Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861




"Nurse! nurse! Call my sons. I am dying!"

Mrs. Clark ran to the bed.

"Quick! quick!" cried Mrs. Blount. "Do not stop for me. You cannot help
me now. Call my sons before it is too late!"

Her tone and action were so imperative that they enforced obedience, and
the nurse ran down-stairs with all speed. She found no one but the hired
girl in the kitchen, who said, in answer to her hurried inquiries, that
both brothers were out, gone to bring in the cattle before the storm.
Mrs. Clark sent her in all haste to recall them, and then returned to
the sick-room. As she entered, the dying woman looked up quickly, her
face clouded with disappointment when she saw that she was alone. The
nurse said all in her power to assure her that her sons would soon be
there, but she could not allay the strange excitement into which their
absence seemed to have thrown her.

"My strength is failing," she said, sadly; "every moment is precious;
if I die without that promise which they could not refuse to a dying
mother's prayer, God knows what will become of them!"

Mrs. Clark urged the necessity of quiet, but the sufferer paid no heed
to the caution. She talked on, wildly, and sometimes incoherently,
about the hopes she built upon the reconciliation her death-bed would
effect,--showing, in these few moments of unnatural loquacity, how
deeply she had felt the animosity between her sons, and how great had
been the effort to conquer it. This excitement could not continue long;
her voice soon grew weaker, and at last she ceased speaking, appearing
to sink into a stupor of exhaustion.

An instant after, the door opened and John ran eagerly to the couch,
closely followed by James. Already the poor widow's eyes were closed;
the livid hue that is so fatally significant overspread her face; her
breath came in quick gasps.

"Mother! mother!" cried John, flinging himself on his knees beside her,
and seizing the thin, hard hand.

At that sound, she opened her eyes, but it was too late; she no longer
had the power of utterance. She glanced from one brother to the other
with a piteous, entreating look; her mouth moved convulsively; in the
effort to speak, she sat upright for an instant, ghastly and rigid, and
then fell heavily back.

All was over; her life of labor was changed for eternal rest; and the
two men, whom only her power had restrained, stood with the last barrier
between them removed, avowed and deadly enemies.

Yet, for all that, they were sincere mourners for the sole parent they
had ever known, though it seemed, that, jealous even in their grief,
neither cared to have the other see how much he suffered; for, after
the first few moments, when the heart refuses to be satisfied of the
certainty which it knows only too well, they turned away, and each
sought his own room. Afterwards, when all was prepared and the room
decently arranged, they returned, and alternately through the long night
kept their vigil beside the corpse. It is strange, that, in those quiet
hours of communion with the loved dead, no thought of relenting towards
each other ever suggested itself.

The snow that had been hanging all day in the dark clouds above them
towards evening began to fall. Stilly and continually the tiny flakes
came down, hiding all the ruggedness of earth under a spotless mantle,
even as the white shroud covered the toil-worn frame of the released
sufferer.

In the morning the news spread rapidly, and neighbors came to the
afflicted house. But the brothers seemed to resent their offers of
assistance as an intrusion, refusing to allow any other watchers,
themselves continuing night and day to watch beside the corpse; and that
awful vigil, instead of softening their hearts, seemed to harden them
into a more deadly hatred.

The third afternoon, when all the country-side was ghastly in its
winding-sheet of snow, and the clouds hung heavy as a pall over the
stricken earth, the little funeral held its way from the lonely
farm-house to the village-churchyard. As a last tribute of respect to
their mother, the two brothers drove side by side in the same sleigh.
Those who saw them said that it was a sight not to be forgotten,--those
two black figures, with their stern, pale faces, so much alike, yet so
unsympathizing, sitting motionless, not even leaning on each other in
that moment of grief. So they were together, yet apart, during the
ceremony that consigned the wife to the grave where five-and-twenty
years before they had laid the husband. So they were together, yet
apart, when they turned their horse's head towards their home and rode
away silently into the sombre twilight.

