Twice-Told Tales (16 page)

This outline is all that I remember. But the incident, though of the
purest originality, unexampled, and probably never to be repeated, is
one, I think, which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind. We
know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly,
yet feel as if some other might. To my own contemplations, at least,
it has often recurred, always exciting wonder, but with a sense that
the story must be true and a conception of its hero's character.
Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent
in thinking of it. If the reader choose, let him do his own
meditation; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years
of Wakefield's vagary, I bid him welcome, trusting that there will be
a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done
up neatly and condensed into the final sentence. Thought has always
its efficacy and every striking incident its moral.

What sort of a man was Wakefield? We are free to shape out our own
idea and call it by his name. He was now in the meridian of life; his
matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm,
habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most
constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest
wherever it might be placed. He was intellectual, but not actively so;
his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no
purpose or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so
energetic as to seize hold of words. Imagination, in the proper
meaning of the term, made no part of Wakefield's gifts. With a cold
but not depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with
riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality, who could have
anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place
among the doers of eccentric deeds? Had his acquaintances been asked
who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which
should be remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of
Wakefield. Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She,
without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet
selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort
of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to
craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping
of petty secrets hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she
called a little strangeness sometimes in the good man. This latter
quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent.

Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the dusk
of an October evening. His equipment is a drab greatcoat, a hat
covered with an oil-cloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a
small portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he
is to take the night-coach into the country. She would fain inquire
the length of his journey, its object and the probable time of his
return, but, indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates
him only by a look. He tells her not to expect him positively by the
return-coach nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days,
but, at all events, to look for him at supper on Friday evening.
Wakefield, himself, be it considered, has no suspicion of what is
before him. He holds out his hand; she gives her own and meets his
parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years' matrimony,
and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to
perplex his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has
closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open and a vision of
her husband's face through the aperture, smiling on her and gone in a
moment. For the time this little incident is dismissed without a
thought, but long afterward, when she has been more years a widow than
a wife, that smile recurs and flickers across all her reminiscences of
Wakefield's visage. In her many musings she surrounds the original
smile with a multitude of fantasies which make it strange and awful;
as, for instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look
is frozen on his pale features; or if she dreams of him in heaven,
still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile. Yet for its
sake, when all others have given him up for dead, she sometimes doubts
whether she is a widow.

But our business is with the husband. We must hurry after him along
the street ere he lose his individuality and melt into the great mass
of London life. It would be vain searching for him there. Let us
follow close at his heels, therefore, until, after several superfluous
turns and doublings, we find him comfortably established by the
fireside of a small apartment previously bespoken. He is in the next
street to his own and at his journey's end. He can scarcely trust his
good-fortune in having got thither unperceived, recollecting that at
one time he was delayed by the throng in the very focus of a lighted
lantern, and again there were footsteps that seemed to tread behind
his own, distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him, and anon he
heard a voice shouting afar and fancied that it called his name.
Doubtless a dozen busybodies had been watching him and told his wife
the whole affair.

Poor Wakefield! little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this
great world. No mortal eye but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to thy
bed, foolish man, and on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee
home to good Mrs. Wakefield and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself
even for a little week from thy place in her chaste bosom. Were she
for a single moment to deem thee dead or lost or lastingly divided
from her, thou wouldst be woefully conscious of a change in thy true
wife for ever after. It is perilous to make a chasm in human
affections—not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close
again.

Almost repenting of his frolic, or whatever it may be termed,
Wakefield lies down betimes, and, starting from his first nap, spreads
forth his arms into the wide and solitary waste of the unaccustomed
bed, "No," thinks he, gathering the bedclothes about him; "I will not
sleep alone another night." In the morning he rises earlier than usual
and sets himself to consider what he really means to do. Such are his
loose and rambling modes of thought that he has taken this very
singular step with the consciousness of a purpose, indeed, but without
being able to define it sufficiently for his own contemplation. The
vagueness of the project and the convulsive effort with which he
plunges into the execution of it are equally characteristic of a
feeble-minded man. Wakefield sifts his ideas, however, as minutely as
he may, and finds himself curious to know the progress of matters at
home—how his exemplary wife will endure her widowhood of a week, and,
briefly, how the little sphere of creatures and circumstances in which
he was a central object will be affected by his removal. A morbid
vanity, therefore, lies nearest the bottom of the affair. But how is
he to attain his ends? Not, certainly, by keeping close in this
comfortable lodging, where, though he slept and awoke in the next
street to his home, he is as effectually abroad as if the stage-coach
had been whirling him away all night. Yet should he reappear, the
whole project is knocked in the head. His poor brains being hopelessly
puzzled with this dilemma, he at length ventures out, partly resolving
to cross the head of the street and send one hasty glance toward his
forsaken domicile. Habit—for he is a man of habits—takes him by the
hand and guides him, wholly unaware, to his own door, where, just at
the critical moment, he is aroused by the scraping of his foot upon
the step.—Wakefield, whither are you going?

At that instant his fate was turning on the pivot. Little dreaming of
the doom to which his first backward step devotes him, he hurries
away, breathless with agitation hitherto unfelt, and hardly dares turn
his head at the distant corner. Can it be that nobody caught sight of
him? Will not the whole household—the decent Mrs. Wakefield, the
smart maid-servant and the dirty little footboy—raise a hue-and-cry
through London streets in pursuit of their fugitive lord and master?
Wonderful escape! He gathers courage to pause and look homeward, but
is perplexed with a sense of change about the familiar edifice such as
affects us all when, after a separation of months or years, we again
see some hill or lake or work of art with which we were friends of
old. In ordinary cases this indescribable impression is caused by the
comparison and contrast between our imperfect reminiscences and the
reality. In Wakefield the magic of a single night has wrought a
similar transformation, because in that brief period a great moral
change has been effected. But this is a secret from himself. Before
leaving the spot he catches a far and momentary glimpse of his wife
passing athwart the front window with her face turned toward the head
of the street. The crafty nincompoop takes to his heels, scared with
the idea that among a thousand such atoms of mortality her eye must
have detected him. Right glad is his heart, though his brain be
somewhat dizzy, when he finds himself by the coal-fire of his
lodgings.

