more pleasing than a flesh-and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage the
company, and they set off again with renewed speed, and at last
reach India Wharf in time to see the Nahant steamer packed full of
excursionists, with a crowd of people still waiting to go aboard. It
does not look inviting, and they hesitate. In a minute or two their
spirits sink so low, that if they should see the wooden bull step out of
a grotto on the deck of the steamer the spectacle could not revive them.
At that instant they think, with a surprising singleness, of Nantasket
Beach, and the bright colors in which the Gardens of Maolis but now
appeared fade away, and they seem to see themselves sauntering along the
beautiful shore, while the white-crested breakers crash upon the sand,
and run up
“In tender-curving lines of creamy spray,”
quite to the feet of that lotus-eating party.
“Nahant is all rocks,” says the leader to Aunt Melissa, who hears
him with a sweet and tranquil patience, and who would enjoy or suffer
anything with the same expression; “and as you've never yet seen the
open sea, it's fortunate that we go to Nantasket, for, of course, a
beach is more characteristic. But now the object is to get there. The
boat will be starting in a few moments, and I doubt whether we can walk
it. How far is it,” he asks, turning toward a respectable-looking man,
“to Liverpool Wharf?”
“Well, it's consid'able ways,” says the man, smiling.
“Then we must take a hack,” says the pleasurer to his party. “Come on.”
“I've got a hack,” observes the man, in a casual way, as if the fact
might possibly interest.
“O, you have, have you? Well, then, put us into it, and drive to
Liverpool Wharf; and hurry.”
Either the distance was less than the hackman fancied, or else he drove
thither with unheard-of speed, for two minutes later he set them down on
Liverpool Wharf. But swiftly as they had come the steamer had been even
more prompt, and she now turned toward them a beautiful wake, as she
pushed farther and farther out into the harbor.
The hackman took his two dollars for his four passengers, and was
rapidly mounting his box,--probably to avoid idle reproaches. “Wait!”
said the chief pleasurer. Then, “When does the next boat leave?” he
asked of the agent, who had emerged with a compassionate face from the
waiting-rooms on the wharf.
“At half past two.”
“And it's now five minutes past nine,” moaned the merrymakers.
“Why, I'll tell you what you can do,” said the agent; “you can go to
Hingham by the Old Colony cars, and so come back by the Hull and Hingham
boat.”
“That's it!” chorused his listeners, “we'll go;” and “Now,” said their
spokesman to the driver, “I dare say you didn't know that Liverpool
Wharf was so near; but I don't think you've earned your money, and you
ought to take us on to the Old Colony Depot for half-fares at the most.”
The driver looked pained, as if some small tatters and shreds of
conscience were flapping uncomfortably about his otherwise dismantled
spirit. Then he seemed to think of his wife and family, for he put on
the air of a man who had already made great sacrifices, and “I couldn't,
really, I couldn't afford it,” said he; and as the victims turned from
him in disgust, he chirruped to his horses and drove off.
“Well,” said the pleasurers, “we won't give it up. We will have our
day's pleasure after all. But what _can_ we do to kill five hours and
a half? It's miles away from everything, and, besides, there's nothing
even if we were there.” At this image of their remoteness and the
inherent desolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in
the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened
on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of
the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed,
and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there
till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to
alleviate the situation: he gave them each the advertisement of his line
of boats, neatly printed upon a card, and then he went away.
All this prospect of waiting would do well enough for the ladies of the
party, but there is an impatience in the masculine fibre which does
not brook the notion of such prolonged repose; and the leader of the
excursion presently pretended an important errand up town,--nothing
less, in fact, than to buy a tumbler out of which to drink their claret
on the beach. A holiday is never like any other day to the man who takes
it, and a festive halo seemed to enwrap the excursionist as he pushed on
through the busy streets in the cool shadow of the vast granite
palaces wherein the genius of business loves to house itself in this
money-making land, and inhaled the odors of great heaps of leather and
spices and dry goods as he passed the open doorways,--odors that mixed
pleasantly with the smell of the freshly watered streets. When
he stepped into a crockery store to make his purchase a sense of
pleasure-taking did not fail him, and he fell naturally into talk with
the clerk about the weather and such pastoral topics. Even when he
reached the establishment where his own business days were passed some
glamour seemed to be cast upon familiar objects. To the disenchanted eye
all things were as they were on all other dullish days of summer,
even to the accustomed bore leaning up against his favorite desk and
transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme. Yet to the gaze of
this pleasure-taker all was subtly changed, and he shook hands right
and left as he entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of his
effusion. He had merely come to get some newspapers to help pass away
the long moments on the wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried
back thither to hear what had happened during his absence.