The last person who saw them that night was Mrs. Clark. The brothers
had insisted that both she and the Irish girl should leave early in the
day,--replying to all offers of putting the house in order, that they
preferred to be alone. But on her way home after the funeral, Mrs. Clark
passed the house in a friend's sleigh and stopped a moment for her
bundle, which in the hurry of the morning had been forgotten. To her
surprise, as she approached the door, she saw that there were no lights
visible in any of the windows, although it was already very dark.
Thinking the brothers were in the back part of the house, she pushed
open the door, which yielded to her touch, and was just about to make
her way towards the kitchen, when she heard a sound in the parlor, and
then these words, quite distinctly:--

"Are you ready, James?"

"Yes,--only one word. It is a long account we have to settle, and it
must be final."

"It shall be. Mine is a heavy score. Years ago I swore to wipe it out,
and now the time has come."

Mrs. Clark's knock interrupted them. There was an angry exclamation, and
the door was opened. To her intense surprise, no light came from within.
She could not understand how they could settle their accounts in the
darkness; but they gave her no time for reflection; an angry voice, in
answer to her inquiries, bade her go on to the kitchen, and she hastened
off. There she found a single candle burning dimly; by its light she
picked up her bundle, and, leaving the door open to see her way,
returned to the front of the house. Though not a nervous woman, she felt
an undefined fear at the mysterious darkness and silence; and as she
passed the brothers standing in the doorway, she was struck with fresh
terror at the livid pallor of those two stern faces that looked out from
the black shadow. When she was going out, she heard the door of the
parlor bolted within, and she rejoined her friends, right glad to be
away from the sad house.

So those two men were left alone, locked into the dark room together, in
the horrible companionship of their inextinguishable hatred and their
own bad hearts. It will forever remain unknown what passed between them
through the long hours of that awful night, when the wind howled madly
around the lightless house, and the clouds gathered blacker and thicker,
shrouding it in impenetrable gloom.

Three days passed before any living creature approached the spot,--three
days of cold unparalleled in the annals of that country,--cold so severe
that it compelled even the hardy farmers to keep as much as possible by
the fireside. On the fourth day, Isaac Welles began to think they had
been quite long enough alone, and he started with a friend to visit the
Blount brothers. Arrived at the farm-house, they saw the sleigh standing
before the door, but no sign of any one stirring. The shutters of the
windows were closed, and no smoke came out of the chimney. They knocked
at the door. No answer. Surprised at the silence, they at length tried
to open it. It was not locked, but some heavy substance barred the way.
With difficulty they forced it open wide enough to go in.

To this day those men shudder and turn pale, as they recall the awful
scene that awaited them within that house, which was, in fact, a tomb.

The obstacle which opposed their entrance was the dead body of John
Blount. He lay stretched on the floor,--his face mutilated by cuts and
disfigured with gore, his clothes disordered and bloody, and one hand
nearly severed from the arm by a deep gash at the wrist; yet it was
evident that none of these wounds were mortal. After that terrible
conflict, he had probably crawled to the door and fallen there, faint
with loss of blood; the silent, cruel cold had completed the work of
death.

Following the blood-track, the two men entered the parlor, with
suspended breath and hearts that almost ceased to beat. There they
found the dead body of James Blount,--his clothes half torn off, in the
violence of the strife that could end only in murder. A long, deep cut
on the throat had terminated that awful struggle, though many other less
dangerous wounds showed how desperate it had been. He lay just as he
fell,--his features still contracted with a look of defiance and
hatred, and in his right hand still clasped a long, sharp knife. He had
succumbed in that mortal conflict, which quenched a lifelong quarrel,
and was to prove fatal alike to victor and vanquished. Thus the vow of
John Blount was fulfilled,--the pent-up hatred of years satisfied in his
brother's murder.

The room was in the wildest disorder,--chairs thrown down and broken,
tables overturned, and the carpet torn. In one corner they found a
second long, sharp knife. It had been at least a fair fight.

They laid the two ghastly corpses side by side: they had been chained
together all their lives; they were chained together in death. The two
fratricides are buried in one grave.

This terrible tragedy blighted the spot where it took place. No one
would ever inhabit that house again. The furniture was removed, except
from the one room which to this day remains unchanged, and the building
left to fall to decay. The superstitious affirm, that, in the long
winter nights, oaths and groans steal out, muffled, on the rising wind,
from the dark shadows of the Lonely House.

* * * * *


BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION.


