March (14 page)

I do not think I was jealous of Brown, exactly, for finding approval in my wife’s fine eyes. And yet I was uneasy, as we left the hall, and were invited by our girls’ teacher, Mr. Sanborn, to an impromptu reception for the speaker. The Emersons and the Thoreaus were attending, Sanborn assured us. Marmee assented even without waiting for a word from me, and at that I felt my gloom settle a little deeper upon me, rolling in like a damp fog.

We got to Sanborn’s rooms a little before Brown, who, when he arrived, seemed ill at ease. I judged him a man unused to refined interiors. The young man introduced him to those he had not yet met, coming at last to us. Up close, I noted that Brown’s corduroy suit was frayed at the sleeve. His hand, when I took it, was calloused, as you would expect, and there was dirt trapped under his fingernails.

Marmee addressed him with great animation, inquiring about every particular of his Adirondack project, which, with the largess of a wealthy Quaker benefactor, aimed to turn indigent blacks into landowning farmers-and voters. Brown and his boys had surveyed and registered the freedmen’s land titles so that unscrupulous whites could not lay claim to them, and now they were helping the settlers master the rudiments of farming in a harsh landscape with a short growing season. Brown spoke kindly but tersely in answer to her queries, only becoming animated when Marmee asked if such a settlement was not a boon to the enterprise of assisting runaways on to Canada, as the border was not very distant and a black community must offer better opportunities for concealment. Brown’s eyes bored into hers as he recounted the flight of a couple he had but recently assisted under pursuit from a bounty hunter who, he remarked coldly, he had been obliged at last to shoot. Marmee’s lips, as he said this last, were parted. Her face wore an expression I could only describe as avid. I could see that Brown ignited the very part of my wife’s spirit I wished to quench; the lawless, gypsy elements of her nature.

She was congratulating him on his works and wishing him even greater success in the future. “I could do so much more, madam, had I only the means. But I am dogged by debts and lawsuits.”

I had heard something of Brown’s business history: how he had been most unfortunate in certain well-meaning efforts to sell American wool to the English mills. But I had no idea, until he began to enumerate his woes to my wife, ,of the extent of his indebtedness and his legal worries. Marmee turned to me, and I saw the question framed in her eyes. I had seen the way our girls jostled for her gaze, and I felt myself that moment like a child in want of her approval. I realized then that I was jealous. She saw Brown as a heroic figure; I wanted her to see
me
that way. And yet I did not have it in me to make wild rides to the border, shooting over my shoulder at bounty hunters. Even in speech, my most stirring sermon paled beside the blood-dipped oratory of Brown.

Well, then. If I could not earn my wife’s esteem, perhaps at least I had the means with which to purchase it. I had, for some time since, been quietly divesting myself of my industrial interests, as the repulsive effects of the factory system had become clear to me. I had come to the conclusion that I could not, in conscience, profit from the degradation of human toil and the despoilation of water and air, once I began to grasp how very much the returns on my investments were married to these consequences. So I had sold out of my shares in this factory and that, as opportunity presented, and I had a large store of capital awaiting a worthy use. Although I had not spoken of it to anyone, I had it in my mind to found a Utopian community one day, when the girls were older; a “place just right” where men and women of learning could live with Nature, but without its exploitation. But that was a dream for the future. It need not preclude some use of my capital in the present.

“If you have some time tomorrow to call on me, Mr. Brown, perhaps we could discuss this further?” Marmee’s smile when I said this last was, I deemed, worth whatever sum Brown asked of me.

