The Female Prose Writers of America/Maria J. B. Browne/Looking Up in the World
Something must be done to escape from the inevitable disgrace and odium of labouring at such a disgraceful and odious business as shoemaking. James Skates should not be a shoemaker any longer, nor Katy a shoemaker’s wife! “O yes, to be sure, something must be done,” said Cousin Sophronia, “it was a shame they were not getting above their neighbours, and looking up in the world, when Katy had natural abilities to make so much of an appearance, and cut such a dash in the city. Mr. Skates must be persuaded; and she guessed between them, they could manage it, as he was not the readiest with arguments or decision, in matters where the odds of logic were so decidedly on the other side. Yes, Skates must be brushed up, and persuaded to go to the city with his family, board them at a hotel or boarding-house, and then engage himself in some employment which would furnish spending money—money was to be made so easy in the city. And then it would be so much more respectable than to burrow in the country, where one never was heard of, and shoemake for a living! She herself would introduce them into the first society, and bestow favours of that important kind upon them in such profusion, a lifetime would not be long enough to cancel the debt of gratitude they would owe her!
Katy and Sophronia “cut and dried” the whole affair, while Sophronia sat in the rocking-chair with her mits on, and fanned her self; and Katy ran about as if she had been put upon an extra pair of springs in every limb, to wait upon her. When it was all ready and propped up on all sides with invincible arguments, Mr. Skates was cautiously and warily “towed in,” to become the lion in the scheme; while Sophronia and her cousin worked vigorously at the long arm, till all obstacles were finally thrust out of the way. Indeed, such had been the silent effect of Sophronia’s “continual dropping” about gentility and respectability, even upon a mind so slowly perceptive, and so absolutely common-place as Mr. Skates’s, that the difficulty of gaining him over to their side, was far less formidable than the ambitious cousins had anticipated. To the unconcealed surprise and consternation of all his neighbours and friends, and in the very face of remonstrance, and forebodings of ruin, Mr. Skates did let his house and shop, and consent to emigrate upon uncertainties, to the great city—the great city, which stood out in alto relievo before the vision of his wife, like the veritable Paradise. To his praise, however, be it spoken, it was not without many inward misgivings, and hours of almost tearful reluctance, that he started upon such a wildgoose chase; and if his wife, who was the polestar of his being, though now dangerously out of her true position, had not been on the wing, fluttering up almost out of his sight in the track of her foolish ambition, the peaceful scenes that had always encircled him, and bounded his desires, and the almost irresistible attractions of his pleasant labour, would have won him back from his illusion, and left him a quiet, useful, and valuable citizen.
These arrangements were very suddenly got up, and of course must be executed while at a fever heat, or they would be likely to fail, as Mr. Skates, though his neighbours had never called him “shifty-minded” before, might possibly sicken of the prospective change, and overturn the whole just on the very eve of accomplishment. When Katy was so near the enchanted circle, it would be death to be obliged to withdraw. Sophronia considerately protracted her stay a week longer than she had at first meditated, to mind the children, and do some “light chores,” to facilitate the preparations which Mr. and Mrs. Skates were so busy and so animated in making. And when the “things” were nearly all removed from their places, and packed away into the chambers, and all the rooms began to look stripped and melancholy, and there began to be gloomy and ill-omened echoes shooting through the unfurnished apartments—echoes that would croak of desolation, and would sometimes strike like a knell on James’s simple heart in spite of himself—in spite of the bustling and gleefulness of his triumphant little wife—in spite of the glare of Cousin Sophronia’s fancy paintings, which she took care to hold up before him to the very last moment of her tarrying,—when matters were in such a train, and she had given the unsophisticated aspirants all necessary directions, quite a catalogue, by the way, Cousin Sophronia took her departure, and in a few days Mr. and Mrs. Skates were ready to follow.
Mrs. Skates was happy as a queen when they were all seated in the cars going to the city—the city at last!—and when the coach drew up before the splendid entrance of a great castle-like hotel, and the servants came out and overwhelmed them with attentions and services, and conducted them in as if they were indeed the Hon. Captain Somebody and lady, she was quite bewildered with excitement and triumph. “Let my neighbours sneer now if they will,” thought Katy, as she tossed her vain little head, and sat down with a mixture of confusion, diffidence, and complacency, in the long, brilliantly illuminated, and magnificent drawing-room. Oh, such a gorgeous carpet, her feet fairly sunk in its plushy softness, as if she had been treading on a bed of fresh moss! Such luxurious furniture!—such dazzling lamps and mirrors! While her bewildered vision was struggling to take in all this grandeur at one grasp, another sense carried in a throb of bitter mortification to her heart.
“Name, sir?” said a servant to her husband, who was standing still with mouth and eyes wide open, looking about him in amazement, trying to collect himself, and to decide whether he was in the body or out of the body, so like an unreal panorama seemed all that was around him to his simplicity. “Name, sir?” politely repeated the servant, his face looking the personation of a subdued chuckle.
“Oh, Squire James and Miss Skates!” replied Mr. Skates very audibly; and then, on second thought, as if something of the most absolute importance had been forgotten, he added, “and the children, too,—put them in.”
The servant retreated instantly, and saved himself a hemorrhage, perhaps, by indulging his overcharged mirthfulness, and recorded on the book of arrivals for the morning paper, “—— James, Esq., and Miss Skates.”
Now Mr. Skates had been instructed—specifically instructed—to say, when his name was called for at the hotel, “James Skates, Esq., lady and children,” but his mind and memory were topsy-turvy with this dashing so suddenly into gentility, and no wonder he could not concentrate his ideas to a proper focus. Mrs. Skates felt badly about it, for she feared the whole city would be misled when they came to read it, and she thought best to have the mistake corrected; but she would consult Cousin Sophronia. By the time she had an opportunity to consult her oracle, however, the unfor tunate edition of the paper had gone by, and everybody in the world but themselves had forgotten the announcement, if, indeed, they ever noticed it.
It was already evening when Mr. and Mrs. Skates arrived; Katy was very much excited, and cruelly exhausted—her cheeks burned like a fever, and her arms trembled with fatigue, as she tossed the baby hither and thither to quiet him, and alternately soothed and scolded poor little terrified James. Mr. Skates indicated, as soon as he could collect his recreant faculties, that they would like to engage board “for a spell, and see if they liked;” and the landlord, whose keen eye was so familiarly educated to the mensuration of pretensions, and who could detect at a glance the spurious from the genuine coin, after some demurring and some adroitly directed regrets that his house was so crowded he should not be able to accommodate the gentleman for a few days as well as he could desire, to all of which Mr. Skates obligingly replied “it was just as wal,” he ordered a servant to conduct Mr. and Mrs. Skates to No. 150!
Oh what a journey it was, superadded to the day’s weariness, to reach No. 150, and through what a labyrinth of endless halls, walled up on both sides by rows of green window-blind-looking doors! and up, up, up what flights and flights of stairs, and round what numbers of corners! Katy felt as if she should drop down, and Mr. Skates, whose good temper outlasted everything, jocosely remarked to his baggage-laden conductor, “Wal, sir, if it’s much further, we’ll stop in somewhere and rest. I hope when you get us up here you’ll be sure to come and show us the way out again!”
Poor Katy was sick enough by the time she reached her room; and as she entered it, her thoughts would revert to her own bed chamber at the cottage home—vastly larger than this little hot “six by eight” enclosure—so pleasantly and commodiously furnished, and commanding a view of such a green and flowing landscape from its windows; here she could see from the one window, she knew not what it was, some great dark object, which gradually developed into the brick wall of a neighbouring building, and that bounded the prospect. But she was too ill to care much that night,—her head ached violently, and spun round with dizziness, and all she could do was just to go to bed, sweltering and fainting, and leave the charge of unrobing and quieting the children to her husband. Mr. Skates thought the undertaking too hopeless to get down stairs and up again alone, so he went without his supper, and bathed Katy’s burning forehead, and whistled and hummed the old home lullabys to the children, till all were uneasily slumbering, and then, as the noise in the streets died away, all but the occasional rattle of a vehicle on the pavement, or the echoing tramp of a solitary foot-fall breaking in on the midnight hush of the city, and the lamps one by one flickered and expired, Mr. Skates too, his mind in a whirl, and his purposes and expectations all misty and intangible, composed himself into a restless and half-watchful repose. Even that was broken ever and anon, by a sudden scream from one or both of the children, whose sleep itself was fritted away by the stifling heat of the small, close room, and the excitement and fatigue their own little frames were suffering.
