bosom, jet hair silvered with the gray of her sixty years here and there. Of course, if my wife had not prepared me for it, I should have been unprepared. As it was, I brought my business faculty into unconscious exercise as I often — invariably — do when dealing with a stranger, — yourself, if you will allow me. It is experience, I suppose, but I make final decision, in the ten minutes after introduction, whether or no you are a trained swindler, or a rich ignoramus, or an insolvent ne'er-do-well, or simply what you say of yourself. So, when I met Mrs. Throop I entrenched myself rapidly, before those terrible eyes and her most peculiar manner, in that way. Whatever we were saying with our lips, what she said with those singular eyes was this : " I understand you perfectly, sir ! you are a New-Englander. You were caught by business, when the war broke out, in Alabama. You hated secession more heartily every day by reason of being conscripted. You went through battles without firing your gun, holding yourself only by main force from shooting your own Confederate officers. You are heartily glad Mr. Davis was overthrown. You are speculating in land. You love money desperately because it is power. You have awful defects and " —

It was merely by way of parry, not thrust, that I crossed swords with those inexpressible eyes by saying, only with my eyes, to myself and to her : " All your life, madam, you were too rich, and thus made selfish, — yourself became your occupation and your weariness. The long siege of Charleston and the killing of your only son has kept you at such strain of nerves in reference to yourself more than ever as that you cannot sleep at night, — how intensely wide awake during the day ! And you are a ritualist. I blame your forms of religion for that no more than I do the particular street a man in delirium of fever dashes down, escaping from his chamber. Except this, obeying a purer gospel, you would have gone utterly out of and apart from yourself to the sufficient Saviour, standing away from you, but bidding you come, leaving yourself behind, to Him. All your perpetual observances are but the workings of the same unceasing introspection. By long-continued, tensely strained gaze inward upon your own soul you have grown into the second nature of your exceeding insight as to the inmost souls of others " —

I think I am a sensible, practical man. I do heartily despise mesmerism and spiritualism, but I have met Mrs. Throop ! I find I have to abandon the making you understand anything about her. Her soul had so worn the body threadbare, as by perpetually grinding spirit against the flesh, that she was to you almost purely a soul, having to do only with the soul in you too. Yes, I -will stop. The reader who has met such persons will excuse my failure in describing this lady. Mr. Clammeigh was a great relief that evening. If you desire to interest a statue of Apollo in your conversation, your work is hard, — so steadily interested in all you are saying as to his eyes, so essentially uninterested in you and all your fly-like buzz as to his soul. Because I know land, know cotton, by having come pretty thoroughly to know the man who sells the same ! What did I care, however, for Mr. Clammeigh's perfect propriety, accurate excellence, gentlemanly reticence ? He had to do our law work to our company's satisfaction, or there were other lawyers. As to Helen ? Here, too, being only a land-agent, having no facility with my pen, I cannot make you understand how perfectly we understood Mr. Clammeigh. So far as Helen or myself was concerned, he was a corpse with all of the death of a corpse, but untouched, I do assure you, by one of the tears gen erally dropped upon such !

And the reader must allow me to make an ex planation here. I said I have no literary facility, being merely a man of business. Now a friend, whose painful task has been to look over my manu script, entreats me to correct my style, or at least " put in more verbs." I have no objection to verbs, none at all, if I but knew what verbs and where to put them ! My business correspondence has not been considered uninteresting, — for the matter, however, not the manner : please accept this narrative in that way.

I am not dealing with characters, but actual persons. I know I should let them live for themselves on these pages instead of trying to portray them, but neither Mrs. Throop Jior Mr. Clarnmeigh express themselves at all in their words ; you had to know them in person. Therefore I have a dozen times given up all idea of attempting to make this narration. But how can I help myself ? The whole affair is, in certain senses, the most remarkable of my life ; it will cease to press upon me when I have fairly written it out, — that is, as well as I can.

" Did you observe our meeting ? " my wife asked me afterward.

" No, I completely forgot about all that," I said. " I was in the custody, at the moment, of Mrs. Throop."

" We were both perfectly prepared for it, of course ! " my wife said. " I merely remarked, when introduced, 'We have met before, I believe.' I thought his steady pallor turned a shade of yellow at first, I don't know. It is amazing how keenly people can live and afterward utterly die ; it almost shakes my belief in the immortality of the soul," my wife added.

