of United States official, he was naturally called upon for information
concerning the estates of Italians believed to have emigrated early in
the century to Buenos Ayres, and was commissioned to learn why certain
persons in Mexico and Brazil, and the parts of Peru, had not, if they
were still living, written home to their friends. On the other hand, he
was intrusted with business nearly as pertinent and hopeful by some of
his own countrymen, and it was not quite with surprise that he one
day received a neatly lithographed circular with his name and address
written in it, signed by a famous projector of such enterprises, asking
him to cooperate for the introduction of horse-railroads in Venice.
The obstacles to the scheme were of such a nature that it seemed hardly
worth while even to reply to the circular; but the proposal was one
of those bold flights of imagination which forever lift objects out of
vulgar association. It has cast an enduring, poetic charm even about the
horse-car in my mind, and I naturally look for many unprosaic aspects of
humanity there. I have an acquaintance who insists that it is the place
above all others suited to see life in every striking phase. He pretends
to have witnessed there the reunion of friends who had not met in many
years, the embrace, figurative of course, of long lost brothers,
the reconciliation of lovers; I do not know but also some scenes
of love-making, and acceptance or rejection. But my friend is an
imaginative man, and may make himself romances. I myself profess to have
beheld for the most part only mysteries; and I think it not the least
of these that, riding on the same cars day after day, one finds so many
strange faces with so little variety. Whether or not that dull, jarring
motion shakes inward and settles about the centres of mental life the
sprightliness that should inform the visage, I do not know; but it is
certain that the emptiness of the average passenger's countenance is
something wonderful, considered with reference to Nature's abhorrence of
a vacuum, and the intellectual repute which Boston enjoys among envious
New-Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey out of our cold metropolis is
enlivened by a mystery so positive in character as the young lady
in black, who alighted at a most ordinary little street in Old
Charlesbridge, and heightened her effect by going into a French-roof
house there that had no more right than a dry goods box to receive a
mystery. She was tall, and her lovely arms showed through the black
gauze of her dress with an exquisite roundness and _morbidezza_. Upon
her beautiful wrists she had heavy bracelets of dead gold, fashioned
after some Etruscan device; and from her dainty ears hung great hoops of
the same metal and design, which had the singular privilege of touching,
now and then, her white columnar neck. A massive chain or necklace, also
Etruscan, and also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one
little ungloved hand glittered a multitude of rings. This hand was very
expressive, and took a principal part in the talk which the lady held
with her companion, and was as alert and quick as if trained in the
gesticulation of Southern or Latin life somewhere. Her features, on the
contrary, were rather insipid, being too small and fine; but they were
redeemed by the liquid splendor of her beautiful eyes, and the mortal
pallor of her complexion. She was altogether so startling an apparition,
that all of us jaded, commonplace spectres turned and fastened our
weary, lack-lustre eyes upon her looks, with an utter inability to
remove them. There was one fat, unctuous person seated opposite, to whom
his interest was a torture, for he would have gone to sleep except for
her remarkable presence: as it was, his heavy eyelids fell half-way
shut, and drooped there at an agonizing angle, while his eyes remained
immovably fixed upon that strange, death-white face. How it could have
come of that colorlessness,--whether through long sickness or long
residence in a tropical climate,--was a question that perplexed another
of the passengers, who would have expected to hear the lady speak any
language in the world rather than English; and to whom her companion or
attendant was hardly less than herself a mystery,--being a dragon-like,
elderish female, clearly a Yankee by birth, but apparently of many
years' absence from home. The propriety of extracting these people from
the horse-cars and transferring them bodily to the first chapter of a
romance was a thing about which there could be no manner of doubt, and
nothing prevented the abduction but the unexpected voluntary exit of the
pale lady. As she passed out everybody else awoke as from a dream, or as
if freed from a potent fascination. It is part of the mystery that
this lady should never have reappeared in that theatre of life, the
horse-car; but I cannot regret having never seen her more; she was so
inestimably precious to wonder that it would have been a kind of loss to
learn anything about her.