But they all rose quite as vigorous as could reasonably be anticipated, and novelty supplied abundantly the stimulus that otherwise would have been lacking. Mrs. Skates was somewhat faint, and felt some disagreeable visitings of nausea now and then, but she managed with her husband’s good offices, in matters pertaining to the toilet, to get herself and the children all ready in full dress for breakfast, some minutes before it was announced. When the terrific notes of the gong—it had a giant voice—were heard pealing and groaning and moaning and growling and howling through the long empty halls, affrighting the very echoes, such a chorus of unaffected terror as issued from the throats of the two young Skateses was appalling! Mr. and Mrs. Skates, too, were startled and alarmed, and thought at first that all the wild beasts in the world were in desperate battle just outside of their own door, and the children shrieked as if every sense were but an inlet to the most excruciating torture. In vain did papa and mamma hush and hug and soothe and threaten after the cause of the alarm was ascertained; every measure weighed light as a feather in the balance with the fright and horror they experienced at the sudden acquaintanceship of this unearthly noise. The poor children refused to be comforted till it was too late for the regular breakfast, so Mr. Skates, lady and children, breakfasted alone.
Cousin Sophronia was good enough to come quite early, and spend all the morning with Mrs. Skates, congratulating her on having emerged from a living burial in the country, welcoming her to the unutterable delights of a city life, and giving her lessons in gentility, while Mr. Skates went out into the street to look up some kind of “genteel business;” for he was made distinctly to under stand, that none other would answer his purpose, though his simple ideas were at the lowest possible ends concerning the boundary lines between a genteel and an ungenteel occupation. But Sophronia assured him that such as he was in pursuit of was “plenty as quails,” and he supposed it must be of course, if he had only been sufficiently acquainted in the city to know where to look for it. Everywhere he inquired he was informed by the industrious and laborious business men, that “they did not keep the article,” and he came to his hotel from his unsuccessful tour quite discouraged and disheartened. But he was soon called to forget his ill success in obtaining employment, by the necessity of preparation for dinner. Cousin Sophronia had apprised Mrs. Skates that “folks did not dress much for breakfast, but dinner at hotels and fashionable bordin’ houses” was a great affair, and conducted with a marvellous display of state and ceremony—that they must be dressed in their very best and gayest clothes, and be on the alert to “see just how other folks did,” or coming from the country so fresh, they would be liable to some gross violations of dinner-table etiquette, and the “folks would think so strange of it.”
Katy felt less apprehension for her own ability to manage than she did for her husband and children. Mr. Skates was mortally awkward, there was no disputing, and the children would be most likely to do as children always will behave worst when they are put upon their best behaviour—cry when it is indispensable they should be quiet,—seize upon things they should let alone, and sometimes, by the simplest prattle, uncover family secrets it takes the practised ingenuity of parents to conceal—the plain-spoken little wretches!
Mr. Skates was sent to the barber to get himself shaved after the most approved fashion, and then he was trimmed out in his new suit of blue broadcloth, with his fancy silk vest and his new blue and white plaid neckerchief, and his white linen handkerchief shaken out of its neat folds, and stuffed with fashionable carelessness into his coat pocket, by Sophronia’s own competent hands. Indeed, he looked very much dressed up, and you would hardly have suspected his occupation but for the peculiar stoop in the shoulders craftsmen of his calling are apt to acquire, and for certain dark-coloured and very incorrigible labour-lines and calluses on his hands, which perseveringly resisted all the influence of soap and sand which could be brought to bear upon them. Honourable labour-lines and calluses they were, too; he was in no danger of losing the good opinion and respect of any whose respect and good opinion were worth preserving, for these; he might be, for suffering himself to be persuaded to blush for them, to be coaxed, and not very reluctantly, into his present apish and incongruous transition!
