The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (14 page)

As I was about to leave the library, Phebe said, “I have a few books in our attic-room that you are welcome to, Miss Sigourney. Mostly tales and poems.”

“Oh, thank you, Phebe! That's very kind of you. Perhaps I will look in some day then to see what you have.”

“Please do, Miss Sigourney.” She smiled sweetly. “I think the world would be a very dismal world without books, don't you? I could not live without books. I take so much pleasure in reading beautiful stories and poetry. I like to hear beautiful words and thoughts. ‘Beautiful' is my favorite word, you see.”

We laughed again. “And pictures,” she went on. “I have scrapbooks full of beautiful paintings. And mother bought me some water cakes so I can try to teach myself.”

“I especially like beautiful paintings also, Phebe. Would you like me to teach you a little?”

“Oh yes, Miss Sigourney! Would you please?”

From that moment on, Phebe became my only pupil—an especially apt one—during all my time at Newspirit.

I
T WAS, JUST AS
Phebe had predicted, two days later that the children held their performance. In the forenoon Phebe and Peter had accompanied their mother to help with the first hay and then with picking berries. After dinner they played in the stream to cool off while practicing the lines they had composed. Sisters Rebecca, Sabra, and I had spent the morning in kitchen drudgery, while Lucy tended the garden, harvesting our second crop of peas and tiny early squash.

That afternoon all other recreations and labors were laid aside so that the whole company might repair to the small clearing in the woods that had become our fair-weather theater, lecture hall, and pulpit. The clearing had been opened perhaps by a great wind a few years ago, for the decaying trunks lay like benches about our modest amphitheater, which had been then kept open, according to Mr. Brown's theory, by grazing deer. And now we kept it arranged to our liking as well.

Rebecca and Sabra had made wreaths of braided hay, oak leaves, and flowers for the women to wear about their heads. Each gentleman brought a flower of his choosing to be presented to the children upon completion of an act in the drama. Surely anyone stumbling upon us would have thought he had wandered into some strange Druidical ceremony, as we sat ranged round the “stage” in our linen tunics, wreaths, and flowers while the children enacted their fables.

Phebe and Peter performed four. Following each, one of the brethren was to suggest a modern application and present the little actors with a flower. The first fable was “The Dog and the Wolf,” with Peter wearing a collar of woven field grasses and Phebe in a wolf's mask that she had drawn and colored on paper.

“Who put that collar 'round your neck,” Wolf asked, “and fed you to such sleekness?”

“Why my master, of course,” answered Dog.

“Then,” said Wolf, “may no friend of mine be treated like a dog, for this collar is as grievous as starvation!”

Brother Miles suddenly stood to his full height and declaimed his interpretation like an overblown actor announcing the Trump of Doom: “Abstain from the fruits of oppression and blood! Seek, rather, the means of your independence. The beast named Man has yet most costly tastes, and must regenerate himself before the earth be restored to fruitfulness and redeemed from the curse of his cupidity.”

We all applauded, and while Mr. Miles stepped forward to present each of his children a small cluster of budding Lily-of-the-Valley, for innocence, Brother Brown stood up and expanded on his worthy founding partner's words: “Of all the traffic in which civilized society is involved, that of human labor is the most degrading. From the state of serfdom to the receipt of wages is a small step in human progress. Laboring for wages must itself be transcended to unburden the aspirations of humanity's spirit!” Pleased with his contribution, Brother Brown sat down again and continued munching on pea pods from the small basket he seemed to carry everywhere.

Sabra leaned toward me and whispered her interpretation: “Does not Liberty make a better marriage?”

But just as Brown finished, the children began another fable. Phebe sat before Peter, who held a broken piece of foxtail grass in his hand, similar to a whole foxtail Phebe wore attached to her little backside.

“My life is no longer worth living,” Peter exclaimed. Then he looked at Phebe in her fine foxtail and seemed to look about at other imagined foxes beside her.

“Assembled foxes all,” he said in a loud, high voice, “tails are, after all, most ungraceful. They are but heavy appendages and quite superfluous. See how much better off I am!” He shook his tailless behind at the foxes, whereupon Phebe spoke up as the representative of gathered clan.

“Dear Sir,” she began. “You advise us merely to
your
advantage. For if you would bring us into your own condition, that is to conceal your own deficiency in the general distress, will we not
all
share your deficiency in common?”

Up leapt Miss Somerby, her abundant hair flying out from beneath her wreath of Lady Slippers and leaves, to pluck the thick bouquet of orange and yellow Hawkweed, emblem of quick-sightedness, from Mr. Brown's unwilling, bony hand. She then carried it to the children.