It seemed that there had hardly ever been such an eventful period in the
lives of the family before, and he listened to a minute account of it
from Cousin Lucy. “You know, Frank,” says she, “that Sallie's one idea
in life is to keep the baby from getting the whooping-cough, and I
declare that these premises have done nothing but reëcho with the most
dolorous whoops ever since you've been gone, so that at times, in my
fear that Sallie would think I'd been careless about the boy, I've been
ready to throw myself into the water, and nothing's prevented me but the
doubt whether it wouldn't be better to throw in the whoopers instead.”
At this moment a pale little girl, with a face wan and sad through all
its dirt, came and stood in the doorway nearest the baby, and in another
instant she had burst into a whoop so terrific that, if she had meant
to have his scalp next it could not have been more dreadful. Then she
subsided into a deep and pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to
the victims of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable. But her
outburst had set at work the mysterious machinery of half a dozen other
whooping-coughers lurking about the building, and all unseen they wound
themselves up with appalling rapidity, and in the utter silence which
followed left one to think they had died at the climax.
“Why, it's a perfect whooping-cough factory, this place,” cries Cousin
Lucy in a desperation. “Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poor
little dreadful object you,” she continues, turning upon the only
visible operative in the establishment. “Here, take this,” and she
bribes her with a bit of sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly
off along the edge of the wharf. “That's been another of their projects
for driving me wild,” says Cousin Lucy,--“trying to take their own lives
in a hundred ways before my face and eyes. Why _will_ their mothers let
them come here to play?”
Really, they were very melancholy little figures, and might have gone
near to make one sad, even if they had not been constantly imperilling
their lives. Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much
matter about the scantiness of their clothing, but their squalor
was depressing, it seemed, even to themselves, for they were a
mournful-looking set of children, and in their dangerous sports trifled
silently and almost gloomily with death. There were none of them above
eight or nine years of age, and most of them had the care of smaller
brothers, or even babes in arms, whom they were thus early inuring to
the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed in pantaloons and
shirts which no excess of rolling up in the legs and arms could make
small enough, and the incorrigible too-bigness of which rendered the
favorite amusements still more hazardous from their liability to trip
and entangle the wearers. The little girls had on each a solitary
garment, which hung about her gaunt person with antique severity of
outline; while the babies were multitudinously swathed in whatever
fragments of dress could be tied or pinned or plastered on. Their faces
were strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and their distractions
among the coal-heaps and cord-wood constantly added to the variety and
advantage of these effects.
“Why do their mothers let them come here?” muses Frank aloud. “Why,
because it's so safe, Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they'd have to be
playing upon the sills of fourth-floor windows, and here they're out
of the way and can't hurt themselves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their
park,--their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their Cascine. And
look at their gloomy little faces! Aren't they taking their pleasure in
the spirit of the very highest fashion? I was at Newport last summer,
and saw the famous driving on the Avenue in those pony phaetons,
dog-carts, and tubs, and three-story carriages with a pair of footmen
perching like storks upon each gable, and I assure you that all those
ornate and costly phantasms (it seems to me now like a sad, sweet
vision) had just the expression of these poor children. We're taking
a day's pleasure ourselves, cousin, but nobody would know it from our
looks. And has nothing but whooping-cough happened since I've been
gone?”
“Yes, we seem to be so cut off from every-day associations that I've
imagined myself a sort of tourist, and I've been to that Catholic church
over yonder, in hopes of seeing the Murillos and Raphaels--but I found
it locked up, and so I trudged back without a sight of the masterpieces.