In the interior of the island of Borneo there has been found a certain
race of wild creatures, of which kindred varieties have been discovered
in the Philippine Islands, in Terra del Fuego, and in Southern Africa.
They walk usually almost erect upon two legs, and in that attitude
measure about four feet in height; they are dark, wrinkled, and hairy;
they construct no habitations, form no families, scarcely associate
together, sleep in trees or in caves, feed on snakes and vermin, on ants
and ants' eggs, on mice, and on each other; they cannot be tamed, nor
forced to any labor; and they are hunted and shot among the trees, like
the great gorillas, of which they are a stunted copy. When they are
captured alive, one finds, with surprise, that their uncouth jabbering
sounds like articulate language; they turn up a human face to gaze upon
their captor; the females show instincts of modesty; and, in fine, these
wretched beings are Men.

Men, "created in God's image," born immortal and capable of progress,
and so differing from Socrates and Shakspeare only in degree. It is but
a sliding scale from this melancholy debasement up to the most regal
condition of humanity. A traceable line of affinity unites these outcast
children with the renowned historic races of the world: the Assyrian,
the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, the Jew,--the beautiful Greek, the strong
Roman, the keen Arab, the passionate Italian, the stately Spaniard, the
sad Portuguese, the brilliant Frenchman, the frank Northman, the wise
German, the firm Englishman, and that last-born heir of Time, the
American, inventor of many new things, but himself, by his temperament,
the greatest novelty of all,--the American, with his cold, clear eye,
his skin made of ice, and his veins filled with lava.

Who shall define what makes the essential difference between those
lowest and these loftiest types? Not color; for the most degraded races
seem never to be the blackest, and the builders of the Pyramids were far
darker than the dwellers in the Aleutian Islands. Not unmixed purity of
blood; since the Circassians, the purest type of the supreme Caucasian
race, have given nothing to history but the courage of their men and the
degradation of their women. Not religion; for enlightened nations have
arisen under each great historic faith, while even Christianity has its
Abyssinia and Arkansas. Not climate; for each quarter of the globe has
witnessed both extremes. We can only say that there is an inexplicable
step in progress, which we call civilization; it is the development of
mankind into a sufficient maturity of strength to keep the peace and
organize institutions; it is the arrival of literature and art; it is
the lion and the lamb beginning to lie down together, without having, as
some one has said, the lamb inside of the lion.

There are innumerable aspects of this great transformation; but there is
one, in special, which has been continually ignored or evaded. In the
midst of our civilization, there is a latent distrust of civilization.
We are never weary of proclaiming the enormous gain it has brought
to manners, to morals, and to intellect; but there is a wide-spread
impression that the benefit is purchased by a corresponding physical
decay. This alarm has had its best statement from Emerson. "Society
never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other.... What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing,
thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his
pocket, and the naked New-Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear,
a mat, and the undivided twentieth part of a shed to sleep under! But
compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal
strength the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike
the savage with a broad-axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch; and the same blow
shall send the white man to his grave."

Were this true, the fact would be fatal. Man is a progressive being,
only on condition that he begin at the beginning. He can afford to wait
centuries for a brain, but he cannot subsist a second without a body. If
civilization sacrifice the physical thus hopelessly to the mental, and
barbarism merely sacrifice the mental to the physical, then barbarism is
unquestionably the better thing, so far as it goes, because it provides
the essential preliminary conditions, and so can afford to wait.
Barbarism is a one-story log-hut, a poor thing, but better than nothing;
while such a civilization would be simply a second story, with a first
story too weak to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven
in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in
a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement. In such a
view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object,
good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain
built on. But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious
merchant-prince in his counting-room, tottering feebly about, his thin
underpinning scarcely able to support what he has already crammed
into that heavy brain of his, and he still piling in more,--one feels
disposed to cry out, "Unsafe passing here! Stand from under!"

