Board May Be Had

by Louisa May Alcott, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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"The Harlow Summer School of Ideal Philosophy will hold its First Session in the Hall upon the Common, from the twelfth of July to the seventh of August, 1880. Lectures daily at nine and at four. Board may be had in the village at five dollars the week." — from the Circular

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Mrs. Rhoda Pratt read the proof of the circular with both hands in the bread, which is the only way a woman in July has time to read anything, and Mr. Lemuel Sprague held it for her at a respectful distance, as though the dough might rise up and object.

"'Board may be had in the village,'" she read aloud. "Where?"

"Why, here," said Mr. Sprague, surprised. "You said you would take a few."

"I said I would take six, if they were quiet and came at the Fourth and went at the first frost. That was in March, and you were talking about Plato at the time, and I didn't think you heard me." She gave the dough a turn it had not earned. "And who said five dollars?"

Mr. Sprague looked at the circular as if it had said it on its own. He was a long, mild, white-haired man of sixty, who had kept a school, and then a bookshop, and then nothing in particular, and who lived now with his sister on the other side of the Common and walked over every afternoon to ask Mrs. Pratt's opinion on the soul. He had been asking it for eleven years, ever since her husband died, and had never once noticed that she gave it with a broom in her hand. He was the best man in Harlow and the most useless, and she would have put her arm in the fire for him, though she would have said something sharp first.

"I believe Professor Gault said five," said Mr. Sprague. "In his letter. He said that in St. Louis a student could not be asked to give more, and that the spirit of the thing—"

"The spirit of the thing," said Mrs. Pratt, "does not eat butter. Butter is twenty-eight cents. Eggs are twenty. The ice-man wants a dollar and a half a week for a cake the size of a hymn-book, and he'll want it every day if there are philosophers in the house, for I suppose they are the kind that like their milk cold." She took her hands out of the dough and looked at them. "Six dollars."

"The circular is printed, Rhoda."

"It is a proof. I can see the printer's thumb on it."

They looked at each other across the bread-board. Mr. Sprague's eyes, which were blue and very hopeful, had looked across that board at a great many schemes: the Harlow Lyceum, which had lasted two winters; the Grahamite Bakery, which had lasted one; the Society for the Study of the Inner Light, which had met in her parlor and left a stain on the carpet from a sermon-lamp. She had fed them all. She had a note at the Harlow Savings Bank for a hundred and forty dollars, falling due the first of October, which had been made, in the first place, to put a new roof on the house, and in the second place had grown, quietly, as notes do, during the winter of the Grahamite Bakery.

She knew to the cent what twenty boarders at five dollars would clear in four weeks, if nobody broke a leg and the hens held out. She had done the sum on the back of the almanac the night he first spoke of it. It would clear the note, and twelve dollars over, and the twelve dollars would be gone by the time the first philosopher had worn out the back stairs.

"Five dollars," she said, "and they wipe their boots."

"My dear Rhoda!"

"Put it in the circular."

He did not put it in the circular. But he went home very happy, and she went back to the bread, and wrote that night in the ledger, under June 30: Agreed with L. S., twenty at $5. Mem.: the cots from the church vestry. Mem.: speak to Philomène about the wages.

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"The aim of the School is to free the student, for a season, from the cares that bind the spirit to its conditions, and to give the higher faculties their opportunity." — from the Circular

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The philosophers came up from Boston on the Fitchburg cars on Saturday the tenth of July, in a heat that made the rails swim, and there were not twenty of them. There were twenty-six.

There were three clergymen, two of them Unitarian and one who was not sure. There were seven schoolmistresses, who had saved for it all winter, and you could tell which they were because they had brought notebooks and their own soap. There was a gentleman from Philadelphia who had written a book on the Infinite and had brought forty copies of it in a trunk, which had to go up the back stairs on Mrs. Pratt's hired girl and the boy from the livery. There was a doctor's widow from Chicago named Mrs. Augusta Pell, who ate no animal food, required unbolted wheat in all its forms and a room facing the sunrise, and had been told by somebody in Chicago that New England had plenty of both. And there was Professor Hiram Gault of St. Louis, who was the reason for everything, and who had a beard like a waterfall and a voice to match, and who shook Mrs. Pratt's hand in the front entry and said, "Ah! Our hostess! The Real made Rational!" and went up to the best room, which had been Mr. Pratt's.