“Nonsense, my dear ladies!” she declaimed, as if speaking to an assemblage of married women. “Husbands are ridiculous things and are quite unnecessary!”

Everyone laughed, taking her meaning to be a witty reversal of the fable's sentiment.

I had come to like this outspoken quality in Sabra. But other qualities aroused my suspicions. I began to doubt she remained a faithful Pythagorean in her diet. Moreover, she dimmed beside Lucy Miles—a humble, hard-working woman who abided by the rules of the Community whether or not she found them convenient and practical. Any potential breach of their communal agreements Lucy Miles would have opened to the general consent. Plain, compact, and sturdy, there was not a wisp of hypocrisy or cant about her. Moreover, she seemed to conduct her life with a laudable absence of female vanity.

While pretty Miss Somerby, on the contrary, was ever decking herself out with some blossom or attitude. By winter, I fairly believed she was resorting to the rouge-pot, despite her declaration that “I should hope to avoid intemperance, envy, or ill-temper for the highest motives, yet just now I am thinking of my complexion.” Her “virtuous” complexion, I mean to say, seemed to arise from something other than her virtue. Yet who could not deny the woman a certain decorative beauty?

I found, in short, that I did not fully trust her. Perhaps any degree of apostasy in her case was simply the result of having all her life received so energetic a response from men that she could not cast aside what had become an ingrained pleasure. In the presence of men she seemed truly to glow, her dark eyes brightened and her face flushed, her posture grew erect, and her hair—close to burnt sienna or red ocher—seemed to take on new luster.

Still, I wondered about a certain hypocrisy in the woman. After all, humility, moderation in all things, and self-control over petty vanities were very much first principles among the members of the Community. And it was upon this petty vanity that I silently called Miss Somerby into question.

As the children continued their performances, I recalled the spark that surged between Sister Sabra and Tom when I introduced them to one another. She shook her hair, and her black eyes seemed to deepen. She flaunted her earth-stained tunic and flashed a smile, opening before his fascinated gaze like a dark blossom brushed suddenly by a shaft of sunlight. Only later was I to discover that she had indeed enthralled Tom into her service, but I jump ahead of my story if I relate that discovery here.

I
N BRIEF
, Tom did return to the Community, having delayed his departure to England for little more than a fortnight.

“Mr. Dana,” he told me upon his return, “says that the success of prosecution is uncertain, but he's willing to brief the proper attorneys in the criminal courts if you wish, Allegra. To assess their opinions, that is.”

“I do not wish, if he is uncertain. I won't be dragged before a gaping public who, despite their sympathies against my abduction, are not likely to believe in my resistance while abiding some months in a bagnio. I do not care to trust to the law alone on speculation, I mean. Have you ever known of a woman to publicly expose some libertine but that her own reputation is not called immediately into question? Of course not.
Then
how should I earn my living?”

“There's sense in what you say, Allegra. I'll not deny that.” He turned our discussion again to the question of my removal.

“I need just now to collect myself and plan more carefully before moving on,” I said.

“As you wish, Allegra,” he finally said. “As to Dudley, we can bide our time a little longer. But you must not settle here for long. Agreed?”

“We agree. And don't forget, brother, that we're assured of Mr. Dana's confidence, and Miss Fuller's. No one else beyond Mr. and Mrs. Miles, and Mr. Brown, knows a thing about my captivity. For the rest, I am a temporary guest, one Miss Sigourney, in need of a place to live and paint undistracted by the cares and demands of the great world, so long as she makes her contribution to the Community. So our secret should be safe.”

ELEVEN

Doubts and quandaries

A
llow me, reader, to offer but one occurrence to exemplify many others that aroused my skepticism and strengthened my resolve to leave the Newspirit Community.

Mr. Miles and Mr. Brown, always in search of appropriate recruits, invited from time to time prospects to visit for a day. Such observers proved harmless enough, appearing among us mostly out of curiosity. But Brothers Miles and Brown had a more precarious habit of leaving the Community at any season to attend reform lectures and conventions. In favor of such company they at times rather shirked their responsibilities as husbandmen.

Once, they, along with Brother Perry and Sister Lovejoy, traveled to Concord, staying over with friends, for two days of meetings and lectures by leading abolitionists. But just then the barley crop had come into ripeness, been cut, and lay in the field awaiting harvest. We might have saved it, or most of it, upon their return, but for a thunderstorm. Mrs. Miles, Sister Sabra, the children, and I gathered from the barley field what we could of the crop into our baskets and ran before the storm to the granary. We were able to save only a few weeks' worth in advance of the deluge. But it was exhausting work, and we probably could not have saved much more before our strength gave out, even if the storm had held off.