Sydney Smith, in his "Moral Philosophy," has also put strongly this case
of physiological despair. "Nothing can be plainer than that a life of
society is unfavorable to all the animal powers of men.... A Choctaw
could run from here to Oxford without stopping. I go in the mail-coach;
and the time the savage has employed in learning to run so fast I have
employed in learning something useful. It would not only be useless in
me to run like a Choctaw, but foolish and disgraceful." But one may well
suppose, that, if the jovial divine had kept himself in training for
this disgraceful lost art of running, his diary might not have recorded
the habit of lying two hours in bed in the morning, "dawdling and
doubting," as he says, or the fact of his having "passed the whole day
in an unpleasant state of body, produced by laziness"; and he might
not have been compelled to invent for himself that amazing rheumatic
armor,--a pair of tin boots, a tin collar, a tin helmet, and a tin
shoulder-of-mutton over each of his natural shoulders, all duly filled
with boiling water, and worn in patience by the sedentary Sydney.

It is also to be remembered that this statement was made in 1805,
when England and Germany were both waking up to a revival of physical
training,--if we may trust Sir John Sinclair in the one case, and
Salzmann in the other,--such as America is experiencing now. Many years
afterwards, Sydney Smith wrote to his brother, that "a working senator
should lead the life of an athlete." But supposing the fact still true,
that an average red man can run, and an average white man cannot,--who
does not see that it is the debility, not the feat, which is
discreditable? Setting aside the substantial advantages of strength
and activity, there is a melancholy loss of self-respect in buying
cultivation for the brain by resigning the proper vigor of the body. Let
men say what they please, they all demand a life which shall be whole
and sound throughout, and there is a drawback upon all gifts that are
paid for in infirmities. There is no thorough satisfaction in art or
intellect, if we yet feel ashamed before the Indian because we cannot
run, and before the South-Sea Islander because we cannot swim. Give us a
total culture, and a success without any discount of shame. After all,
one feels a certain justice in Warburton's story of the Guinea trader,
in Spence's Anecdotes. Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day,
when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey,
"you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world." "I
don't know how great you may be," said the Guinea-man, "but I don't like
your looks; I have often bought a man, much better than both of you
together, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas."

Fortunately for the hopes of man, the alarm is unfounded. The advance
of accurate knowledge dispels it. Civilization is cultivation, whole
cultivation; and even in its present imperfect state, it not only
permits physical training, but promotes it. The traditional glory of
the savage body is yielding before medical statistics: it is becoming
evident that the average barbarian, observed from the cradle to the
grave, does not know enough and is not rich enough to keep his body in
its highest condition, but, on the contrary, is small and sickly and
short-lived and weak, compared with the man of civilization. The great
athletes of the world have been civilized; the long-lived men have been
civilized; the powerful armies have been civilized; and the average of
life, health, size, and strength is highest to-day among those races
where knowledge and wealth and comfort are most widely spread. And yet,
by the common lamentation, one would suppose that all civilization is a
slow suicide of the race, and that refinement and culture are to leave
man at last in a condition like that of the little cherubs on old
tomb-stones, all head and wings.

It must be owned that the delusion has all the superstitions of history
in its favor, and only the facts against it. If we may trust tradition,
the race has undoubtedly been tapering down from century to century
since the Creation, so that the original Adam must have been more than
twice the size of the Webster statue. However far back we go, admiring
memory looks farther. Homer and Virgil never let their hero throw a
stone without reminding us that modern heroes only live in glass houses,
to have stones thrown at them. Lucretius and Juvenal chant the same
lament. Xenophon, mourning the march of luxury among the Persians, says
that modern effeminacy has reached such a pitch, that men have even
devised coverings for their fingers, called gloves. Herodotus narrates,
that, when Cambyses sent ambassadors to the Macrobians, they asked what
the Persians had to eat and how long they commonly lived. He was told
that they sometimes attained the age of eighty, and that they ate a mass
of crushed grain, which they termed bread. On this, they said that it
was no wonder, if the Persians died young, when they partook of such
rubbish, and that probably they would not survive even so long, but for
the wine they drank; while the Macrobians lived on flesh and milk, and
survived one hundred and twenty years.

But, unfortunately, there were no Life Insurance Companies among the
Macrobians, and therefore nothing to bring down this formidable average
to a reliable schedule,--such as accurately informs every modern man how
long he may live honestly, without defrauding either his relict or his
insurers. We know, moreover, precisely what Dr. Windship can lift, at
any given date, and what the rest of us cannot; but Homer and Virgil
never weighed the stones which their heroes threw, nor even the words in
which they described the process. It is a matter of certainty that
all great exploits are severely tested by Fairbanks's scales and
stop-watches. It is wonderful how many persons, in the remoter
districts, assure the newspaper-editors of their ability to lift twelve
hundred pounds; and many a young oarsman can prove to you that he has
pulled his mile faster than Ward or Clark, if you will only let him give
his own guess at time and distance.

