Part 33

It was, as I wrote to her, history repeating itself, and that I felt as if I had taken root again in my native soil, and was budding anew into a second springtime.

In May I wrote to the girl whose first winter “out” had, thanks to the affectionate adoption of uncles and aunts, fulfilled her rosiest dreams:

“Do you recollect that I quoted to you at our parting in January, what a quaint old lady said to me in my girlhood: ‘My dear, you may be an angel some day! You will never be young again. Therefore, make the most of youth.’

“I paraphrase her counsel now, and to you: Make the most of your present freedom, for you are going to be a pastor’s daughter again. As you know, your father has been preaching hither and yon all winter, and has had four calls to as many different churches: two in New Jersey, one in New Haven, and, lastly, in Springfield, Massachusetts. For reasons that seem good and sufficient to him, he has accepted the last-named invitation, and he will enter upon the duties connected therewith, this month.

“The ‘Old First’ is the most ancient church in Springfield, if not the oldest in the Connecticut Valley. It has had an honorable history, in more than two hundred years of existence. If you have read Doctor Holland’s _Bay Path_, you will recollect Mr. Moxon, the then pastor of this church. Perhaps because I have read the book, and maybe because my old Massachusetts grandmother (a Puritan of the Puritans, and preciously uncomfortable to live with, she was!) talked to me of the straitlaced notions, works, and ways of the ‘orthodox’ New-Englander, which she thought ‘blazed’ the only road to heaven—I have an idea that we will find the atmosphere of Springfield very different from any other in which we have lived. If I am right, it will be a change even from Presbyterian Richmond. However this may be, I counsel you to enjoy the remaining weeks of your stay there to the utmost.”

If I were called upon to describe what was the real “atmosphere” of the loveliest of New England towns, in which we lived for five busy years, I should say that it was “stratified,” and that in a fashion that puzzled us grievously up to the latest day of our sojourn. Public spirit of the best and most enlightened sort; refinement and taste in art and literature; social manners and usages that were metropolitan, and neighborliness which made the stranger and sojourner welcome and at ease—all this was “shot,” if I may so express it, with strata of bigotry; with stubborn convictions that the holders thereof were right, and the insignificant residue of the world utterly wrong, and with primitive modes of daily life and speech, that never ceased to surprise and baffle us. Yet we flattered ourselves that we knew something of the world and the inhabitants thereof!

In the process of acclimation we had occasion, if we had never had it before, to be thankful for the unfailing and robust sense of humor that had stood our friend in many straits which would else have been annoyances. Before long, we recognized that certain contradictory phases of conduct and language, hard to comprehend and hard to endure, had their keynote in what one of the best of my new friends once aptly defined to me as “an agony of incommunicableness,” inherent in the New-Englander’s composition. He may have drawn the strain through nearly three centuries from his early English ancestry. I have seen the same paradox in the Briton of this generation. Of one such man I said, later in life, when I was alone with my sick son, thousands of miles from home: “The ice was slow in breaking up; but it gave way all at once, and there was warm water under it.”

“Agony of incommunicableness!” Over and over, during those five years, I blessed the man who put that key into my hand.

I cannot better illustrate what I am trying to explain than by relating what is, to me, one of the most precious and altogether satisfactory memories connected with our Springfield experiences.

Four months after our removal to the beautiful city, I received a formal request (everything up to that time had a smack of formality to my apprehension) that I would take charge of a young men’s Bible-class, the teacher of which had left the town. The application was startling, for not one of the young fellows had ever called on me, or evinced other consciousness of the insignificant fact of my existence than was implied in a grave salutation at the church-door and on the street. After consultation with my husband I accepted the position, and on the next Sabbath was duly inducted into office by the superintendent. That is, he took me to the door of the class-room and announced: “Mrs. Terhune, young gentlemen, who will conduct your class in the place of Mr. L., resigned.”

I walked up the room to face eight bearded men, the youngest twenty-two years of age, drawn up in line of battle at the far end. I bowed and said “Good-afternoon,” in taking the seat and table set for me in front of the line. They bowed in silence. I began the attack by disclaiming the idea of “teaching” them, concealing as best I could my consternation at finding men where I had looked for lads. I asked “the privilege of studying with them,” and thanked them for the compliment of the invitation to do this. Then I opened the Bible and delivered a familiar running lecture upon the lesson for the day. Not a question was asked by one of the dumb eight, and not a comment was made at the close of the “exercises” upon what had been said. I went through the miserable form of shaking hands with them all as we separated, and carried home a thoroughly discouraged spirit. By the following Sunday I hit upon the idea of calling upon each student to read a reference text, as it occurred in the course of the lecture, and I took care there should be plenty of them. That was the first crack in the ice. Encouraged by the sound of their own voices, the young fellows put a query or two, and I used these as nails upon which to hang observations not indicated in the “lesson-papers.” Next week there were sixteen in line. Before the first year was out there were forty, and they gave a dramatic entertainment in a neighboring hall, which netted a sum large enough to enlarge the class-room to double the original size. They decorated it with their own hands, and I was with them every evening thus employed.

