Part 10 (1/2)
And as to musquitoes. Ah! you too have suffered. You have lain, hour after hour, listening to that never-ceasing war-song, till you were as nervous as a hump-backed cat face to face with Jowler in a corner. You have ”turned over;” you have lain on your side, lain on your back, lain on your face, spite of your prominent nose. You have doubled your fists up under your arm-pits, and twisted your feet into hard knots under your night-clothes, to no avail. You have then fallen back on your dignity and the pigmy-ness of your tormentors, and folding your arms resolutely over your chest, and looking fiercely up to the ceiling, exclaimed:
”Come one--come all--this bed shall fly From its stout legs as soon as I!”
And yet, at that very moment, an ”owdacious” bite has sent you, with a smothered exclamation, into the middle of the floor, bewailing the day you were born.
Next day you get a ”musquito net.” What a fool not to think of it before. You festoon it round your bed. It looks pink-y and safe. You explore it carefully that night before getting in, that no treacherous crevice be left for the enemy. You put out the light, and oh! happiness unutterable, listen to their howl of rage _outside_, which sounds like the ”music of the spheres,” and fall asleep. Next morning you wake with a splitting headache. Can it be the confined air of the net? _Horrible!_ You spend that day nursing your head and your wrath. Why were musquitoes made? You find no satisfactory solution. What do they live on when not devouring human beings? Why, in the same bed, is one bitten and the other left? Why infest New York, and leave Brooklyn, whose inhabitants deserve punishment for monopolizing Beecher? Why, if they _must_ bite, not pitch in at once, instead of stopping to harrow you by giving a concert.
That night you refuse to gasp under a net, for all the musquitoes that ever swarmed. You even light your gas defiantly, open the windows, and sneer at the black demons as they buzz in for their nocturnal raid. You sit and read--occasionally boxing your own ears--till the small hours, and then--to bed; only to dash frantically against the wall, throw your pillows at the enemy, laugh hysterically, and rise at daylight a blear-eyed, spotted, dismal wretch!
_WOMEN'S NEED OF RECREATION._
I read an article the other day on working-men's clubs, which set me thinking. In it was set forth the necessity, after a man's hard day's work, of an evening of rest, away from home, where he should find light and warmth, and boon companions.h.i.+p, other than is to be found in the corner grocery.
Now this is well, were there not a better way, as I believe. I am not about to propose clubs for working-women, because our police reports show every day that they have existed for a long time--thanks to ”corner groceries”--and that they are made of any implement that comes handy, and result in bruised flesh and a broken head. This being the case, I cannot see why the working-woman, as well as the working-man, does not need, after a hard day's work, ”light, warmth, and boon companions.h.i.+p of an evening, away from home.” Nay, all the more, since work, hard as her husband may, it is often in the fresh, open air; or, if not, he has it going and returning, and the boon companions.h.i.+p of his fellow-workmen with it; while she, with ”Ginx's last baby” to look after, in some noisome tenement house, stands over the perpetual wash-tub or cooking-stove, with two or three half-grown children hanging to her draggled skirts, never exchanging her unwomanly rags, not even perhaps to ma.s.s for a hurried prayer in the church which, G.o.d be thanked, is free alike to poor and rich, and which suggests, in its own way, a distant heaven for her.
Thinking over all this, I said why not Germanize this thing? Why not have clubs for working-men and their families, with innocent amus.e.m.e.nt minus the drink? Isn't it possible? Or if not, I wish it were, for the poor hara.s.sed women's sake. I only see the millennial germ of it; but this I know, that the wives need it more, far more, than their husbands, the wide world over, and in every strata of society; by the pains of motherhood, even in favorable conditions; by her intenser nervous organization; by her indoor confinement and narrowing, petty detail-worries; by the work that ends not at sundown as does his. By the wakeful, unrestful nights, which every mother knows; _this_ is the hardest, most wearing kind of work, no matter what may be said of the husband, who has his sleep at least; who demands _that_ in every family exigency as his right, and as the foundation of his ability to labor for his family. Ah! what if the wife and mother, with less strength, feebler organization, should make a stand for this? even when, in addition to her other cares, she helps in some outside honest way to support the family?
Does she not, too, need warmth, light, and boon companions.h.i.+p of an evening? While it is true that
”All work and no play Makes Jack a dull boy,”
remember it is just as true of Jack's wife as it is of Jack, and the founders of ”Working-men's Clubs” would do well to put this into their foundation.