It is easy, therefore, to trace the origin of these exaggerations. Those
old navigators, for instance, who saw so many fine things which were
not to be seen, how should they help peopling the barbarous realms with
races of giants? Job Hartop, who three times observed a merman rise
above water to his waist, near the Bermudas,--Harris, who endured such
terrific cold in the Antarctics, that once, perilously blowing his nose
with his fingers, it flew into the fire and was seen no more,--Knyvett,
who, in the same regions, pulled off his frozen stockings, and his toes
with them, but had them replaced by the ship's surgeon,--of course
these men saw giants, and it is only a matter for gratitude that they
vouchsafed us dwarfs also, to keep up some remains of self-respect in
us. In Magellan's Straits, for instance, they saw, on one side, from
three to four thousand pigmies with mouths from ear to ear; while on the
other shore they saw giants whose footsteps were four times as large as
an Englishman's,--which was a strong expression, considering that the
Englishman's footstep had already reached round the globe.

The only way to test these earlier observations is by later ones. For
instance, in the year 1772, a Dutchman named Roggewein discovered Easter
Island. His expedition had cost the government a good deal, and he
had to bring home his money's worth of discoveries. Accordingly, his
islanders were all giants,--twice as tall, he said, as the tallest of
the Europeans; "they measured, one with another, the height of twelve
feet; so that we could easily,--who will not wonder at it?--without
stooping, have passed between the legs of these sons of Goliath.
According to their height, so is their thickness." Moreover, he "puts
down nothing but the real truth, and upon the nicest inspection," and,
to exhibit this caution, warns us that it would be wrong to rate the
women of those regions as high as the men, they being, as he pityingly
owns, "commonly not above ten or eleven feet." Sweet young creatures
they must have appeared, belle and steeple in one. And it was certainly
a great disappointment to Captain Cook, when, on visiting the same
Island, fifty years later, he could not find man or woman more than six
feet tall. Thus ended the tale of this Flying Dutchman.

Thus lamentably have the inhabitants of Patagonia been also dwindling,
though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the
apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at
twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown
downward; yet he said of them that they were "enormous goblins," seven
feet high, every one of them. One of his officers, however, writing an
independent narrative, seemed to think this a needless concession; he
admits, indeed, that the women were not, perhaps, more than seven feet,
or seven and a half, or, it might be, eight, "but the men were, for
the most part, about nine feet high, and very often more." Lieutenant
Cumming, he said, being but six feet two, appeared a mere pigmy among
them. But it seems, that, in after-times, on some one's questioning this
diminutive lieutenant as to the actual size of these enormous goblins,
the veteran frankly confessed, that, "had it been anywhere else but in
Patagonia, he should have called them good sturdy savages and thought no
more on't."

But, these facts apart, there are certain general truths which look
ominous for the reputation of the _physique_ of savage tribes.

First, they cannot keep the race alive, they are always tending to
decay. When first encountered by civilization, they usually tell stories
of their own decline in numbers, and after that the downward movement is
accelerated. They are poor, ignorant, improvident, oppressed by others'
violence, or exhausted by their own; war kills them, infanticide and
abortion cut them off before they reach the age of war, pestilences
sweep them away, whole tribes perish by famine and smallpox. Under the
stern climate of the Esquimaux and the soft skies of Tahiti, the same
decline is seen. Parkman estimates that in 1763 the whole number of
Indians east of the Mississippi was but ten thousand, and they were
already mourning their own decay. Travellers seldom visit a savage
country without remarking on the scarcity of aged people and of young
children. Lewis and Clarke, Mackenzie, Alexander Henry, observed this
among Indian tribes never before visited by white men; Dr. Kane remarked
it among the Esquimaux, D'Azara among the Indians of South America, and
many travellers in the South-Sea Islands and even in Africa, though the
black man apparently takes more readily to civilization than any other
race, and then develops a terrible vitality, as American politicians
find to their cost.

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