Still, there was never a syllable to indicate that this was anything but a business venture. I love boys with my whole heart, and I had said this and more in their hearing, eliciting no response.

At the end of the second year, when there were fifty members in the class, one of the eldest of the number removed from Springfield to a distant city. One of the greatest surprises of my life was in the form of a letter I had the week after he had bidden me good-bye as coolly as if he had expected to see me next Sunday as usual.

He began by telling me how often he had wished he could express what those Sunday afternoons had been in his life. He “feared that I might have thought him unresponsive and ungrateful.”

“If indeed you ever troubled yourself to bestow more than a passing thought upon this one of the many to whom you have ministered,” he went on, “I don’t believe you ever noticed that I let nobody else take the seat next to you on the left? I used to go very early to make sure of it. I shall unite with the church here next Sunday. You have a right to know of a purpose, formed weeks ago, in that class-room—the most sacred spot to me on earth.”

He wrote to me of his marriage two years later, then of the coming of his first-born son. About once a year I heard from him, and that he was prospering in business and happy in his home. Ten years ago I had a paper containing a marked obituary-notice bearing his name.

The same story, with variations that do not affect the general purport of the class-history, might be repeated here. I hear of “my boys” from all parts of the world. All are gray-haired now who have not preceded their grateful leader to the Changeless Home.

There were sixty-six of them when I told them, one Sunday afternoon, five years after our first meeting, that Doctor Terhune had accepted a pressing call to a Brooklyn church, and that I must leave them. The news was absolutely unexpected, and a dead silence ensued. Then one fellow, who had been received into the church with ten others of our class, at the preceding communion season, arose in his place:

“Is there anything _we_ could do to keep him—and you?” he asked, huskily. “Has anybody done anything to make your residence here unpleasant? If so”—stammering now, and a defiant scowl gathering upon his handsome face—“Say! can’t we fellows just _clean them out_, and keep you and the Doctor?”

It was impossible not to laugh. It was as impossible to hold back the tears at the odd demonstration of the “boys’” claim to membership in the Church Militant. He may have forgotten the upgushing of the warm water under the ice. I shall never lose the memory.

Nor yet of the farewell reception to which the boys rallied in force, excluding all other guests from the pleasant class-room we had built, and in which I spent some of the happiest hours vouchsafed to me in the city I had called “a cold-storage vault,” before I got under the ice of English reserve and Puritanical self-consciousness—engendered, as I am fain to believe, by the rigid self-examination enjoined by the founders of State and Church. In those rude and strenuous days, self-examination took the place, with tortured, naked souls, of the penances prescribed in the communion they had left to find

“Freedom to worship God,”

and

“A church without a bishop, A state without a king.”

The class-room was wreathed with flowers; there was music by the boys, and social chat; a collation of their own devising: then the eldest of the band, a married man for years, goodly of form and feature, and with a nature as lovely as his face, arose to make a farewell “presentation address.” He never finished it, although it began bravely enough. The handsome set of brasses he passed over to me were labelled, as he showed me, “FROM YOUR BOYS.”

“You will have another class in your new home,” the speaker broke into the carefully prepared peroration to say, “but please let us always call ourselves, ‘Your Boys!’”

They are that still, and they will be evermore! A finer, more loyal body of young men it would be hard to find in New England, or elsewhere. It has happened so often that I have come to look for it, that, on steamer or train, on the street or in hotel, I am accosted by a middle-aged man—invariably highly respectable in appearance—with—

“I beg your pardon. Let me recall myself to your memory. I belonged to your Bible-class in Springfield.”

If, as usually happens, he adds to his name, “One of your boys”—the ashes are blown away from the embers of long-past acquaintanceship. The talk that ensues invariably emphasizes the pleasing fact that, if there were a black sheep in our fold, he has, up to date, escaped detection.

God bless each and every one of them!

I cannot close the chapter that has to do with our Springfield days, without paying a brief tribute to two who played important parts in the drama of our family life. Both have passed from mortal vision, and I may, therefore, name them freely.