It is all very well to live a principled life, I thought that evening, to go off showing your linen tunics and canvas shoes to the world and holding conversations calculated to enlighten people about the wonders of the Newspirit experiment and its implications for “truly progressing human beings” who are moving toward the transformations of the millennium of love, but you had better arrange your principles in some order that will, first, sustain your life and health. Without maintaining the very sources of your life—that is to say, above all, food—you have little chance of demonstrating to the world a better path. How convincing can one be, after all, if one merely trades worldly follies for unworldly?

If we allow the fruit of our orchards to wither because canker worms have as much right to God's apples as we, if we turn back into the earth better than half our crops to enrich the soil in our enthusiasm to avoid animal manures, if we sit helpless in the dark of autumn and winter evenings because we abhor burning animal fat in our lamps, will we not hobble ourselves so as to insure the failure of our experiment? Will we not defeat our higher principles by inattention to first, and obvious, necessities? And worse, is it not more extraordinary, even, for the world to forgive the failure of an ideal, no matter how beneficent or noble, than to forgive the patriotic clatterwhacking of hypocrites, the felonies of thieves and brothel keepers, and the swindles of legislators?

D
URING TOM'S BRIEF STAY
among us, he soon expressed similar misgivings. We had, however, already agreed that I should remain where I was until Tom returned from England. I think he humored my wishes to stay on because he came to think of the unworldliness of the Newspirit Brotherhood as an inoculation against Mr. Dudley. This hermitage he viewed as a sort of pastoral separation from the traffic-laden world in which Joseph Dudley lived.

But even as Tom and I discussed my future opportunities during that week when he returned to Newspirit, Sister Sabra worked her magic upon him. Much as I delighted in his renewed company, I came to believe that Tom's being here even briefly cost him more and benefited me less than he had expected.

Sister Sabra was our principal distraction, or rather Tom's. They began taking walks alone in the moonlight. And I discovered, under the most awkward of circumstances, that the Community's quiet periods in the afternoons were not always in their case given over to rest or mental elevation.

One day, I had taken my paint box and canvas into the woods to capture in oils the shafts of afternoon light as they struck deep beneath the forest canopy and enbrightend the leafy duff and lichenstained stems of trees upon a certain rocky outcropping.

After less than an hour of fussing with my burnt ochres, umbers, and bistres, I became so drowsy that I had to lie back for a short nap. Something awakened me—I could not tell what it was. I recall only a sort of deep groan such as a wounded animal might utter. I thought at first I might have been dreaming, and, shaking the sleep from my head, slowly sat up. Then another strange commotion issued from below where I lay: unfathomable, lunatic voices.

Changing my position carefully, I was able to discern two people stretched out on the ground, leaning against a fallen forest patriarch. After a minute or two I realized that it was Tom and Sabra, her hair loose and wild. Perhaps it was my sleepiness still, or the trees and foliage between us, but it took me some confused moments to recognize that they were indiscreetly engaged. Her right hand, as Aunt Sally would have put it, “was where it should not be” and moving with an urgency and vigor that left no doubt as to its destination.

In reflex I turned away; only a moment later did I comprehend what I had actually seen, as if the aftereffect were clearer than the initial vision, as if I might have happened upon a beautiful-haired Harpie, tearing the organs of a hero, the two of them eternally enfolded in torturous pleasure.

Not wishing to attract attention to myself, I carefully lay back, closed my eyes again, and tried to ignore the oddly pathetic sounds drifting through the trees. At the crisis, which sounded prolific indeed, I had to cover my ears. Inexplicably, it was I who suddenly felt embarrassment, almost as if I were the one who had been espied in dubious ecstasy.

They did not tarry long, however, having achieved the purpose of their assignation. I then attended to my palette and canvas. But painting went badly. I was unable to expunge the lingering apparition of their raptures. Although I would miss Tom, I was not sorry two days later when he left Newspirit for that sea journey which would place him beyond Sister Sabra's talons.

I knew now, however, that when he returned, it would be better for us both if I were to leave my hermitage and regain my more adventuresome independence. Just how that was to take place I could not say. And Tom would not return before the following spring. For the most part, I managed to put the question out of my head by embracing my routines of life and work in the Community.

Then another experience unsettled me. Miss Fuller visited once that first winter, paying her respects to Lucy and Hiram Miles. She also wanted to see, or so I gathered, how we fared under the more severe conditions of the season. It was a delight to see this bold, energetic lady once again, to hear her voice of self-assurance, to see the certain, warm curve of her shoulders. And it was she, no less, who led me to consider the question of my tenure at Newspirit again.

“And you have taken up your palette once more!” she said as the two of us sat alone by the stove in the library one afternoon. “As you yourself have said, the principal attraction of these circumstances is this very freedom to earn a modest sufficiency while you continue to paint, to make up for that most unfortunate loss of your liberty.”

