The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids Read online

  acenic scenery. A fifth had a funny case in law

  to tell. A sixth was erudite in wines. A sev-

  enth had a strange characteristic anecdote of the

  private life of the Iron Duke, never printed, and

  never before announced in any public or private

  company. An eighth had lately been amusing

  his evenings, now and then, with translating a

  comic poem of Pulci's. He quoted for us the

  more amusing passages.

  And so the evening slipped along, the hours

  told, not by a water-clock, like King Alfred's,

  but a wine-chronometer. Meantime the table

  seemed a sort of Epsom Heath; a regular ring,

  where the decanters galloped round. For fear

  one decanter should not with sufficient speed

  reach his destination, another was sent express

  after him to hurry him; and then a third to

  hurry the second; and so on with a fourth and

  fifth. And throughout all this nothing loud,

  nothing unmannerly, nothing turbulent. I am

  quite sure, from the scrupulous gravity and aus-

  terity of his air, that had Socrates, the field-

  marshal, perceived aught of indecorum in the

  the company he served, he would have forth-

  with departed without giving warning. I after-

  ward learned that, during the repast, an invalid

  bachelor in an adjoining chamber enjoyed his

  first sound refreshing slumber in three long,

  weary weeks.

  It was the very perfection of quiet absorption

  of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and

  good talk. We were a band of brothers. Com-

  fort -- fraternal, household comfort, was the grand

  trait of the affair. Also, you could plainly see

  that these easy-hearted men had no wives or

  children to give an anxious thought. Almost all

  of them were travelers, too; for bachelors alone

  can travel freely, and without any twinges of

  their consciences touching desertion of the fire-

  side.

  The thing called pain, the bugbear styled

  trouble -- those two legends seemed preposter-

  ous to their bachelor imaginations. How could

  men of liberal sense, ripe scholarship in the

  world, and capacious philosophical and con-

  vivial understandings -- how could they suffer

  themselves to be imposed upon by such monk-

  ishfables? Pain! Trouble! As well talk of

  Catholic miracles. No such thing. -- Pass the

  sherry, Sir. -- Pooh, pooh! Can't be! -- The port,

  Sir, if you please. Nonsense; don't tell me so.

  -- The decanter stops with you, Sir, I believe.

  And so it went.

  Not long after the cloth was drawn our host

  glanced significantly upon Socrates, who, sol-

  emnly stepping to the stand, returned with an

  immense convolved horn, a regular Jericho

  horn, mounted with polished silver, and other-

  wise chased and curiously enriched; not omit-

  ting two life-like goat's heads, with four more

  horns of solid silver, projecting from opposite

  sides of the mouth of the noble main horn.

  Not having heard that our host was a per-

  former on the bugle, I was surprised to see him

  lift this horn from the table, as if he were about

  to blow an inspiring blast. But I was relieved

  from this, and set quite right as touching the

  purposes of the horn, by his now inserting his

  thumb and forefinger into its mouth; where-

  upon a slight aroma was stirred up, and my

  nostrils were greeted with the smell of some

  choice Rappee. It was a mull of snuff. It

  went the rounds. Capital idea this, thought I,

  of taking snuff at about this juncture. This good-

  ly fashion must be introduced among my coun-

  trymen at home, further ruminated I.

  The remarkable decorum of the nine bach-

  elors -- a decorum not to be affected by any

  quantity of wine -- a decorum unassailable by

  any degree of mirthfulness -- this was again set

  in a forcible light to me, by now observing that,

  though they took snuff very freely, yet not a

  man so far violated the proprieties, or so far

  molested the invalid bachelor in the adjoining

  room as to indulge himself in a sneeze. The

  snuff was snuffed silently, as if it had been

  some fine innoxious powder brushed off the

  wings of butterflies.

  But fine though they be, bachelors' dinners,

  like bachelors' lives, can not endure forever.

  The time came for breaking up. One by one

  the bachelors took their hats, and two by two,

  and arm-in-arm they descended, still convers-

  ing, to the flagging of the court; some going to

  their neighboring chambers to turn over the

  Decameron ere retiring for the night; some to

  to smoke a cigar, promenading in the garden on

  the cool river-side; some to make for the street,

  call a hack, and be driven snugly to their dis-

  tant lodgings.

  I was the last lingerer.

  "Well," said my smiling host, "what do you

  think of the Temple here, and the sort of life

  we bachelors make out to live in it?"

  "Sir," said I, with a burst of admiring can-

  dor -- "Sir, this is the very Paradise of Bach-

  elors!"

