SPLEISTVILLE,
_Up the Hudson_.
Dearest Mamma,--A whole week since we landed! and we are terribly amused
("terribly" is American for "much"); and do you know that describes almost
everything in comparison to at home. Everything is "colossalised"--events,
fortunes, accidents, climate, conversation, ambitions--everything is in the
extreme--all en-gros, not en-detail. They can't even have a tram run off a
line, which in England or France might kill one or two people, without its
making a holocaust of half a street full. Even in their hospitality they
are twice the size of other nations, simply too kind and generous for
words. They have loaded us with invitations; we have been out morning, noon
and night.
The thing which surprises me is they should still employ animals of normal
size; one would expect to see elephants and mammoths drawing the hansoms
and carts!
Now we are staying in a country palace with the family we met on the boat,
whom the Americans we know in England would not speak to; in fact, I am
sure they are rather hurt at our coming here; but Octavia says she prefers
to see something we do not see in England. The Van Verdens, and Courtfields
and Latours are almost like us, only they are richer and have better French
furniture. So she says she wants to see the others, the American Americans
we don't meet at home. If people are nice in themselves how can it matter
who they are or if "fashionable" or not. The whole thing is nonsense and if
you belong to a country where the longest tradition is sixteen hundred and
something, and your ancestor got there then through being a middle class
puritan, or a ne'er-do-weel shipped off to colonise a savage land, it is
too absurd to boast about ancestry or worry in the least over such things.
The facts to be proud of are the splendid, vivid, vital, successful
creatures they are now, no matter what their origin; but just like
Hurstbridge and Ermyntrude in the nursery, the one thing they can't have
they think immensely of. Nearly everyone tells you here, their
great-great-grandfather came over in the Mayflower. (How absurd of the
Cunard line to be proud of the Mauretania! The Mayflower, of course, must
have been twice the size.) I wonder if in Virginia they would inform us
theirs were the original cavaliers. I don't expect so, because cavaliers
always were gentlemen, and puritans of any century only of the middle
classes. Fancy if we had to announce to strangers that Tom's ancestor
carried the standard at Agincourt and Octavia's and mine came over with the
Conqueror!
Even in a week Tom has got so wearied about the Mayflower that yesterday at
lunch when some new people came, and one woman began again, he said his
father had collected rags and bones, and his great-great-grandfather was
hung for sheep stealing! The woman nearly had a fit, and I heard her
reproaching our hostess afterwards, as she said she had been invited to
meet an English Earl! And the poor hostess looked so unhappy and came and
asked me in such a worried voice if it were really true; so I told her I
thought not exactly, but that the late Earl had a wonderful collection of
Persian carpets and ivories which Tom might be alluding to. Even this did
not comfort her, I could see she was still troubled over the sheep
stealing, and the only thing I could think of to explain that was about the
eighth Earl, don't you remember, Mamma? who was beheaded for the Old
Pretender.
But the exquisite part of it all is the lady Tom told the story to was
interviewed directly she got home, I suppose, for this morning in most of
the papers there are headlines six inches tall: