XX

My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile--that is of our

possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in general

and of Florence in particular--was a perfectly recoverable little

awareness, as I find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence

on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely

interested and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine

letters, letters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept open, in our

air, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of Europe"

which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, so

shortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder had, early in our

Fourteenth Street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that

neighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than

during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an

extension of interest and admiration--she was in those years quite

exceedingly handsome--ranked for us with the Albany aunts, adding so a

twist, as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her own close

kin. This couple must have been, putting real relatives aside, my

parents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm

thread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other to

their supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in the

same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose

place in our vision, I should like to trace: that of the Kings, for

instance, of my mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's--the

Kings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social and

moral possibilities at Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous but

more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during a

considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable _agrement_ at Tours

and at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the winter Trouville, on the

lowest possible terms. Fain would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it,

under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the

singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte of the former

name, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked,

and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel of

placid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return from

China after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's

death in the Red Sea--which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of

death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some Christmas treat of our

childhood under her roof in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in

that twilight of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked to

us always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives the

most intensely educated and most pointedly proper--an occasion followed

by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. I would

keep her in my eye through the Genevese age and on to the crisis of the

Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his

Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of

understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of its

end--he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from

first wounds, as under his mother's malediction--on the stone beneath

which he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his

father's family. I should further pursue my subject through other

periods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to

the very end of the story--which for myself was the impression, first,

of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull

Surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all

dependent on the _dame de compagnie_ who read aloud to her that Saturday

Review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to

which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead

and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world

rez-de-chaussee at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in

presence of the end (end of her very personal career, I mean, but not of

her perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address).

I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young

consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my

abundance down. The place for the lapse consents with difficulty,

however, to be _any_ particular point of the past at which I catch

myself (easily caught as I am) looking about me; it has certainly

nothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one June

afternoon of 1855 in the form of the minor share of the box of a

carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, W. J.'s

and mine, through so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item in

the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with the

spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded--without

knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked for

such an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still to

feel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down,

the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects which, so

far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as just

sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for

me as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come to

Europe--we had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before,

from that steamer Atlantic, of the Collins line, then active but so soon

to be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since a

certain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasion

assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition--the theatre

is distinct to me as Brougham's--one of the features of which was the at

that time flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of some

predicament, supposed droll, of its hero Mr. Mouser, whose wife, if I am

correct, carries on a laundry and controls as she may a train of young

assistants. A feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit of

Mr. Mouser round and round the premises by the troop of laundresses,

shouting his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, though

whether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence I

fail to remember. It was enough that the public nerve had at the moment

been tried by the non-arrival of the Atlantic, several days overdue, to

the pitch at last of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall of

the curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. Mouser, still breathless,

reappeared at the footlights, where I can see him now abate by his

plight no jot of the dignity of his announcement, "Ladies and

gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlantic

is safe!" the house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a

roar of relief, as I had never heard the like of and which gave me my

first measure of a great immediate public emotion--even as the incident

itself to-day reminds me of the family-party smallness of the old New

York, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fond

vociferation, for the same thing at once. It was a moment of the golden

age--representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched Arctic

had gone down in mortal woe and her other companion, the Pacific,

leaving England a few months later and under the interested eyes of our

family group, then temporarily settled in London, was never heard of

more. Let all of which show again what traps are laid about me for

unguarded acute reminiscence.

I meet another of these, though I positively try to avoid it, in the

sense of a day spent on the great fusty curtained bed, a mediaeval

four-poster such as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London and

North-Western station, where it appeared, to our great inconvenience,

that I had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed

(probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before) the dull seed of

malaria, which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever. This

condition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but left

alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is

the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and of

our complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease--for I recall in

particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone--with

the thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the very

smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation

altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum

of a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in, these last, and

must then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps

I was ever to know--that of almost holding my breath in presence of

certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hours

that precious fine art had been disclosed to me--scantly as the poor

place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote

it. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and I

must have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all by

this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the whole

succession of those summer days. The next application of it that stands

out for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note after

all so much less than I remember, is the intensity of a fond

apprehension of Paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel

that hung, through the soft summer night, over the Rue de la Paix. I

hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister,

though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the

larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I

seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had but

just turned twelve!--and that now filled out its frame or case for me

from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been,

for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very

breath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of

preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of--though I

believe I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any

rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a

_modiste_ just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings,

as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried through

frank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine

strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the

effect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comforting

I couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been

_right_ to myself--as against some danger of being wrong, and if I had

uttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "I told

you so, I told you so!" What I had told myself was of course that the

impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most

insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but I had had

before me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in the

very sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I

ever till then known what a charm _was_?--a large, a local, a social

charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all events, this

mystery, one's property--that of one's mind; and so, once for all, I

helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted all

immensely for practice in taking in.

I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that

has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely

determinant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way

from Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a

village now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura,

where we were to spend the night. I was stretched at my ease on a couch

formed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress

and other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever,

which, though not now checking our progress, assured me, in our little

band, these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body was

pampered so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my

appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the

first--by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way, that

morning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old Hotel de

l'Univers at Lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my

good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhaps

somewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it was

afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the

ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court,

of the French scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such,

in particular, had prepared me not a little, when I should in due course

hear of it, for what was meant by the _vie de province_--that expression

which was to become later on so _toned_, as old fine colour and old fine

opinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the

_suggested_ romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with

implications and memories, memories of one's "reading," save the mark!

all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which

we were to "post," ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind

of contradiction of common experience. The postilion, in a costume

rather recalling, from the halls of Ferrero, that of my debardeur,

bobbed up and down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black-whiskered

and acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godefroi of

Metz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne Lorraine"

if ever there was, acquired in New York: I enjoy the echo of their very

names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together

for me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recovered

moment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine--we

had mounted and mounted--during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I

took in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some

power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I

had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The village

street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened

out, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an object

also a fresh revelation and that I recognised with a deep joy--though a

joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated

illness and of cold chicken--as at once a castle and a ruin. The only

castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villa

above us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen no

structure rise beyond that majesty so I had seen none abased to the

dignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase,

and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle

than any note of the solid one--little experience as I had had either of

solidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on

which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt

and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of

whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew her

for a peasant in sabots--the first peasant I had ever beheld, or beheld

at least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormous

value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that

sank in as I lay--the truth of one's embracing there, in all the

presented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt no

scene present, not even the one I had raked from the Hotel Westminster;

the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sit

most warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was

"Europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me--as if by a

mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now,

only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that

time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't

have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified

and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an

uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary

measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression

was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things

than I then knew.