They first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where they
afterwards saw each other; whither, indeed, he followed her; and there
the match was also broken off. Why it was broken off, and why it was
renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long love-story, which
I do not think myself qualified to rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a
sustained or involved narration; though I am persuaded that a skillful
romancer could turn the courtship of Basil and Isabel March to excellent
account. Fortunately for me, however, in attempting to tell the reader of
the wedding-journey of a newly married couple, no longer very young, to
be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall have nothing
to do but to talk of some ordinary traits of American life as these
appeared to them, to speak a little of well-known and easily accessible
places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of character.
They had agreed to make their wedding-journey in the simplest and
quietest way, and as it did not take place at once after their marriage,
but some weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy from the
outset.
"How much better," said Isabel, "to go now, when nobody cares whether you
go or stay, than to have started off upon a wretched wedding-breakfast,
all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting to see you aboard the
cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of honey-moonshine about us; we
shall go just like anybody else,--with a difference, dear, with a
difference!" and she took Basil's cheeks between her hands. In order to
do this, she had to ran round the table; for they were at dinner, and
Isabel's aunt, with whom they had begun married life, sat substantial
between them. It was rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added,
with a conscious blush, "We are past our first youth, you know; and we
shall not strike the public as bridal, shall we? My one horror in life is
an evident bride."
Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to
be taken for a bride; and for my part I do not object to a woman's being
of Isabel's age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have
been very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has
lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when they met
first, eight years before; but he could not help recurring with an
inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken engagement,
which but for that fatality they might have spent together, he imagined,
in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted him, more or
less; it was part of his love; the loss accounted irreparable really
enriched the final gain.
"I don't know," he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can
whose cheeks are clasped between a lady's hands, "you don't begin very
well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this
way, they will put us into the 'bridal chambers' at all the hotels. And
the cars--they're beginning to have them on the palace-cars."
Just then a shadow fell into the room.
"Wasn't that thunder, Isabel?" asked her aunt, who had been contentedly
surveying the tender spectacle before her. "O dear! you'll never be able
to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It's actually raining now!"
In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible storm of June, 1870. All
in a moment, out of the hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us before
we quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the
clouds, and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible
violence. In the square upon which our friends looked out of their
dining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in the
driving floods of the rainfall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent
themselves in desperate submission, and then with a great shudder rent
away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail mingled
with the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved the storm
vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, where the
lightning played like flames burning from the earth, while the thunder
roared overhead without ceasing. There was something splendidly
theatrical about it all; and when a street-car, laden to the last inch of
its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under the
stinging blows of the hailstones, our friends felt as if it were an
effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their
admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent
reality in the affair, and at intervals during the storm they debated
about going at all that day, and decided to go and not to go, according
to the changing complexion of the elements. Basil had said that as this
was their first journey together in America, he wished to give it at the
beginning as pungent a national character as possible, and that as he
could imagine nothing more peculiarly American than a voyage to New York
by a Fall River boat, they ought to take that route thither. So much
upholstery, so much music, such variety of company, he understood, could
not be got in any other way, and it might be that they would even catch a
glimpse of the inventor of the combination, who represented the very
excess and extremity of a certain kind of Americanism. Isabel had eagerly
consented; but these aesthetic motives were paralyzed for her by the
thought of passing Point Judith in a storm, and she descended from her
high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence and the
orchestra, and then to the idea of going by land in a sleeping-car.
Having comfortably accomplished this feat, she treated Basil's consent as
a matter of course, not because she did not regard him, but because as a
woman she could not conceive of the steps to her conclusion as unknown to
him, and always treated her own decisions as the product of their common
reasoning. But her husband held out for the boat, and insisted that if
the storm fell before seven o'clock, they could reach it at Newport by
the last express; and it was this obstinacy that, in proof of Isabel's
wisdom, obliged them to wait two hours in the station before going by the
land route. The storm abated at five o'clock, and though the rain
continued, it seemed well by a quarter of seven to set out for the Old
Colony Depot, in sight of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning
caused Isabel to seize her husband's arm, and to implore him, "O don't go
by the boat!" On this, Basil had the incredible weakness to yield; and
bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot. It was the first
swerving from the ideal in their wedding journey, but it was by no means
the last; though it must be confessed that it was early to begin.