I wish that some of the pains taken to make human beings ”_good_” were expended in trying to make them _happy_. Particularly is this necessary in regard to young people, though it is a fact that should be recognized much more than it is, in the conditions of every human being. Let a little suns.h.i.+ne into the outward circ.u.mstances surrounding them before you begin to talk about a future state. There are children, and grown people too, so cob-webbed over with care and misery, that all talk, how ”_good_” soever, is useless. _They want some brightness infused into their lives._ It may be a wife--weary, body and soul; tired of plodding; she needs some kind voice to say (alas! how little husbands think of it!): ”Come, leave all your cares just _now, this minute_, and if you can't leave without I take your place, I'll take it, and it will be a gain to both of us; for you have come just to that spot where you must stop to rest, or fail entirely.” It may be a little child under your care, perhaps your own, perhaps another's; who is not really ”_bad_,”
but only troublesome. It wants change; a ramble in the Park, or a ramble somewhere; something to see and talk about, and _happify_ it; some new objects to occupy its mind and thoughts; and the more intelligent the child is, the more necessary this becomes. Many a child is punished because its active mind, having no food, becomes a torment to itself and others. _Give it food!_ Take it up to the Park and show it the animals there. Tell it of their habits, and the way they live in the countries from which they were taken. This is a _cheap_ pleasure, it is true, and may, though it ought not to be, a very commonplace one to you; but you have no idea how it freshens the mind and body of the little one.
_Sometimes I almost think that happiness is goodness._ Certainly, till the hard and difficult lesson of life is thoroughly learned, it is wise to lend a helping hand to those who are stumbling after, lest they fall by the way to rise no more.
Perhaps you have some good servants in your house whose underground, plodding life needs relief, who have grown sharp and querulous on account of it; whose lot needs brightening a bit. Send them or take them to some place of amus.e.m.e.nt; give them a holiday, or half a holiday if you can do no better. You have no idea how this break in their wearisome round will lighten toil for many a day; and more because _you thought of it_, perhaps, than from the pleasure the amus.e.m.e.nt afforded.
Life presses heavily on most of us in one shape or another. They are not always the greatest sufferers, whose barrel of meal and cruse of oil fail. Therefore, when I open a church door, and the first sentence I hear is about ”An _Awful_ G.o.d,” I sometimes want to invite the speaker to rest himself a bit, and let me try my hand at it. I believe that most people want soothing, and comforting, and encouraging, more than denouncing or frightening, even though the latter be done with good intentions. I know most _women_ have been ”punished” enough during the week, without being threatened with it in another world on Sundays. Take that poor soul with a drunken husband, who tries to support him and herself, and no end of children, by was.h.i.+ng, and whose husband comes home only to demand her money, and smash up her wash-tub and table and chairs for his amus.e.m.e.nt. Would you talk to that woman about an ”_awful G.o.d_,” when she stole away to church for a crumb of comfort on Sunday?
You had much better buy her a new wash-tub, and put her brute of a husband where--but it won't do to say all one thinks, even out of ”meetin'.”
_THE GOOD OLD HYMNS._
Did you never know any person who was brought up on the good old _Zion-hymns_, whom they ever failed to move to the foundations when heard? The feet moving on unholy errands linger on their way past the church door, as the melody floats out upon the air. That man--who has wasted life, and energy, and talent, which might have blessed mankind, to reap only the whirlwind--he is back again with his little head upon his mother's lap, while she sings that same hymn, which will never grow old, about ”the beautiful river.” His eyes moisten as he thinks how pained she would be, were she living, to know him now. The hymn ceases, and the low benediction follows, and as the wors.h.i.+ppers emerge, he recollects himself, and with an impatient pshaw! pa.s.ses on. What, _he_ moved at a ”conventicle hymn”? _He_, who for years has never crossed the threshold of a church! He? who believes neither in prayer nor priests, Bible nor Sundays? He, who has ”outgrown all that”? Ah! but he hasn't.
He _can't_ outgrow it. It is _there_. It _will_ come, whether he desires it or no. Come in spite of all his efforts to laugh or reason it away.
Come, though he lives in open derision and mockery of that religion whose divine precepts he cannot efface from his mind. Come, as it did to John Randolph, who, after years of atheism and worldliness and ambition, left on record, ”that the only men he ever knew well and approached closely, whom he did not discover to be unhappy, were sincere believers of the Gospel, who conformed their lives, as far as the nature of man can permit, to its precepts.” ”Often,” he says, ”the religious teachings of his childhood were banished wholly by business or pleasure; but after a while they came more frequently, and stayed longer, until at last they were his first thoughts on waking and his last before going to sleep.” Said he, ”I could not banish them if I would.”
”Now and then I like to go into a church,” said a young man apologetically to a companion who was deriding the idea. ”Priestcraft!
priestcraft!” exclaimed his companion. ”Tell me what possible good can it do you?” ”Well,” said the young man, ”somehow, when I hear those hymns it is like hearing the pleading voice of my mother as I left home to become the graceless fellow I am now. I cannot tell you how they move me, or how they make me wish I were better. If I ever do become better, it will be because I cannot separate them from all that seems, in my better moments, worth embodying in the word 'home.'” Walter Scott said to his son-in-law, when he was on his death-bed, ”Be a _good_ man, Lockhart--be a good man; nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.” It were easy to multiply instances where earth's gifted and greatest have borne similar testimony, after having tested all that the world had to offer, as an equivalent for ”that peace which pa.s.seth all understanding.”