" His soul seems, at least, to have withdrawn itself from the surface," I said. " The hand of a dead man has as little warmth and pressure. I dare say you have prejudiced me. The man has come to hide himself very perfectly in himself, but .it may be mere timidity ; a rabbit burrows as deeply in its hole from fright as a robber in his cave for ambush."

" Did you notice Agnes Throop ? " my wife asks.

" How could I help it ? At least after I passed from Mrs. Throop to the mere bodily presence of her husband. She is more frail and more beautiful than I had expected."

" But it was touching ! " my wife continues.

" I did not need that special tenderness in her eyes

and her kiss at meeting and parting, to see that

Mr..Clammeigh had told her everything. I was

more vexed and touched than I can say ! It was

so at the convent," my wife continues, after long

thought. " The girl bewitched those pallid old 2 nuns ; they crossed themselves and petted and almost dreaded her. An unaccountable fascination of manner ? eyes ? — what is it ? "

" Magnetism," I make reply, for I have not for nothing heard so many lectures in Boston. " Excess of electricity. She has instant, ready, amazing sympathy for almost every person she meets. She is giving her soul away all the time. And she requires and has everybody else's soul back in return. If she was to spend an evening in one of those five-acre parlors at Saratoga, every one of the five hundred who were thrown with her would say, — every man, child, even woman of them would say, — ' What a charming woman ! ' I would say myself that only love like hers could melt that man Clammeigh. Ah, how she loves him ! "

" I wonder, wonder, wonder," my wife said, dreamily, and explained by adding, " Oh, never mind ! "

" Mrs. Throop," I say, as much to myself as* to my wife, " is what the French call — I know my pronunciation is wrong — a femme exaltSe. Madame Roland in politics, Madame Kriidener in religion, possibly Madame Guyon in the same, Charlotte Corday in vengeance. In various forms it is all Joan of Arc over and over again. I never had exactly the same experience, — experience as to another individual I mean. She was to me as if my conscience had taken flesh and dress in her person and stood before me."

" And therefore you made so clean a breast of it at supper ? " my wife asked.

" Oh, in mentioning — incidentally and very quietly, I am sure — that I was from New England ; that, although you are from the South, you held through the war the same Union sentiments as myself ? Yes, I think it always best to haver no concealments."

"Frankness is your one weakness, dear," my wife saw fit to reply.

" I have always found it best, in society as in business, my love. It certainly places us all at our ea'se with each other."

" And the General and yourself are going West to look at land ? "

" Yes, the daughter naturally inherits from the mother," I say, in continuance of profound philosophical thought, and postponing, with a gesture, my wife and her question, " the power of the eyes without their ferocity, the fullness of soul without its violence. It is the father in her which tempers the mother."

"You told me that General Throop realized George Washington to you for the first time in your life. And when I was so pleased, you told me that Aaron Burr " —

" A New-Englander," I interpose.

" — had said Washington was far from being the demi-god people thought."

"And;" I added, "that Adams had told a friend, waving his hand, after dinner, toward a portrait of the said Father of his Country, ' that old wooden head made his fortune by holding his tongue ! ' A little stolid, not swift enough for Wall Street, not having instinct for money as of a rat-terrier for vermin. It was not on carrion the eagles of those days fed, if they were slow of wing. Behind the times General Throop certainly is, absurd in his exasperation at the new era, intensely prejudiced — I do believe, however," I abruptly added, " if George Washington were to rise from the dead, he would be elected president ! "

I could have proved the same, had not an old and very black woman from General Throop's entered our room at this moment with a courtesy as deep as her bright-colored handkerchief head-dress was high. She brought certain patterns of millinery matters for Helen, and I wish I had let her alone.

"Well, Aunt Mary Martha Washington," I said, — for Helen had thus made her known to me, — " how do you like the new things, aunty ? "

" They 're not the things, marster, only patterns to make 'em with," she replies, seriously, for she suspects me.

" Oh, I mean your being free and all that ! " And I wish, as I say it, that I had known better.

" I don't like them at all, sir ! " she says, with a grave gladness for the opportunity. " We were chillern of body-sarvants of General Washington. General Theodore Throop, he bought us at the break-up there. All my life I 've sat in our church, left-hand gallery. I 've heard a thousand sermons proving we was chillern of Ham, made slaves by our Heavenly Father ! I am religious, sir, I hope. He permits these abolitionist fool folks and things, black and white ! It 's sinful ! It won't be for long"-

" Never mind, aunty ! " Curious the command with which this Southern wife of mine checks her on the spot. It lay in certain inflections of voice, •the heritage in the blood for generations. But the black woman knows I am a Yankee, as marked in her coldness to me as she is deferential to Helen thereafter !