They both felt more tranquil when they were irretrievably committed by
the purchase of their tickets, and when they sat down in the
waiting-room of the station, with all the time between seven and nine
o'clock before them. Basil would have eked out the business of checking
the trunks into an affair of some length, but the baggage-master did his
duty with pitiless celerity; and so Basil, in the mere excess of his
disoccupation, bought an accident-insurance ticket. This employed him
half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal contest, and went and
took his place beside Isabel, who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl,
perfectly content.
"Isn't it charming," she said gayly, "having to wait so long? It puts me
in mind of some of those other journeys we took together. But I can't
think of those times with any patience, when we might really have had
each other, and didn't! Do you remember how long we had to wait at
Chambery? and the numbers of military gentlemen that waited too, with
their little waists, and their kisses when they met? and that poor
married military gentleman, with the plain wife and the two children, and
a tarnished uniform? He seemed to be somehow in misfortune, and his
mustache hung down in such a spiritless way, while all the other military
mustaches about curled and bristled with so much boldness. I think
'salles d'attente' everywhere are delightful, and there is such a
community of interest in them all, that when I come here only to go out
to Brookline, I feel myself a traveller once more,--a blessed stranger in
a strange land. O dear, Basil, those were happy times after all, when we
might have had each other and didn't! And now we're the more precious for
having been so long lost."
She drew closer and closer to him, and looked at him in a way that
threatened betrayal of her bridal character.
"Isabel, you will be having your head on my shoulder, next," said he.
"Never!" she answered fiercely, recovering her distance with a start.
"But, dearest, if you do see me going to--act absurdly, you know, do stop
me."
"I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop. Besides, I didn't undertake
to preserve the incognito of this bridal party."
If any accident of the sort dreaded had really happened, it would not
have mattered so much, for as yet they were the sole occupants of the
waiting room. To be sure, the ticket-seller was there, and the lady who
checked packages left in her charge, but these must have seen so many
endearments pass between passengers,--that a fleeting caress or so would
scarcely have drawn their notice to our pair. Yet Isabel did not so much
even as put her hand into her husband's; and as Basil afterwards said, it
was very good practice.
Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirrored in all that come
near us, and our friends were fated to meet frequent parodies of their
happiness from first to last on this journey. The travesty began with the
very first people who entered the waiting-room after themselves, and who
were a very young couple starting like themselves upon a pleasure tour,
which also was evidently one of the first tours of any kind that they had
made. It was of modest extent, and comprised going to New York and back;
but they talked of it with a fluttered and joyful expectation as if it
were a voyage to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque of their
happiness (but with a touch of tragedy) in that kind of young man who is
called by the females of his class a fellow, and two young women of that
kind known to him as girls. He took a place between these, and presently
began a robust flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself, after a
brief struggle, of her parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with
a sort of tender rudeness inconceivable vapidities, such as you would
expect from none but a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus courted
became selfishly unconscious of everything but her own joy, and made no
attempt to bring the other girl within its warmth, but left her to
languish forgotten on the other side. The latter sometimes leaned
forward, and tried to divert a little of the flirtation to herself, but
the flirters snubbed her with short answers, and presently she gave up
and sat still in the sad patience of uncourted women. In this attitude
she became a burden to Isabel, who was glad when the three took
themselves away, and were succeeded by a very stylish couple--from New
York, she knew as well as if they had given her their address on West
999th Street. The lady was not pretty, and she was not, Isabel thought,
dressed in the perfect taste of Boston; but she owned frankly to herself
that the New-Yorkeress was stylish, undeniably effective. The gentleman
bought a ticket for New York, and remained at the window of the office
talking quite easily with the seller.
"You couldn't do that, my poor Basil," said Isabel, "you'd be afraid."
"O dear, yes; I'm only too glad to get off without browbeating; though I
must say that this officer looks affable enough. Really," he added, as an
acquaintance of the ticket-seller came in and nodded to him and said
"Hot, to-day!" "this is very strange. I always felt as if these men had
no private life, no friendships like the rest of us. On duty they seem so
like sovereigns, set apart from mankind, and above us all, that it's
quite incredible they should have the common personal relations."
At intervals of their talk and silence there came vivid flashes of
lightning and quite heavy shocks of thunder, very consoling to our
friends, who took them as so many compliments to their prudence in not
going by the boat, and who had secret doubts of their wisdom whenever
these acknowledgments were withheld. Isabel went so far as to say that
she hoped nothing would happen to the boat, but I think she would
cheerfully have learnt that the vessel had been obliged to put back to
Newport, on account of the storm, or even that it had been driven ashore
at a perfectly safe place.
People constantly came and went in the waiting-room, which was sometimes
quite full, and again empty of all but themselves. In the course of their
observations they formed many cordial friendships and bitter enmities
upon the ground of personal appearance, or particulars of dress, with
people whom they saw for half a minute upon an average; and they took
such a keen interest in every one, that it would be hard to say whether
they were more concerned in an old gentleman with vigorously upright
iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, and reading all the evening
papers, or a young man who hurled himself through the door, bought a
ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and then ran down a
departing train before it got out of the station: they loved the old
gentleman for a certain stubborn benevolence of expression, and if they
had been friends of the young man and his family for generations and felt
bound if any harm befell him to go and break the news gently to his
parents, their nerves could not have been more intimately wrought upon by
his hazardous behavior. Still, as they had their tickets for New York,
and he was going out on a merely local train,--to Brookline, I believe,
they could not, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling of contempt for
his unambitious destination.
They were already as completely cut off from local associations and
sympathies as if they were a thousand miles and many months away from
Boston. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-jets as a gust of wind
drew through the station; they shared the gloom and isolation of a man
who took a seat in the darkest corner of the room, and sat there with
folded arms, the genius of absence. In the patronizing spirit of
travellers in a foreign country they noted and approved the vases of
cut-flowers in the booth of the lady who checked packages, and the pots
of ivy in her windows. "These poor Bostonians," they said; "have some
love of the beautiful in their rugged natures."
But after all was said and thought, it was only eight o'clock, and they
still had an hour to wait.
Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a subtile interpretation of
his uneasiness, "I don't want anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know
the weaknesses of men; and you had better go and pass the next half-hour
over a plate of something indigestible."
This was said 'con stizza', the least little suggestion of it; but Basil
rose with shameful alacrity. "Darling, if it's your wish--"
"It's my fate, Basil," said Isabel.
"I'll go," he exclaimed, "because it isn't bridal, and will help us to
pass for old married people."
"No, no, Basil, be honest; fibbing isn't your forte: I wonder you went
into the insurance business; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go because
you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps, or think you may be so before
we get to New York.
"I shall amuse myself well enough here!"
I suppose it is always a little shocking and grievous to a wife when she
recognizes a rival in butchers'-meat and the vegetables of the season.
With her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery and her dainty
habits of lunching, she cannot reconcile with the idea (of) her husband's
capacity for breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at all hours of
the day and night--as they write it on the sign-boards of barbaric
eating-houses. But Isabel would have only herself to blame if she had not
perceived this trait of Basil's before marriage. She recurred now, as his
figure disappeared down the station, to memorable instances of his
appetite in their European travels during their first engagement. "Yes,
he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too full of the notion of getting
into Italy to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I thought
I must break with him on account of the wild-boar; and at Heidelberg, the
sausage and the ham!--how could he, in my presence? But I took him with
all his faults,--and was glad to get him," she added, ending her
meditation with a little burst of candor; and she did not even think of
Basil's appetite when he reappeared.
With the thronging of many sorts of people, in parties and singly, into
the waiting room, they became once again mere observers of their kind,
more or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so that individual
traits were merged in the character of multitude. Even then, they could
catch glimpses of faces so sweet or fine that they made themselves felt
like moments of repose in the tumult, and here and there was something so
grotesque in dress of manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The
ticket-seller's stamp clicked incessantly as he sold tickets to all
points South and West: to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston; to New
Orleans, Chicago, Omaha; to St. Paul, Duluth, St. Louis; and it would not
have been hard to find in that anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness,
an image of the whole busy affair of life. It was not a particularly sane
spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in
the distance, but also in the future--to which no line of road carries
you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every
imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to
Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes
well, is it exactly you who arrive?
In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last an old woman, so very
infirm that she had to be upheld on either hand by her husband and the
hackman who had brought them, while a young girl went before with shawls
and pillows which she arranged upon the seat. There the invalid lay down,
and turned towards the crowd a white, suffering face, which was yet so
heavenly meek and peaceful that it comforted whoever looked at it.
In spirit our happy friends bowed themselves before it and owned that
there was something better than happiness in it.
"What is it like, Isabel?"
"O, I don't know, darling," she said; but she thought, "Perhaps it is
like some blessed sorrow that takes us out of this prison of a world, and
sets us free of our every-day hates and desires, our aims, our fears,
ourselves. Maybe a long and mortal sickness might come to wear such a
face in one of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret the
poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had fallen away."
