Read Ebook: The Galaxy May 1877 Vol. XXIII.—May 1877.—No. 5. by Various

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y take them!) he is to be put in the kindergarten at Geneva, and left there for some years. It's a consolation to think that he can't be anywhere more desolate than he's sure to be at home.

Meanwhile, work for papa and mamma, and bouts of colic for him, poor little chap!

The father's part was to try and present an available surface for the dabbing, which he did by drawing out first an arm, then a leg of the child at full length, just as one pulls an elastic cord to find how far it will stretch, letting it go with a snap when at full tension--as he dropped arm or leg when little Malaise resented such unwarrantable experiments on his ductility by a sudden, louder-than-usual roar. It was piteous! But to see that father and mother--he lanky, spectacled, grave as an owl, she serious, abstracted, revolving doubtless some scheme of work, mechanically getting through this piece of business, recognized as necessary by their conscientiousness, but perplexing in its nature, and unaccountable as having fallen to their lot--no propriety, no indignant sympathy for the baby, could quite withstand the drollery of the scene.

But nothing could pacify nurse! "The idiots!" she almost screamed. "The child will die, and I hope it will, for she's not fit to have it. I hope it will die!"

BIEBRICH, 21st.

I have kept this open, thinking I could tell you definitely when we shall get into our quarters at Schwalbach, but nothing is settled yet, and we've been pottering about in these river towns. As Schlangenbad and Wiesbaden are very full, I counsel my lord to stop here where we are well off; for this is a very comfortable hotel, and I don't want to do any more unpacking till we are finally bestowed in our rooms at the Villa Auth?s.

There is an abandoned palace of the Grand Duke of Nassau here--one of the ruins in King William's track of '66. It is so melancholy to see these ruined principalities. Union's a very nice word, but forced union, matrimonial or political, is not comfortable either to see or endure. However, here's the palace, with its lovely neglected gardens, grass uncut, wild flowers flaunting where should be trim velvet turf only, fountains plashing in weedy ponds--and an admirable resort we find the shaded avenues and deserted parterres for ourselves and our small queen. We could scarce be better provided for.

To-day, watching from our windows the steamer coming down the river, we spied, on its deck, our travelling companions again--Mr. and Mrs. Malise--and, sure enough, the little gray parcel on the bench not far from mamma! Going at last, I hope, toward that nurse on the Moselle. Poor little Malaise!

Address your next as last year. And with fond love to the whole household,

Your Lil.

At last I've seen my "poor little Malaise" again. Your questions would have kept him in my memory if there had been a chance of my forgetting the woful baby; and so soon as we were warmly settled into house, home habits, and friendly circle again --and to go back to my first-page sentence, I set forth one morning to hunt up the little man. I found my people easily enough--a good house in a good street--"A large house, that must require much thought and care," I said to Mrs. Malise; whereupon she told me the care did not fall upon her, as the house was, after an imperfect fashion, conducted as a co?perative boarding-house--a germ, she hoped, of a co?perative hotel or family club. Half a dozen or so of their friends occupied the house with them, and they paid an admirable housekeeper to manage for them. It was only a make-shift--not what one liked to mention when speaking of future possibilities of confederated homes--had I read the article in a late number of the "Victoria Magazine" containing a magnificent picture of co?perative living?--but better than dreary lodgings or isolated homes, especially when a woman devoted her life to other than household duties. I replied that I believed every ardent spirit at some time or another was discontented with the beaten way, and dreamed of glorious possibilities of associate life and labor, wherein all selfishness should be suppressed, justice and all the beatitudes reign, and souls develop all their capabilities scarce conscious of even the body's hampering; but that practically the only successful lay experiment in communism I had ever heard of was that early one of the Indians in Paraguay under the care of the Jesuit missionaries--Phalansterians who wore their rosaries around their necks because they had no pockets in which to carry them!

And I thought that people without bonds of kinship or close sympathy would not happily bear being forced into incessant, intimate companionship unless they were either saints or prodigies of imperturbable courtesy.

Well, life was a choice of evils, she answered me, and their experiment had so far succeeded very well. But I might judge for myself a little: would I, with my husband, dine with them on either one of such and such days the next week, to meet this confederate household assembled? This was an advance I had not counted on. My especial interest was in the child, and though I liked well enough for myself accepting an invitation that promised to be something out of the common way in dinners, I was hardly prepared to pledge Ronayne. He not only likes a good dinner, and feels injured when he doesn't get it, but he is very particular as to the society in which he eats it. He can be gloriously jolly and informal when he likes; but he wouldn't be his father's son if he weren't what I call just a bit snobbish about the people he will know in England--London especially.

"Ronayne, don't you want one more chance of freedom? Are you frightened about to-morrow morning, and the pell-mell household mamma promises you? Because if you are, I'll let you off now. You may run away in the night. I'll be a forsaken maiden, and papa shan't have the loch dragged, or advertise a 'Mysterious and Heart-Rending Disappearance.'"

