Their Silver Wedding Journey
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY
By William Dean Howells
1871
I. THE OUTSET
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.”
II. MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM.
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 am 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.”
III. THE NIGHT BOAT.
There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache
darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the
spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. Therefore I do not think
it trivial or untrue to say that there is for the moment nothing more
satisfactory in life than to have bought your ticket on the night boat
up the Hudson and secured your state-room key an hour or two before
departure, and some time even before the pressure at the clerk's office
has begun. In the transaction with this castellated baron, you have of
course been treated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your
self-respect swells with a sense of having escaped positive insult; your
key clicks cheerfully in your pocket against its gutta-percha number,
and you walk up and down the gorgeously carpeted, single-columned,
two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas and chairs, a glitter
of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic chandeliers overhead, unawed even by
the aristocratic gloom of the yellow waiters. Your own stateroom as
you enter it from time to time is an ever-new surprise of splendors, a
magnificent effect of amplitude, of mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains,
and of marble topped wash-stand. In the mere wantonness of an unalloyed
prosperity you say to the saffron nobleman nearest your door, “Bring
me a pitcher of ice-water, quick, please!” and you do not find the
half-hour that he is gone very long.
If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much pleasure from these things,
then imagine the infinite comfort of our wedding-journeyers, transported
from Broadway on that pitiless afternoon to the shelter and the quiet
of that absurdly palatial steamboat. It was not yet crowded, and by the
river-side there was almost a freshness in the air. They disposed of
their troubling bags and packages; they complimented the ridiculous
princeliness of their stateroom, and then they betook themselves to
the sheltered space aft of the saloon, where they sat down for the
tranquiller observance of the wharf and whatever should come to be seen
by them. Like all people who have just escaped with their lives from
some menacing calamity, they were very philosophical in spirit; and
having got aboard of their own motion, and being neither of them
apparently the worse for the ordeal they had passed through, were of a
light, conversational temper.
“What an amusingly superb affair!” Basil cried as they glanced through
an open window down the long vista of the saloon. “Good heavens! Isabel,
does it take all this to get us plain republicans to Albany in comfort
and safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise? Well, I
shall never be satisfied with less hereafter,” he added. “I am spoilt
for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour; I am a ruinous
spendthrift, and a humble three-story swell-front up at the South End is
no longer the place for me. Dearest,
'Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,'
never to leave this Aladdin's-palace-like steamboat, but spend our lives
in perpetual trips up and down the Hudson.”
To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly
sketched the life they could lead aboard. Since they could not help
it, they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval between
disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our democratic
'menage' to the taste of the richest and most extravagant plebeian
amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he
minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is
this ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the steamboat
berth into which he gets with his pantaloons on, and out of which he may
be blown by an exploding boiler at any moment; it is he who will have
for supper that overgrown and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon, and
will not let any one else buy tea or toast for a less sum than he pays
for his surfeit; it is he who perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and
the reluctance of the waiters; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of
the saloon, with his womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where
Basil and Isabel sit. Personally, he is not so bad; he is good-looking,
like all of us; he is better dressed than most of us; he behaves himself
quietly, if not easily; and no lord so loathes a scene. Next year he is
going to Europe, where he will not show to so much advantage as here;
but for the present it would be hard to say in what way he is vulgar,
and perhaps vulgarity is not so common a thing after all.
It was something besides the river that made the air so much more
sufferable than it had been. Over the city, since our friends had come
aboard the boat, a black cloud had gathered and now hung low upon
it, while the wind from the face of the water took the dust in the
neighboring streets, and frolicked it about the house-tops, and in the
faces of the arriving passengers, who, as the moment of departure drew
near, appeared in constantly increasing numbers and in greater variety,
with not only the trepidation of going upon them, but also with the
electrical excitement people feel before a tempest.
The breast of the black cloud was now zigzagged from moment to moment
by lightning, and claps of deafening thunder broke from it. At last the
long endurance of the day was spent, and out of its convulsion burst
floods of rain, again and again sweeping the promenade-deck where the
people sat, and driving them disconsolate into the saloon. The air was
darkened as by night, and with many regrets for the vanishing prospect,
mingled with a sense of relief from the heat, our friends felt the boat
tremble away from her moorings and set forth upon her trip.
“Ah! if we had only taken the day boat!” moaned Isabel. “Now, we shall
see nothing of the river landscape, and we shall never be able to put
ourselves down when we long for Europe, by declaring that the scenery of
the Hudson is much finer than that of the Rhine.”
Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured couple, that they would
be just even to the elements, which had by no means been generous to
them; and they owned that if so noble a storm had celebrated their
departure upon some storied river from some more romantic port than New
York, they would have thought it an admirable thing. Even whilst they
contented themselves, the storm passed, and left a veiled and humid sky
overhead, that gave a charming softness to the scene on which their eyes
fell when they came out of the saloon again, and took their places with
a largely increased companionship on the deck.