But what's the reason that all the shops hereabouts have nothing but
luxuries for sale? The windows are perfect tropics of oranges, and
lemons, and belated bananas, and tobacco, and peanuts.”
“Well, the poor really seem to use more of those luxuries than anybody
else. I don't blame them. I shouldn't care for the necessaries of life
myself, if I found them so hard to get.”
“When I came back here,” says Cousin Lucy, without heeding these
flippant and heartless words, “I found an old gentleman who has
something to do with the boats, and he sat down, as if it were a part of
his business, and told me nearly the whole history of his life. Isn't
it nice of them, keeping an Autobiographer? It makes the time pass so
swiftly when you're waiting. This old gentleman was born--who'd ever
think it?--up there in Pearl Street, where those pitiless big granite
stores are now; and, I don't know why, but the idea of any human baby
being born in Pearl Street seemed to me one of the saddest things I'd
ever heard of.”
Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of the nurse and the baby, who had
got into one of their periodical difficulties, and her interlocutor
turned to Aunt Melissa.
“I think, Franklin,” says Aunt Melissa, “that it was wrong to let that
nurse come and bring the baby.”
“Yes, I know, Aunty, you have those old-established ideas, and they're
very right,” answers her nephew; “but just consider how much she enjoys
it, and how vastly the baby adds to the pleasure of this charming
excursion!”
Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat thoughtfully out upon the bay. “I
presume you think the excursion is a failure,” she said, after a while;
“but I've been enjoying every minute of the time here. Of course, I've
never seen the open sea, and I don't know about it, but I feel here just
as if I were spending a day at the seaside.”
“Well,” said her nephew, “I shouldn't call this exactly a
watering-place. It lacks the splendor and gayety of Newport, in a
certain degree, and it hasn't the illustrious seclusion of Nahant. The
surf isn't very fine, nor the beach particularly adapted to bathing; and
yet, I must confess, the outlook from here is as lovely as anything one
need have.”
And to tell the truth, it was very pretty and interesting. The landward
environment was as commonplace and mean as it could be: a yardful of
dismal sheds for coal and lumber, and shanties for offices, with each
office its safe and its desk, its whittled arm-chair and its spittoon,
its fly that shooed not, but buzzed desperately against the grimy pane,
which, if it had really had that boasted microscopic eye, it never would
have mistaken for the unblemished daylight. Outside of this yard was the
usual wharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil of trucks and carts and
fleet express-wagons, its building up and pulling down, its discomfort
and clamor of every sort, and its shops for the sale, not only of those
luxuries which Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic refreshments as
lemon-pie and hulled-corn.
When, however, you turned your thoughts and eyes away from this aspect
of it, and looked out upon the water, the neighborhood gloriously
retrieved itself. There its poverty and vulgarity ceased; there its
beauty and grace abounded. A light breeze ruffled the face of the bay,
and the innumerable little sail-boats that dotted it took the sun and
wind upon their wings, which they dipped almost into the sparkle of the
water, and flew lightly hither and thither like gulls that loved the
brine too well to rise wholly from it; larger ships, farther or nearer,
puffed or shrank their sails as they came and went on the errands
of commerce, but always moved as if bent upon some dreamy affair of
pleasure; the steamboats that shot vehemently across their tranquil
courses seemed only gayer and vivider visions, but not more substantial;
yonder, a black sea-going steamer passed out between the far-off
islands, and at last left in the sky above those reveries of
fortification, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a memory
of battle; to the right, on some line of railroad, long-plumed trains
arrived and departed like pictures passed through the slide of a
magic-lantern; even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction, seemed
to have no malice in the blows which, after a loud clucking, it dealt
the pile, and one understood that it was mere conventional violence like
that of a Punch to his baby.
“Why, what a lotus-eating life this is!” said Frank, at last. “Aunt
Melissa, I don't wonder you think it's like the seaside. It's a great
deal better than the seaside. And now, just as we've entered into the
spirit of it, the time's up for the 'Rose Standish' to come and bear
us from its delights. When will the boat be in?” he asked of the
Autobiographer, whom Lucy had pointed out to him.