"Too late. It's a hopeless case. I'm much too far gone for that. And I'm not going to help you to get rid of me, Mistress Lil."

However, for once I was discreet, and answered Mrs. Malise that I should like to come, but must see my husband before promising ourselves. Then I asked to see my small friend; but his mother, consulting her watch, begged me to excuse his non-appearance to-day, for this was just the moment when his nurse would be laying him down for his nap; and though often he would not sleep at all, yet system was everything, and he had to lie in his little bed two hours, though his eyes were broad open all the while.

"But will he lie there so long without crying?"

"But you do not mean without your baby?"

"You weaned him, then, very early?"

"Oh, dear, yes. Since he was three months old, he's been brought up as Pip was. But perhaps 'Great Expectations' was not among your books read."

"No; but I suppose you mean your baby's brought up by hand? But I can't think how you could bear to put him away from you if it wasn't actually needful. Why, my heart's broken only to think that in a month or so more my baby will not depend upon me, humanly, for all her little life."

"Ah, plainly you have a vocation to be a mother. I haven't; and if I had to care for Mill in all things, it would be simple slavery to me. But it must be a great step from art to the nursery too."

"Whatever I see, I don't despair of winning you over to our side. I think it only needs that this great movement for woman's freedom and enlightenment, all that underlies it, all it implies, be fairly brought before you, to receive your assent and co?peration. And, to be unwisely frank, perhaps, it is such women as you we ought to gain, must gain--women of sentiment, tenderness, tact, suave manner--sympathetic women, to bring a gracious element into the contest. The workers already in the field have fought so long, against such odds and obloquy, that it is no wonder all the softness, conciliation are gone out of them, and that their aspect and address suggest only warfare, aggressive and unsparing."

And so on during the call. I wish I could photograph for you Mrs. Malise's drawing-room. You will not suppose it cumbered with the ordinary pretty feminine litter; but I can tell you Aunt Janet's sewing-room couldn't begin to rival it in grim dead-in-earnestness: straight up and down chairs that mean work; a writing-table big enough for a board-room, and fitted with suitably mighty writing implements; a slippery green leather couch upon which no laziness could be so desperate as to court repose; books lining one wall, and papers, stacks of papers everywhere--manuscripts and newspapers; no ornaments, unless a clock, a Cleopatra's needle in black marble, a skull, a wild-eyed, shock-headed oil portrait of a man I guessed to be the father of my hostess, and photographs of Mill, Mazzini, and Swinbourne be considered decorative.

Once at home again, I flew up stairs to Ronayne's dressing-room to run over his engagement tablet. One of the days named by Mrs. Malise was clear, so I said quietly at dinner, "Oh, Ronayne, don't make any engagement for Friday, for we are to dine at the Coming Events New Era Peep o'Day Associate Club."

"Let them think you idiotic, dear--that goes without saying because you're a man--but not that you're a tyrant to whom a poor-spirited wife must succumb.

And about here, I think it was, my eloquence and pathos were suddenly checked in their flow. Men, husbands especially, take such mean advantages! And reasoning, and calm, intellectual conversation have, somehow, so little charm for them! I tell you painful truths, my Susie, but they're for your good and guidance. I know that long-legged, yellow-haired laddie out in New Zealand is a demi-god. Of course he is--they all are--but it's best not to marry 'em--if one can help it!

Our host and hostess received us in the confederate drawing-room, where were three or four other guests already, and the greater number of the associate household and the lacking members presented themselves before dinner was announced. Fourteen or fifteen people in all, and not, to the casual glance, differing strikingly from unassociate dwellers in "isolate homes and dreary lodgings."

"And no wonder!" I couldn't help saying, for she had mounted and mounted as she described the scene, until there really was something supernatural and alarming in the slim, white-draped length of lady, and the height from which the big blue eyes in their hollow orbits shone down upon me.

Next--let me see--two gentlemen, bachelors, one a pugnacious fellow-countryman to whose tremendous r-r's my heart warmed in this lisping land of Cockaigne--a proof-reader at one of the great publishing houses; the other as curious a specimen as I've encountered--a man of sixty or so, of courtly manners, an ex-Anglican parson, an ex-Catholic convert, a present "seeker after truth"--a man who knows something about everything and believes the last thing--but sure of nothing save that this world's a comfortable place, and loving nothing, one would swear, but his pug dog, a superb creature, fairly uncanny for wisdom, but a vilely ill-tempered beast, gurr-ing if one but looked at it.

The food-regenerator and his wife and the blonde "healer" had seats together, and were helped only to vegetables and fruits--the girl, indeed, taking only unbolted bread, of which an enormous supply in the shape of hard little cakes was placed before her, together with a large vegetable-dish full of stewed prunes; and the two mountains of bread and fruit had disappeared when the meal was ended--how many pounds I don't know, but then dinner is her sole meal in the twenty-four hours.

"Did you see that young woman's dinner?" burst out my liege that night when we were discussing our late experiences. "Disgusting! It ought to have been served in a trough! I looked every instant to see her fall from her chair and have to be carried out. If one is to gorge oneself like an anaconda once a day upon fruit and chopped straw in order to live to a good old age, I think we'll elect to be cut off in our youthful bloom."

