Part 14 (1/2)
”I only ask now a good physical condition, and I go to warmer climes hoping to save time there. I put everything and everybody off that interferes with this, except 'p.u.s.s.y Willow,' which will be a pretty story for a child's 'series.'”
At last she sailed away, about the 1st of March, 1867, with that delightful power of knowing what she wanted, and being content when she attained her end, which is too rare, alas! Her letters glowed and blossomed and shone with the fruit and flowers and suns.h.i.+ne of the South. It was hardly to be expected that her literary work could actually reach the printers' hands under these circ.u.mstances as rapidly as if she had been able to write at home: therefore it was with no sense of surprise that we received from her, during the summer of 1868, what proved to be a chapter of excuses instead of a chapter of her book: ”I have a long story to tell you of _what_ has prevented my going on with my story, which you must see would so occupy all the nerve and brain force I have that I have not been able to write a word except to my own children. To them in their needs I _must_ write _chapters_ which would otherwise go into my novel.”
About this period she found herself able to come again to Boston for a few days' visit. There were often long croonings over the fire far into the night; her other-worldliness and abstractions brought with them a dreamy quietude, especially to those whose harried lives kept them only too much awake. Her coming was always a pleasure, for she made holidays by her own delightful presence, and she asked nothing more than what she found in the companions.h.i.+p of her friends.
After her return to Hartford and in December of the same year, I find some curious notes showing how easily she was attracted by new subjects of interest away from the work she had in hand; not that she saw it in that light, or was aware that her story was in the least r.e.t.a.r.ded by such digressions, but her keen sympathy with everything and everybody made it more and more difficult for her to concentrate her power upon the long story which she considered after all of the first importance. She writes to the editor of the ”Atlantic Monthly:”
”I see that all the leading magazines have a leading article on 'Planchette.'
”There is a lady of my acquaintance who has developed more remarkable facts in this way than any I have ever seen; I have kept a record of these communications for some time past, and everybody is very much struck with them.
”I have material to prepare a very curious article. Shall you want it?
And when?”
We can imagine the feeling of a publisher waiting for copy of her promised story on reading this note! Also the following of a few days later:--
”I am beginning a series of articles called 'Learning to Write,'
designed to be helpful to a great many beginners.... I shall instance Hawthorne as a model and speak of his 'Note Book' as something which every young author aspiring to write should study.... My materials for the 'Planchette' article are really very extraordinary,... but I don't want to write it now when I am driving so hard upon my book.... It costs some patience to you and certainly to me to have it take so long, yet I have conscientiously done all I could, since I began. Now the end of it is in plain sight, but there is a good deal to be done to bring it out worthily, and I work upon it steadily and daily. I never put so much work into anything before.”
A week later she says again:--
”I thank you very much for your encouraging words, for I really need them. I have worked so hard that I am almost tired. I hope that you will still continue to read, and that you will not find it dull.... I have received the books. What a wonderful fellow Hawthorne was!”
There is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase ”almost tired.” Indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and these later letters from which I have made the foregoing extracts are all written by an amanuensis.
Happily the time was near for a second flight to Florida, and she wrote with her own rested hand en route from Charleston:--
”Room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers everywhere, windows open, birds singing.”
She enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers busily during the journey in order to send them back to Boston to be sold at a fair in behalf of the Cretans: ”Make them do the Cretes all the good you can,” she said.
It appears that by this time ”Oldtown Folks” was fairly off her hands, and she was free once more. She evidently found Mandarin very much to her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having to go to Canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her story.
The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health. She saw the next step to take was to surrender her large house in Hartford and pa.s.s her winters altogether at the South. She wrote from Florida: ”I am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you and ---- would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of life. There's no earthly sense in having anything,--lordy ma.s.sy, no!
By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown house till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the premises and give it to you hot.”
Her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and articles for magazines.
”Gladly would I fly to you on the wings of the wind,” she says, ”but I am a slave, a bound thrall to _work_, and I cannot work and play at the same time. After this year I hope to have a little rest, and above all things I won't be hampered with a serial to write.... We have sold out in Hartford.”
All this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption, which gave her intense joy. ”I am doing just what you say,” she wrote, ”being first lady-in-waiting on his new majesty. He is very pretty, very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair.... I am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no bliss under heaven to compare with a baby.” Later she wrote on the same subject: ”You ought to see my baby. I have discovered a way to end the woman controversy. Let the women all say that they won't take care of the babies till the laws are altered. One week of this discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. Only tell us what you want, they would say, and we will do it. Of course you may imagine me trailing after our little king,--first granny-in-waiting.”
In the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at St. John's Wood, in London, which possessed peculiar attractions. Other houses were as comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing rooms were gayer, but this was the home of George Eliot, and on Sunday afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that London had to give. Here it was that George Eliot told us of her admiration and deep regard, her affection, for Mrs. Stowe. Her reverence and love were expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our hearts by her love for our friend. Many letters had already pa.s.sed between Mrs. Stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amus.e.m.e.nt at a fancy Mrs. Stowe had taken that Casaubon, in ”Middlemarch,” was drawn from the character of Mr. Lewes. Mrs. Stowe took it so entirely for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her mind of the illusion. Evidently it was the source of much harmless household amus.e.m.e.nt at St. John's Wood. I find in Mrs. Stowe's letters some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. She writes: ”We were all full of George Eliot when your note came, as I had received a beautiful letter from her in answer to one I wrote from Florida. She is a n.o.ble, true woman; and if anybody doesn't see it, so much the worse for _them_, and not her.” In a note written about that time Mrs. Stowe says she is ”coming to Boston, and will bring George Eliot's letters with her that we may read them together;” but that pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried out.
Her own letter to Mrs. Lewes, written from Florida in March, 1876, may be considered one of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of writing she ever achieved.
Although this letter is accessible in a life of Mrs. Stowe published by her son during her life, I am tempted to reproduce a portion of it in these pages for those who have not seen it elsewhere. It is a positive loss to cut such a letter, but it covers too much s.p.a.ce to quote in full. She dates in
ORANGE BLOSSOM TIME, MANDARIN,
March 18, 1876.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--I always think of you when the orange-trees are in blossom; just now they are fuller than ever, and so many bees are filling the branches that the air is full of a sort of still murmur.