[Illustration: “The young lady in black, who alighted at a most ordinary
little street.”]
On the other hand, I should be glad if two young men who once presented
themselves as mysteries upon the same stage could be so distinctly and
sharply identified that all mankind should recognize them at the day of
judgment. They were not so remarkable in the nature as in the degree of
their offense; for the mystery that any man should keep his seat in a
horse-car and let a woman stand is but too sadly common. They say
that this, public unkindness to the sex has come about through the
ingratitude of women, who have failed to return thanks for places
offered them, and that it is a just and noble revenge we take upon
them. There might be something advanced in favor of the idea that we
law-making men, who do not oblige the companies to provide seats for
every one, deserve no thanks from voteless, helpless women when we offer
them places; nay, that we ought to be glad if they do not reproach us
for making that a personal favor which ought to be a common right. I
would prefer, on the whole, to believe that this selfishness is not a
concerted act on our part, but a flower of advanced civilization; it is
a ripe fruit in European countries, and it is more noticeable in Boston
than anywhere else in America. It is, in fact, one of the points of our
high polish which people from the interior say first strikes them on
coming among us; for they declare--no doubt too modestly--that in their
Boeotian wilds our Athenian habit is almost unknown. Yet it would not
be fair to credit our whole population with it. I have seen a laborer
or artisan rise from his place, and offer it to a lady, while a dozen
well-dressed men kept theirs; and I know several conservative young
gentlemen, who are still so old-fashioned as always to respect the
weakness and weariness of women. One of them, I hear, has settled it
in his own mind that if the family cook appears in a car where he is
seated, he must rise and give her his place. This, perhaps, is a trifle
idealistic; but it is magnificent, it is princely. From his difficult
height, we decline--through ranks that sacrifice themselves for women
with bundles or children in arms, for old ladies, or for very young and
pretty ones--to the men who give no odds to the most helpless creature
alive. These are the men who do not act upon the promptings of human
nature like the laborer, and who do not refine upon their duty like my
young gentlemen, and make it their privilege to befriend the idea of
womanhood; they are men who have paid for their seats and are going to
keep them. They have been at work, very probably, all day, and no
doubt they are tired; they look so, and try hard not to look ashamed of
publicly considering themselves before a sex which is born tired, and
from which our climate and customs have drained so much health that
society sometimes seems little better than a hospital for invalid woman,
where every courtesy is likely to be a mercy done to a sufferer. Yet
the two young men of whom I began to speak were not apparently of this
class, and let us hope they were foreigners,--say Englishmen, since we
hate Englishmen the most. They were the only men seated, in a car full
of people; and when four or five ladies came in and occupied the aisle
before them, they might have been puzzled which to offer their places
to, if one of the ladies had not plainly been infirm. They settled the
question--if there was any in their minds--by remaining seated, while
the lady in front of them swung uneasily to and fro with the car, and
appeared ready to sink at their feet. In another moment she had actually
done so; and, too weary to rise, she continued to crouch upon the floor
of the car for the course of a mile, the young men resolutely keeping
their places, and not rising till they were ready to leave the car. It
was a horrible scene, and incredible,--that well-dressed woman sitting
on the floor, and those two well-dressed men keeping their places; it
was as much out of keeping with our smug respectabilities as a hanging,
and was a spectacle so paralyzing that public opinion took no action
concerning it. A shabby person, standing upon the platform outside,
swore about it, between expectorations: even the conductor's heart
was touched; and he said he had seen a good many hard things aboard
horse-cars, but that was a little the hardest; he had never expected to
come to that. These were simple people enough, and could not interest me
a great deal, but I should have liked to have a glimpse of the complex
minds of those young men, and I should still like to know something of
the previous life that could have made their behavior possible to them.
They ought to make public the philosophic methods by which they reached
that pass of unshamable selfishness. The information would be useful to
a race which knows the sweetness of self-indulgence, and would fain know
the art of so drugging or besotting the sensibilities that it shall no
feel disgraced by any sort of meanness. They might really have much
to say for themselves; as, that the lady, being conscious she could no
longer keep her feet, had no right to crouch at theirs, and put them to
so severe a test; or that, having suffered her to sink there, they fell
no further in the ignorant public opinion by suffering her to continue
there.