She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whose face beamed a tender
smile, as Isabel spoke to her. A chord thrilled in two lives hitherto
unknown to each other; but what was said Basil would not ask when the
invalid had taken Isabel's hand between her own, as for adieu, and she
came back to his side with swimming eyes. Perhaps his wife could have
given no good reason for her emotion, if he had asked it. But it made her
very sweet and dear to him; and I suppose that when a tolerably unselfish
man is once secure of a woman's love, he is ordinarily more affected by
her compassion and tenderness for other objects than by her feelings
towards himself. He likes well enough to think, "She loves me," but still
better, "How kind and good she is!"
They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of getting places on the
cars, and they never saw her again. The man at the wicket-gate leading to
the train had thrown it up, and the people were pressing furiously
through as if their lives hung upon the chance of instant passage. Basil
had secured his ticket for the sleeping-car, and so he and Isabel stood
aside and watched the tumult. When the rash was over they passed through,
and as they walked up and down the platform beside the train, "I was
thinking," said Isabel, "after I spoke to that poor old lady, of what
Clara Williams says: that she wonders the happiest women in the world can
look each other in the face without bursting into tears, their happiness
is so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged about with misery. She
declares that there's nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a
young mother, or a little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her
heart. She wonders they can live through it."
"Clara is very much of a reformer, and would make an end of all of us
men, I suppose,--except her father, who supports her in the leisure that
enables her to do her deep thinking. She little knows what we poor
fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours,
and sob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the
same strain?"
"O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a
blessed life. Perhaps it was that made me shed those few small tears. She
seemed a very religious person."
"Yes," said Basil, "it is almost a pity that religion is going out. But
then you are to have the franchise."
"All aboard!"
This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy he might have been about
to utter; and presently the train carried them out into the gas-sprinkled
darkness, with an ever-growing speed that soon left the city lamps far
behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being
most impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred
miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews,
to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The draw
bridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and
steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it
must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rock
trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have
placed in your path,--you think of these after the journey is done, but
they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your
helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of
irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet
of the sleeping car, and feel yourself hurled forward through the
obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is
upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition
as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic facts in the world. To the
fantastic mood which possesses you equally, sleeping or waking, the
stoppages of the train have a weird character; and Worcester,
Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in dream-land than
well-known towns of New England. As the train stops you drowse if you
have been waking, and wake if you have been in a doze; but in any case
you are aware of the locomotive hissing and coughing beyond the station,
of flaring gas-jets, of clattering feet of passengers getting on and off;
then of some one, conductor or station-master, walking the whole length
of the train; and then you are aware of an insane satisfaction in renewed
flight through the darkness. You think hazily of the folk in their beds
in the town left behind, who stir uneasily at the sound of your train's
departing whistle; and so all is a blank vigil or a blank slumber.
By daylight Basil and Isabel found themselves at opposite ends of the
car, struggling severally with the problem of the morning's toilet. When
the combat was ended, they were surprised at the decency of their
appearance, and Isabel said, "I think I'm presentable to an early
Broadway public, and I've a fancy for not going to a hotel. Lucy will be
expecting us out there before noon; and we can pass the time pleasantly
enough for a few hours just wandering about."
She was a woman who loved any cheap defiance of custom, and she had an
agreeable sense of adventure in what she proposed. Besides, she felt that
nothing could be more in the unconventional spirit in which they meant to
make their whole journey than a stroll about New York at half-past six in
the morning.
"Delightful!" answered Basil, who was always charmed with these small
originalities. "You look well enough for an evening party; and besides,
you won't meet one of your own critical class on Broadway at this hour.
We will breakfast at one of those gilded metropolitan restaurants, and
then go round to Leonard's, who will be able to give us just three
unhurried seconds. After that we'll push on out to his place."