They had already reached that part of the river where the uplands begin,
and their course was between stately walls of rocky steepness, or wooded
slopes, or grassy hollows, the scene forever losing and taking grand
and lovely shape. Wreaths of mist hung about the tops of the loftier
headlands, and long shadows draped their sides. As the night grew,
lights twinkled from a lonely house here and there in the valleys; a
swarm of lamps showed a town where it lay upon the lap or at the foot of
the hills. Behind them stretched the great gray river, haunted with many
sails; now a group of canal-boats grappled together, and having an air
of coziness in their adventure upon this strange current out of their
own sluggish waters, drifted out of sight; and now a smaller and
slower steamer, making a laborious show of keeping up was passed, and
reluctantly fell behind; along the water's edge rattled and hooted the
frequent trains. They could not tell at any time what part of the river
they were on, and they could not, if they would, have made its beauty a
matter of conscientious observation; but all the more, therefore, they
deeply enjoyed it without reference to time or place. They felt some
natural pain when they thought that they might unwittingly pass the
scenes that Irving has made part of the common dream-land, and they
would fair have seen the lighted windows of the house out of which
a cheerful ray has penetrated to so many hearts; but being sure of
nothing, as they were, they had the comfort of finding the Tappan Zee
in every expanse of the river, and of discovering Sunny-Side on every
pleasant slope. By virtue of this helplessness, the Hudson, without
ceasing to be the Hudson, became from moment to moment all fair and
stately streams upon which they had voyaged or read of voyaging, from
the Nile to the Mississippi. There is no other travel like river travel;
it is the perfection of movement, and one might well desire never to
arrive at one's destination. The abundance of room, the free, pure air,
the constant delight of the eyes in the changing landscape, the soft
tremor of the boat, so steady upon her keel, the variety of the little
world on board,--all form a charm which no good heart in a sound body
can resist. So, whilst the twilight held, well content, in contiguous
chairs, they purred in flattery of their kindly fate, imagining
different pleasures, certainly, but none greater, and tasting to its
subtlest flavor the happiness conscious of itself.
Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so interesting to them in
this objective light, that they had little desire to turn from its
contemplation to the people around them; and when at last they did so,
it was still with lingering glances of self-recognition and enjoyment.
They divined rightly that one of the main conditions of their present
felicity was the fact that they had seen so much of time and of the
world, that they had no longer any desire to take beholding eyes, or
to make any sort of impressive figure, and they understood that their
prosperous love accounted as much as years and travel for this result.
If they had had a loftier opinion of themselves, their indifference to
others might have made them offensive; but with their modest estimate
of their own value in the world, they could have all the comfort of
self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity.
“O yes!” said Basil, in answer to some apostrophe to their bliss from
Isabel, “it's the greatest imaginable satisfaction to have lived
past certain things. I always knew that I was not a very handsome or
otherwise captivating person, but I can remember years--now blessedly
remote--when I never could see a young girl without hoping she would
mistake me for something of that sort. I couldn't help desiring that
some fascination of mine, which had escaped my own analysis, would have
an effect upon her. I dare say all young men are so. I used to live
for the possible interest I might inspire in your sex, Isabel. They
controlled my movements, my attitudes; they forbade me repose; and yet
I believe I was no ass, but a tolerably sensible fellow. Blessed be
marriage, I am free at last! All the loveliness that exists outside of
you, dearest,--and it's mighty little,--is mere pageant to me; and I
thank Heaven that I can meet the most stylish girl now upon the
broad level of our common humanity. Besides, it seems to me that our
experience of life has quieted us in many other ways. What a luxury it
is to sit here, and reflect that we do not want any of these people to
suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful, or well dressed, and do
not care to show off in any sort of way before them!”
This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just sense of their contrast
to the group of people nearest there,--a young man of the second or
third quality--and two young girls. The eldest of these was carrying
on a vivacious flirtation with the young man, who was apparently an
acquaintance of brief standing; the other was scarcely more than a
child, and sat somewhat abashed at the sparkle of the colloquy. They
were conjecturally sisters going home from some visit, and not skilled
in the world, but of a certain repute in their country neighborhood for
beauty and wit. The young man presently gave himself out as one who, in
pursuit of trade for the dry-goods house he represented, had travelled
many thousands of miles in all parts of the country. The encounter was
visibly that kind of adventure which both would treasure up for future
celebration to their different friends; and it had a brilliancy and
interest which they could not even now consent to keep to themselves.
They talked to each other and at all the company within hearing,
and exchanged curt speeches which had for them all the sensation of
repartee.
Young Man. They say that beauty unadorned is adorned the most.
Young Woman (bridling, and twitching her head from side to side, in the
high excitement of the dialogue). Flattery is out of place.
Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don't believe me, you ask your
mother when you get home.
(Titter from the younger sister.)
Young Woman (scornfully). Umph! my mother has no control over me!
Young Man. Nobody else has, either, I should say. (Admiringly.)
Young Woman. Yes, you've told the truth for once, for a wonder. I'm
able to take care of myself,--perfectly. (Almost hoarse with a sense of
sarcastic performance.)
Young Man. “Whole team and big dog under the wagon,” as they say out
West.
Young Woman. Better a big dog than a puppy, any day.
Giggles and horror from the younger sister, sensation in the young man,
and so much rapture in the young woman that she drops the key of her
state-room from her hand. They both stoop, and a jocose scuffle for it
ensues, after which the talk takes an autobiographical turn on the part
of the young man, and drops into an unintelligible murmur. “Ah! poor
Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in
thy foolish and insipid face?”
Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one young and the other old,
talking of some business out of which the latter had retired. The
younger had been asked his opinion upon some point, and he was expanding
with a flattered consciousness of the elder's perception of his
importance, and toadying to him with the pleasure which all young men
feel in winning the favor of seniors in their vocation. “Well, as I was
a-say'n', Isaac don't seem to haf no natcheral pent for the glothing
business. Man gomes in and wands a goat,”--he seemed to be speaking of a
garment and not a domestic animal,--“Isaac'll zell him the goat he wands
him to puy, and he'll make him believe it 'a the goat he was a lookin'
for. Well, now, that's well enough as far as it goes; but you know and
I know, Mr. Rosenthal, that that 's no way to do business. A man gan't
zugzeed that goes upon that brincible. Id's wrong. Id's easy enough to
make a man puy the goat you want him to, if he wands a goat, but the
thing is to make him puy the goat that you wand to zell when he don't
wand no goat at all. You've asked me what I thought and I've dold you.
Isaac'll never zugzeed in the redail glothing-business in the world!”
“Well,” sighed the elder, who filled his armchair quite full, and
quivered with a comfortable jelly-like tremor in it, at every pulsation
of the engine, “I was afraid of something of the kind. As you say,
Benjamin, he don't seem to have no pent for it. And yet I proughd him up
to the business; I drained him to it, myself.”