  II. THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS.

  It lies not far from Woedolor Mountain in

  New England. Turning to the east, right out

  from among bright farms and sunny meadows,

  nodding in early June with odorous grasses, you

  enter ascendingly among bleak hills. These

  gradually close in upon a dusky pass, which,

  from the violent Gulf Stream of air unceasing-

  ly driving between its cloven walls of haggard

  rock, as well as from the tradition of a crazy

  spinster's hut having long ago stood somewhere

  hereabouts, is called the Mad Maid's Bellows'-

  pipe.

  Winding along at the bottom of the gorge is

  a dangerously narrow wheel-road, occupying the

  bed of a former torrent. Following this road

  to its highest point, you stand as within a

  Dantean gateway. From the steepness of the

  walls here, their strangely ebon hue, and the

  sudden contraction of the gorge, this particular

  point is called the Black Notch. The ravine

  now expandingly descends into a great, purple,

  hopper-shaped hollow, far sunk among many

  Plutonian, shaggy-wooded mountains. By the

  country people this hollow is called the Devil's

  Dungeon. Sounds of torrents fall on all sides

  upon the ear. These rapid waters unite at

  last in one turbid brick-colored stream, boiling

  through a flume among enormous boulders.

  They call this strange-colored torrent Blood

  River. Gaining a dark precipice it wheels sud-

  denly to the west, and makes one maniac spring

  of sixty feet into the arms of a stunted wood of

  gray haired pines, between which it thence eddies

  on its further way down to the invisible low-

  lands.

  Conspicuously crowning a rock
y bluff high

  to one side, at the cataract's verge, is the ruin

  of an old saw-mill, built in those primitive times

  when vast pines and hemlocks superabounded

  throughout the neighboring region. The black-

  mossed bulk of those immense, rough-hewn,

  and spike-knotted logs, here and there tumbled

  all together, in long abandonment and decay,

  or left in solitary, perilous projection over the

  cataract's gloomy brink, impart to this rude

  wooden ruin not only much of the aspect of one

  of rough-quarried stone, but also a sort of

  feudal, Rhineland, and Thurmberg look, derived

  from the pinnacled wildness of the neighboring

  scenery.

  Not far from the bottom of the Dungeon

  stands a large white-washed building, relieved,

  like some great whited sepulchre, against the

  sullen background of mountain-side firs, and

  other hardy evergreens, inaccessibly rising in

  grim terraces for some two thousand feet.

  The building is a paper-mill.

  Having embarked on a large scale in the seeds-

  man's business (so extensively and broadcast,

  indeed, that at length my seeds were distributed

  through all the Eastern and Northern States

  and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and

  the Carolinas), the demand for paper at my

  place became so great, that the expenditure

  soon amounted to a most important item in the

  general account. It need hardly be hinted how

  paper comes into use with seedsmen, as en-

  velopes. These are mostly made of yellowish

  paper, folded square; and when filled, are all

  but flat, and being stamped, and superscribed

  with the nature of the seeds contained, assume

  not a little the appearance of business-letters

  ready for the mail. Of these small envelopes I

  used an incredible quantity -- several hundreds

  of thousands in a year. For a time I had purchased

  my paper from the wholesale dealers in

  a neighboring town. For economy's sake, and

  partly for the adventure of the trip, I now resolved

  to cross the mountains, some sixty miles,

  and order my future paper at the Devil's Dun-

  geon paper-mill.

  The sleighing being uncommonly fine toward

  the end of January, and promising to hold so

  for no small period, in spite of the bitter cold I

  started one gray Friday noon in my pung, well

  fitted with buffalo and wolf robes; and, spend-

  ingone night on the road, next noon came in

  sight of Woedolor Mountain.

  The far summit fairly smoked with frost;

  white vapors curled up from its white-wooded

  top, as from a chimney. The intense congela-

  tion made the whole country look like one

  petrifaction. The steel shoes of my pung

  craunched and gritted over the vitreous, chippy

  snow, as if it had been broken glass. The forests

  here and there skirting the route, feeling the

  same all-stiffening influence, their inmost fibres

  penetrated with the cold, strangely groaned --

  not in the swaying branches merely, but like-

  wise in the vertical trunk -- as the fitful gusts re-

  morselessly swept through them. Brittle with

  excessive frost, many colossal tough-grained

  maples, snapped in twain like pipe-stems, cum-

  bered the unfeeling earth.

  Flaked all over with frozen sweat, white as a

  milky ram, his nostrils at each breath sending

  forth two horn-shaped shoots of heated respira-

  tion, Black, my good horse, but six years old,

  started at a sudden turn, where, right across the

  track -- not ten minutes fallen -- an old distorted

  hemlock lay, darkly undulatory as an anaconda.

  Gaining the Bellows'-pipe, the violent blast,

  dead from behind, all but shoved my high-back-

  ed pung up-hill. The gust shrieked through

  the shivered pass, as if laden with lost spirits

  bound to the unhappy world. Ere gaining the

  summit, Black, my horse, as if exasperated by

  the cutting wind, slung out with his strong hind

  legs, tore the light pung straight up-hill, and

  sweeping grazingly through the narrow notch,

  sped downward madly past the ruined saw-mill.