At that early hour there were not many people astir on the wide avenue
down which our friends strolled when they left the station; but in the
aspect of those they saw there was something that told of a greater heat
than they had yet known in Boston, and they were sensible of having
reached a more southern latitude. The air, though freshened by the
over-night's storm, still wanted the briskness and sparkle and pungency
of the Boston air, which is as delicious in summer as it is terrible in
winter; and the faces that showed themselves were sodden from the
yesterday's heat and perspiration. A corner-grocer, seated in a sort of
fierce despondency upon a keg near his shop door, had lightly equipped
himself for the struggle of the day in the battered armor of the day
before, and in a pair of roomy pantaloons, and a baggy shirt of neutral
tint--perhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst the siege of the
hot weather lasted,--now confronted the advancing sunlight, before which
the long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring. A marketing
mother of a family paused at a provision-store, and looking weakly in at
the white-aproned butcher among his meats and flies, passes without an
effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied shop-girls tripped by in the
draperies that betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby;
from a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those cool young New
Yorkers whom no circumstances can oppress: breezy-coated, white-livened,
clean, with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the elbow
of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning's news is
snatched, whilst the person sways lightly with the walk; in the
street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were rows of people with
baskets between their legs and papers before their faces; and all showed
by some peculiarity of air or dress the excess of heat which they had
already borne, and to which they seemed to look forward, and gave by the
scantiness of their number a vivid impression of the uncounted thousands
within doors prolonging, before the day's terror began, the oblivion of
sleep.
As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway,
and found themselves in a yet deeper seclusion, Basil-began to utter in a
musing tone:
"A city against the world's gray Prime,
Lost in some desert, far from Time,
Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
Have only sifted sands and dew,
Yet still a marble head of man
Lying on all the haunted plan;
The passions of the human heart
Beating the marble breast of Art,
Were not more lone to one who first
Upon its giant silence burst,
Than this strange quiet, where the tide
Of life, upheaved on either aide,
Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat
With human waves the Morning Street."
"How lovely!" said Isabel, swiftly catching at her skirt, and deftly
escaping contact with one of a long row of ash-barrels posted
sentinel-like on the edge of the pavement. "Whose is it, Basil?"
"Ah! a poet's," answered her husband, "a man of whom we shall one day any
of us be glad to say that we liked him before he was famous. What a
nebulous sweetness the first lines have, and what a clear, cool light of
day-break in the last!"
"You could have been as good a poet as that, Basil," said the
ever-personal and concretely-speaking Isabel, who could not look at a
mountain without thinking what Basil might have done in that way, if he
had tried.
"O no, I couldn't, dear. It's very difficult being any poet at all,
though it's easy to be like one. But I've done with it; I broke with the
Muse the day you accepted me. She came into my office, looking so
shabby,--not unlike one of those poor shop-girls; and as I was very well
dressed from having just been to see you, why, you know, I felt the
difference. 'Well, my dear?' said I, not quite liking the look of
reproach she was giving me. 'You are going to leave me,' she answered
sadly. 'Well, yes; I suppose I must. You see the insurance business is
very absorbing; and besides, it has a bad appearance, your coming about
so in office hours, and in those clothes.' 'O,' she moaned out, 'you used
to welcome me at all times, out in the country, and thought me prettily
dressed.' 'Yes, yes; but this is Boston; and Boston makes a great
difference in one's ideas; and I'm going to be married, too. Come, I
don't want to seem ungrateful; we have had many pleasant times together,
I own it; and I've no objections to your being present at Christmas and
Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I must draw the line there.' She
gave me a look that made my heart ache, and went straight to my desk and
took out of a pigeon hole a lot of papers,--odes upon your cruelty,
Isabel; songs to you; sonnets,--the sonnet, a mighty poor one, I'd made
the day before,--and threw them all into the grate. Then she turned to me
again, signed adieu with mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the
bottom wire of the poor thing's hoop-skirt clicking against each step of
the stairway, as she went slowly and heavily down to the street." "O
don't--don't, Basil," said his wife, "it seems like something wrong. I
think you ought to have been ashamed."
"Ashamed! I was heart broken. But it had to come to that. As I got
hopeful about you, the Muse became a sad bore; and more than once I found
myself smiling at her when her back was turned. The Muse doesn't like
being laughed at any more than another woman would, and she would have
left me shortly. No, I couldn't be a poet like our Morning-Street friend.
But see! the human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement with cooks
and second-girls."
They were frowzy serving-maids and silent; each swept down her own door
steps and the pavement in front of her own house, and then knocked her
broom on the curbstone and vanished into the house, on which the hand of
change had already fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to
the domestic gods, but had been invaded at more than one point by the
bustling deities of business in such streets the irregular, inspired
doctors and doctresses come first with inordinate door-plates, then a
milliner filling the parlor window with new bonnets; here even a
publisher had hung his sign beside a door, through which the feet of
young ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children to patter.