Mrs. Pratt put the Philadelphia gentleman in the sewing-room, and the three clergymen on the cots in the parlor, and four of the schoolmistresses in the attic, two to a bed, where they said it was like being girls again and lay awake till one telling each other so. She put Mrs. Pell in the east chamber, which faced the sunrise and also the barn. She put herself on the kitchen settle, with a shawl, and did not mention it, and Philomène on a pallet in the pantry, which Philomène did mention, in French and then in English, till Mrs. Pratt promised her fifty cents a week more for the session. That made Philomène's wages two dollars and a half, and it made Philomène sing.

Philomène Bouchard was nineteen and came from a farm above Sherbrooke, in the Province of Quebec, by way of a cotton mill in Fitchburg which she had left because, she said, the noise got into her teeth. She was strong and quick and pious and broke a dish a week, and she sang at the sink a long song about a girl and a white duck that never came to an end, so that by the second week the schoolmistresses in the attic were humming it at the morning lecture.

The morning lecture was at nine. Breakfast for twenty-six was at seven, and to have breakfast for twenty-six at seven a woman must be at the stove at five, and to be at the stove at five she must have set the beans to soak at ten the night before, which meant that she sat down, when she sat down at all, at a quarter past. The Hall was a stone's throw across the Common, and the windows were open on account of the heat, and so were Mrs. Pratt's, and so from nine to eleven, while she scalded the milk-pans and skimmed and chopped and blacked the stove, she had the lectures too, free of charge, coming over the grass with the smell of cut hay and Mr. Sprague's voice going up a little at the ends of his sentences, as it always did when he was happy.

She heard that the soul was not conditioned by its circumstances. She heard that labor of the hands was a lower form of the activity of spirit, through which spirit must pass on its way to knowing itself. She heard Professor Gault say, in a voice that rattled the spoons, that the true self was free, and that the unfree self was only the true self not yet aware of its freedom; and at that point the bottom went out of the bean-pot and she said a word that was not in the Circular, and Philomène crossed herself.

She kept the accounts at night by the kitchen lamp, after the clergymen had stopped talking on the parlor cots. She kept them in two columns, as her father had taught her when she was eight, Received on the left and Paid on the right; and since the left column was going to come all in a lump at the end, she found, the first week, that she had nothing to put in it, and began to put other things.

July 13. Lecture: "On the Superiority of Spirit to its Conditions." — and on the right: Ice, 25 cts. Ice gone by noon.

July 15. Lecture: "The Ideal Household." — and on the right: Mrs. P. will not eat the bread; wants it made of unbolted meal; 3 lbs. Graham flour, 15 cts.; same lady will not eat Graham bread made by Philomène; says it is "heavy with the grosser element." Made it myself. She ate four slices.

July 16. Lecture: "The Negation of the Negative." — and on the right: Mr. Hollis (Philad.) has burned a hole in the sewing-room table with his lamp, writing on the Infinite. Also, 2 doz. eggs, 40 cts. Also, the hens are tired.

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"No distinction shall be made among members of the School, who shall be equal in its fellowship as they are in the life of the mind." — from the Circular

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On the last Saturday in July Philomène's sister was married in Fitchburg, and Philomène came to Mrs. Pratt at six in the morning, in the dark of the pantry, with her face in her apron.

She did not ask for the day. She asked whether, perhaps, if Madame could spare her, if it was not too much, she might go on the noon train and come back on the last; and then, before Mrs. Pratt could answer, she said that of course she could not go, it was nothing, it was only Délima, and there were twenty-six philosophers, and Madame was tired, and she would stay. And she put the apron down and started for the stove.

Mrs. Pratt looked at her and saw a girl of nineteen who had been sleeping on a pallet among the preserves for three weeks and had broken only two dishes in that time, which was under her average, and who had one sister in this country, and was about to miss her wedding.

She also saw dinner for twenty-six at one o'clock, and supper at six, on the day of Professor Gault's great lecture, "The Finite Self and Its Release," for which three more people were coming over from Leominster and would certainly stay to eat.