The mild-mannered man of business who presented himself at my study the following morning was a very different cast of being from the wild-eyed orator of the night before. Brown bearing his cashbook was almost irreconcilable with Brown bearing his broad sword. It was a transformation so complete as to be quite disarming. He seemed humble, diffident, almost embarrassed by his errand. I tried to set him at his ease. It would be an odd thing, in a former peddler, if I were to suddenly conceive that trade was somehow a base occupation for a crusading idealist. Brown had sought wealth for the highest reasons: so that he might support his large family and underwrite his antislavery struggle. That he had not amassed a fortune was largely, it seemed to me, the result of ill luck. Certainly, as he laid out his affairs, I saw a history of diligent, even backbreaking, effort. He had toiled and he had failed, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him for it. He did not come to me, he said, asking for charity, but for an investment in land that would be, also, an investment in human liberty. He had a new scheme that, if it prospered, would relieve his indebtedness and then fund what he described as a vast magnification of the Underground Railroad. I was captured by the vision he laid out: of brave escorts, well armed and amply supported, who would risk all to shepherd not just individuals to freedom but, working plantation by plantation, liberate dozens, scores, perhaps even hundreds of escapees at a time.

The business venture that was to fund this enterprise seemed sound enough-Brown clearly knew both land and livestock. He pulled out his maps and pointed to tracts in Ohio that had jumped in worth from eleven dollars to a staggering seven hundred dollars an acre. The land he proposed to buy would likewise soar, he said, as the same canal system pushed west. These were dazzling projections, but even if he were wrong, and the potential profit was not so vast as he calculated, then my capital at least would be secured in the land itself. Once I had agreed, his demeanor reverted immediately to that of the passionate evangel. He shook my hand vigorously. I rang for tea and Marmee came to pour it. It was a felicitous moment, for she entered the study in time to hear Brown declaiming : “Mr. March, know that one good, believing, strong-minded man such as yourself is worth a hundred, nay, twenty thousand, men of weak character.” I could not help adding a little flourish to this. “I can take no credit, Mr. Brown. What is it that Heine says? ‘We do not have ideas. The idea has us ... and drives us into the arena to fight for it like gladiators, who combat whether they will or no.’” It was a pompous little utterance, in retrospect, and, recollecting the blank face Brown showed me, it was plain enough that he had little time for German poets, no matter that they described his character with precision. Indeed, I think he had little time for reading of any kind, save the Old Testament, which he seemed to have by heart, and which, I came to realize over the course of our acquaintance, he relied on as a military manual as much as a spiritual guidebook.

For about a year, I allowed myself to bask in his approval and, even more, in the approval from my wife that came as its by-product. The initial sum he had asked was itself large; and in the months after I had advanced it, he wrote to me of further expenses which must needs be met to secure the earlier outlays. The town that would grow up on our land would need a hotel; it would need a warehouse. Soon, the skeletons of these large buildings loomed large on the bare prairie, yet the promised canal and the town itself remained mere dreams. Somehow, Brown’s confidence always stanched my skepticism and carried me along. Always, he was certain that just a little further investment would assure our vast return. I considered each request, and I assented, for by then I was in the stream so deep that rowing back to shore looked more arduous than pushing on. What I did not know-and where Brown was culpable-was that I was not, as I thought, his sole financier. Brown had borrowed against the very same tracts time and time again, spending the money, I learned much later, on secret arms caches that were not destined for the facilitation of escapes, but for the mounting of insurrection.

Now, when I can view the matter at some emotional remove, I don’t think he saw himself as misleading any one of us. He truly believed-he had completely convinced himself-that there would be profit enough to cover all he had spent. When the canal was routed elsewhere and the land was sold as nearly worthless, my claim was only one of several of equal merit, none of which could be satisfied. In the end, I used the last of my wealth to pay off his other creditors, rather than see him jailed for fraud and his work for abolition ended.

“But must it have been our entire capital?” Marmee asked, the day I unfolded to her the desperate state of our fortune. She was standing half turned away from me at the parlor window. Her hand stroked her swollen belly, for the news of my ruin had come as we awaited the birth of our fourth child. I moved to her, and embraced her, letting my hands rest on top of her own. I could not say that I had done it entirely to win her approbation. It would have been too cruel, and in any case, it was not, by then, entirely true. For if Brown had in some way seduced her, then he had seduced me, also. “He gives himself, entire.” I laid my face alongside hers and whispered my words in her ear. “He risks his very life. I was asked to risk only money. How then offer any less than all?” We stood there for some time, silent. I felt her body shuddering, and I knew that she wept. “The ravens feed the prophets,” I said. She turned her face then, and gave a crooked smile. “Do they so? Well, I hope someone has instructed them the way to Concord.” I kissed her tears away. We did not speak of it again.