“Well, she's _ben_ in half an hour, now. There she lays, just outside
the 'John Romer.'”
There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleasure-takers had been so lost
in the rapture of waiting and the beauty of the scene as never to have
noticed her arrival.
II--THE AFTERNOON
It is noticeable how many people there are in the world that seem bent
always upon the same purpose of amusement or business as one's self.
If you keep quietly about your accustomed affairs, there are all your
neighbors and acquaintance hard at it too; if you go on a journey,
choose what train you will, the cars are filled with travellers in your
direction. You take a day's pleasure, and everybody abandons his usual
occupation to crowd upon your boat, whether it is to Gloucester, or
Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach you go. It is very hard to believe that,
from whatever channel of life you abstract yourself, still the great sum
of it presses forward as before: that business is carried on though you
are idle, that men amuse themselves though you toil, that every train is
as crowded as that you travel on, that the theatre or the church fills
its boxes or pews without you perfectly well. I suppose it would not be
quite agreeable to believe all this; the opposite illusion is far more
flattering; for if each one of us did not take the world with him now at
every turn, should he not have to leave it behind him when he died? And
that, it must be owned, would not be agreeable, nor is the fact quite
conceivable, though ever so many myriads in so many million years have
proved it.
When our friends first went aboard the “Rose Standish” that day they
were almost the sole passengers, and they had a feeling of ownership
and privacy which was pleasant enough in its way, but which they lost
afterwards; though to lose it was also pleasant, for enjoyment no more
likes to be solitary than sin does, which is notoriously gregarious, and
I dare say would hardly exist if it could not be committed in company.
The preacher, indeed, little knows the comfortable sensation we have in
being called fellow-sinners, and what an effective shield for his guilt
each makes of his neighbor's hard-heartedness.
Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a lonely transgression till
that day, when in the silence of the little cabin he took the bottle of
claret from the handbag, and prepared to moisten the family lunch with
it. “I think, Aunt Melissa,” he said, “we had better lunch now, for it's
a quarter past two, and we shall not get to the beach before four. Let's
improvise a beach of these chairs, and that water-urn yonder can stand
for the breakers. Now, this is truly like Newport and Nahant,” he added,
after the little arrangement was complete; and he was about to strip
away the bottle's jacket of brown paper, when a lady much wrapped up
came in, and, reclining upon one of the opposite seats, began to take
them all in with a severe serenity of gaze that made them feel for a
moment like a party of low foreigners,--like a set of German atheists,
say. Frank kept on the bottle's paper jacket, and as the single tumbler
of the party circled from mouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the
honest drink the false air of a medicinal potion of some sort; and to
see Aunt Melissa sipping it, no one could have put his hand on his heart
and sworn it was not elderberry wine, at the worst. In spite of these
efforts, they all knew that they had suffered a hopeless loss of repute;
yet after the loss was confessed, I am not sure that they were not the
gayer and happier through this “freedom of a broken law.” At any rate,
the lunch passed off very merrily, and when they had put back the
fragments of the feast into the bags, they went forward to the bow of
the boat, to get good places for seeing the various people as they came
aboard, and for an outlook upon the bay when the boat should start.