Besides these talkers, there were scattered singly, or grouped about in
twos and threes and fours, the various people one encounters on a Hudson
River boat, who are on the whole different from the passengers on other
rivers, though they all have features in common. There was that man of
the sudden gains, who has already been typified; and there was also the
smoother rich man of inherited wealth, from whom you can somehow know
the former so readily. They were each attended by their several retinues
of womankind, the daughters all much alike, but the mothers somewhat
different. They were going to Saratoga, where perhaps the exigencies
of fashion would bring them acquainted, and where the blue blood of a
quarter of a century would be kind to the yesterday's fluid of warmer
hue. There was something pleasanter in the face of the hereditary
aristocrat, but not so strong, nor, altogether, so admirable;
particularly if you reflected that he really represented nothing in the
world, no great culture, no political influence, no civic aspiration,
not even a pecuniary force, nothing but a social set, an alien
club-life, a tradition of dining. We live in a true fairy land after
all, where the hoarded treasure turns to a heap of dry leaves. The
almighty dollar defeats itself, and finally buys nothing that a man
cares to have. The very highest pleasure that such an American's money
can purchase is exile, and to this rich man doubtless Europe is a
twice-told tale. Let us clap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and be
glad.
We can be as glad, apparently, and with the same reason as the poorly
dressed young man standing near beside the guard, whose face Basil and
Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concerning whom, they romanced
that he was going home, wherever his home was, with the manuscript of
a rejected book in his pocket. They imagined him no great things of a
poet, to be sure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feeling for him,
and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught
flavors of Tennyson and Browning in his verse, with a moderner tint from
Morris: for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods and heroes of
the nineteenth century, that he was now carrying back from New York
with him? Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-accepted
disappointments a moving little picture of this poor imagined poet's
adventures; with what kindness and unkindness he had been put to shame
by publishers, and how, descending from his high, hopes of a book, he
had tried to sell to the magazines some of the shorter pieces out of the
“And other Poems” which were to have filled up the volume. “He's going
back rather stunned and bewildered; but it's something to have tasted
the city, and its bitter may turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till
he finds himself longing for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow!
one compassionate cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to lunch,
being struck, as we are, with something fine in his face. I hope he's
got somebody who believes in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more
comfortable, for the present, if he went over the railing there.”
So the play of which they were both actors and spectators went on about
them. Like all passages of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery,
with a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent
tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed,
of either were at work there, and this was but one brief scene of
the immense complex drama which was to proceed so variously in such
different times and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity.
The contrasts were sharp: each group had its travesty in some other; the
talk of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next;
but of all these parodies none was so terribly effective as the two
women, who sat in the midst of the company, yet were somehow distinct
from the rest. One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other was
dressed in bridal white, and they were both alike awful in their mockery
of guiltless sorrow and guiltless joy. They were not old, but the soul
of youth was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruin ancient as
sin looked from their eyes; their talk and laughter seemed the echo of
an innumerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land
and time, each solitary forever, yet all bound together in the unity of
an imperishable slavery and shame.
What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters! Let us be glad the night
drops her curtain upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the
other actors from our view.
Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there
were numbers of people lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes
of talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were others reading
“Lothair,” a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very
fashionable book indeed. There was in the air that odor of paint and
carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of the chandeliers
ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her
respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious
feeling of coziness and security to our travellers.
A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot's
bell signaling the engineer to slow the boat. There was a moment of
perfect silence; then all the drops of the chandeliers in the saloon
clashed musically together; then fell another silence; and at last came
wild cries for help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses.
“Send out a boat!” “There was a woman aboard that steamboat!” “Lower
your boats!” “Run a craft right down, with your big boat!” “Send out a
boat and pick up the crew!” The cries rose and sank, and finally ceased;
through the lattice of the state-room window some lights shone faintly
on the water at a distance.
“Wait here, Isabel!” said her husband. “We've run down a boat. We don't
seem hurt; but I'll go see. I'll be back in a minute.”
Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a world wildly unbuttoned
and unlaced, where it was the fashion for ladies to wear their hair down
their backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to speak to
each other without introduction. The place with which she had felt so
familiar a little while before was now utterly estranged. There was no
motion of the boat, and in the momentary suspense a quiet prevailed,
in which those grotesque shapes of disarray crept noiselessly round
whispering panic-stricken conjectures. There was no rushing to and
fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there was not a man to be seen, for
apparently they had all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the
calamity. A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it was such a
topsy-turvy world that it would have seemed only another dream-land,
but that it was marked for reality by one signal fact. With the rest
appeared the woman in bridal white and the woman in widow's black, and
there, amidst the fright that made all others friends, and for aught
that most knew, in the presence of death itself, these two moved
together shunned and friendless.
Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had become known to Isabel and
the rest that their own steamer had suffered no harm, but that she had
struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of canal boats, from which
those alarming cries and curses had come. The steamer was now lying by
for the small boats she had sent out to pick up the crew of the sunken
vessel.
“Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chandeliers,” said one of
the ladies. “Is it such a very alight matter to run down another boat
and sink it?”
She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered lightly, “I don't think
you ladies ought to have been disturbed at all. In running over a common
tow-boat on a perfectly clear night like this there should have been no
noise and no perceptible jar. They manage better on the Mississippi, and
both boats often go down without waking the lightest sleeper on board.”
The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of humor, listened with
undisguised displeasure to this speech. It dispersed them, in fact; some
turned away to bivouac for the rest of the night upon the arm-chairs
and sofas, while others returned to their rooms. With the latter went
Isabel. “Lock me in, Basil,” she said, with a bold meekness, “and if
anything more happens don't wake me till the last moment.” It was hard
to part from him, but she felt that his vigil would somehow be useful
to the boat, and she confidingly fell into a sleep that lasted till
daylight.
Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly devolved so great a
responsibility, went forward to the promenade in front of the saloon, in
hopes of learning something more of the catastrophe from the people whom
he had already found gathered there.
A large part of the passengers were still there, seated or standing
about in earnest colloquy. They were in that mood which follows great
excitement, and in which the feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk.
At such times one feels that a sensible frame of mind is unsympathetic,
and if expressed, unpopular, or perhaps not quite safe; and Basil,
warned by his fate with the ladies, listened gravely to the voice of the
common imbecility and incoherence.
The principal speaker was a tall person, wearing a silk travelling-cap.
He had a face of stupid benignity and a self-satisfied smirk; and he was
formally trying to put at his ease, and hopelessly confusing the loutish
youth before him. “You say you saw the whole accident, and you're
probably the only passenger that did see it. You'll be the most
important witness at the trial,” he added, as if there would ever be any
trial about it. “Now, how did the tow-boat hit us?”
“Well, she came bows on.”
“Ah! bows on,” repeated the other, with great satisfaction; and a little
murmur of “Bows on!” ran round the listening circle.
“That is,” added the witness, “it seemed as if we struck her amidships,
and cut her in two, and sunk her.”
“Just so,” continued the examiner, accepting the explanation, “bows on.
Now I want to ask if you saw our captain or any of the crew about?”
“Not a soul,” said the witness, with the solemnity of a man already on
oath.
“That'll do,” exclaimed the other. “This gentleman's experience
coincides exactly with my own. I didn't see the collision, but I did see
the cloud of steam from the sinking boat, and I saw her go down. There
wasn't an officer to be found anywhere on board our boat. I looked about
for the captain and the mate myself, and couldn't find either of them
high or low.”
“The officers ought all to have been sitting here on the promenade
deck,” suggested one ironical spirit in the crowd, but no one noticed
him.
The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap now took a chair, and a number
of sympathetic listeners drew their chairs about him, and then began an
interchange of experience, in which each related to the last particular
all that he felt, thought, and said, and, if married, what his wife
felt, thought, and said, at the moment of the calamity. They turned the
disaster over and over in their talk, and rolled it under their tongues.
Then they reverted to former accidents in which they had been concerned;
and the silk-capped gentleman told, to the common admiration, of a
fearful escape of his, on the Erie Road, from being thrown down a steep
embankment fifty feet high by a piece of rock that had fallen on the
track. “Now just see, gentlemen, what a little thing, humanly speaking,
life depends upon. If that old woman had been able to sleep, and hadn't
sent that boy down to warn the train, we should have run into the rock
and been dashed to pieces. The passengers made up a purse for the boy,
and I wrote a full account of it to the papers.”
“Well,” said one of the group, a man in a hard hat, “I never lie down
on a steamboat or a railroad train. I want to be ready for whatever
happens.”
The others looked at this speaker with interest, as one who had invented
a safe method of travel.
“I happened to be up to-night, but I almost always undress and go to
bed, just as if I were in my own house,” said the gentleman of the silk
cap.
“I don't say your way isn't the best, but that's my way.”
The champions of the rival systems debated their merits with suavity and
mutual respect, but they met with scornful silence a compromising spirit
who held that it was better to throw off your coat and boots, but keep
your pantaloons on. Meanwhile, the steamer was hanging idle upon the
current, against which it now and then stirred a careless wheel, still
waiting for the return of the small boats. Thin gray clouds, through
rifts of which a star sparkled keenly here and there, veiled the
heavens; shadowy bluffs loomed up on either hand; in a hollow on the
left twinkled a drowsy little town; a beautiful stillness lay on all.
After an hour's interval a shout was heard from far down the river; then
later the plash of oars; then a cry hailing the approaching boats, and
the answer, “All safe!” Presently the boats had come alongside, and the
passengers crowded down to the guard to learn the details of the search.
Basil heard a hollow, moaning, gurgling sound, regular as that of the
machinery, for some note of which he mistook it. “Clear the gangway
there!” shouted a gruff voice; “man scalded here!” And a burden was
carried by from which fluttered, with its terrible regularity, that
utterance of mortal anguish.
Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the
morning come.
The boat swiftly ascended the current, and presently the steeper shores
were left behind and the banks fell away in long upward sloping fields,
with farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visible in the
generous expanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawing his nets,
and bending from his boat, there near Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque
immortal attitudes of Raphael's Galilean fisherman; and now a flush
mounted the pale face of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the
dawn there came, more to the sight than any other sense, a vague menace
of heat. But as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil
bathed his weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion
of the scalded man, and how he was to fare that day. This poor wretch
seemed of another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the
happy, and Basil's pity was quite an abstraction; which, again, amused
and shocked him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a
little more earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien
creature here and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to
the disaster of the night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft of her
who so filled his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security
of sleep, Death had passed them both so close that his presence might
well have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg that grazes the ship in
the night freezes all the air about it. But it was quite idle: where
love was, life only was; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden
that he would have laid upon them; his revery reflected with delicious
caprice the looks, the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore him
far away from the sad images that he had invited to mirror themselves in
it.
IV. A DAY'S RAILROADING
Happiness has commonly a good appetite; and the thought of the
fortunately ended adventures of the night, the fresh morning air, and
the content of their own hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the
boat reached Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated with
spirit the question of breakfast and the best place of breakfasting in
a city which neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy
way.
They decided at last, in view of the early departure of the train, and
the probability that they would be more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast
at the station, and thither they went and took places at one of the
many tables within, where they seemed to have been expected only by
the flies. The waitress plainly had not looked for them, and for a time
found their presence so incredible that she would not acknowledge the
rattling that Basil was obliged to make on his glass. Then it appeared
that the cook would not believe in them, and he did not send them, till
they were quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught which impudently
affected to be coffee, the oily slices of fugacious potatoes slipping
about in their shallow dish and skillfully evading pursuit, the pieces
of beef that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit, steaming
evilly up into the face when opened, and then soddening into masses of
condensed dyspepsia.
The wedding-journeyers looked at each other with eyes of sad amaze.
They bowed themselves for a moment to the viands, and then by an equal
impulse refrained. They were sufficiently young, they were happy, they
were hungry; nature is great and strong, but art is greater, and before
these triumphs of the cook at the Albany depot appetite succumbed. By
a terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor
in their cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the character and
history of the materials of that breakfast.
Presently Isabel paused, played a little with her knife, and, after a
moment looked up at her husband with an arch regard and said: “I was
just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where
our train once stopped for breakfast. I remember the freshness and
brightness of everything on the little tables,--the plates, the napkins,
the gleaming half-bottles of wine. They seemed to have been preparing
that breakfast for us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly
seated before they served us with great cups of 'cafe-au-lait', and the
sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable
gravy, and potatoes,--such potatoes! Dear me, how little I ate of it! I
wish, for once, I'd had your appetite, Basil; I do indeed.”
She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despite the tragical
contrast her words had suggested, Basil finally joined. So much
amazement had probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted
in that place; but their lightness did not at all commend them. The
waitress had not liked it from the first, and had served them with
reluctance; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon
them as if he believed them about to escape without payment. Here, then,
they had enforced a great fact of travelling,--that people who serve the
public are kindly and pleasant in proportion as they serve it well. The
unjust and the inefficient have always that consciousness of evil which
will not let a man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful.
Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact. There was
already such heat from without, even at eight o'clock in the morning,
that they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly
took their places in the train, which had been made up for departure.
They had deliberately rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as
affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in
the spirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found
themselves quite comfortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed
to view the scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the
city, with much complacency. There was sufficient draught through the
open window to make the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth
gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart. It is
a landscape that I greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil
picturesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I say they
enjoyed it. There are nowhere any considerable hills, but everywhere
generous slopes and pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a grazing
country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River rippling down through all,
and at frequent intervals the life of the canal, now near, now far away,
with the lazy boats that seem not to stir, and the horses that the train
passes with a whirl, and, leaves slowly stepping forward and swiftly
slipping backward. There are farms that had once, or still have, the
romance to them of being Dutch farms,--if there is any romance in
that,--and one conjectures a Dutch thrift in their waving grass and
grain. Spaces of woodland here and there dapple the slopes, and the cozy
red farm-houses repose by the side of their capacious red barns. Truly,
there is no ground on which to defend the idleness, and yet as the train
strives furiously onward amid these scenes of fertility and abundance,
I like in fancy to loiter behind it, and to saunter at will up and down
the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard gates, and sit upon the porches
or thresholds, and am served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies
who have done their morning's work and have leisure to be knitting or
sewing; or if there are no old ladies, with decent caps upon their
gray hair, then I do not complain if the drink is brought me by some
red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of Washington Irving's pages, with
no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes
an attitude of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I have done
drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as I lounge through the
barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do
not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the elm-tree beside the
pump. In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for a harmless person,
and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in the sun before the
gate. At all the places, I have the people keep bees, and, in the
garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable world as
hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a great bed in which
the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of delicate
spray hanging over it. I walk unmolested through the farmer's tall
grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of his voluble
mowing-machine, and learn to my heart's content that his name begins
with Van, and that his family has owned that farm ever since the days
of the Patroon; which I dare say is not true. Then I fall asleep in a
corner of the hayfield, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal beside
that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only, because
they are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip
and half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his anatomical
interest. The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the
rudder swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can step
on. She is laden with flour from the valley of the Genesee, and may
have started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She
is succinctly manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a
fiery-haired lady of imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I explore,
is plainly furnished with a cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing
but profane language is allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked
jollity and ease, we glide imperceptibly down the canal, unvexed by the
far-off future of arrival.
Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes, but I am aware that
less superficial spirits could not be satisfied with them, and I can not
pretend that my wedding-journeyers were so.
They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape; they invited themselves
to be reminded of passages of European travel by it; and they placed
villas and castles and palaces upon all the eligible building-sites.
Ashamed of these devices, presently, Basil patriotically tried to
reconstruct the Dutch and Indian past of the Mohawk Valley, but here he
was foiled by the immense ignorance of his wife, who, as a true American
woman, knew nothing of the history of her own country, and less than
nothing of the barbarous regions beyond the borders of her native
province. She proved a bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the
events which Basil mentioned; and she had never even heard of the
massacres by the French and Indians at Schenectady, which he in his
boyhood had known so vividly that he was scalped every night in his
dreams, and woke up in the morning expecting to see marks of the
tomahawk on the head-board. So, failing at last to extract any sentiment
from the scenes without, they turned their faces from the window, and
looked about them for amusement within the car.
It was in all respects an ordinary carful of human beings, and it was
perhaps the more worthy to be studied on that account. As in literature
the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an
improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire
to look upon the heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his
habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at
such times very precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a
man and a brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural,
unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life
and inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be
moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by his stinted
inspirations, to share his foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse
selfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world, if you do not refuse to
be amused; and our friends were very willing to be entertained. They
delighted in the precise, thick-fingered old ladies who bought sweet
apples of the boys come aboard with baskets, and who were so long in
finding the right change, that our travellers, leaping in thought with
the boys from the moving train, felt that they did so at the peril of
their lives. Then they were interested in people who went out and found
their friends waiting for them, or else did not find them, and wandered
disconsolately up and down before the country stations, carpet-bag in
hand; in women who came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands with or
sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got seats for them, and placed
their bags or their babies in their laps, and turned for a nod at the
door; in young ladies who were seen to places by young men the latter
seemed not to care if the train did go off with them, and then threw
up their windows and talked with girl-friends, on the platform without,
till the train began to move, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and
moist red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it,
and could not calm themselves to the dull level of the travel around
them; in the conductor, coldly and inaccessibly vigilant, as he went his
rounds, reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his
head from time, to time, and listened with a faint, sarcastic smile to
the questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some
information out of him; in the trainboy, who passed through on his many
errands with prize candies, gum-drops, pop-corn, papers and magazines,
and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impartiality,
or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural perception of character in
those who received them.