III

He knew that a New World there must be, and sailed, The Old World forsaking, he sought it, nor failed. But, seeking and finding — in this was his gain, — A nobler Columbus than sailed out of Spain!

Not three weeks after this, and General Theodore Throop and myself were making together our last day's ride before reaching the lands I was endeavoring to exchange with him for his Charleston property. So far as steamer and railway could carry us on our journey we had gone. For the last week the pre-locomotive horse had been the only conveyance possible to the dense forests and miry roads far west of the Mississippi. Roads, horse, cabins, coarse food, shuck beds, people as of a stone age prior even to the taming of horses, — at all these I winced in sympathy with the aversion, greater still, of the General. Not that he intimated it by a word. A hundredth part of the annoyance then endured occurring before the war, or even now in Charleston, would have kept him an Etna in perpetual eruption. I could not but admire, almost venerate and lore, the thorough gentleman in my aged companion. A removal was essential to the support of wife and daughter. Such a trip would have been the business of Theodore the son ; possibly would have been unnecessary had Theodore lived. But Theodore was now part of the dust — how wholly iD vain ! — of Sumter. The General rode by my side, feeble but erect, and resolved to make the best of everything,

— an old soldier upon a campaign, a cavalier of Charles and Prince Rupert retreating before the Roundheads. And, riding with a Roundhead, too, the old General clothed himself in endurance as in his necessary coat of mail. Silent in regard to bodily inconvenience, the negroes swarming about us everywhere, less, with all his kindness, than the other insects in his regard ; the war and its results a powder-magazine between us from which we both instinctively held back the torches of our tongues,

— these things excepted, my companion is as genial as when in his parlor at home. Only somehow I am the host now in this very extensive parlor of the West, whose duty it is to entertain, — as hard a business as devolved on Virgil playing the host to Dante through Malbolge ; for we rode upon a causeway through a vast swamp on either side, every pool thereof venomous beneath its green scum with snakes and terrible with alligators, nature itself turned vicious in the vines strangling, anaconda-like, the decrepit trees, and leafing through the air upon fresh victims. Now and then the crash, of a falling tree sounding through the slimy silence, decayed trunks falling, on three occasions, across our very road !

" But some ten miles more to Brownstown," I say to the General as we ride soberly along through the live-oaks craped in moss.

" Fifty, if necessary," the General adds, cheerfully, " although I am a little fatigued."

" And here comes some one who can tell us," I add ; for during the last twenty miles we have not been so certain we are on the right road. I turn to speak to a horseman who has joined us, but am, at first, too dazzled to speak. For, instead of some rough backwoodsman, I behold a Philadelphia exquisite ! The fool is young, and not bad-looking in his waxed moustache, pomaded hair, broadcloth suit, gauntleted hands, well-brushed hat a little to one side. The instant I address him I am, in imagination, at the office of a first-class hotel in the East, confronting the exceedingly cool clerk thereof. And to him am I the dusty and tired and probably disreputable and . insolvent traveler, the nuisance inevitable to his calling.

" I intended to ask about the road," I say, as soon as I can adjust myself to the occasion ; " but I see you are a stranger like myself."

" Road to Brownstown nine miles." And our hotel clerk lifts his silver-handled whip to pass us, with a contemptuous cut on the flanks of his very bright bay, then consents to endure us, seeing the road is so lonely. He had not looked at my companion.