The house built for us by a parishioner in the pleasantest part of the city, was in the immediate neighborhood of the homestead of the late Samuel Bowles, the well-known proprietor of the _Springfield Republican_. The house was now occupied by his widow and family. To the warm friendship that grew up between Mrs. Bowles and myself I owe more than I can trust my pen to express here. From our earliest meeting, the “middle wall of partition” of strangerhood ceased to be to either of us. Hers, as I often reminded her, was the one and only house in the place into which I could drop, between the lights, unannounced, when the humor seized me, and without putting on hat or coat. The ascent of the half-block of space dividing our doors is ever associated in my mind with the gloaming and moonlight, and slipping away from duties to relax thought and tongue, for one calming and sweetening half-hour, in the society of one “who knew.” It was not alone that, as one who had been born, and had lived out her girlhood in the Middle States, her range of ideas and sympathies was not limited by the circle of hills binding Springfield into a close corporation. Her great, warm heart took in the homesick stranger that I was, for many a month after transplantation, and gave me a corner of my very own. She was a safe, as well as an appreciative listener, and gave me many a hint respecting my new environment that wrought out good to me. Her fine sense of humor was another bond that drew us together. The snug sitting-room, looking upon the quiet street, up which the shadows gathered slowly on summer evenings, and where the sleigh-bells jingled shrilly in the early winter twilight, echoed to bursts of laughter better befitting a pair of school-girls than two matrons who were both on the shady side of fifty. I was in the earthly Jerusalem, with my son, when the gates of the Celestial City opened to receive her faithful, loving spirit. I am sure that, as Bunyan affirmed when another travel-worn pilgrim entered into rest, “All the bells of the city rang for joy.”

In April, 1884, our eldest daughter became the wife of James Frederick Herrick, one of the _Republican’s_ editorial staff. We left her in Springfield when, in the same year, we returned to the Middle States to take up our abode for the next twelve years in Brooklyn. We could not have left her in safer, tenderer keeping. A brother-editor said of him once that he “had a heart of fire in a case of ice.” The simile did not do justice to the gentle courtesy and dignity that lent a touch of old-school courtliness to manner and address. In all the intimate association of the next ten years, I never saw in him an act, or heard a word that approximated unkindness or incivility. I wrote him down then, as I do now, as in all respects, the thorough gentleman in what makes the much-abused word a badge of honor. His ideals were high and pure; his life, private and professional, above reproach.

“The stuff martyrs and heroes are made of,” said one who knew him well and long.

He would have died for the truth; he would have laid down his life with a smile for his wife and children. Such harmonious blending of strength and sweetness as were found in the life of this man—modest to a fault, and resolute to a proverb—I have never seen in another.

“_I have fought the good fight_” is the wording of his epitaph. I could have wished to add, “_Of whom the world was not worthy_.”

In 1886 he received an appointment that brought him to New York. There he yielded up a blameless life in 1893. If his last illness were not the direct result of steady, unremitting work, it is yet true that he wrought gallantly after the fatal fever fastened upon him, standing patiently in his lot until prostrated by delirium.

I shall part with reason and memory before I forget that his last thought was of the young wife kneeling at his pillow, and that the dying eyes, in losing their hold upon earth, committed her to me.

XLVI

RETURN TO MIDDLE STATES—THE HOLY LAND—MY FRIENDS THE MISSIONARIES—TWO CONSULS IN JERUSALEM

IN the sketch of my husband’s life-work, written by a faithful co-laborer in the vineyard which is the world, and appended to this story, his reasons for returning to the Middle States are briefly given. As I near the latter chapters of my record, I am hampered by the necessity of treating cautiously of persons and incidents too near the present day to be spoken of with the freedom time made justifiable in earlier reminiscences. Those twelve years in the City of Churches were crowded with events of more or less moment. They were busy, and not unhappy years. Our home-group, reduced to four by the marriage of our eldest daughter, was made still smaller by the marriage of her sister on March 5, 1889, to Frederic Van de Water, of Brooklyn. The choice was wise, and the union has been one of rare blessedness.

“In-laws” have no terrors in our circle. No sinister significance attaches to the term “mother-in-law.” The adopted sons were loyal and loving to the parents of their wives. Not a cloud darkens the memory of our intercourse. The only obstacle to Belle’s marriage was thus stated in whimsical vexation by her father:

“It is hard that, when there are said to be fifteen hundred proper names in the English language, my girls must select men who have the same. It leads to no end of confusion!”

Our boy, now grown into an athletic six-footer, was graduated from Columbia University in 1893. We three had lived in great peace and contentment during his college course. We talk often, and wistfully, of those four years of church-work, social duties, literary tasks, and academic studies, which filled hands and heads. We spent our winters in town. Sunnybank grew to be more and more a home in the summer months. It was like a return to the time when our own babies filled house and verandas with merry prattle, and our hearts made music; for there were, at the date I name, four boys to repeat the history for the proud grandparents. But for the great sorrow that had broken up Christine’s happy home in February, and brought her back to us with her two boys, and the birth, a fortnight thereafter, of Belle’s second boy, the years slipped by brightly, without other signal event until “Bert’s” graduation at the June Commencement. There was, for me, one notable exception to the gentle flow.