A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as
well as the traits common to all railway travel; and our friends decided
that this was not a very well-dressed company, and would contrast with
the people on an express-train between Boston and New York to no better
advantage than these would show beside the average passengers between
London and Paris. And it seems true that on a westering' line, the
blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks,
the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into
increasing informality of costume. I speak of the undressful sex alone:
woman, wherever she is, appears in the last attainable effects of
fashion, which are now all but telegraphic and universal. But most of
the passengers here were men, and they mere plainly of the free-and-easy
West rather than the dapper East. They wore faces thoughtful with the
problem of buying cheap and selling dear, and they could be known by
their silence from the loquacious, acquaintance-making way-travellers.
In these, the mere coming aboard seemed to beget an aggressively
confidential mood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any means of
relieving their ennui; or they felt that they might here indulge safely
in the pleasures of autobiography, so dear to all of us; or else, in
view of the many possible catastrophes, they desired to leave some
little memory of themselves behind. At any rate, whenever the train
stopped, the wedding-journeyers caught fragments of the personal
histories of their fellow-passengers which had been rehearsing to those
that sat next the narrators. It was no more than fair that these should
somewhat magnify themselves, and put the best complexion on their
actions and the worst upon their sufferings; that they should all appear
the luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people
that ever were, and should all have made or lost the most money. There
was a prevailing desire among them to make out that they came from or
were going to same very large place; and our friends fancied an actual
mortification in the face of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope
(or some other insignificant classical station, in the ancient Greek and
Roman part of New York State), after having listened to the life of a
somewhat rustic-looking person who had described himself as belonging
near New York City.
Basil also found diversion in the tender couples, who publicly comported
themselves as if in a sylvan solitude, and, as it had been on the bank
of some umbrageous stream, far from the ken of envious or unsympathetic
eyes, reclined upon each other's shoulders and slept; but Isabel
declared that this behavior was perfectly indecent. She granted, of
course, that they were foolish, innocent people, who meant no offense,
and did not feel guilty of an impropriety, but she said that this sort
of thing was a national reproach. If it were merely rustic lovers, she
should not care so much; but you saw people who ought to know better,
well-dressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotion in the face
of the world, and going to sleep on each other's shoulders on every
railroad train. It was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really
infamous. Before she would allow herself to do such a thing she
would--well, she hardly knew what she would not do; she would have a
divorce, at any rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh at it; and he
would make her hate him if he kept on.
From the seat behind their own they were now made listeners to the
history of a ten weeks' typhoid fever, from the moment when the narrator
noticed that he had not felt very well for a day or two back, and all
at once a kind of shiver took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly
insensible, and could eat nothing but a little pounded ice--and his
wife--a small woman, too--used to lift him back and forth between the
bed and sofa like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half the
time whether he was dead or alive. This history, from which not the
smallest particular or the least significant symptom of the case was
omitted, occupied an hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for
the entertainment of one who had been five minutes before it began a
stranger to the historian.
At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailed forth in accents of
desperation the words, “O, disgusting!” The monotony of the narrative in
the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat of the day, had lulled
her into slumbers from which she awoke at the stopping of the train, to
find her head resting tenderly upon her husband's shoulder.
She confronted his merriment with eyes of mournful rebuke; but as she
could not find him, or the harshest construction, in the least to blame,
she was silent.
“Never mind, dear, never mind,” he coaxed, “you were really not
responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune,--whatever
you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare
say it is sheer, disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard,
swinging from the roof: 'This train stops twenty minutes for dinner
at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have
anything edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could dine
at the Albany station, even.”
In a little while they found themselves in an airy, comfortable
dining-room, eating a dinner, which it seemed to them France in the
flush of her prosperity need not have blushed to serve; for if it wanted
a little in the last graces of art, it redeemed itself in abundance,
variety, and wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famishing passenger
stood a beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and
jacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindliness and grace which
make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his calling, which
disenthrall it of servility, and constitute him your eager host, not
your menial, for the moment. From table to table passed a calming
influence in the person of the proprietor, who, as he took his richly
earned money, checked the rising fears of the guests by repeated
proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he would give them
due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the
cars, to prey with beak and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon
everything in reach, remained to eat like Christians; and even a poor,
scantily-Englished Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to
ask how long the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made a good
dinner in spite of himself.
“O Basil, Basil!” cried Isabel, when the train was again in motion,
“have we really dined once more? It seems too good to be true.
Cleanliness, plenty, wholesomeness, civility! Yes, as you say, they
cannot be civil where they are not just; honesty and courtesy go
together; and wherever they give you outrageous things to eat, they add
indigestible insults. Basil, dear, don't be jealous; I shall never meet
him again; but I'm in love with that black waiter at our table. I never
saw such perfect manners, such a winning and affectionate politeness. He
made me feel that every mouthful I ate was a personal favor to him. What
a complete gentleman. There ought never to be a white waiter. None but
negroes are able to render their service a pleasure and distinction to
you.”
