Part 24
What fancies we weave, what dreams we dream over a piece of homely old china! Every cup, every jar in our china ingatherings, has the charm of fantasy, visions of past life and beauty, though only imagined. I like to think that the china I love has been warmly loved before—has been made a cherished companion, been tenderly handled ere I took it to be my companion and to care for it. It is much the same friendly affection that I feel for an old well-read, half-worn book; the unknown hands through which it has passed, the unseen eyes that have gazed on it, have endeared it to me. This imagined charm exists in china if it be old, though we know not a word of its past, save that it has a past and is not fresh from the potter’s wheel and the kiln. The very haze of uncertainty is favorable to the fancies of a dreamer; I summon past owners from that shadowy hiding-place; weave romances out of that cloud; build past dwelling-houses more quaint, more romantic than any in whose windows I have gazed, whose threshold I have trodden in my real china hunting. Victor Cousin says: “If beauty absent and dreamed of does not affect you more than beauty present, you may have a thousand other gifts, but not that of imagination.” If you have no imagination you may have none of these china dreams—these “children of an idle brain,” but you still may have china memories. Fair country sights does my old china bring to my eyes; soft country sounds does it bring to my ears, the sound of buzzing bees, of rustling branches, “the liquid lapse of murmuring streams,” of rippling brooks where we dipped the old blue crockery mugs and cups the day we found them, and drank the pure but sun-warmed water. When I look at this queen’s-ware creamer, I hear the sweet, clear, ear-thrilling notes of the meadow-lark, “in notes by distance made more sweet”—who sang outside of the farm-house where I first saw the dainty shell of china. Sweet scents, too, does the old china bear. When I found that old yellow Wedgwood dish in the country tavern, it was filled with tiny fragrant wild strawberries—I smell, nay, I taste them still. That flaring-topped vase was full of sweet white honeysuckle when I espied it in a farm-house window—I carried away the scent of the honeysuckle when I bought the vase. This old mottled stone-ware jug, with the hound handle, stood in the deep shade of a stone wall by the side of a sunny hay-field when first it met my view. It was filled with honest home-brewed beer for the hay-makers. We sat fuming and sizzling in the hot sun, watching them spread and turn the fragrant hay until the beer had all been drunk (and we did not have to wait long), and we bore the jug off in triumph, breathing to us forever the scent of new-mown hay with, to speak truthfully, a slight tinge of stale beer.
A halo of “sweet Sabean odors” fairly envelops all family china. In those blue and white Canton sugar-bowls, and in that great jar with the red lacquered cover, my grandmother kept her fragrant spiced rose-leaves—there are rose-leaves in them now. In that tall pitcher she always placed the first lilac and cherry blooms—and lo! as I look at the poor cracked thing, “sweet is the air with budding haws and white with blossoming cherry-trees.” More prosaic and homely, but equally memory-sweet, what a penetrating aroma of strong green tea rises out of that copper-lustre teapot! What a burnt and bitter, but wholly good-smelling steam arises from that old flip-mug, the steam from many a quart of flip brewed from New England rum, and home-made beer, stirred with the red-hot iron loggerhead.
Like Charles Lamb, I was born china-loving. “I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.” When I was a little child the dearest treasures of my doll’s house were a small cup-plate of purest porcelain, delicately bordered with a diagonal design of tiny berries and spike-shaped bachelor’s buttons and fine lines of gold, and a nicked India china tea-caddy, cork-stoppered, and filled with precious rose-water—rose-water of my grandmother’s own make, distilled in the old rose-water still that stood, when unused, a cumbrous and mysterious machine under the dusty eaves of the garret. I suspect that still had been employed in early colonial days to manufacture a less innocuous liquid than rose-water, but now only the petals of the Queen of the Prairie, the sweet-brier, the cinnamon roses, went into its innocent limbec; and its sweet-scented product was intensified by the contents of one of the long, thin, gilt glass bottles of ottar of roses that my great-uncle, Captain Royal, who “followed the sea,” brought home in such vast numbers from China. One day there poured out from the door of my doll’s house a penetrating fragrance of roses; I peered within—the keen anguish of that moment fills me even now; the tea-caddy had fallen—nay, had been knocked on my precious little plate, and both were broken. There on her back, drenched with my cherished rose-water, lay the iconoclast, my miserable maltese kitten, in mischief still, pulling down with her sharp, wicked claws my proudest masterpiece, a miniature chandelier of wire and glass beads over which I had spent many a weary hour. I burst into a loud wail of hopeless despair; the bedraggled kitten rushed frightened from my side, shedding odors of Araby as she bounded away,
“An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger.”