It was, I think, in mid-June, that I had a letter from the proprietor of the _Christian Herald_, a religious paper of wide circulation, asking me to write a serial that should run through six months’ issues of that periodical. Just at that time my mind was working upon a projected story (published afterward in book-form under the caption _The Royal Road_), and this seemed a promising medium for circulating it among the classes I wished to reach. Accordingly, I called at the _Christian Herald_ office to discuss the plan. My brief and satisfactory interview with the managing editor over, I arose to go when he invited me to step into the adjoining room, where the proprietor would like to speak with me for a minute. I was courteously received, and final arrangements for the publication of the serial were made. I was again on the point of departure, when the proprietor directed my attention to a new and handsome map of the city of Jerusalem, spread out upon his desk, inquiring, in an offhand way:

“Have you ever visited the Holy Land?”

“Never,” I replied, adding involuntarily, “It has been one of my dearest dreams that I might go some day.”

“It would be a very easy matter for you to fulfil the wish,” in the same easy, unpremeditated tone.

“Easy?” I repeated. “Yes; in my dreams!”

“In the flesh, and in reality. Will you sit down for a moment, please?”

He proceeded then, in less time than it will take me to write it, to unfold a plan in which I soon saw, although he did not say it, that the serial story, my call, and the map of Jerusalem, conspicuously displayed on his desk, were so many stages of a carefully concerted scheme. He wanted me to go to Syria, with the express purpose of investigating the condition of the women of that land, and getting an insight into their domestic life, and at the same time incidentally gleaning material for sketches of historical localities—in short, to gather material for such “familiar talks” as I had held with American women upon household and social topics. These were to be supplied to his paper, week by week. His provision for travelling expenses would include those of my husband, or any other escort I might select. The sum he named as remuneration for the work was handsome, but this circumstance made a slight impression upon me at the time. Our dialogue ended in my promise to take the matter into consideration, and to let him have my decision in a day or two. I hope he never guessed at the whirl of emotions lying back of a sober face and calm demeanor.

I recollect walking out into the bustling streets as if I trod upon air, my head ringing as if nerves were taut harpstrings, my heart throbbing tumultuously. I scarcely knew where I was, or whither I was going. Something, somewhere—it seemed in the upper ether, yet so near that I heard words and music—was singing rapturously:

“Jerusalem the Golden! Methinks each flower that blows, And every bird a-singing Of that sweet secret knows. I know not what the flowers May feel, or singers see, But all these summer raptures Are prophecies of thee!”

It was my favorite hymn, but it was nothing in me that sang it then.

“One of my dearest dreams!”—ever since, as a child, I had fed a perfervid imagination upon Bible stories, and chanted David’s psalms aloud in the Virginia woods, to tunes of my own making. One of them broke into the jubilant _Jerusalem the Golden_ pealing in the ether overhead:

“My feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!”

Was I, then, so near the fulfilment of the heavenly dream?

* * * * *

We sailed for the Holy City in September—my big boy and I. Doctor Terhune could not go, and we had always promised that our son should have a foreign trip when his university work was done. The opportunity was auspicious.

Each of us told as much of the story of the memorable seven months abroad as we were willing the public should read—I, in the letters published first in the _Christian Herald_, subsequently in book-form under the title, _The Home of the Bible_; Bert, in a smaller volume, _Syria from the Saddle_, a breezy chronicle of a young man’s impressions of what he saw and heard while in Syria. I considered it then, and I think it now, a remarkable book, coming, as it did, from the pen of a boy of twenty-one. He celebrated his majority in the desert-places between Damascus and Jerusalem.

Two or three incidents, eventful forever to us, may be mentioned briefly in this personal narrative.

I am not a believer in dreams. I do attach importance to “coincidences,” holding some that have fallen into my life in reverence the more sincere because I cannot explain them away.

One night in Paris, where we spent a fortnight on the way to Syria _via_ Egypt, I had a long and distressing dream of carrying a poor ailing baby along dark streets and over fences and fields. My arms ached under the weight of the limp body; my heart and ears ached with the piteous wailing of the sufferer, for whom I could do nothing. I awoke in the morning, utterly worn out in nerve, and depressed unreasonably in spirit. That forenoon I wrote my daughter:

“It was an ugly, gruesome dream. Your aunt Myrtle would see in it an omen of evil. She says that a death in the family has always followed her dream of the sick baby she cannot put out of her arms. It is an old superstition. You may recollect that Charlotte Brontë alludes to it in _Jane Eyre_. I have so such dreads. Yet I find myself wishing that I had not had that ‘visitation.’ It has left a very unpleasant impression on my mind—a sort of bad taste in my mental mouth. I am thankful that it came to me, and not to Myrtle.”

My sister had been ill before we left home, but was convalescent when we sailed, and a letter from her husband awaited us in Paris, conveying the cheerful assurance of her confirmed improvement in health and strength, and bidding me have no further anxiety on her account.