 

What does a man really need, after all, in a material way? Bread, shelter, a little raiment. The latter we had, even to being able to sell some excess cottons, silks, and woolens. What man can wear two coats, after all? I was glad to give up the garments on the peg rail that spoke to me of slave labor, worm slaughter, and sheep theft-for is not fleece the rightful property of the sheep? And why should the humble silkworm be sentenced to death for our finery? The one suit I kept was my humblest linen homespun.

Our bread we could raise, thanks to my familiarity with the rites of the soil. Shelter, too, we had, although our lives within the large house had to undergo some substantial alteration. For the servants, we had to find other situations-all but the loyal Hannah, who insisted that she would stay with us no matter how paltry the amount we could now pay. We sold the horses and carriage, and went instead on foot or by the public conveyance. The elegant elm-wood dining table went elsewhere, replaced with a simple piece I fashioned myself The French sofas, likewise, departed to new homes, as did the silver service and the porcelain plate. Yet each loss was somehow compensated by Marmee’s genius and industry. When we let go a beloved painted screen, she dressed the place instead with yellow branches of maple or twists of scarlet woodbine. Her busy needle embroidered colorful cushions for the simple stools that had replaced our silken upholstery. And so we were rescued from deformity and dreariness by her graceful plainkeeping. If she lamented the end of her leisure, she did not let me see it: she sang those days more often than she ever had, and found time for merry play with the girls. The sound of their laughter was sweetened when, in the waning days of summer, it was seasoned with the piquancy of our newborn Amy’s cries.

We had been very quiet about our reduced circumstances, partly out of a natural reticence and partly out of anxiety for Brown, whom neither of us wished to expose to public opprobrium. But friends could not help but notice the carts coming to take our belongings. And despite our best economies, before very long I became behindhand with my debts. Tradesmen
will
talk in the taverns, and so eventually all Concord knew that we were in a most depleted state. Good friends such as the Emersons and the Thoreaus helped us, with tact, inviting us more often to dine at their table, pleading surfeit of some produce or other and sending baskets to our door.

I did note this, and set it down as yet one more of life’s injustices: that the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor. My creditors would come to me most graciously, diffident, if not downright apologetic, for asking what was theirs. It was as if I would be doing them a great, unlooked for kindness if only I would pay them a trifling sum on my outstanding debts. I would give them tea, and polite conversation, and, even when my answer to their just entreaty had to be a regretful, “Nothing, sir,” my mortification was always entirely self-inflicted, for
their
civility never failed.

You might wonder that I did not start again and build a second fortune. But one must have seed capital to grow wealth and I was not a footloose youth anymore, who could take to the Virginia byways for as long as it took to earn an honest nest egg. What I could make with my pen and my preachments was spent before it was earned, servicing our debt and that one luxury that neither I nor Marmee could forswear; giving our mite to those unfortunates even poorer than we.

And this, also: I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man’s duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming. If I prolong my dark hours by the consumption of costly oil, then I waste both the life of the beast slaughtered for the purpose, and the clarity of mind which comes from timely sleep. If I indulge in coffee then I pay to pollute myself, when instead I could have a cleansing draught of water at no charge at all. None in our household ate meat, but now we learned to do without milk and cheese also, for why should the calf be deprived of its mother’s milk? Further, we found that by limiting our own consumption to two meals a day, we were able to set aside a basket of provisions from which the girls were able to exact a pleasure far greater than sating an animal appetite. Once a week, they carried the fruits of their sacrifice as a gift to a destitute brood of German immigrants.