Here and there stood groups of dwellings unmolested as yet outwardly; but
even these had a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew
themselves to be cheapish boarding-houses or furnished lodgings for
gentlemen, and were trying to hide it. To these belonged the frowzy
serving-women; to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit
children and mothers of the streets were clawing for bits of coal.
By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some
omnibuses beginning their long day's travel up and down the handsome,
tiresome length of that avenue; but for the most part it was empty. There
was, of course, a hurry of foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but these
were sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper was still fast
asleep. The waiter at the restaurant into which our friends stepped was
so well aware of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of the
city, that he could not forbear a little patronage of them, which they
did not resent. He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric
abundance, and charged for it with barbaric splendor. It is all but
impossible not to wish to stand well with your waiter: I have myself been
often treated with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet I have never
been able to withhold the 'douceur' that marked me for a gentleman in
their eyes, and entitled me to their dishonorable esteem. Basil was not
superior to this folly, and left the waiter with the conviction that, if
he was not a New Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the world at any rate.
Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this man of the world continued
his pilgrimage down Broadway, which even in that desert state was full of
a certain interest. Troops of laborers straggled along the pavements,
each with his dinner-pail in hand; and in many places the eternal
building up and pulling down was already going on; carts were struggling
up the slopes of vast cellars, with loads of distracting rubbish; here
stood the half-demolished walls of a house, with a sad variety of
wall-paper showing in the different rooms; there clinked the trowel upon
the brick, yonder the hammer on the stone; overhead swung and threatened
the marble block that the derrick was lifting to its place. As yet these
forces of demolition and construction had the business of the street
almost to themselves.
"Why, how shabby the street is!" said Isabel, at last.
"When I landed, after being abroad, I remember that Broadway impressed
me with its splendor."
"Ah! but you were merely coming from Europe then; and now you arrive
from Burton, and are contrasting this poor Broadway with Washington
Street. Don't be hard upon it, Isabel; every street can't be a Boston
street, you know," said Basil. Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great
intensity both by birth and conviction, believed her husband the only man
able to have thoroughly baffled the malignity of the stars in causing him
to be born out of Boston; yet he sometimes trifled with his hardly
achieved triumph, and even showed an indifference to it, with an
insincerity of which there can be no doubt whatever.
"O stuff!" she retorted, "as if I had any of that silly local pride!
Though you know well enough that Boston is the best place in the world.
But Basil! I suppose Broadway strikes us as so fine, on coming ashore
from Europe, because we hardly expect anything of America then."
"Well, I don't know. Perhaps the street has some positive grandeur of its
own, though it needs a multitude of people in it to bring out its best
effects. I'll allow its disheartening shabbiness and meanness in many
ways; but to stand in front of Grace Church, on a clear day,--a day of
late September, say,--and look down the swarming length of Broadway, on
the movement and the numbers, while the Niagara roar swelled and swelled
from those human rapids, was always like strong new wine to me. I don't
think the world affords such another sight; and for one moment, at such
times, I'd have been willing to be an Irish councilman, that I might have
some right to the pride I felt in the capital of the Irish Republic. What
a fine thing it must be for each victim of six centuries of oppression to
reflect that he owns at least a dozen Americans, and that, with his
fellows, he rules a hundred helpless millionaires!"
Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel knew nothing about politics,
and she felt that she was getting into deep water; she answered
buoyantly, but she was glad to make her weariness the occasion of hailing
a stage, and changing the conversation. The farther down town they went
the busier the street grew; and about the Astor House, where they
alighted, there was already a bustle that nothing but a fire could have
created at the same hour in Boston. A little farther on the steeple of
Trinity rose high into the scorching sunlight, while below, in the shadow
that was darker than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among their
flowers.
"How still they lie!" mused the happy wife, peering through the iron
fence in passing.
"Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poor things!" said Basil; and
through both their minds flashed the wonder if they should ever come to
something like that; but it appeared so impossible that they both smiled
at the absurdity.
"It's too early yet for Leonard," continued Basil; "what a pity the
church-yard is locked up. We could spend the time so delightfully in it.
But, never mind; let us go down to the Battery,--it's not a very
pleasant place, but it's near, and it's historical, and it's open,--where
these drowsy friends of ours used to take the air when they were in the
fashion, and had some occasion for the element in its freshness. You can
imagine--it's cheap--how they used to see Mr. Burr and Mr. Hamilton down
there."