Ah! never again, even at sight of housemaids’ broken spoils, have I felt such heart-breaking grief. To this day, when I look back at the plate here shown and the little coffee-cans of the blue Tournay sprigged set which I now know to be Crown Derby, and to have been bought by Uncle Royal in a sudden streak of extravagance (perhaps he, too, was china-mad); to this day I grieve for their companion, the little broken cup-plate, and again I smell the sweet, cloying fragrance of rose-water.
These old dark blue plates also tell a tale. They are known to us as “the doctor’s pie-plates,” not from the comical figure of Dr. Syntax with which they are decorated, but so called in derision. An old New England physician, a pie-hater, stole, one Thanksgiving eve, twenty-eight carefully made pies that his patient wife and daughters had provided for his Thanksgiving guests. He rose stealthily in the dead of night, threw lemon and apple, quince and cranberry, mince and “Marlborough” pies to the pigs, and hid the blue pie-plates in an old rat-nibbled, cobweb-filled, musty, dusty coach that had stood for half a century in his carriagehouse, and in which his English grandmother had journeyed in state throughout New England. Thirty years later, after his death, at the destruction of the old coach, these hidden pie-plates were found by his descendants. They are therefore not simply “good pieces of blue,” they are ceramic monuments of the household tyranny of man.
Shall I ever forget my first view of my largest and choicest Washington pitcher? It stood filled with dried grasses and pressed and varnished autumn leaves, and painfully covered with an ignominious shell of decalcomanie and scrap-book pictures, on a table in a lonely lighthouse. Only by its shape did we know it, the old watermelon shape of Liverpool ware. Not a vestige of its early decoration could be seen, but we bought it as a hazard of fortune. Oh, the delight I felt when I reached home and scraped off Pauline Hall’s smirking and high-colored countenance, and saw with a thrill of friendly recognition the black-lined face of my own solemn and immaculate Washington surmounting her full-blown, rosy shoulders and scarlet and gold bodice. Never do I look at my fully restored pitcher but I see him again, as then, with his dignified head turned very much aside, as if sadly shocked at the position and dress he found himself in.
The clear blue letters on these old Delft apothecary jars speak not to me of the drugs and syrups, of the lohocks and electuaries that were contained within them in olden times; they are abbreviations of various Biblical proverbs, such as “Every fool will be meddling,” and “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” The little, ill-drawn blue cherubs that decorate these jars seem always to wink and smirk maliciously at me, and to hold their fat sides as though they were thinking of the first time they gazed at me and jeered at me out of the window of the gray old farm-house in Narragansett, as I stood entrapped by the sudden crushing in of a peaked-roofed hen-house upon which I had climbed to peer within a window at the hidden Delft treasures. There I stood on broken eggs and piercing splinters for one hour, with only distracted hens and scarcely less distracted thoughts for company, until the owner of hen-house and Delft jars returned and kindly chopped me out of my absurd and well-deserved stocks. Severe and unceasing monitors are my old apothecary jars.
When I stick gillyflowers and clove-pinks in the pierced tops of these three-legged India china “posy-holders,” I am, like Marjorie Fleming, “all primmed up with Majestick Pride”—the honest pride of a successful china-finder who has snatched her prize from before the very face of a dozen other collectors. These “posy-holders” stood for forty years on the high-towering mantel-tree of a country parlor, a parlor that was viewed yearly by scores of inquisitive and curiosity-seeking summer visitors, visitors too dull-visioned to recognize these china treasures. Perhaps the high-shelved station of the china, a foot only from the ceiling, helped to hide them. Perhaps the gruesome row of oval silvered disks that stood in their company, tarnished coffin-plates bearing the names of past and dead dwellers in that home, may have chilled and repelled investigation. Perhaps the scarlet, blue, and gold dragons and shrimps on the posy-holders were dulled by the greater glories of their surroundings, for this parlor shone resplendent with glowing color. The walls had been painted by a travelling artist in the early part of this century, and lavish was his fancy and his sense of color. Above the high black mantel-shelf a yellow ochre sun threw his rays over vermillion and purple clouds. These rays of light were gilded and curved in various directions, and gave Phœbus the appearance of a good-tempered, smiling octopus, withal somewhat intoxicated. At either side of the fireplace sprung a great palm-tree that bore at the base of a spreading cluster of leaves luscious bunches of great hanging pineapples. Around one tree a frightful serpent coiled, his striped folds most beautifully diversified with gilded spots. Behind the other tree lurked a crouching tiger. On the plastered wall were painted two portraits with fine simulated gold frames, apparently held in place by heavy cord and tassels; one was of George Washington, the other the past owner of all these glories. It was curious to see the marked and comic likeness a fair young daughter of the house, the village school-mistress, bore to the hard-faced, non-perspectived old daub of a grandfather on the wall; had you dressed her in a brass-buttoned blue coat and a high stock, she would have been far more like the portrait than most portraits are like their originals. One large space was decorated with a full-passengered coach with four prancing horses; the other bore a marine view—fierce waves, and a strangely rigged brig, with gilded cannon, and fine flags and pennants all blowing stiffly against the wind that filled the sails. A steamboat, too, sailed these waters blue—the greatest triumph of the painter’s art. Robert Fulton’s invention was in its infancy when this steamboat was evolved, and it was plainly constructed from the artist’s imagination. The cranky hull bore two brick chimneys; it rested on crossbars like a wagon, and had four great wheels that sat well up out of the water. The floor of this room was painted a dull drab color, and in brilliant yellow was displayed a diagram of the solar system, planets, moons, and orbits, sadly worn and defaced, however, by the footsteps of three generations of New Englanders.
