But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, Ishould be glad to dwell at considerably more length because, ofall men whom I have ever known, this individual was fittest tobe a Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing to causes whichI may not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment fromthis peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable ofit, and, were he to continue in office to the end of time, wouldbe just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with justas good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-Houseportraits would be strangely incomplete; but which mycomparatively few opportunities for observation enable me tosketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the Collector,our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military service,subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory,had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the declineof his varied and honorable life. The brave soldier had alreadynumbered, nearly or quite, his threescore years and ten, and waspursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened with infirmitieswhich even the martial music of his own spirit-stirringrecollections could do little towards lightening. The step waspalsied now that had been foremost in the charge. It was onlywith the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavilyon the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and painfully ascendthe Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress acrossthe floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. Therehe used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspectat the figures that came and went; amid the rustle of papers,the administering of oaths, the discussion of business, and thecasual talk of the office; all which sounds and circumstances[21]seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to maketheir way into his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance,in this repose, was mild and kindly. If his notice wassought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed out uponhis features; proving that there was light within him, and thatit was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp thatobstructed the rays in their passage. The closer you penetratedto the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. Whenno longer called upon to speak, or listen, either of which operationscost him an evident effort, his face would briefly subsideinto its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful tobehold this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility ofdecaying age. The framework of his nature, originally strongand massive, was not yet crumbled into ruin.
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To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages,was as difficult a task as to trace out and build upanew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, froma view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance,the walls may remain almost complete, but elsewheremay be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength,and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, withgrass and alien weeds.
No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazonedabroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had nowanother kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it,with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets ofanatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise,in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost,and gone regularly through the office. Borne on suchqueer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a[29]name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before,and, I hope, will never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while thethoughts that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had beenput to rest so quietly, revived again. One of the most remarkableoccasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in me,was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety tooffer the public the sketch which I am now writing.
It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different orderof composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointlessand inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myselfwith writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, oneof the Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention,since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughterand admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller.Could I have preserved the picturesque force of his style, andthe humorous coloring which nature taught him how to throwover his descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would havebeen something new in literature. Or I might readily have founda more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of thisdaily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to flingmyself back into another age; or to insist on creating the semblanceof a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment,the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by therude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would[40]have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaquesubstance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency;to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily; toseek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hiddenin the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters,with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. Thepage of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace,only because I had not fathomed its deeper import.A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leafpresenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the realityof the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only becausemy brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribeit. At some future day, it may be, I shall remember afew scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write themdown, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I sawmuch reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losingside, rather than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had beennone of the warmest of partisans, I began now, at this seasonof peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with whichparty my predilections lay; nor was it without something likeregret and shame, that, according to a reasonable calculation ofchances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to be betterthan those of my Democratic brethren. But who can see aninch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was thefirst that fell!
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morningwhen our story begins its course, that the women, of whomthere were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiarinterest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue.The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of improprietyrestrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale fromstepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their notunsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest tothe scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, therewas a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old Englishbirth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separatedfrom them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughoutthat chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmittedto her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and brieferbeauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less[56]force and solidity, than her own. The women who were nowstanding about the prison-door stood within less than half acentury of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had beenthe not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. Theywere her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their nativeland, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largelyinto their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shoneon broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round andruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and hadhardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of NewEngland. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity ofspeech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be,that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect toits purport or its volume of tone.
The door of the jail being flung open from within, thereappeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging intosunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, witha sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. Thispersonage prefigured and represented in his aspect the wholedismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was hisbusiness to administer in its final and closest application to theoffender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, helaid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom hethus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the prison-door,she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity andforce of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by herown free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of somethree months old, who winked and turned aside its little facefrom the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore,had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight ofa dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which shewas the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from hereyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like amass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind,and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and keptbringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of alittle town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other facesthan were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of thosesteeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences the most trifling and immaterial,passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childishquarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, cameswarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whateverwas gravest in her subsequent life; one picture preciselyas vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or allalike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit,to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms,from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. 152ee80cbc
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