I suppose that these were not very remarkable people, and that nothing
but the indomitable interest our friends took in the human race could
have enabled them to feel any concern in their companions. It was,
no doubt, just such a company as goes down to Nantasket Beach every
pleasant day in summer. Certain ones among them were distinguishable as
sojourners at the beach, by an air of familiarity with the business of
getting there, an indifference to the prospect, and an indefinable touch
of superiority. These read their newspapers in quiet corners, or, if
they were not of the newspaper sex, made themselves comfortable in the
cabins, and looked about them at the other passengers with looks of
lazy surprise, and just a hint of scorn for their interest in the boat's
departure. Our day's pleasurers took it that the lady whose steady gaze
had reduced them, when at lunch, to such a low ebb of shabbiness, was a
regular boarder, at the least, in one of the beach hotels. A few other
passengers were, like themselves, mere idlers for a day, and were eager
to see all that the boat or the voyage offered of novelty. There were
clerks and men who had book-keeping written in a neat mercantile hand
upon their faces, and who had evidently been given that afternoon for
a breathing-time; and there were strangers who were going down to the
beach for the sake of the charming view of the harbor which the trip
afforded. Here and there were people who were not to be classed with any
certainty,--as a pale young man, handsome in his undesirable way, who
looked like a steamboat pantry boy not yet risen to be bar-tender, but
rapidly rising, and who sat carefully balanced upon the railing of the
boat, chatting with two young girls, who heard his broad sallies with
continual snickers, and interchanged saucy comments with that prompt
up-and-coming manner which is so large a part of non-humorous humor, as
Mr. Lowell calls it, and now and then pulled and pushed each other. It
was a scene worth study, for in no other country could anything so bad
have been without being vastly worse; but here it was evident that there
was nothing worse than you saw; and, indeed, these persons formed a
sort of relief to the other passengers, who were nearly all monotonously
well-behaved. Amongst a few there seemed to be acquaintance, but the far
greater part were unknown to one another, and there were no words wasted
by any one. I believe the English traveller who has taxed our nation
with inquisitiveness for half a century is at last beginning to find
out that we do not ask questions because we have the still more vicious
custom of not opening our mouths at all when with strangers.
It was a good hour after our friends got aboard before the boat left her
moorings, and then it was not without some secret dreads of sea-sickness
that Aunt Melissa saw the seething brine widen between her and the
familiar wharf-house, where she now seemed to have spent so large a
part of her life. But the multitude of really charming and interesting
objects that presently fell under her eye soon distracted her from those
gloomy thoughts.
There is always a shabbiness about the wharves of seaports; but I must
own that as soon as you get a reasonable distance from them in Boston,
they turn wholly beautiful. They no longer present that imposing array
of mighty ships which they could show in the days of Consul Plancus,
when the commerce of the world sought chiefly our port, yet the docks
are still filled with the modester kinds of shipping, and if there is
not that wilderness of spars and rigging which you see at New York, let
us believe that there is an aspect of selection and refinement in
the scene, so that one should describe it, not as a forest, but, less
conventionally, as a gentleman's park of masts. The steamships of many
coastwise freight lines gloom, with their black, capacious hulks,
among the lighter sailing-craft, and among the white, green-shuttered
passenger-boats; and behind them those desperate and grimy sheds assume
a picturesqueness, their sagging roofs and crooked gables harmonizing
agreeably with the shipping; and then growing up from all, rises the
mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, and spire, and dome,--a fair
and noble sight, indeed, and one not surpassed for a certain quiet and
cleanly beauty by any that I know.
Our friends lingered long upon this pretty prospect, and, as inland
people of light heart and easy fancy will, the ladies made imagined
voyages in each of the more notable vessels they passed,--all cheap and
safe trips, occupying half a second apiece. Then they came forward to
the bow, that they might not lose any part of the harbor's beauty and
variety, and informed themselves of the names of each of the fortressed
islands as they passed, and forgot them, being passed, so that to this
day Aunt Melissa has the Fort Warren rebel prisoners languishing in Fort
Independence. But they made sure of the air of soft repose that hung
about each, of that exquisite military neatness which distinguishes
them, and which went to Aunt Melissa's housekeeping heart, of the green,
thick turf covering the escarpments, of the great guns loafing on the
crests of the ramparts and looking out over the water sleepily, of the
sentries pacing slowly up and down with their gleaming muskets.
“I never see one of those fellows,” says Cousin Frank, “without setting
him to the music of that saddest and subtlest of Heine's poems. You know
it, Lucy;” and he repeats:--
“Mein Herz, mein Herz is traurig,
Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai;
Ich stehe gelehnt an der Linde,
Hoch auf der alten Bastei.
* * * * *
“Am alten grauen Thurme
Ein Schilderhäuschen steht;
Ein rothgeröckter Bursche
Dort auf und nieder geht.