The temper came up in her, as it did. It was not at Philomène. It was at Professor Gault and the Leominster people and the hens and the Circular and the fact of Saturday, and it had nowhere honest to go, so she held it a moment in her mouth, like a hot potato, until it cooled enough to swallow.

"Go and put on your good things," she said. "The noon train. And take the half-dollar out of the tea-caddy for a present, and tell your sister it's from the house."

Philomène wept, and kissed her hand, which was greasy, and went.

So at half past ten, with the dinner not begun, Mrs. Pratt was alone in the kitchen with a peck of peas in the pod, a leg of mutton for those who would eat it and a dish of baked beans for Mrs. Pell, who would eat the beans and say they had been near the mutton, and the four o'clock lecture coming. She sat down on the back step with the pan in her lap and began on the peas, and through the open windows of the Hall she heard Mr. Sprague introducing a gentleman who was going to read a paper on the Oversoul.

She had shelled perhaps a quart when a shadow came along the step and sat down beside her, and a small brown hand reached into the pan.

It was one of the schoolmistresses, the youngest, a Miss Lettice Haynes from Worcester, who taught forty children in a district school and had come to Harlow on thirty-one dollars she had saved since the Christmas before. She was plain and freckled and sunburnt across the nose from walking to the Hall bareheaded, and she shelled peas like a woman who had been doing it since she could sit up.

"You'll miss your paper on the Oversoul," said Mrs. Pratt.

"I heard it in May," said Miss Haynes. "He read it at the Worcester Lyceum. It hasn't changed." She split a pod with her thumb. "The French girl went off crying on the noon train. I saw her from the attic. I thought you'd be one short."

"I'm always one short," said Mrs. Pratt. "I'm used to it."

They shelled. The pan filled. Across the Common the gentleman on the Oversoul reached a part of his paper that made the audience laugh, and Miss Haynes said, without looking up, "That's where he says Emerson told him so on the cars to Concord. He says it every time."

Mrs. Pratt laughed, which she had not done since Tuesday, and then, because a woman who has been hearing philosophy through a kitchen window for three weeks has questions saved up, she said, "Miss Haynes. You've been taking notes. What's the Negation of the Negative?"

Miss Haynes considered a pod.

"As near as I can tell," she said, "a thing is what it is, and then it runs into what it isn't, and that's the first negative. And then it comes back from what it isn't to what it is, and it's more itself than before, for having been out and come home. That's the second. And the Professor says the second is higher."

"Like a girl who goes into a mill and comes back to the farm?"

"I suppose. Or a pea." Miss Haynes held one up. "First it's a pea in a pod. Then it's out of the pod, which is the pod negated. Then it's in the pot—"

"Which is the pea negated, I should think."

"And then it's in the Professor, and that's the release of the finite self." Miss Haynes put the pea in her mouth. "I may have that wrong. I'll ask him at supper."

"Don't ask him at supper," said Mrs. Pratt. "He talks with his fork."

They did the mutton between them, and the potatoes, and a blackberry pudding for which the blackberries had been picked on the Thursday by two of the clergymen, who had been sent out into the pasture with a pail each on the strength of a remark of Mr. Sprague's about the dignity of simple labor and had come back with one pail, half full, and their hands torn, extremely happy. Miss Haynes laid the table for twenty-nine. She laid it, Mrs. Pratt observed, as a woman lays a table who has done it in her mother's house with one fork too few and had to decide which uncle should eat with his spoon.

At one the bell rang and the philosophers came across the grass in the white glare, talking, and wiped their boots, for Mrs. Pratt had nailed a piece of sacking to the step on the second morning and stood in the door every noon until it was done; and they sat down to dinner, and ate it, and said that it was very good, and that Philomène was a treasure.

Miss Haynes did not go to the four o'clock lecture either. She dried. At a quarter past five, with the pots on the shelf, she took off the apron Mrs. Pratt had lent her and hung it on its nail and said, "I'm going to go and hear the last of it. I'd like to know how he gets the finite self released. I've got forty of them to manage come September."

"Come and tell me," said Mrs. Pratt.

Miss Haynes came back at six and told her. As near as she could make out, the finite self was released by knowing itself to be the infinite self all along. Mrs. Pratt said she would bear it in mind, and cut the bread for supper.

