I lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring of
memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions--the action
of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still
be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the
rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot"
and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. These
things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern
and quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a
history or a picture of the time--the background of which I see after
all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as many other
matters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially,
and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn
afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best
"put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively
obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken between
any day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew
"at home," ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, but
peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in
documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De
Peysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composing
round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") Wards, Hunts and _tutti quanti_--to
whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and who
swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have
formed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly the
street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best--though with a
rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread
of micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in the
ample face of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly rising just
opposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhat
grimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously
flourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only less
interesting than the dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly
west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large and
delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the
distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final
phase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of
unfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded,
snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the
sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when
both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more
freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "Freely"
indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation;
since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we
might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship
and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all
equally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without a
break to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as I
supposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high
amenity, the general aesthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in
its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange
long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and
cushion-thumping in _his_ only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is
distinct enough too--just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more,
to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was too
vague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession to
the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good
greatgrandfather, Alexander Robertson already named, who was nothing if
not Scotch and Presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait
by the elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriage
so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the
rueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of India
muslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the Washington
Square "parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration of the then
Mayor of the city--I think Mr. Varick.
We progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in the
fold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we were
practically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen to
enter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and I connect
myself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whose
orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as small
unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any
congregation detected by us; doing so, I make out moreover, with a sense
of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "What church do you
go to?"--the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; of
the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. To which
I must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselves
didn't so prepare us for invidious remark--remark I mean upon our
pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same
discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done--as to hush in
my breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (of
which we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simply
for instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we
"went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It was
colder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we
could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom and
that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of
the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find
ourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearly
amused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be
theologically more _en regle_. How as mere detached unaccompanied
infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is
beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and
conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence,
the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last
beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time
and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take
publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough,
all the difference of the old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the
social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher
than to-day--a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other
dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were
less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich
sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been
sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the
perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of
patronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was done
us--that is that we were placed to our advantage--I infer from my having
liked so to "go," even though my grounds may have been but the love of
the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture,
sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed
most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot
of the mind. Let me at the same time make the point that--such may be
the snobbery of extreme youth--I not only failed quite to rise to the
parental reasoning, but made out in it rather a certain sophistry; such
a prevarication for instance as if we had habitually said we kept the
carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when we
wanted one to University Place, where Mr. Hathorn had his
livery-stable: a connection, this last, promoted by my father's
frequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks were limited through an
injury received in youth) and promoting in turn and at a touch, to my
consciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. I
recall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being despatched to Mr.
Hathorn to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and odour, the genial
warmth, at a fine steaming Irish pitch, of the stables and their
stamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairs
tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seek
the floor again, at my appeal, as those of big bearded Mr. Hathorn
himself: an impression enriched by the drive home in lolling and bumping
possession of the great vehicle and associated further with Sunday
afternoons in spring, with the question of distant Harlem and remoter
Bloomingdale, with the experience at one of these junctures of far-away
Hoboken, if it wasn't Williamsburg, which fits in fancifully somewhere;
when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something,
something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, something
quite ragged and graceless, in the nature of a public tea-garden and
ices. The finest link here, however, is, for some reason, with the New
York Hotel, and thereby with Albany uncles; thereby also with Mr.
Hathorn in person waiting and waiting expensively on his box before the
house and somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles even as Mrs. Cannon
had subtly struck me as being.
Intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is my vision of the halls of
Ferrero--where the orgy of the senses and even the riot of the mind, of
which I have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of a
dance than anywhere. Let this sketch of a lost order note withal that
under so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguished
from infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune had to be deemed
urgent. It was the sense for this form of relief that clearly was
general, superseding as the ampler Ferrero scene did previous limited
exhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in the
ancient person of M. Charriau--I guess at the writing of his name--whom
I work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at
across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more that
I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the
portraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and
_jarret tendu_, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. Edward
Ferrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic
and moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the
Civil War, as a General of volunteers--very much as if he had been one
of Bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which,
however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, but
most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion and
as if _we_ wanted but a touch to become also men of the world.
Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, and
extraordinarily agile--he could so gracefully leap and bound that his
bounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all the
felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus--he was
still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most
elegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequent
and delightful soirees, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups
repeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figured
it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness,
and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, with
the mothers, were the lavish note in him--just as the fact that he never
himself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, by
attendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later
dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in full
measure even at the time the presence of his sister Madame Dubreuil, a
handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact
preponderantly, and who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so
engaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that I hear to this
hour her shrill Franco-American accent: "Don't look at _me_, little
boy--look at my feet." I see them now, these somewhat fat members,
beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels
but attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to her
solid ankles--an emphatic sign of the time; not less than I recover my
surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance,
substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which,
her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so
perfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning the
corner backward, she never fell prone on her face.
It consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she
appeared at the soirees, or at least at the great fancy-dress soiree in
which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is
doubtless really shut up, as the "genius of California," a dazzling
vision of white satin and golden flounces--her brother meanwhile
maintaining that more distinctively European colour which I feel to have
been for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in the
character of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, highly consonant with his
type. There hovered in the background a flushed, full-chested and
tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order,
at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still--the Opera having
at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents
and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as
the Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our
very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square
bristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great bills
beside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil always so serviceably came in at
the bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at the
best, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged
I fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say
nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer,
the "European" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, in
the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of the
great Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of
advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our
personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched
between them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of things
that they drew out the halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly to
resound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon the
stage, and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we
had but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never have been more the
case than on the occasion of my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball--not
at the operatic Academy, but at the dancing-school, which came so nearly
to the same thing--the dress of a debardeur, whatever that might be,
which carried in its puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarlet
and silver such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend.
The legend had come round to us, it was true, by way of Albany, whence
we learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one of
the least lamentable, of our cousin Johnny had been his figuring as a
debardeur at some Parisian revel; the elegant evidence of which, neatly
packed, though with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully sent
on to us. The instructions for use were in fact so vague that I was
afterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly
dishonoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. I fell, that is I stood,
short of my proper form by no less than half a leg; the essence of the
debardeur being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in white
silk stockings and with neat calves, from the beribboned breeches which
I artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. The discovery, after the
fact, was disconcerting--yet had been best made withal, too late; for
it would have seemed, I conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt to
lengthen my legs than to shorten Johnny's _culotte_. The trouble had
been that we hadn't really known what a debardeur _was_, and I am not
sure indeed that I know to this day. It had been more fatal still that
even fond Albany couldn't tell us.