So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness to be satisfied, a homage
perhaps beyond its desert to the good dinner and the decent service of
it. But here they erred in the right direction, and I find nothing more
admirable in their behavior throughout a wedding journey which certainly
had its trials, than their willingness to make the very heat of whatever
would suffer itself to be made anything at all of. They celebrated its
pleasures with magnanimous excess, they passed over its griefs with a
wise forbearance. That which they found the most difficult of management
was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who write
their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the
fact that it is so typical, in this respect. I even imagine that ideal
reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the
life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their
own silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when there was
absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of
their love, which they were never tired of hearing as they severally
knew it. Let it not be a reproach to human nature or to me if I say
that there was something in the comfort of having well dined which now
touched the springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that they had
never so rejoiced in these tender reminiscences.
They had planned to stop over at Rochester till the morrow, that they
might arrive at Niagara by daylight, and at Utica they had suddenly
resolved to make the rest of the day's journey in a drawing-room car.
The change gave them an added reason for content; and they realized how
much they had previously sacrificed to the idea of travelling in the
most American manner, without achieving it after all, for this seemed
a touch of Americanism beyond the old-fashioned car. They reclined in
luxury upon the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs; they surveyed with
infinite satisfaction the elegance of the flying-parlor in which they
sat, or turned their contented regard through the broad plate-glass
windows upon the landscape without. They said that none but Americans or
enchanted princes in the “Arabian Nights” ever travelled in such state;
and when the stewards of the car came round successively with tropical
fruits, ice-creams, and claret-punches, they felt a heightened assurance
that they were either enchanted princes--or Americans. There were more
ladies and more fashion than in the other cars; and prettily dressed
children played about on the carpet; but the general appearance of the
passengers hardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere; and they were
plainly in that car because they were of the American race, which finds
nothing too good for it that its money can buy.
V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.
They knew none of the hotels in Rochester, and they had chosen a certain
one in reliance upon their handbook. When they named it, there stepped
forth a porter of an incredibly cordial and pleasant countenance, who
took their travelling-bags, and led them to the omnibus. As they were
his only passengers, the porter got inside with them, and seeing their
interest in the streets through which they rode, he descanted in a
strain of cheerful pride upon the city's prosperity and character, and
gave the names of the people who lived in the finer houses, just as if
it had been an Old-World town, and he some eager historian expecting
reward for his comment upon it. He cast quite a glamour over Rochester,
so that in passing a body of water, bordered by houses, and overlooked
by odd balconies and galleries, and crossed in the distance by a bridge
upon which other houses were built, they boldly declared, being at
their wit's end for a comparison, and taken with the unhoped-for
picturesqueness, that it put them in mind of Verona. Thus they reached
their hotel in almost a spirit of foreign travel, and very willing to
verify the pleasant porter's assurance that they would like it, for
everybody liked it; and it was with a sudden sinking of the heart that
Basil beheld presiding over the register the conventional American
hotel clerk. He was young, he had a neat mustache and well-brushed hair;
jeweled studs sparkled in his shirt-front, and rings on his white hands;
a gentle disdain of the travelling public breathed from his person in
the mystical odors of Ihlang ihlang. He did not lift his haughty head to
look at the wayfarer who meekly wrote his name in the register; he did
not answer him when he begged for a cool room; he turned to the board on
which the keys hung, and, plucking one from it, slid it towards Basil
on the marble counter, touched a bell for a call-boy, whistled a bar of
Offenbach, and as he wrote the number of the room against Basil's name,
said to a friend lounging near him, as if resuming a conversation,
“Well, she's a mighty pooty gul, any way, Chawley!”
When I reflect that this was a type of the hotel clerk throughout the
United States, that behind unnumbered registers at this moment he is
snubbing travellers into the dust, and that they are suffering and
perpetuating him, I am lost in wonder at the national meekness. Not that
I am one to refuse the humble pie his jeweled fingers offer me. Abjectly
I take my key, and creep off up stairs after the call-boy, and try to
give myself the genteel air of one who has not been stepped upon. But I
think homicidal things all the same, and I rejoice that in the safety of
print I can cry out against the despot, whom I have not the presence to
defy. “You vulgar and cruel little soul,” I say, and I imagine myself
breathing the words to his teeth, “why do you treat a weary stranger
with this ignominy? I am to pay well for what I get, and I shall not
complain of that. But look at me, and own my humanity; confess by some
civil action, by some decent phrase, that I have rights and that they
shall be respected. Answer my proper questions; respond to my fair
demands. Do not slide my key at me; do not deny me the poor politeness
of a nod as you give it in my hand. I am not your equal; few men are;
but I shall not presume upon your clemency. Come, I also am human!”
Basil found that, for his sin in asking for a cool room, the clerk
had given them a chamber into which the sun had been shining the whole
afternoon; but when his luggage had been put in it seemed useless to
protest, and like a true American, like you, like me, he shrank from
asserting himself. When the sun went down it would be cool enough; and
they turned their thoughts to supper, not venturing to hope that, as it
proved, the handsome clerk was the sole blemish of the house.
Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evidences of luxury afforded
by all the appointments of a hotel so far west of Boston, and they both
began to feel that natural ease and superiority which an inn always
inspires in its guests, and which our great hotels, far from impairing,
enhance in flattering degree; in fact, the clerk once forgotten, I
protest, for my own part, I am never more conscious of my merits and
riches in any other place. One has there the romance of being a stranger
and a mystery to every one else, and lives in the alluring possibility
of not being found out a most ordinary person.
They were so late in coming to the supper-room, that they found
themselves alone in it. At the door they had a bow from the head-waiter,
who ran before them and drew out chairs for them at a table, and
signaled waiters to serve them, first laying before them with a gracious
flourish the bill of fare.
A force of servants flocked about them, as if to contest the honor
of ordering their supper; one set upon the table a heaping vase
of strawberries, another flanked it with flagons of cream, a third
accompanied it with plates of varied flavor and device; a fourth
obsequiously smoothed the table-cloth; a fifth, the youngest of the
five, with folded arms stood by and admired the satisfaction the rest
were giving. When these had been dispatched for steak, for broiled
white-fish of the lakes,--noblest and delicatest of the fish that
swim,--for broiled chicken, for fried potatoes, for mums, for whatever
the lawless fancy, and ravening appetites of the wayfarers could
suggest, this fifth waiter remained to tempt them to further excess, and
vainly proposed some kind of eggs,--fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled
eggs, boiled eggs, or omelette.