But I doubt if that other young man could say anything for himself, who,
when a pale, trembling woman was about to drop into the vacant place at
his side, stretched his arm across it with, “This seat's engaged,” till
a robust young fellow, his friend, appeared, and took it and kept it
all the way out from Boston. The commission of such a tragical wrong,
involving a violation of common usage as well as the infliction of a
positive cruelty, would embitter the life of an ordinary man, if any
ordinary man were capable of it; but let us trust that nature has
provided fortitude of every kind for the offender, and that he is not
wrung by keener remorse than most would feel for a petty larceny. I dare
say he would be eager at the first opportunity to rebuke the ingratitude
of women who do not thank their benefactors for giving them seats. It
seems a little odd, by the way, and perhaps it is through the peculiar
blessing of Providence, that, since men have determined by a savage
egotism to teach the offending sex manners, their own comfort should
be in the infliction of the penalty, and that it should be as much a
pleasure as a duty to keep one's place.
Perhaps when the ladies come to vote, they will abate, with other
nuisances, the whole business of overloaded public conveyances. In the
mean time the kindness of women to each other is a notable feature of
all horse-car journeys. It is touching to see the smiling eagerness with
which the poor things gather close their volumed skirts and make room
for a weary sister, the tender looks of compassion which they bend upon
the sufferers obliged to stand, the sweetness with which they rise, if
they are young and strong, to offer their place to any infirm or heavily
burdened person of their sex.
But a journey to Boston is not entirely an experience of bitterness.
On the contrary, there are many things besides the mutual amiability of
these beautiful martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A whole
car-full of people, brought into the closest contact with one another,
yet in the absence of introductions never exchanging a word, each being
so sufficient to himself as to need no social stimulus whatever, is
certainly an impressive and stately spectacle. It is a beautiful day,
say; but far be it from me to intimate as much to my neighbor, who
plainly would rather die than thus commit himself with me, and who, in
fact, would well-nigh strike me speechless with surprise if he did so.
If there is any necessity for communication, as with the conductor, we
essay first to express ourselves by gesture, and then utter our desires
with a certain hollow and remote effect, which is not otherwise to be
described. I have sometimes tried to speak above my breath, when, being
about to leave the car, I have made a virtue of offering my place to
the prettiest young woman standing, but I have found it impossible; the
_genius loci_, whatever it was, suppressed me, and I have gasped out my
sham politeness as in a courteous nightmare. The silencing influence
is quite successfully resisted by none but the tipsy people who
occasionally ride out with us, and call up a smile, sad as a gleam of
winter sunshine, to our faces by their artless prattle. I remember
one eventful afternoon that we were all but moved to laughter by the
gayeties of such a one, who, even after he had ceased to talk, continued
to amuse us by falling asleep, and reposing himself against the shoulder
of the lady next him. Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of the agreeable
variety they contribute to horse-car life, that the conductor treats his
inebriate passengers with such unfailing tenderness and forbearance.
I have never seen them molested, though I have noticed them in the
indulgence of many eccentricities, and happened once even to see one
of them sit down in a lady's lap. But that was on the night of Saint
Patrick's day. Generally all avoidable indecorums are rare in the
horse-cars, though during the late forenoon and early afternoon, in the
period of lighter travel, I have found curious figures there:--among
others, two old women, in the old-clothes business, one of whom was
dressed, not very fortunately, in a gown with short sleeves, and
inferentially a low neck; a mender of umbrellas, with many unwholesome
whity-brown wrecks of umbrellas about him; a peddler of soap, who
offered cakes of it to his fellow-passengers at a discount, apparently
for friendship's sake; and a certain gentleman with a pock-marked face,
and a beard dyed an unscrupulous purple, who sang himself a hymn all the
way to Boston, and who gave me no sufficient reason for thinking him a
sea-captain. Not far from the end of the Long Bridge, there is apt to be
a number of colored ladies waiting to get into the car, or to get out
of it,--usually one solemn mother in Ethiopia, and two or three mirthful
daughters, who find it hard to suppress a sense of adventure, and to
keep in the laughter that struggles out through their glittering
teeth and eyes, and who place each other at a disadvantage by divers
accidental and intentional bumps and blows. If they are to get out, the
old lady is not certain of the place where, and, after making the car
stop, and parleying with the conductor, returns to her seat, and is
mutely held up to public scorn by one taciturn wink of the conductor's
eye.
Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to note one so common and
observable as that middle-aged lady who gets aboard and will not see the
one vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door, blind and
deaf to all the modest beckonings and benevolent gasps of her
fellow-passengers. An air as of better days clings about her; she seems
a person who has known sickness and sorrow; but so far from pitying her,
you view her with inexpressible rancor, for it is plain that she
ought to sit down, and that she will not. But for a point of honor the
conductor would show her the vacant place; this forbidding, however, how
can he? There she stands and sniffs drearily when you glance at her, as
you must from time to time, and no wild turkey caught in a trap was ever
more incapable of looking down than this middle-aged (shall I say also
unmarried?) lady.
Of course every one knows the ladies and gentlemen who sit
cater-cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is
that large and ponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you,
practically sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by having your
knee under him. He implies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up
more space than belongs to you, and that you are justly made an example
of.
I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse-car an advocate of one
of the great reforms of the day. He held a green bag upon his knees, and
without any notice passed from a question of crops to a discussion of
suffrage for the negro, and so to womanhood suffrage. “Let the women
vote,” said he,--“let 'em vote if they want to. _I_ don't care. Fact is,
I should like to see 'em do it the first time. They're excitable,
you know; they're excitable;” and he enforced his analysis of female
character by thrusting his elbow sharply into my side. “Now, there's
my wife; I'd like to see her vote. Be fun, I tell you. And the
girls,--Lord, the girls! Circus wouldn't be anywhere.” Enchanted with
the picture which he appeared to have conjured up for himself, he
laughed with the utmost relish, and then patting the green bag in his
lap, which plainly contained a violin, “You see,” he went on, “I go
out playing for dancing-parties. Work all day at my trade,--I'm a
carpenter,--and play in the evening. Take my little old ten dollars a
night. And _I_ notice the women a good deal; and _I_ tell you they're
_all_ excitable, and _I sh'd_ like to see 'em vote. Vote right and vote
often,--that's the ticket, eh?” This friend of womanhood suffrage--whose
attitude of curiosity and expectation seemed to me representative of
that of a great many thinkers on the subject--no doubt was otherwise a
reformer, and held that the coming man would not drink wine--if he could
find whiskey. At least I should have said so, guessing from the odors he
breathed along with his liberal sentiments.
Something of the character of a college-town is observable nearly always
in the presence of the students, who confound certain traditional ideas
of students by their quietude of costume and manner, and whom Padua or
Heidelberg would hardly know, but who nevertheless betray that they are
banded to--
“Scorn delights and live laborious days,”
by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a clannishness of cane
or scarf, or a talk of boats and base-ball held among themselves. One
cannot see them without pleasure and kindness; and it is no wonder that
their young-lady acquaintances brighten so to recognize them on the
horse-cars. There is much good fortune in the world, but none
better than being an undergraduate twenty years old, hale, handsome,
fashionably dressed, with the whole promise of life before: it's a state
of things to disarm even envy. With so much youth forever in her heart,
it must be hard for our Charlesbridge to grow old: the generations arise
and pass away but in her veins is still this tide of warm blood, century
in and century out, so much the same from one age to another that it
would be hardy to say it was not still one youthfulness. There is a
print of the village as it was a cycle since, showing the oldest of
the college buildings and upon the street in front a scholar in his
scholar's-cap and gown, giving his arm to a very stylish girl of that
period, who is dressed wonderfully like the girl of ours, so that but
for the student's antique formality of costume, one might believe that
he was handing her out to take the horse-car. There is no horse-car in
the picture,--that is the only real difference between then and now in
our Charlesbridge, perennially young and gay. Have there not ever been
here the same grand ambitions, the same high hopes,--and is not the
unbroken succession of youth in these?
