Yesterday the lady was in her most amiable mood, and we talked
together--about Boston, it so happened.
“Do you like Boston?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I replied; “I am fond of Boston. It fascinates me.”
“But not fonder of it than of Butte, in Montana?”
“Oh, no,” said I, hastily. “Butte in Montana is my first love.
There are barren mountains there--they are with me always. Boston
doesn’t go to my heart in the least, but I like it much. I like to
live here.”
“I am fond of Boston--sometimes,” Annabel Lee observed. “Here by
the sea it is not quite Boston. It is everything. This sea washes
down by enchanted purple islands and touches at the coast of Spain.
But if one can but turn one’s eyes from it for a moment, Boston is
a fine and good thing, and interesting.”
“I think it is--from several points of view,” I agreed.
“Tell me what you find that interests you in Boston,” said my friend
Annabel Lee.
“There are many things,” I replied. “I have found a little corner
down by the East Boston wharf where often I sit on cold days. The
sun shines bright and warm on a narrow wooden platform between
two great barrels, and I can be hidden there, but I can watch the
madding crowd as it goes. The crowd is very madding down around East
Boston. And I do not lack company--sometimes brave, sharp-toothed
rats venture out on the ground below me. They can not see the
madding crowd, but they can enjoy the sunshine and hunt mice among
the rubbish.
“The dwellers in East Boston--they are the poor we have always with
us. They are not the meek, the worthy, the deserving poor. They are
the devilish, the ill-conditioned--one with the wharf rats that hunt
for mice. Except that the rats do occasionally try to clean their
soft, gray coats by licking them with their little red tongues;
whereas, the poor--But why should the poor wash? Are they not the
poor?
“As I rest me between my two great barrels and watch this grewsome
pageant, I think: It seems a quite desperate thing to be poor in
Boston, for Boston is said to be of the best-seasoned knowledge and
to carry a lump of ice in its heart. From between my two barrels in
East Boston I have seen humanity, oh, so brutal, oh, so barbarous
as ever it could have been in merrie England in the reign of good
old Harry the Eighth.----
“And so then that is very interesting.”
“In truth it is so,” said my friend Annabel Lee.
“Boston is fair, and very fair.--Tell me more.”
“And times,” I said, “I sit in one of the window-seats on the stairway
of the Public Library. And I look at the walls. A Frenchman with
a marvelous fancy and great skill in his finger-ends has worked
on those walls. He painted there the emblems of all the world’s
great material things of all ages. And over them he painted a thin
gray veil of those things that are not material, that come from no
age, that are with us, around us, above us--as they were with the
children of Israel, with the dwellers in Pompeii, with the fair
cities of Greece and the inhabitants thereof.
“I have looked at the paintings and I have been dazzled and
transported. What is there not upon those walls!
“I have seen, in truth, ‘the vision of the world and all the wonder
that shall be.’
“I have seen the struggling of the chrysalis-soul and its bursting
into light; I have seen the divinity that doth sometime hedge the
earth; I have looked at a conception of Poetry and I have heard
the thin, rhythmic sounds of shawms and stringed instruments; and
I have heard low, voluptuous music from within the temple--human
voices like sweet jessamine; I have seen the fascinating idolatry
of pagans--and I have seen, pale in the evening by the light of
a star, the wooden figure of the Cross; I have leaned over the
edge of a chasm and beheld the things of old--the army of Hannibal
before Carthage--the Norsemen going down to the sea in ships--the
futile, savage fighting of Goths and Vandals; I have seen science
and art within the walled cities, and I have seen frail little lambs
gamboling by the side of the brook; I have seen night-shades lowering
over occult works, and I have seen bees flying heavy-laden to their
hives on a fine summer’s morning; I have heard a lute played where a
tiny cataract leaps, and the pipes of Pan mingled with the bubbling
notes of a robin in mint meadows; I have seen pages and pages of
printed lines that reach from world’s end to world’s end; I have
seen profound words written centuries ago in inks of many colors; I
have seen and been overwhelmed by the marvels of scientific things
bristling with the accurate kind of knowledge that I shall never
know; withal, I have seen the complete serenity of the world’s
face, as shown by the brush of the Frenchman Chavannes.
“And over all, the nebulous conception of the long, ignorant silence.
“What is there not upon those wonderful walls!
“I sit in semi-consciousness in the little window-seat and these
things swim before my two gray eyes. My mind is full of the vision
of murmuring, throbbing life.
“But what a thing is life, truly--for marvelous as are these
pictures, those that I have seen, times, down where the rats forage
among the rubbish, are more marvelous still.”
“Truly,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “there is much, much, in
Boston. Tell me more.”
“Well, and there is the South Station,” I went on. “Oh, not until
one has ambled and idled away a thousand hours in that place of
trains and varied peoples can one know all of what is really to
be found within its waiting-rooms.