Do you wonder that the china posy-holders were overlooked in all this blaze of glory? I recount the gaudy decorations with grateful praise. Through them my treasures stood, ever “eye-sweet and fair,” but unnoticed, for years, humbly awaiting my china-loving and china-spying vision.
These dainty egg-shell cups and saucers have also their memory, their lesson—a word softly spoken but clear; they were once owned by two silver-haired “antient maides” of Chippendale elegance and Pilgrim blood, who lived under the moss-covered, decaying rooftree of a pallid, gaunt, old colonial home in New England. These “last leaves on the tree” kept their dainty, shallow, apse-shaped china closets in a state of snowy purity, of precise and unvarying order, of unspotted contamination, which might be taken as an emblem of their narrow, pure, and monotonous lives. No thick, substantial modern wares, no gayly painted crockery, no vessels of common clay, stood on their well-ordered and softly shining shelves, just as no modern notions, no knowledge of the common, the evil things of life, had ever entered their simple minds, had ever shocked their fair souls. Fragile, graceful, antiquated, pale in decoration, were their weakly sprigged, lavender-bordered, delicately fluted cups; looking like their own softly wrinkled faces, their meagre, bent figures, their slender hands. Worn was the gilt on the china, faded was the furniture of their rooms, as ill-health had worn their gentle spirits. Rather scantily filled were their china shelves, as were thin and few their garments, as was sparsely filled their larder. Deep green shadows fell on the glass doors and white shelves of their china closets from the thick-branched old lilacs that close-screened each small-paned window, from the dark century-old cedars that overhung their home; death and loneliness and scanty means had shadowed their lives. My pure, dignified, and silent old cousins, no sweetly-perfumed, softly-tinted, strong-growing blossoms of New England life were you, but rather the sad, white, scentless “life everlasting” that waved like summer snow-drifts over your own sterile, rock-filled fields. These fragile porcelain emblems of your colorless life shall not be carelessly handled and rudely gazed at in their new home, but, close-hidden away in an old apple-wood beaufet which once stood beside your virginal china closets, shall forever teach to me the lesson of contentment, simplicity, and resignation which you showed in your gentle lives, the lesson which through your old china still lives—the lesson of peace and rest.
A halo of mysterious ghost-seeing, an eternal radiance of poesy, surrounds this copper-lustre pitcher. We found this irradiated pitcher when we went a-spinet-hunting. We found the ghost also, a tall, pale, terrifying apparition, who stealthily entered our room at midnight as we slept in the old Pardon tavern, who mysteriously and quietly carried off our gowns, but who proved in the cold disillusionizing daylight to be our landlady’s daughter, an amateur dressmaker of unbounded ambition and few resources. And our poet! we found him also, a unique and untutored son of the gods, a rare product of New England soil. We prosaically hired this Yankee Walt Whitman to drive us to the Maybee farm—the house which we had been assured held both china and spinet. Our dearly-remembered poet was a tall, wiry New Englander, whose only visible attire was a moth-eaten fur hat, a woollen shirt, a pair of heavy boots, and faded overalls, held in place by a single suspender. He looked too thinly clad for the raw spring weather, but seemed perfectly comfortable and contented in his light clothing. Poet-like, his hair was long. Four little wintry curls blew out from under the old hat. We had been warned that he did not call himself a farmer, but proudly avowed and named himself a poet; and it was hinted that he was a little “luny.” He had begun his rhyming career with the composition of epitaphs for all the village inhabitants, both living and dead; and from thence had advanced to the constant use of rhymes in every-day life and hence had acquired the name of “Rhyming Darius.” He “lisped in numbers for the numbers came;” and proudly did he display his God-given talent to us prosy city folks. He also combined with his vocation as poet the additional talent of employing intensely legal forms of speech; for he had at an early period of his life been a witness in some country trespass case, and had since then always spent a day “in court,” whenever the rare days of idleness of a New England farmer would permit. As a result, he always cross-questioned everyone with whom he had any conversation, and adopted, as far as he could remember, a lawyer’s phraseology and legal terms. He had a wily manner of evading questions, and seldom gave a direct answer; so between questions and answers we held “open court” all the way to the Maybee farm.