" Are you acquainted in this region, sir ? " the General asks after some silence ; and I observe, on the instant, that our new arrival recognizes in the General a millionaire, pecuniary or social, and modulates his entire tone and bearing. As I rein my horse in from between the two that they may ride together, I demand of myself : Culture, manner, social position, — just how do these mold the very body of a man or woman ? This old General wears them like the purple of a king, bowed to as such, no man plainer in person or attire. And what amount of dress or diamonds could make this fop other than himself? Yet it does speak well for the fellow that he defers to, recognizes, unbosoms himself to the old General. We soon have his history. He was born and has lived all his life in Brownstown. His father and familylive there now. He lives there himself, a regular physician. He is back but a few months from medical lectures in Philadelphia. This whole region, sir, is a miserable wilderness, fit only for alligators and negroes. He would not stay in it an hour if he could help it. The people are disgusting savages. He avenges himself "by dosing them, sir, dosing them most deucedly ! " only his language is more highly colored as he warms to the companionship. Incidentally, as cool matter of course, he refers with contempt to Christianity as an exploded superstition, a species of Buddhism lingering for a little longer, chiefly in such benighted regions, sir, as we are riding through. As we journey rather slowly, the nine miles suffice to reassure us as to the tremendous strides of science, sir ; in the very foremost rank of which marches Dr. Alexis Jones, — for the honor of his name, intensely illuminated upon a cream-colored card, is also intrusted to the General, who has slowly to unbutton many wrappings to place the same in his pocket. Here a sudden turn of the road brings us upon a horse tied to a sapling a little off the edge of the highway to the left ; the dismounted rider, his saddle-bags at his feet, just turning from a huge oak as we come upon him unawares, owing to the mud which deadens the sound of our horses' hoofs. The General and myself see nothing beyond this, merely bowing as we ride by. Dr. Alexis Jones is both nearer to the person and sharper-sighted ; reins up a moment, then rides on, breaking into a peal of insolent laughter.

" Would you believe it, sir," he explains to the General at last, " that fellow was standing by that tree shaving ! See the lather on his face ? Had hung up one of those little round looking-glasses to the bark by his knife stuck in. Was going to black his boots, brush his clothes and hair, — saw all the things lying on his saddle-bags. Put on a clean shirt, too, sure as you live ! " But Dr. Jones is far more profane than can be here recorded. " You see ? He is fixing up before he goes into Brownstown. Like a eircus, wants to make an awn-tray! Road so lonely, never thought anybody would happen along, see ? " And as our companion goes off into another fit of laughter, I recall a certain hurried movement and shamefacedness in the person surprised, who seemed from my hasty glance to be a gentleman and very young.

" And I know who it is ! " Dr. Jones bursts out a moment after, with an oath and a downward cut of his whip-hand which causes his horse to bound. " The preacher ! — See the black clothes and the peculiar face ? " Dr. Jones is evidently speaking of a species of being entirely distinct from, exceedingly inferior to, himself.

The way remaining before we enter Brownstown hardly suffices for even the rapid and condensed information imparted in this connection. There once had been a flourishing church in the little town. No regular minister had lived there for years, — " dying out, gentlemen, the whole thing, even here as everywhere ! " Terribly fallen the membership had become ; horse-racing, gambling, hunting on Sundays but varieties of the apostasy into which the brotherhood had fallen, the very officers of the church participants of the same. " There is old Squire Robinson, very pillar of the ex-church, worst of all. Nice time this preacher will have there ! You see, that will be his home while he stays, — yes, while!" The securing of a pastor being hardly by action of the apostate church itself, said pastor more probably sent by some Board of the denomination outside, " this young fellow shaving there" is to be the pastor of the scattered sheep.

" It will be fun alive," our friend adds, " to see how the thing will work ! And the idea of his actually stopping to fix up before meeting his people, brushing up to go to Squire Robinson's ! " Our friend sees a degree of amusement in the matter which we cannot appreciate until afterward.

" There 's about only one Christian — never mind the women, their weakness, poor things ! — in this Brownstown that has stood it out. New Hampshire they call him, queer old soul ! I suppose he came from there. Postmaster. Office, you know, in his store. Grim as death. And this, gentlemen," — unspeakable scorn in our friend as he waves his hand toward a neglected graveyard on the roadside as we enter the street of straggling cabins which constitutes the town, — " this is our Laurel Hill, our City Cemetery. Added dozens to its denizens myself since I began my practice, — practice, you observe, practice ! And this," halting his restless horse as we get fairly into the ragged hem, so to speak, of the village, and regarding the same with disgust beyond words, — " this is our Philadelphia ! Our Continental Hotel is that long, low, double, villainous old cabin on the right, with the tumble-down porch in front ; Dick Frazier — sheriff also by profession, gambler and sot by occupation — hotel-keeper. I hope to see you again, to show you our churches, libraries, museums, galleries of art, Fairmounts, navy-yards. If you survive Dick Frazier ! "

I saw that the very horse of the man was restless because laden with such an ass, glancing at me with intelligent eye which said, " Is n't he a fool ? How would you like to carry him ? " The offensiveness of the fellow being in manner more than in words.

