They had waited to see Leonard, in order that they might learn better how
to find his house in the country; and now, when they came in upon him at
nine o'clock, he welcomed them with all his friendly heart. He rose from
the pile of morning's letters to which he had but just sat down; he
placed them the easiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being a busy
hour with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which was
still damp and odorous from the porter's broom, as a kind of down-town
parlor; but after they had briefly accounted to his amazement for their
appearance then and there, and Isabel had boasted of the original fashion
in which they had that morning seen New York, they took pity on him, and
bade him adieu till evening.
They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the ferry, and in a
little while had taken their places in the train on the other side of the
water.
"Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, "that Leonard travels fifty miles
every day by rail going to and from his work!"
"I must, dearest, if I would be truthful."
"Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at
the South End, aren't there?" And in agreement upon Boston as a place of
the greatest natural advantages, as well as all acquirable merits, with
after talk that need not be recorded, they arrived in the best humor at
the little country station near which the Leonards dwelt.
I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost
of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a long description of
the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and they had
not met since Isabel's return from Europe and renewal of her engagement.
Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease
all that she had said in blame of Basil's conduct during the rupture, and
exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit
after their marriage. And now that they had come together, their only
talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which husbands
could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme.
Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend's joy the sweet reflection of her own
honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of
the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and
comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in
their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age,
when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to
them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty,
fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and
benighted as their great-grandmothers could have been in the same
circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other, in their
absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. "Do
you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her oppressor, after
having given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon
husbands, "that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have
been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first
year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better
and better just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem
a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet"--she
put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement little
push--"there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the
proceedings."
"Isabel," said her husband, with severity, "this is bridal!"
"No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to the general
public. But the application of it is that you must be careful not to
contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we can be like the
Leonards very much sooner than they became so. The great object is not to
have any hitchiness; and you know you ARE provoking--at times."
They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil happiness by the
example and precept of their friends; and the time passed swiftly in the
pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards.
This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the
life led by vast numbers of prosperous New Yorkers who love both the
excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to
unite the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of the
metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction; and
everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men like
himself, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spend all their
working hours in the city and all their smoking and sleeping hours in the
country.
The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their best looks for
our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, said
guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it come to an end; yet they
all resigned themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other
result than to detain the travellers into the very heart of the hot
weather. In that weather it was easy to do anything that did not require
an active effort, and resignation was so natural with the mercury at
ninety, that I aan not sure but there was something sinful in it.
They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany by the day
boat, which was represented to them in every impossible phase. It would
be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it stopped the heat would be
insupportable. Besides it would bring them to Albany at an hour when they
must either spend the night there, or push on to Niagara by the night
train. "You had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost
till you reach West Point, and you'll see all the best scenery. Then you
can get a good night's rest, and start fresh in the morning." So they
were counseled, and they assented, as they would have done if they had
been advised: "You had better go by the morning boat. It's deliciously
cool, travelling; you see the whole of the river, you reach Albany for
supper, and you push through to Niagara that night and are done with it."
They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at noon, and
fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat of the country into
the heat of the city, where some affairs and pleasures were to employ
them till the evening boat should start.
Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat brooded
upon them. All abroad burned the fierce white light of the sun, in which
not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but the very air withered,
and was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full
of people who had come long journeys from broiling cities of the West,
and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of
them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and
there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a
sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another;
after every station the desperate conductor swung through the long aisle
and punched the ticket, which each passenger seemed to yield him with a
tacit malediction; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which
could only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind buffeted
faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the clatter of the
rails struck through and through the car like a demoniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they seemed to
have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so
close and dead and mined with the carbonic breath of the locomotives was
the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare
of the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover
lower and lower, and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a
heat deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer, before which
every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine,
and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends
also paused, and saw that the mercury was above ninety, and exulting with
the pride that savages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed
their souls to the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool
across their faces, and made them forget the thermometer for the brief
time of the transit. But presently they drew near that strange, irregular
row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the river on the
New York aide, and before the boat's motion ceased the air grew thick and
warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the
buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued, passing up
through a gangway, on one side of which a throng of return-passengers was
pent by a gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild animals. They were
streaming with perspiration, and, according to their different
temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor.
"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil when, free of the press, they
lingered for a moment in the shade outside, "whether we had better walk
up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage
there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer,
with half the exertion. By this route we shall have sights end smells
which the other can't offer us, but whichever we take we shall be sorry."
"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry upon the
easiest possible terms, this weather."
They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well for them
both if she could have exercised this philosophy with regard to the whole
day's business, or if she could have given up her plans for it, with the
same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat! It seems to
me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we
find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters
very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we
feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The mere fact of
intention gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one may call the
devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have scarcely a
sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We will not
taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle
sin of omission is all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I
had been Columbus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when
I was quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have
sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation and
Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as ever I came in
sight of their granite perch should have turned back to England. But it
is now too late to repair these errors, and so, on one of the hottest
days of last year, behold my obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or
Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment of a
series of intentions, any of which had wiselier been left unaccomplished.
Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street,
and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling
and calming by the way, until they reached the ticket-office on Broadway,
whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to the steamboat an hour
or two before her departure. She felt that they had yielded sufficiently
to circumstances and conditions already on this journey, and she was
resolved that the present half-day in New York should be the half-day of
her original design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed, but it was
inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no means wanting
in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,--the spectacle of that great
city on a hot day, defiant of the elements, and prospering on with every
form of labor, and at a terrible cost of life. The man carrying the hod
to the top of the walls that rankly grow and grow as from his life's
blood, will only lay down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the
sun blaze in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he
toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk; the
trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced tormentor on
the box has strength to lash him on; in all those vast palaces of
commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase, packing and unpacking,
lifting up and laying down, arriving and departing loads; in thousands of
shops is the unspared and unsparing weariness of selling; in the street,
filled by the hurry and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness
of buying.
Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and Isabel could,
when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vision, magnificent at
times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to have
dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimage through that squalid street by the
river-side, where presently they came to a market, opening upon the view
hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions
of cars like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a
foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings (rising
gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories) on either hand
look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust that the hot breaths of
wind caught up and sent swirling into the shabby shops. Here they dreamed
of the eternal demolition and construction of the city, and farther on of
vacant lots full of granite boulders, clambered over by goats. In their
dream they had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious and
whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from the car, and
running out of the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselves in the shade
of the cross-street. A little strip of shadow lay along the row of
brown-stone fronts, but there were intervals where the vacant lots cast
no shadow. With great bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to
avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult torrents or vast
expanses of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before, moved
on. They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to be told that
people were out and again that they were in; and they had a sense of cool
dark parlors, and the airy rustling of light-muslined ladies, of chat and
of fans and ice-water, and then they came forth again; and evermore
"The day increased from heat to heat."
At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a purpose to go
down town again, and of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks of
brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brownstone flights of steps,
and their handsome, intolerable uniformity, oppressed them like a
procession of houses trying to pass a given point and never getting by.
Upon these streets there was, seldom a soul to be seen, so that when
their ringing at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with a
vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars
and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next
intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across
his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad. Up to
the time of their getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the
return down-townwards they had kept up a show of talk in their wretched
dream; they had spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere;
and they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been so
little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder might even at
that moment be somewhere taking place; and that no murder of the whole
homicidal year could have such proper circumstance; they morbidly
wondered what that day's murder would be, and in what swarming
tenement-house, or den of the assassin streets by the river-sides,--if
indeed it did not befall in some such high, close-shuttered, handsome
dwelling as those they passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to
strike down the master and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the
family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They
conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguish
of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy misery of
stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But
now at last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car,
they seemed to have drifted infinite distances and long epochs asunder.
They looked hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely
questioned when it was and from what far city they or some remote
ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each
other a tacit farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end
of the world.
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of
the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng
of trucks and wagons lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank
by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every
shape and size: there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved
all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking
faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-journeyers
emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and incidents of their dream
faded before the superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was four
o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The spiritless air
seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom
of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in
sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own
had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind blew across
the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets. In the
upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and
steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up
and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life. All
sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and
jarred the gaudily painted Stages, with quivering horses driven each by a
man who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered with
a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of
death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them
pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the
foot-passengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of
the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though
there were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul, they
held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there
they showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat
unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before
his death-white flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with
the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying
huskily to the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My
hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart--" But still the
multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading,
vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the
side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the
beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal
lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to
be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though
there was no reason for this,--looked on it amazed, and at last their own
errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of
purpose, they cried with one voice, that it was a hideous sight, and
strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the
soda-fountain sparkled.
It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a
thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with a
maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven
degrees!" Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat; before he tossed off the
hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from either
side of the fountain. Then in the order of their coming they issued
through another door upon the side street, each, as he disappeared,
turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance upon a little
group near another counter. The group was of a very patient,
half-frightened, half-puzzled looking gentleman who sat perfectly still
on a stool, and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing all over his head
a handkerchief full of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other
when the first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look upon
this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic sculpture as
eminently characteristic of the local life, and as "The Sunstroke" would
sell enormously in the hot season. "Better take a little more of that,"
the apothecary said, looking up from his prescription, and, as the
organized sympathy of the seemingly indifferent crowd, smiling very
kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted something in the glass he
held. "Do you still feel like fainting?" asked the humane authority.
"Slightly, now and then," answered the other, "but I'm hanging on hard to
the bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda-fountain, and I feel that
I'm all right as long as I can see that. The people get rather hazy,
occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But I don't know that I
look very impressive myself," he added in the jesting mood which seems
the natural condition of Americans in the face of all embarrassments.
"O, you'll do!" the apothecary answered, with a laugh; but he said, in
answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He mustn't be moved for an
hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed
her office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband's
skull. Isabel offered her the commiseration of friendly words, and of
looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they could do nothing, she and
Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.
"What a shocking thing!" she whispered. "Did you see how all the people
looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and evidently
forgot them the next instant? It was dreadful. I shouldn't like to have
you sun-struck in New York."
"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident
must happen to me among strangers, I think I should prefer to have it in
New York. The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest
place. Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan as well as
the Levite would be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, it requires peculiar
gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give
me the busiest part of Broadway for a sun-stroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first victim
to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothecary's was merely
exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for revival. The apothecary has a
case of the kind on his hands every blazing afternoon, and knows just
what to do. The crowd may be a little 'ennuye' of sun-strokes, and to
that degree indifferent, but they most likely know that they can only do
harm by an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as
they have delegated their helpfulness to the proper authority, and go
about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle of a village
street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't know what to do, and the
tender-hearted people would crowd about so that no breath of air could
reach the victim."
"May be so, dear," said the wife, pensively; "but if anything did happen
to you in New York, I should like to have the spectators look as if they
saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps I'm a little exacting."
"I think you are. Nothing is so hard as to understand that there are
human beings in this world besides one's self and one's set. But let us
be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and I there in the apothecary's
shop, as it might very well be; and let us get to the boat as soon as we
can, and end this horrible midsummer-day's dream. We must have a
carriage," he added with tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, "as we
ought to have had all day; though I'm not sorry, now the worst's over, to
have seen the worst."