Our poet also made a strange introduction of the letter “u” into words—which use he evidently regarded as something extremely eloquent and scholarly, but which produced some very astonishing variations in our vernacular speech. He was much excited at the nocturnal abstraction of our gowns and he poured forth a perfect volley of rhymed questions upon the subject to us as he drove, seated sidewise, fixing us “with his glittering eye:”
“Why didn’t she apply to ye purs-u-nal An’ ask ye fur the garment? Did she retain the artucle Long enough to bring a warrant? Did she take it with malice of forethought Or unpre-med-ure-tated? Did she terrure-fy ye very bad A-purloinin’ as ye stated? What air ye goin’ to do? Did her mother know it too? Why didn’t ye holler out? An’ ask her what’s she’s about?”
At last, to stop his flood of inquiry, we began to question him, to draw him out about the spinet and china.
“Do you know the Maybees well?”
“Wall—I may perhaps assert And assure-vure-rate I do; At any rate I know him And I s’pose I know her too.”
“Is it an old farm, and an old house?”
“It ain’t so old as some, And it’s a little older ’n others. The farm ’s older ’n the house; It used to be my brother’s.”
“How long have you known them?”
“Oh—quite an in-ture-val, But I ain’t known ’m all my life; I’ve known him sence I was two year old, And a leetle longer his wife.”
“Do you know whether they have an old spinet?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute If you’ll tell me what’s a spinet?”
“It is like a little old-fashioned piano. Have they got such a one? Is it old? Is it small? Describe it to us.”
“They ‘ve the funniest thing you ever see; It’s just as cur-u-ous as it can be; How to dure-scribe it just beats me; Spinet’s the name for it down to a T. It ain’t so big as some pianures, And it ain’t so small as othures; ’Tain’t so old as some you’d see, And ’tain’t so new as it might be; That is all that I can say. I heard old Maybee tell one day He’d a mus-ure-cal com-bure-nation He’d be glad to sell for a very small sum; ’Twas as old and mean As any he’d seen, And he’d like to sell it, he says, Before it drops to pieces.”
We looked at each other in amazement at this strange specimen of Yankee humanity—that is, we did it whenever his gaze was averted long enough to give us any chance to look at each other. We sank back in despair of ever receiving a definite description of the spinet, and above all of any china—that most indescribable of country possessions. We feebly tried to parry him with some of the skill which he himself displayed, but failed ignominiously under the scathing sharpness of this “lawyer” of thirty years’ experience. We finally answered his rhyming questions with as much directness and truth as the chief witness in a murder trial. As we alighted from the wagon and were about to enter the Maybee door, Darius pulled me back by the sleeve and whispered:
“Ye mustn’t mind Miss Maybee If ye find her a leetle cross; She ain’t at all e-lab-ure-ate, Any more than my old horse. She won’t show any man-ures When you ask to see her pianure.”
A sharp-featured young woman advanced to meet us. Her hair bore two partings, an inch apart, and the middle lock was strained painfully back. Her face was curiously mottled with yellow patches which showed plainly that dyspepsia and biliousness had marked her for their own. She looked so sour, so sharp, so devoid of “man-ures” that we quailed visibly before her keen black eye. What new specimen of humanity had we here? Into what world was our China and spinet-hunting carrying us?
We began the conversation very mildly by saying that we had heard that Mrs. Maybee had some china that she wished to sell.
“Then you’ve heard a lie,” the acrid voice broke in.
“But surely we have heard that you have a piano to sell?”
“Well, I ain’t. I’ve got a musical combination, but I ain’t so awful anxious to sell it.”
For minutes we stood there, facing this resentful being, who showed no desire to have us seat ourselves, while we pleaded, we praised, we cajoled, we apologized, and we questioned, until, at last, she allowed us to see her precious spinet. We entered the gloomy “best room” where it stood, gave one glance at it, and sank on the haircloth sofa. It was a _melodeon_—a forlorn, broken-down, old _melodeon_—to which some farm-tinker had added an oblong frame strung with catgut and wire strings, in the apparent hope of forming some instrument of the nature of an Æolian-harp.