All places that fashion has once loved and abandoned are very melancholy;
but of all such places, I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are
there some sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous and decrepit
shade upon the mangy grass-plots? I believe so, but I do not make sure; I
am certain only of the mangy grass-plots, or rather the spaces between
the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and opprobrious
weed, a stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York
Battery. At that hour of the summer morning when our friends, with the
aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, saw the
ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed little boys and girls were
wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to
and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these
little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off
best drew of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck
and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having
been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a
mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when they had crawled out of
their beds, to have put on only so much clothing as the law compelled.
They abandoned themselves upon the green stuff, whatever it was, and,
with their lean hands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared, silent
and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible furnace,
into which in those days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the
child which the younger woman had brought with her feebly wailed unheeded
at her side. On one side of these women were the shameless houses out of
which they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime
dissipation; on the other side were those houses in which had once dwelt
rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down the boarding-house
scale through various un-homelike occupations to final dishonor and
despair. Down nearer the water, and not far from the castle that was once
a playhouse and is now the depot of emigration, stood certain
express-wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-looking men. Beyond
laughed and danced the fresh blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and
smokestacks.
"Well," said Basil, "I think if I could choose, I should like to be a
friendless German boy, setting foot for the first time on this happy
continent. Fancy his rapture on beholding this lovely spot, and these
charming American faces! What a smiling aspect life in the New World must
wear to his young eyes, and how his heart must leap within him!"
"Yes, Basil; it's all very pleasing, and thank you for bringing me. But
if you don't think of any other New York delights to show me, do let us
go and sit in Leonard's office till he comes, and then get out into the
country as soon as possible."
Basil defended himself against the imputation that he had been trying to
show New York to his wife, or that he had any thought but of whiling away
the long morning hours, until it should be time to go to Leonard. He
protested that a knowledge of Europe made New York the most uninteresting
town in America, and that it was the last place in the world where he
should think of amusing himself or any one else; and then they both
upbraided the city's bigness and dullness with an enjoyment that none but
Bostonians can know. They particularly derided the notion of New York's
being loved by any one. It was immense, it was grand in some ways, parts
of it were exceedingly handsome; but it was too vast, too coarse, too
restless. They could imagine its being liked by a successful young man of
business, or by a rich young girl, ignorant of life and with not too nice
a taste in her pleasures; but that it should be dear to any poet or
scholar, or any woman of wisdom and refinement, that they could not
imagine. They could not think of any one's loving New York as Dante loved
Florence, or as Madame de Stael loved Paris, or as Johnson loved black,
homely, home-like London. And as they twittered their little dispraises,
the giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and more conscious of
herself, waking from her night's sleep and becoming aware of her fleets
and trains, and the myriad hands and wheels that throughout the whole sea
and land move for her, and do her will even while she sleeps. All about
the wedding-journeyers swelled the deep tide of life back from its
night-long ebb. Broadway had filled her length with people; not yet the
most characteristic New York crowd, but the not less interesting
multitude of strangers arrived by the early boats and trams, and that
easily distinguishable class of lately New-Yorkized people from other
places, about whom in the metropolis still hung the provincial traditions
of early rising; and over all, from moment to moment, the eager,
audacious, well-dressed, proper life of the mighty city was beginning to
prevail,--though this was not so notable where Basil and Isabel had
paused at a certain window. It was the office of one of the English
steamers, and he was saying, "It was by this line I sailed, you
know,"--and she was interrupting him with, "When who could have dreamed
that you would ever be telling me of it here?" So the old marvel was
wondered over anew, till it filled the world in which there was room for
nothing but the strangeness that they should have loved each other so
long and not made it known, that they should ever have uttered it, and
that, being uttered, it should be so much more and better than ever could
have been dreamed. The broken engagement was a fable of disaster that
only made their present fortune more prosperous. The city ceased about
them, and they walked on up the street, the first man and first woman in
the garden of the new-made earth. As they were both very conscious
people, they recognized in themselves some sense of this, and presently
drolled it away, in the opulence of a time when every moment brought some
beautiful dream, and the soul could be prodigal of its bliss.
"I think if I had the naming of the animals over again, this morning, I
shouldn't call snakes 'snakes'; should you, Eve?" laughed Basil in
intricate acknowledgment of his happiness.
"O no, Adam; we'd look out all the most graceful euphemisms in the
newspapers, and we wouldn't hurt the feelings of a spider."