"Oh, women are the stronghold of superstition," he exclaimed apropos of some passage between himself and the American art-student--"fettered hard and fast by hoary prejudices," he went on with rather a confusion of metaphors, "else the world might move."

"But we bind you, upon a man's testimony, but by a single hair," answered his opponent: "why not burst so slight a shackle?"

"And you to talk of freedom!" he went on as if unhearing. "Why do you wear that emblem at your throat?"

"Possibly because I'm a Christian." She answered without change of voice, but stopping the conversation by addressing some one nearer her. But the little porcelain widow, with a pretty upward movement, like the flutter of a bird on her nest, caught at a floating thread, and said in her tiny flute voice.

"But, Mr. Ridley, if he is interested in symbolism, will remember that the cross is a very ancient symbol, typifying the active and passive forces in nature--good and evil, light and darkness. And is it not very curious how everywhere the sign is impressed on external nature--in the heavens, in crystals, in flowers, in a bird's flight? In the arts too."

"And the legends, fables, and touching or droll superstitions concerning it are endless," said the white-headed doctor beside me. "And yet I'm often struck with the comparative newness of what may be termed literature of the cross. This dwelling on apparition in so many forms of the Story of the Cross is quite modern, and I fancy that a Good Friday service, a following through the Three Hours' Agony with a colloquial soliloquy, if one may use such an expression, upon the Seven Last Words, would have seemed as novel to the early Christians as it does now to the Low Church portion of our beautifully consistent Establishment."

"Though the symbol was always probably in private use among the early Christians," struck in the truth-seeker, "I believe its first public appearance would not date further back than its triumphant one upon the Roman eagles. In the Catacombs, I'm told, the Virgin and Child appear in the oldest work, or symbolism--the Cross never save as executed by late hands."

"May there not be subjective reasons for that?" asked my porcelain widow. "I mean for the modern adoration of the Cross? Do you not think we are much softer hearted, much more keenly susceptible of all the finer emotions than were those old Greek, Roman, and Jewish converts? One feels the same thing, it seems to me, in mystic reading. The old visions were triumphant, simple, or, so to say, material--the very A B C of mysticism; while the visions of later mystics are complicated, involved, like the soul-life of this time, often agonizing beyond natural power of endurance. And the stigmatized saints are of these later times."

"And then," said the art-student, "I think they didn't realize in those early days how long time was going to be, and how tough and many-headed, evil. The faith was but young then. Perhaps they couldn't have borne to know the length and fluctuations of the fight--and they felt so sure of speedy victory, that our Lord's resurrection and ascension appealed to them more keenly than His passion."

"All reasonable theories," replied my neighbor. "But, apropos of some of the legends concerning the Tragedy of the Cross, the weeping willow, the trembling aspen, the robin redbreast, the red crossbill, the passion flower, and so many more, I hardly know a more na?ve example of the way in which our forefathers pressed the exterior world into testimony for their belief than occurs in an old picture in an Augustinian monastery in Sussex.

"It is a fresco on the wall of a chamber--subject, the Nativity--and the animals therein are made to publish the event in words supposed to resemble their characteristic sounds and cries. A cock, crowing, is perched at the top, and a label from out his mouth has the words, 'Christus natus est!' 'Quando, quando?' quacks the duck. Hoarsely the raven, 'In hae nocte.' 'Ubi? ubi?' inquires the cow. And, 'Bethlehem,' bleats out the lamb."

"Oh, Mrs. Stainton, I beg your pardon," suddenly called out the ex-Anglican parson from the foot of the table, and despatching a servant with a plate to the little widow. "I quite forgot your predilection."

"That reminds me," said the Scotchman, "that I saw a photograph of Dixblanc to-day, and was astonished to find her not at all an evil-looking person. I quite believe now that she murdered her mistress in a fit of passion, as she says, and not at all for robbery. And there must have been awful provocation. Fancy living with a disreputable, avaricious, nagging old Frenchwoman!"

"But how worse than with an old Englishwoman of like characteristics?" asked somebody.

You will easily imagine that the talk, as it ran from one thing to another, was now and then upon topics of which I haven't the faintest gleam of knowledge--the doctrines of Swedenborg, the philosophizings of Spinoza and Vaurenargues.

"But we are not all chiefly moved by economic considerations. Some of our members have very considerable incomes, and might live where and how they pleased, but they seem not less satisfied with our experiment than are the poorer associates. There is such relief from care, and we may see as much or as little society as we choose without offence or burden."

Something interrupted Mrs. Malise's argument here, and I asked to see baby.

"Mill? Oh, certainly, if you like; but we shall find him asleep."

And asleep he was in one of those dreary back rooms that are sure to be sunless--a room that is both day and night nursery, I suppose, for there was a hot fire, a close smell, and the German nurse sat making lace under a gas jet flaming away unshaded.

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