Katy Skates robed herself in her new changeable silk, flounced and resetted in the skirt, and decorated about the low neck and short sleeves in the very latest style. Her hair shone and waved and curled deliciously, her eyes sparkled, and her cheeks glowed like roses; and if she had been going to figure at a magnificent entertainment on some great and special occasion, by invitation from an affluent host, she would have looked not only suitably but beautifully habited; for Mrs. Skates was really handsomer in person than many renowned beauties who make considerable sensation in the world. Moreover, to set off her charms still more effectually, Cousin Sophronia—obliging soul!—had been so good as to loan Mrs. Skates a very gay bracelet and brooch, with great glaring, hot-looking purple stones in them, and a chain from which dangled a gold pencil. And when these were all fixed on in their places, and Katy looked in the mirror to see herself, she was sensible of a glow of real admiration, and her little vain heart swelled with pride and satisfaction. I am sorry her pride and satisfaction had no nobler groundwork to base themselves upon!
Mr. Skates, I need not say, admired her too, and could hardly forbear kissing her, as if he were a lover, or she a bride.
The horrible notes of the gong were at length heard grumbling along through the halls. This time the children only turned pale, and clung closer to their parents, with their eyes stretched open, staring wonderingly. Mr. Skates carried the baby, and Mrs. Skates led James and hung on her husband’s arm, till, with a crowd that kept swelling all the way from “No. 150” down, they found themselves floating into the spacious dining-hall of the hotel; and somehow, they hardly realized how, they were seated at the table. Everything was new and strange. Mr. Skates innocently stared at the services and ceremonies he could not understand, and Mrs. Skates increased and made manifest her confusion, by trying to appear at ease, and accustomed to it all. The “great towel” laid by his plate Mr. Skates had no use for, with a good white handkerchief in his pocket, so he “doubled it up,” and put it behind him, to keep it out of little James’s hands.
That hopeful young “scion” opened the table scene by being vastly troublesome. He refused to be seated on his father’s knee, and clamoured bravely for his “high chair.” Mr. Skates’s arguments for some time were of no avail, but at length he succeeded in persuading his small but resolute antagonist that “they did not have high chairs here in the city,” and he must either be good, or be sent to No. 150 to stay alone. James surrendered; but as soon as he was fairly settled in his place, and had looked a long inquisitive stare into the faces of the company on the opposite side of the table, he seized a silver fork that lay by his father’s plate, and began raking it over his cheeks and his protruded tongue.
“What’s this, pa? what’s this thing?” he inquired, holding it still more fast, while his father attempted to take it out of his determined grasp.
“You mustn’t meddle with it—let it alone, James. It looks some like a spoon!” replied Mr. Skates, forcing it away from the little hand, and laying it down on the cloth. But James, with the children’s universal license to misbehave on the most important occasions, instantly took it up again, and began ringing the elegant champagne glass which a servant that moment presented to a gentleman who sat next.
“We han’t got no such ’poons to home, have we, pa?” interrogated the youngster.
“Ah, James!” interrupted Mrs. Skates, who had had more than she could do thus far to keep her borrowed finery out of the hands and mouth of the astonished baby, “Ah, James; what did I tell you?”
“You said you should trounce me if I wasn’t still,” confessed the child, rapping his head with the fork, and making it do the service of a comb in frizzling up his nicely-smoothed hair. But the memory of the threat silenced him for a few minutes, while a fiery-red blush of three-fold mortification, suffused the before glowing cheeks of his exasperated mamma—mortification that her son had exposed his ignorance of the purposes for which silver forks are used—that he should disclose so publicly, and without remorse, the unfortunate and disgraceful fact that he was a stranger to such luxuries at home, and lastly, that he should be so explicit in his delineation of her peculiar mode of family discipline!
But Mrs. Skates’s cheeks tingled worse and worse, and her forehead burned hotter and hotter, when she heard her unsophisticated spouse remark to a waiter who handed him a well-filled plate,
“Thank’ee, thank’ee, sir, but you’ve loaded most too heavy of that; I can’t eat all this and taste of all them other sorts, too. I see you’ve got lots back there yet!” Mrs. Skates set her satin slipper hard down on Mr. Skates’s boot, under the table, telegraphing that he was guilty of something, he hardly knew what; but it made him silent, and left her to blush and flutter at the impertinent smile she saw running from lip to lip on the other side of the table,—a cruel but very common way of exposing the real vulgarity and grossness of mind which would pass itself for high breeding, and a contempt for what, by a kind of false comparison, appears unrefined or uncultivated in the manners of others.
