XXI

How shall I render certain other impressions coming back to me from that

summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on

the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various

couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? I considered

it best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to

it, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settled

themselves near Geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among great

spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats

and airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff--which

its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at our

disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on a

chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and I, in the

course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from

afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity,

history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilky,

who, according to his nature, or I may say to his genius, had made

without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her and

quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilky's age

followed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed and

consorted, though with lapses and disparities; I being on the whole,

during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really

fortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as it

were, to the view of W. J., and the other, perhaps the more immediately

sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall have

more to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker of

him is to know again something of the sense that I attached all along

our boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse,

his genius (as I have used the word) for making friends. It was the only

genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing

the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by

the very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. For I had in

a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geniality

was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for

himself, so to speak, than for other friends--of whom indeed we, his own

adjuncts, were easily first--so far at least as he discriminated. At

night all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all his

acquaintance were his family. The trail of his sociability was over us

all alike--though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recover

it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is

called taking life. I must have already at the Campagne Gerebsoff begun

to see him take it with all his directness--begun in fact to be a trifle

tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, we

are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all;

reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interest

to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There was

a small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this operation of the

contrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as if

Wilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter for

my own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder

brother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Chatelaine,

then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on my

complete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable _sorties_

thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than I

recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of the

rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in

the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in

these pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention. Of this

also more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of Wilky's

contribution to my rich current consciousness--the consciousness fairly

_made_ rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours

when I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost

haunted interior.

Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas

planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so

spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before

lived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth,

depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my

waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt

obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often

below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed.

That was the sense of it--the _character_, in the whole place, pressed

upon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis--which

is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such

material conditions as I _had_ known could have had no depth at all. My

depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight,

for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the

rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there

softly to echo in--mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous,

personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much

encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and

half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's

experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever,

enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, _of_

personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I really

believe I was already aware--that one way of taking life was to go in

for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the

other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense

and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a

circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both

ways--that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and

number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were

what I should have _liked_ to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic

faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when,

as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on

afternoon visits to Chatelaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene that

has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stood

about, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered

villa and its dependances had the air of the happiest home; the big

bearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges--no

petits pays chauds these--appeared to justify, and more, the fond New

York theory of Swiss education, the kind _a la portee_ of young New

Yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, even

romanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "the

languages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk

and honey, and "the relation," above all, the relation from master to

pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this

world save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic

Switzerland. "Did you notice the relation--how charming it was?" our

parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in reference

to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed;

while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of _all_ the

relations--my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous

relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason to

prosper--they were so copiously represented; the English jostled the

American, the Russian the German, and there even trickled through a

little funny French.

A great Geneva school of those days was the Institution Haccius, to

which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our own

faces first turned--under correction, however, by the perceived truth

that if the languages were in question the American reigned there almost

unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must have

appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronised

by the rich and the sophisticated--for even in those days some Americans

were rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all to

matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to

run. What it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candour and

queerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, I

think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of Rodolphe

Toeppfer's Voyages en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which

delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had

come out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. It is

the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster oL endless humour and

sympathy--of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred to

one even to ask--of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on

foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerland

of the time before the railways and the "rush," before the monster

hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised valleys, the circular

tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors.

To turn back to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lost

paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my

childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the

pictures--his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, and

the association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, of

the so-called calamites, a quite sufficient Ruysdael. It must have been

conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions--always in

pursuit of an education--a life not too dissimilar to that of the

storied exiles in the forest of Arden; though one would fain not press,

after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so little

conscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison and

competition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reached

out from the desert--or what might under discouragement pass for such;

it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow one

with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and though

a glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates,

its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem

indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would

induce me to sound.

I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough,

lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known to

ourselves at the time but which I at present fail to recapture, that

what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Paris

on the way to London for the winter; a turn of our situation invested at

the time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again

half prompt me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that mark of

the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of

earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience

which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency,

of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss

school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned

stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further

critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes

and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to

the panoramic. It ministered, to begin with, through our very early

start for Lyons again in the October dawn--without Nadali or the

carriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow

and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the high

haughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only at

appointed and much dissevered places--to the effect, I recall, of its

vainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, beforementioned,

whom I see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from some

rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien que

pour saluer ces dames," as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she

practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the

wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not, in the

event, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and

flurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these

particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on,

making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped as

elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must

much have wished they could emulate her art. Save for this my view of

that migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of our

early morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, and our hunt

there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vain

till we had sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before that of an

Albany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after some

delay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no

possibility, to his regret, of placing us under his own roof; as if

indeed, I remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have been

desired to share his foreign interests--such as _they_ were. He espoused

our cause, however, with gay goodnature--while I wondered, in my

admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and

(a bit doubtfully) whether I should have liked us had I been in his

place; and after some further adventure installed us at the Hotel de la

Ville de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Eveque, a resort now long since

extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of as

rather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement of

spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and a

more or less cobbled court.