So much for the commencement of this long whim-wham. After the initial
conception and the stirring up of the man's sluggish temperament to
put it in practice, the whole matter evolves itself in a natural
train. We may suppose him, as the result of deep deliberation, buying
a new wig of reddish hair and selecting sundry garments, in a fashion
unlike his customary suit of brown, from a Jew's old-clothes bag. It
is accomplished: Wakefield is another man. The new system being now
established, a retrograde movement to the old would be almost as
difficult as the step that placed him in his unparalleled position.
Furthermore, he is rendered obstinate by a sulkiness occasionally
incident to his temper and brought on at present by the inadequate
sensation which he conceives to have been produced in the bosom of
Mrs. Wakefield. He will not go back until she be frightened half to
death. Well, twice or thrice has she passed before his sight, each
time with a heavier step, a paler cheek and more anxious brow, and in
the third week of his non-appearance he detects a portent of evil
entering the house in the guise of an apothecary. Next day the knocker
is muffled. Toward nightfall comes the chariot of a physician and
deposits its big-wigged and solemn burden at Wakefield's door, whence
after a quarter of an hour's visit he emerges, perchance the herald of
a funeral. Dear woman! will she die?

By this time Wakefield is excited to something like energy of feeling,
but still lingers away from his wife's bedside, pleading with his
conscience that she must not be disturbed at such a juncture. If aught
else restrains him, he does not know it. In the course of a few weeks
she gradually recovers. The crisis is over; her heart is sad, perhaps,
but quiet, and, let him return soon or late, it will never be feverish
for him again. Such ideas glimmer through the mist of Wakefield's mind
and render him indistinctly conscious that an almost impassable gulf
divides his hired apartment from his former home. "It is but in the
next street," he sometimes says. Fool! it is in another world.
Hitherto he has put off' his return from one particular day to
another; henceforward he leaves the precise time undetermined—not
to-morrow; probably next week; pretty soon. Poor man! The dead have
nearly as much chance of revisiting their earthly homes as the
self-banished Wakefield.

Would that I had a folio to write, instead of an article of a dozen
pages! Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays
its strong hand on every deed which we do and weaves its consequences
into an iron tissue of necessity.

Wakefield is spellbound. We must leave him for ten years or so to
haunt around his house without once crossing the threshold, and to be
faithful to his wife with all the affection of which his heart is
capable, while he is slowly fading out of hers. Long since, it must be
remarked, he has lost the perception of singularity in his conduct.

Now for a scene. Amid the throng of a London street we distinguish a
man, now waxing elderly, with few characteristics to attract careless
observers, yet bearing in his whole aspect the handwriting of no
common fate for such as have the skill to read it. He is meagre; his
low and narrow forehead is deeply wrinkled; his eyes, small and
lustreless, sometimes wander apprehensively about him, but oftener
seem to look inward. He bends his head and moves with an indescribable
obliquity of gait, as if unwilling to display his full front to the
world. Watch him long enough to see what we have described, and you
will allow that circumstances—which often produce remarkable men from
Nature's ordinary handiwork—have produced one such here. Next,
leaving him to sidle along the footwalk, cast your eyes in the
opposite direction, where a portly female considerably in the wane of
life, with a prayer-book in her hand, is proceeding to yonder church.
She has the placid mien of settled widowhood. Her regrets have either
died away or have become so essential to her heart that they would be
poorly exchanged for joy. Just as the lean man and well-conditioned
woman are passing a slight obstruction occurs and brings these two
figures directly in contact. Their hands touch; the pressure of the
crowd forces her bosom against his shoulder; they stand face to face,
staring into each other's eyes. After a ten years' separation thus
Wakefield meets his wife. The throng eddies away and carries them
asunder. The sober widow, resuming her former pace, proceeds to
church, but pauses in the portal and throws a perplexed glance along
the street. She passes in, however, opening her prayer-book as she
goes.

And the man? With so wild a face that busy and selfish London stands
to gaze after him he hurries to his lodgings, bolts the door and
throws himself upon the bed. The latent feelings of years break out;
his feeble mind acquires a brief energy from their strength; all the
miserable strangeness of his life is revealed to him at a glance, and
he cries out passionately, "Wakefield, Wakefield! You are mad!"
Perhaps he was so. The singularity of his situation must have so
moulded him to itself that, considered in regard to his
fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could not be said to
possess his right mind. He had contrived—or, rather, he had
happened—to dissever himself from the world, to vanish, to give up
his place and privileges with living men without being admitted among
the dead. The life of a hermit is nowise parallel to his. He was in
the bustle of the city as of old, but the crowd swept by and saw him
not; he was, we may figuratively say, always beside his wife and at
his hearth, yet must never feel the warmth of the one nor the
affection of the other. It was Wakefield's unprecedented fate to
retain his original share of human sympathies and to be still involved
in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on
them. It would be a most curious speculation to trace out the effect
of such circumstances on his heart and intellect separately and in
unison. Yet, changed as he was, he would seldom be conscious of it,
but deem himself the same man as ever; glimpses of the truth, indeed,
would come, but only for the moment, and still he would keep saying,
"I shall soon go back," nor reflect that he had been saying so for
twenty years.