Little James by this time had recovered from the shock he had experienced from the recollection of what was in store for him, if he “wasn’t still,” and he found his curiosity was by no means satisfied concerning the new things that were about him. He proceeded with his investigation by seizing a “bill of fare,” which the nearest neighbour had just laid down.
“What’s this, pa?” he inquired, bringing the smooth, clean paper into contact with his greasy mouth. It was a fixed habit of Master James’s this, of introducing everything to the acquaintanceship of his facial orifice, whether said orifice was in receiving order or not.
“I do’ know, child; let it alone, and hand it right straight back to the gentleman—it’s his’n,” replied Mr. Skates, getting not a little impatient at his son’s inquisitiveness.
“But what is it, pa?” persisted James, pouting and scowling that the dawning of his curiosity should be so cruelly repressed.
“I do’ know, I tell you; it looks like a little newspaper about vittles. Now hold your tongue!” retorted Mr. Skates, as he took the soiled paper out of James’s hand, and administered a box on his ear sufficiently expressive to set him snivelling.
This scene of course added to the amusement of the gay young people across the table. They discoursed very audibly about “Jonathans,” and “bumpkins,” and “country animals,” and one young woman, more bold and vulgar-souled and ill-bred than her companions, though her face was royally beautiful, and her voice as soft and sweet as the song of a siren, and her diction, even in rude sarcasm, as polished and musical as the diction of an orator, called quite aloud, “Waiter, do give me that little newspaper about vittles!” Her party joined in the joke with boisterous merriment, and poor Katy, instead of feeling honest contempt, rejoiced that her baby screamed just then, for even an uncomfortable and annoying circumstance relieved the bitter confusion of a consciousness that she and her well-meaning husband were the unfortunate objects of such unprincipled ridicule.
“That’s what we call a bill of fare, mum, not a newspaper,” replied the waiter, obsequiously, placing the paper in her fair hand.
“Oh, I understand, sir!” retorted the disconcerted beauty, a flush of indignation mounting to her very temples, that a servant should dare to presume her ignorant; “your explanation is unnecessary, quite;” but before she could deliver the rebuke she meditated, the offending waiter was out of hearing on the other side of the hall.
Mrs. Skates now began to hope that her sufferings for this once were at an end, but scarcely was the baby quieted, when James caught hold of the chain that depended from his mother’s neck, and inquired with the most provoking innocence, “Whose is this, ma? ’Taint yours, is it? Cousin ’Phrony lent it to you; didn’t she, ma?”
“Sh-h-h, James!” fretted Mrs. Skates. I think at that moment she would have enjoyed the “trouncing business” right heartily! It was too vexatious that he should expose what one felt the keenest anxiety to conceal—the fact that she was really glittering in “borrowed plumage!”
“Shall you whip me, ma?” pursued the little wretch, taking alarm from his mother’s severe expression, and cowering down in the chair behind his father, where he had been standing; while that uncomfortable and embarrassed worthy was trying to clear his plate of its contents, and at the same time working industriously to keep the perspiration from streaming in rivulets over his face. James managed to entertain himself in his new situation with his own perpetual chatter, and with scratching the chair with his fork, till the meal was finished. Oh, how glad were Mr. and Mrs. Skates when that event happened! Poor Katy felt that her little No. 150 would be an asylum, indeed, she was so thoroughly disconcerted; and Mr. Skates felt that he should never desire to dine again as long as he lived! Visions of his own quiet and social table at the forsaken home danced through his mind with a kind of tantalizing mockery; and then the precious absence of ceremony there! Sick, indeed, he was of so much ceremony, that “he didn’t know nothing what they meant by!” He would have relished Katy’s very poorest “washing-day hash,” done up in “pot-skimmings,” a thousand times better than those elaborately served viands, and their multitude of French gastronomic accompaniments, and “feel so all shook-up in his mind,” as he declared he had done at this first city dinner.