“I have found Massachusetts there--not any Massachusetts that I had
ever read about, but the Massachusetts that comes in from Braintree
and Plymouth and Middleboro carrying a Boston shopping-bag; the
Massachusetts that is intellectual and thrusts its forefinger through
the handle of its tea-cup; the Massachusetts that eats soup from
the end of its spoon; the Massachusetts that is good-hearted but
walks funny; the Massachusetts that takes all the children and goes
down to Providence for a day--each of the children with a thick,
yellow banana in its hand; the Massachusetts that has its being
because the world wears shoes--for it is intellectual and can make
shoes.
“And in the South Station, furthermore, there are people from the
wide world around. Actors and authors and artists are to be seen
coming in and going out and sitting waiting in the waiting-rooms.
Some mightily fine and curious persons have sat waiting in those
waiting-rooms, as well as dingy Italians with strings of beads
around their necks.
“And in the South Station there are so many, many people, that,
once in a long while, one can meet with some of those tiny things
that one has waited for for centuries. In among a multitude of
faces there may be a young face with lines of worn and vivid life
in it, and with alert and much-used eyes, and with soft dull hair
above it. In a flash one recognizes it, and in a flash it is gone.
It is a face that means beautiful things and one has known it and
its divineness a long, long time. And here in the South Station in
Boston came the one gold glimpse of it.
“And I have seen in the South Station a strange scene: that of a
mild Jew man bearing the brunt of caring for his large family of
small children, while their child-weary mother was allowed for once
in her life to rest completely, sitting with her eyes closed and
her hands folded. She might well rest tranquil in the thought that
in giving birth to that small Hebraic army she had done her share
of this dubious world’s penance.
“And in the South Station, as much as anywhere, one feels the air
of Boston.
“The air of Boston, too, is wonderful--and ’tis not free for all to
breathe. ’Tis for the anointed--the others must content them with
the untinted, unscented air that blows wild from mountain-tops and
north seas. But for me, I have eyes wherewith to see--and since the
air of Boston has color, I can see it. And I have ears wherewith
to hear--and since the air of Boston has musical vibrations, I can
hear it. And I have sensibility--wherefore all that is pungent in
the air of Boston, and all that is fine, and all that is art, and
all that is beautiful, and all that is true, and all that is benign,
and particularly all that is very cool and all that is bitterly
contemptuous--are not wholly lost upon me.
“If all the persons who go to and fro at the South Station were
heroes and breathed the air there and left their dim shadows behind
them--as they do--I presume the South Station would be hallowed
ground. They all are not heroes, but they breathe the air and leave
their dim shadows, whatever they may be, and ever after the air
of the South Station is tinctured. And since more than a half of
these people are of Boston, the air is tinctured therewith.
“If you are civilized and conventional you may know and breathe this
air. If you are not--well, at least you may stand and contemplate
it. And always one can bide one’s time.
“My contemplation of it has interested me.
“The air of Boston is a mingling of very ancient and very modern
things and ways of thinking that are picturesque and at times lead
to something. The ancient things date back to Confucius and others
of his ilk--and the modern ones are tinted with Lilian Whiting and
newspapers and the theater.
“One is half-conscious of this as one contemplates, and one’s thought
is, ‘Woe is me that I have my habitation among the tents of Kedar!’
One exclaims this not so much that one considers oneself benighted,
but that one is very sure that the air of Boston considers one so.
To be sure, it ought to know, but, somehow, as yet one is content
to bide one’s time.
“But yes. There is a beatified quality in the air of Boston. It
is tinted with rose and blue. It sounds, remotely, of chimes and
flutes. You feel it, perchance, when you sit within the subdued,
brilliant stillness of Trinity church--when you walk among the green
and gold fields about Brookline and Cambridge, where orchids are
lifting up their pale, soft lips--when you are in the Museum of
Fine Arts and see, hanging on the wall, a small dull-toned picture
that is old--so old!
“Music is in the air of Boston. It pours into the heart like fire
and flood--it awakens the soul from its dreaming--it sends the
human being out into the many-colored pathways to see, to suffer,
it may be--yes, surely to suffer--but to live, oh, to live!
“One can see in the mists the slender, gray figure of one’s own
soul rising and going to mingle with all these. In spite of the
clouds about it, one knows its going and that it is well. It was
long since said: ‘My beloved has gone down into her garden to the
bed of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.’ And
now again is the beloved in the garden, and in those moments, oh,
life is fair”----
My friend Annabel Lee opened her lips--her lips like damp, red
quince-blooms in the spring-time--and told me that there were times
when I interested her, times when I amused her mightily, and times
when in me she made some rare discoveries.
But which of the three this time was, she has not told.
V