As for other life on the horse-car, it shows to little or no effect,
as I have said. You can, of course, detect certain classes; as, in the
morning the business-men going in, to their counters or their desks, and
in the afternoon the shoppers coming out, laden with paper parcels. But
I think no one can truly claim to know the regular from the occasional
passengers by any greater cheerfulness in the faces of the latter. The
horse-car will suffer no such inequality as this, but reduces us all to
the same level of melancholy. It would be but a very unworthy kind of
art which should seek to describe people by such merely external traits
as a habit of carrying baskets or large travelling-bags in the car; and
the present muse scorns it, but is not above speaking of the frequent
presence of those lovely young girls in which Boston and the suburban
towns abound, and who, whether they appear with rolls of music in their
hands, or books from the circulating-libraries, or pretty parcels or
hand-bags, would brighten even the horse-car if fresh young looks
and gay and brilliant costumes could do so much. But they only add
perplexity to the anomaly, which was already sufficiently trying with
its contrasts of splendor and shabbiness, and such intimate association
of velvets and patches as you see in the churches of Catholic countries,
but nowhere else in the world except in our “coaches of the sovereign
people.”
In winter, the journey to or from Boston cannot appear otherwise than
very dreary to the fondest imagination. Coming out, nothing can look
more arctic and forlorn than the river, double-shrouded in ice and snow,
or sadder than the contrast offered to the same prospect in summer. Then
all is laughing, and it is a joy in every nerve to ride out over the
Long Bridge at high tide, and, looking southward, to see the wide
crinkle and glitter of that beautiful expanse of water, which laps on
one hand the granite quays of the city, and on the other washes among
the reeds and wild grasses of the salt-meadows. A ship coming slowly
up the channel, or a dingy tug violently darting athwart it, gives an
additional pleasure to the eye, and adds something dreamy or vivid
to the beauty of the scene. It is hard to say at what hour of the
summer's-day the prospect is loveliest; and I am certainly not going to
speak of the sunset as the least of its delights. When this exquisite
spectacle is presented, the horse-car passenger, happy to cling with one
foot to the rear platform-steps, looks out over the shoulder next him
into fairy-land. Crimson and purple the bay stretches westward till its
waves darken into the grassy levels, where, here and there, a hay-rick
shows perfectly black against the light. Afar off, southeastward and
westward, the uplands wear a tinge of tenderest blue; and in the nearer
distance, on the low shores of the river, hover the white plumes of
arriving and departing trains. The windows of the stately houses that
overlook the water take the sunset from it evanescently, and begin to
chill and darken before the crimson burns out of the sky. The windows
are, in fact, best after nightfall, when they are brilliantly lighted
from within; and when, if it is a dark, warm night, and the briny
fragrance comes up strong from the falling tide, the lights reflected
far down in the still water, bring a dream, as I have heard travelled
Bostonians say, of Venice and her magical effects in the same kind. But
for me the beauty of the scene needs the help of no such association;
I am content with it for what it is. I enjoy also the hints of spring
which one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide in the first
open days. Then there is not only a vernal beating of carpets on the
piers of the drawbridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the
receding water show green patches of sea-weeds and mosses, and flatter
the willing eye with a dim hint of summer. This reeking and saturated
herbage--which always seems to me, in contrast with dry land growths,
what the water-logged life of seafaring folk is to that which we happier
men lead on shore,--taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and brightness
of the sun, has then a charm which it loses when summer really comes;
nor does one, later, have so keen an interest in the men wading about in
the shallows below the bridge, who, as in the distance they stoop over
to gather whatever shell-fish they seek, make a very fair show of being
some ungainlier sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come
to the spring-prophesying storks of song and story. A sentiment of
the drowsiness that goes before the awakening of the year, and is so
different from the drowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber,
is in the air, but is gone when we leave the river behind, and strike
into the straggling village beyond.