" And here," he continued, as a man rode toward us from the village, " is a representative specimen of our lovely city, — a genuine, unadulterated Brownstownian in the original package. Hold on a moment, Evans," he added as the countryman was riding by, " allow me to make Mr. Mose Evans known to you, gentlemen ! I will merely add," he continued, as the other raised his hat to us, " that Mr. Evans is " — and he spelled without pronouncing the word — "a B-o-o-r. An I-g-n-o-r-a-n-t man. In fact, my friend Mr. Evans is a f-o-o-1 ! " There was for a moment a perplexity upon the wholesome face of the person in question, — was it possible he could not read ? — coloring and looking sharply from the rascal to myself, followed by a glance of such good-humored but absolute contempt for Dr. Alexis Jones as he bowed to General Throop in silence and rode on, that I was sorry he had not shaken hands with me. -I could have kicked the puppy as, with a wave of his hat, Dr. Jones turned down a side street and rode off ; but I was busy, so to speak, in being ashamed to look the old General in the face, the aspect of the town was so particularly miserable. Yet I had told him of it before ; and I recalled places up the Ashley and Cooper, not many miles from sacred Charleston even, as uninviting. But the brave old soul winced nothing at all. He was on a campaign, and rode as steadily up to the wretched old tavern as if it had been a battery !

Good climate, rich lands, navigable river rolling lazy with excess of mud in sight, — - yet a more miserable town could not exist. I would cheerfully describe the scenery had there been any. My field notes, for our company, of Brown County are, " Land dead level. Sandier soil, post-oaks. Bottom lands, live-oak ; soil, black, waxy, twenty feet deep, very rich, but will bake and crack in summer. Corduroy roads. Mud. Alligators.

Bayous full of ' cotton mouths,' i. e. venomous moccasin snakes. Crops, corn, splendid cotton. Register A 1."

Personally, horror and loathing of the place seized upon me ; suicide even to sojourn there ! Brownstown was, in fact, the very corpse of a town which had tumbled down and died in the mud in a drunken fit ! It may be a singular remark to make, yet if it were not so entirely unadvisable to do so, I would like dearly, at this very juncture, to give my views as to the resurrection of the dead ! I do not mean the rising of dead men from their graves unknown ages hence, save, at least, so far as the doctrine to that effect is incidentally established by another thing. Allow me to state, as clearly as I can, that the thing I refer to is the capability of their resurrection, and complete and eternal transformation in the case of persons dead and buried for years in a figurative, yet good Saxon sense of the word ! I am greatly pressed for time in our real-estate transactions, could find no leisure or disposition to enter on this narrative were it not for the remarkable illustration it affords in reference just to that ! See if I am not right !

IV

The cotton fields are grander far Than cotton factories ever are ! Our hones are frail, our sinews slack, The grander types are farther back !

" I suppose I do have," I wrote the week of our arrival in Brownstown to my wife, " a quick sense of the ludicrous, but I could hardly keep from laughing outright that first morning at breakfast, the idea of our George Washington being so terribly bitten of vermin ! Not that he spoke of it, but I knew his experience during the night from my own. Wherein does the nobility of this General Throop consist, that you reject any comparison of him to Uncle Toby, say, or to Mr. Pickwick, on the instant ? The wearying journey, coarse food, miserable nights, with all the tremendous work of creating a new Carolina for himself out in these Western wilds, is enough to daunt a man thirty years younger ; and the old General has lost twenty pounds by the scales in ' old New Hampshire's store, 1 is pale, tremulous, almost tottering, but uncomplaining and a perfect gentleman, — there is no other word ; commanding, by his very aspect, the hats off the heads and the loose talk off the tongues of even the ' characters ' of Brownstown ! It is what Falstaff said of himself with a variation ; the General is not only a gentleman himself, but the cause of gentlemanliness in others ! We rode out to see the land the General is exchanging his Charleston property for the day after our arrival, three miles from Brownstown, and upon the bank of the river. We stayed all night, by the by, at the cabin, near by, of a Mrs. Evans, a red-faced virago, not worse, I dare say, than Queen Bess. The only member of her family is her grown son, Ike Evans, or Tom, or Bob, I have forgotten his name. He is our guide among these terrible woods, — a sort of mute, inglorious Milton ; for you have read of the Oxford students who came upon that poet, when a boy, lying asleep in the summer woods in his yellow hair, and thought it was Pan. I will tell you more about this Romulus and his she-wolf of a mother, if I do not forget it.