Philomène came in on the last train, at a quarter to eleven, with a piece of wedding-cake in a handkerchief for Madame and her shoes in her hand, and found Mrs. Pratt asleep on the kitchen settle with the ledger open on her knee, and the lamp still going, and in the right-hand column under July 31, in a hand gone large and loose with sleep: Peas, 1 peck. Shelled by Miss L. Haynes of Worcester, a philosopher.

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"The School tenders its warm acknowledgments to all who have aided its labors." — from the Report of the First Session

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The School closed on the seventh of August with a Conversation in the Hall, in which every member was invited to say what the session had given them. The Philadelphia gentleman said it had given him a second volume. Mrs. Pell said it had given her a deeper sense of the unity of all things and a touch of dyspepsia, which she believed came from the well. The clergyman who was not sure said he was now less sure, and thanked them for it. Professor Gault said a great deal, and was going to say more when the bell rang for dinner.

Mr. Sprague came to the kitchen afterwards, with his hat in his hand and a parcel under his arm, while Mrs. Pratt was folding the vestry blankets on the kitchen table to go back to the church.

He had brought her a copy of Professor Gault's Lectures on the Finite Self, printed in St. Louis the year before, bound in green cloth with the Professor's name on the back in gold, and inscribed on the fly-leaf in the Professor's waterfall of a hand, To our Hostess, in whom the Real became Rational, and the Rational, Real. Mr. Sprague had paid for the binding himself. She could see by the green cloth that it had cost a dollar and a quarter, and she could see by his face that he had gone without something to pay it.

She wiped her hands, and took the book, and looked at the inscription, and did not say what she thought, which was a great deal.

"It's very handsome, Lemuel," she said. "I'll keep it in the parlor."

He was so pleased that she nearly let it go at that. Then she reached into the drawer of the kitchen table, under the clothes-pins, and took out the ledger, and opened it to the page where the summing was, and turned it round on the table so that it faced him.

He read it. He had kept a bookshop for nine years and had never once balanced it; but he could read a column, and he read this one twice. Twenty-six boarders at five dollars for four weeks came to five hundred and twenty dollars, and the Leominster people's Saturday dinners to six more; and of the five hundred and twenty-six the butter and eggs and the mutton and the Graham flour and the ice and the cots and Philomène, and a new bottom to the bean-pot, and the table in the sewing-room, came to three hundred and seventy. The note at the bank was a hundred and forty. That left sixteen dollars, and the sixteen dollars was written on the left-hand side, very small, against the words Rhoda Pratt, four weeks, 18 hrs. a day.

Mr. Sprague put his finger on the sixteen dollars, and then took it away again, as if the figure were hot.

"Rhoda," he said, "I never thought."

"I know you didn't," she said. "That's what I'm for."

He sat down on the wood-box, with the hat on his knee, and was quiet for a long time, and she went on folding the vestry blankets, and did not help him. A woman who has carried the basket for eleven years may let a man feel the weight of it once, for a quarter of an hour, if she does not make a habit of it.

"There will be a second session," he said at last. "Professor Gault has written to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy about it already. There are people in Cincinnati."

"There always are."

"Will you take them? Will you take them, Rhoda, if—" and here Mr. Sprague, who had spent his life in the presence of the Ideal and had never in that time once asked anyone a plain question about money, gathered himself up on the wood-box and asked one. "If what?"

Mrs. Pratt laid the last blanket on the pile. She took the stub of pencil from behind her ear, and turned the Circular of the First Session face down on the kitchen table, and wrote on the back of it, in her square hand that had kept the house for thirty years, what was to be printed in the Circular of the Second; and gave it to him; and went out to see to the hens.

The Circular of the Second Session of the Harlow Summer School of Ideal Philosophy came out the following May, on better paper, with a list of eleven lecturers and a portrait of Professor Gault. At the foot of the last page, in the same type as the lectures, it said:

Board may be had of Mrs. Rhoda Pratt, adjoining the Hall, at six dollars the week. A second girl is kept. Members will kindly wipe their boots.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Ludovīcā Māiā Alcott per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Louisa May Alcott, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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