  Into the Devil's Dungeon horse and cataract

  rushed together.

  With might and main, quitting my seat and

  robes, and standing backward, with one foot

  braced against the dash-board, I rasped and

  churned the bit, and stopped him just in time

  to avoid collision, at a turn, with the bleak noz-

  zle of a rock, couchant like a lion in the way --

  a road-side rock.

  At first I could not discover the paper-mill.

  The whole hollow gleamed with the white,

  except, here and there, where a pinnacle of

  granite showed one wind-swept angle bare. The

  mountains stood pinned in shrouds -- a pass of

  Alpine corpses. Where stands the mill? Sud-

  denly a whirling, humming sound broke upon

  my ear. I looked, and there, like an arrested

  avalanche, lay the large whitewashed factory.

  It was subordinately surrounded by a cluster of

  other and smaller buildings, some of which, from

  their cheap, blank air, great length, gregarious

  windows, and comfortless expression, no doubt

  were boarding-houses of the operatives. A

  snow-white hamlet amidst the snows. Various

  rude, irregular squares and courts resulted from

  the somewhat picturesque clusterings of these

  buildings, owing to the broken, rocky nature of

  the ground, which forbade all method in their

  relative arrangement. Several narrow lanes

  and alleys, too, partly blocked with snow fallen

  from the roof, cut up the hamlet in all direc-

  tions.

  When, turning from the traveled highway,

  jingling with bells of numerous farmers -- who

  availing themselves of the fine sleighing, were

  dragging their wood to market -- and frequently

  diversified with swift cutters dashing from inn

  to inn of the scattered villages -- when, I say,

  turning from that bustling main-road, I by de-

  grees wound into the Mad Maid's Bellows'-pipe,

  and saw the grim Black Notch beyond, then some-

  thing latent, as well as something obvious in the

  time and scene, strangely brought back to my

  mind my first sight of dark and grimy Temple-

  Bar. And when Black, my horse, went darting

  through the Notch, perilously grazing its rocky

  wall, I remembered being in a runaway London

  omnibus, which in much the same sort of style,

  though by no means at an equal rate, dashed

  through the ancient arch of Wren. Though the

  two objects did by no means completely corre-

  spond, yet this partial inadequacy but served to

  tinge the similitude not less with the vividness

  than the disorder of a dream. So that, when upon

  reining up at the protruding rock I at last

  caught sight of the quaint groupings of the fac- />
  tory-buildings, and with the traveled highway

  and the Notch behind, found myself all alone,

  silently and privily stealing through deep-cloven

  passages into this sequestered spot, and saw the

  long, high-gabled main factory edifice, with a

  rude tower -- for hoisting heavy boxes -- at one

  end, standing among its crowded outbuildings

  and boarding-houses, as the Temple Church

  amidst the surrounding offices and dormitories,

  and when the marvelous retirement of this mys-

  terious mountain nook fastened its whole spell

  upon me, then, what memory lacked, all trib-

  utary imagination furnished, and I said to my-

  self, "This is the very counterpart of the Paradise

  of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-paint-

  ed to a sepulchre."

  Dismounting, and warily picking my way

  down the dangerous declivity -- horse and man

  both sliding now and then upon the icy ledges

  -- at length I drove, or the blast drove me, into

  the largest square, before one side of the main

  edifice. Piercingly and shrilly the shotted blast

  blew by the corner; and redly and demoniacally

  boiled Blood River at one side. A long wood-

  pile, of many scores of cords, all glittering in

  mail of crusted ice, stood crosswise in the

  square. A row of horse-posts, their north sides

  plastered with adhesive snow, flanked the fac-

  tory wall. The bleak frost packed and paved

  the square as with some ringing metal.

  The inverted similitude recurred -- "The

  sweet tranquil Temple garden, with the Thames

  bordering its green beds," strangely meditated I.

  But where are the gay bachelors?

  Then, as I and my horse stood shivering in

  the wind-spray, a girl ran from a neighboring

  dormitory door, and throwing her thin apron

  over her bare head, made for the opposite

  building.

  "One moment, my girl; is there no shed

  hereabouts which I may drive into?"

  Pausing, she turned upon me a face pale with

  work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural

  with unrelated misery.

  ''Nay," faltered I, "I mistook you. Go on;

  I want nothing."

  Leading my horse close to the door from

  which she had come, I knocked. Another pale,

  blue girl appeared, shivering in the doorway as, to

  prevent the blast, she jealously held the door ajar.

  "Nay, I mistake again. In God's name shut

  the door. But hold, is there no man about?"

  That moment a dark-complexioned well-