“O, you're sure, dearest, that this isn't a vision of fairy-land, which
will vanish presently, and leave us empty and forlorn?” plaintively
murmured Isabel, as the menial train reappeared, bearing the supper they
had ordered and set it smoking down.
Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon her face, and she let fall
her knife and fork. “You don't think, Basil,” she faltered, “that they
could have found out we're a bridal party, and that they're serving us
so magnificently because--because--O, I shall be miserable every moment
we're here!” she concluded desperately.
She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a woman with so much broiled
white-fish on her plate, and such a banquet array about her; and her
husband made haste to reassure her. “You're still demoralized, Isabel,
by our sufferings at the Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings
we enjoy, though I should be sorry to undervalue them. I suspect it's
the custom to use people well at this hotel; or if we are singled
out for uncommon favor, I think I can explain the cause. It has been
discovered by the register that we are from Boston, and we are merely
meeting the reverence, affection, and homage which the name everywhere
commands!
“It's our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and
moral virtue of Boston. This supper is not a tribute to you as a bride,
but as a Bostonian.”
It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it served. It kindled
the local pride of Isabel to self-defense, and in the distraction of the
effort she forgot her fears; she returned with renewed appetite to the
supper, and in its excellence they both let fall their dispute,--which
ended, of course, in Basil's abject confession that Boston was the
best place in the world, and nothing but banishment could make him live
elsewhere,--and gave themselves up, as usual, to the delight of being
just what and where they were. At last, the natural course brought
them to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter approached from the
corner of the table at which he stood, to place the vase near them, he
did not retire at once, but presently asked if they were from the West.
Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were from the East.
He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if he went further,
but took heart, then, and asked, “Don't you think this is a pretty nice
hotel”--hastily adding as a concession of the probable existence of much
finer things at the East--“for a small hotel?”
They imagined this waiter as new to his station in life, as perhaps
just risen to it from some country tavern, and unable to repress his
exultation in what seemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed
to have invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all
the simple poetry of his soul; it was what might have happened in Italy,
only there so much naivete would have meant money; they looked at each
other with rapture and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed
as at a personal compliment: “Yes, it's a nice hotel; one of the best I
ever saw, East or West, in Europe or America.”
They rose and left the room, and were bowed out by the head-waiter.
“How perfectly idyllic!” cried Isabel. “Is this Rochester, New York, or
is it some vale of Arcady? Let's go out and see.”
They walked out into the moonlit city, up and down streets that seemed
very stately and fine, amidst a glitter of shop-window lights; and then,
less of their own motion than of mere error, they quitted the
business quarter, and found themselves in a quiet avenue of handsome
residences,--the Beacon Street of Rochester, whatever it was called.
They said it was a night and a place for lovers, for none but lovers,
for lovers newly plighted, and they made believe to bemoan themselves
that, hold each other dear as they would, the exaltation, the thrill,
the glory of their younger love was gone. Some of the houses had
gardened spaces about them, from which stole, like breaths of sweetest
and saddest regret, the perfume of midsummer flowers,--the despair of
the rose for the bud. As they passed a certain house, a song fluttered
out of the open window and ceased, the piano warbled at the final rush
of fingers over its chords, and they saw her with her fingers resting
lightly on the keys, and her graceful head lifted to look into his; they
saw him with his arm yet stretched across to the leaves of music he had
been turning, and his face lowered to meet her gaze.
“Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there!”
“And if they knew that we, on our wedding journey, stood outside, would
not they wish it was they, here?”
“I suppose so, dearest, and yet, once-upon-a-time was sweet. Pass on;
and let us see what charm we shall find next in this enchanted city.”
“Yes, it is an enchanted city to us,” mused Basil, aloud, as they
wandered on, “and all strange cities are enchanted. What is Rochester
to the Rochesterese? A place of a hundred thousand people, as we read
in our guide, an immense flour interest, a great railroad entrepot, an
unrivaled nursery trade, a university, two commercial colleges, three
collegiate institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I
dare say any respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing
over his city. But Rochester is for us, who don't know it at all, a
city of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over
piano-fortes, of a palatial hotel with pastoral waiters and porter,--a
city of handsome streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of the
golden age. The only definite association with it in our minds is the
tragically romantic thought that here Sam Patch met his fate.”
“And who in the world was Sam Patch?
“Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud
of distresses me. Have you really, then, never heard of the man who
invented the saying, 'Some things can be done as well as others,'
and proved it by jumping over Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this
belief, he attempted the leap of the Genesee Falls. The leap was easy
enough, but the coming up again was another matter. He failed in that.
It was the one thing that could not be done as well as others.”
“Dreadful!” said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. “But what
has all that to do with Rochester?”
“Now, my dear, you don't mean to say you didn't know that the Genesee
Falls were at Rochester? Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we're within
ten minutes' walk of them now.”
“Then walk to them at once!” cried Isabel, wholly unabashed, and in fact
unable to see what he had to be ashamed of. “Actually, I believe you
would have allowed me to leave Rochester without telling me the falls
were here, if you hadn't happened to think of Sam Patch.”
Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief object of their journey
had been to visit the scene of Sam Patch's fatal exploit, and she drew
Basil with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroad station,
beyond which he said were the falls. Presently, after threading their
way among a multitude of locomotives, with and without trains attached,
that backed and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatiently on every
side, they passed through the station to a broad planking above
the river on the other side, and thence, after encounter of more
locomotives, they found, by dint of much asking, a street winding up
the hill-side to the left, and leading to the German Bierhaus that gives
access to the best view of the cataract.