“To be sure, Miss Fuller,” I said. Once our conversation had turned to my thoughts of leaving, however, I found it hard to speak my mind. I could not find the words to say that I truly wanted to strike out, come spring or summer, in order to earn my way once again by portraiture. That I was ambitious to do so even though Tom had found other, more favored employment now, and that I did not wish to inhibit his own success.

Yet, with her promptings, I must have managed to say something of the sort, for I do recall adding: “Tom owes it to himself to consider rather more his own adventures and fortunes. And do I not owe him, by now, emancipation from all my cares?”

She looked at me curiously, like a terrier cocking her head, and asked: “But can Tom, this man you have so convincingly described to me, wish to return to menial pursuits?” She raised her eyebrows, then fluttered her half-closed eyelids. “You are certain that such are his plans?”

“Such plans reflect his true calling, Miss Fuller. And he has made another start, a very good one it seems even in these hard times, in the Lowell manufactories.”

“Well,” she said, drawing herself up as if for a lecture, “I find it hard to believe that your brother wishes to leave you on your own—this Dudley creature is after all still very much at large.” She paused. Then she smiled and continued. “Let me impart a related experience of my dearest brother Richard that may be instructive.

“Richard had decided not to attend Harvard because he thought he loved trade more and saw an opportunity to learn commerce under a merchant of Boston. He worked for several months in this man's offices, but soon enough his disenchantment with the mercantile life became so clear and his distaste for it so violent that the dear boy fled his master, determined to get his proper education. As if mortifying his flesh, he has placed himself under the tutelage of Mr. Thoreau, a young friend of Mr. Emerson. Even as we speak, Mrs. Fullerton, my Richard lives in Concord on grain, milk, and applesauce, and labors under the severity of constant application to his studies.”

“I can only hope that the poor boy succeeds in this direction, Miss Fuller,” I said. “But Tom is otherwise constituted, I assure you. He's no scholar, although he saw himself honestly through his school years so that he might be better prepared to leave his uncle's farm one day. Since he was a child, he has had remarkable gifts for machinery and sums, however strange such passions may seem to you or to me. Yet I expect your brother Richard has deeper, uncommon gifts.”

“Oh, Richard will realize his new ambitions. Mr. Thoreau says that he progresses rapidly, if in a state of renunciation worthy of a Brahmin. Indeed, he says Richard shall soon be prepared to enter Harvard as a
second-
year student… . Nothing lost, you see!”

“I'm happy to hear it, Miss Fuller. But we are speaking of two entirely different men.”

“I don't doubt it. But if as Mencius says, ‘The duty of a student is no other than to seek his lost heart,' is not that also the duty of every man, in time? What has been lost through continual contact with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life, the very soul cries out to regain, in every man and woman. We cannot despoil ourselves forever, can we? Why shouldn't your Tom come to learn something of this himself? And really, Mrs. Fullerton, I can hardly think your brother would wish to see you strike out again entirely alone.”

“Oh, I have no such plans, you see. I expect to travel among my relatives only. I had thought of a sister in Connecticut to start—a far enough remove, I should think.”

“But to be clear, you do not find it sufficiently congenial here for another year … or summer?”

“I do not, to be honest, Miss Fuller, believe any of us shall be here in another year.”

“Ah, I see. Yes, they had to go abegging of a farmer or two, and Hiram said something of small trade with the Shakers for necessities.”

“And worse, as Brother Miles perhaps didn't tell you. Winter is a hard master. One's follies and impracticalities are exposed like faults in river-ice. I have taken the little girl, Phebe, on as pupil, and have become very fond of her. She alone I would miss were I to leave tomorrow.”

“As long as we are being forthright, then,” she said, “I have had similar concerns about the Newspirit project. But Hiram and Lucius do not always listen to my admonitions or counsel.”

“I'm finding I can't live for long as these communitarians would, and I begin to wonder whether even they can.”

She laughed. “Just so, Mrs. Fullerton. But they show no sign of giving up, do they? Perhaps we overstate the direness of the situation? And certainly there is nothing more difficult than casting off the dust of deluded generations. Nevertheless, as Richard's tutor is fond of reminding his friends, to live as a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school—much less a Community—but to so love wisdom as to live according to the problems of life, to their practical solution.”

“As I say, Miss Fuller, I can manage now among family relations.”

“I understand,” she said and smiled. “Of course you alone are the best judge of your own life.”

M
ISS FULLER SOON LEFT
to return to Concord, yet I found that many times during the winter my mind continued to trod over all these considerations. Then in the spring of 1841 Tom finally returned to America, and we found ourselves once again in flight.