Now once more it seemed that for a time I might lead a sanely ordered
existence. Not for long did I hope it. I think I had become resigned
to the unending series of shocks that seemed to compose the daily life
in North America. Few had been my peaceful hours since that fatal
evening in Paris. And the shocks had become increasingly violent. When
I tried to picture what the next might be I found myself shuddering.
For the present, like a stag that has eluded the hounds but hears
their distant baying, I lay panting in momentary security, gathering
breath for some new course. I mean to say, one couldn’t tell what
might happen next. Again and again I found myself coming all over
frightened.
Wholly restored I was now in the esteem of Mr. Belknap-Jackson, who
never tired of discussing with me our own life and people. Indeed he
was quite the most intelligent foreigner I had encountered. I may seem
to exaggerate in the American fashion, but I doubt if a single one of
the others could have named the counties of England or the present
Lord Mayor of London. Our host was not like that. Also he early gave
me to know that he felt quite as we do concerning the rebellion of our
American colonies, holding it a matter for the deepest regret; and
justly proud he was of the circumstance that at the time of that
rebellion his own family had put all possible obstacles in the way of
the traitorous Washington. To be sure, I dare say he may have boasted
a bit in this.
It was during the long journey across America which we now set out
upon that I came to this sympathetic understanding of his character
and of the chagrin he constantly felt at being compelled to live among
people with whom he could have as little sympathy as I myself had.
This journey began pleasantly enough, and through the farming counties
of Philadelphia, Ohio, and Chicago was not without interest. Beyond
came an incredibly large region, much like the steppes of Siberia, I
fancy: vast uninhabited stretches of heath and down, with but here and
there some rude settlement about which the poor peasants would eagerly
assemble as our train passed through. I could not wonder that our own
travellers have always spoken so disparagingly of the American
civilization. It is a country that would never do with us.
Although we lived in this train a matter of nearly four days, I fancy
not a single person dressed for dinner as one would on shipboard. Even
Belknap-Jackson dined in a lounge-suit, though he wore gloves
constantly by day, which was more than I could get Cousin Egbert to
do.
As we went ever farther over these leagues of fen and fell and rolling
veldt, I could but speculate unquietly as to what sort of place the
Red Gap must be. A residential town for gentlemen and families, I had
understood, with a little colony of people that really mattered, as I
had gathered from Mrs. Effie. And yet I was unable to divine their
object in going so far away to live. One goes to distant places for
the winter sports or for big game shooting, but this seemed rather
grotesquely perverse.
Little did I then dream of the spiritual agencies that were to insure
my gradual understanding of the town and its people. Unsuspectingly I
fronted a future so wildly improbable that no power could have made me
credit it had it then been foretold by the most rarely endowed gypsy.
It is always now with a sort of terror that I look back to those last
moments before my destiny had unfolded far enough to be actually
alarming. I was as one floating in fancied security down the calm
river above their famous Niagara Falls--to be presently dashed without
warning over the horrible verge. I mean to say, I never suspected.
Our last day of travel arrived. We were now in a roughened and most
untidy welter of mountain and jungle and glen, with violent tarns and
bleak bits of moorland that had all too evidently never known the
calming touch of the landscape gardener; a region, moreover, peopled
by a much more lawless appearing peasantry than I had observed back in
the Chicago counties, people for the most part quite wretchedly gotten
up and distinctly of the lower or working classes.
Late in the afternoon our train wound out of a narrow cutting and into
a valley that broadened away on every hand to distant mountains.
Beyond doubt this prospect could, in a loose way of speaking, be
called scenery, but of too violent a character it was for cultivated
tastes. Then, as my eye caught the vague outlines of a settlement or
village in the midst of this valley, Cousin Egbert, who also looked
from, the coach window, amazed me by crying out:
“There she is--little old Red Gap! The fastest growing town in the
State, if any one should ask you.”
“Yes, sir; I’ll try to remember, sir,” I said, wondering why I should
be asked this.
“Garden spot of the world,” he added in a kind of ecstasy, to which I
made no response, for this was too preposterous. Nearing the place our
train passed an immense hoarding erected by the roadway, a score of
feet high, I should say, and at least a dozen times as long, upon
which was emblazoned in mammoth red letters on a black ground,
“_Keep Your Eye on Red Gap!_” At either end of this lettering was
painted a gigantic staring human eye. Regarding this monstrosity with
startled interest, I heard myself addressed by Belknap-Jackson:
“The sort of vulgarity I’m obliged to contend with,” said he, with a
contemptuous gesture toward the hoarding. Indeed the thing lacked
refinement in its diction, while the painted eyes were not Art in any
true sense of the word. “The work of our precious Chamber of
Commerce,” he added, “though I pleaded with them for days and days.”
“It’s a sort of thing would never do with us, sir,” I said.
“It’s what one has to expect from a commercialized bourgeoise,” he
returned bitterly. “And even our association, ‘The City Beautiful,’ of
which I was president, helped to erect the thing. Of course I resigned
at once.”
“Naturally, sir; the colours are atrocious.”
“And the words a mere blatant boast!” He groaned and left me, for we
were now well into a suburb of detached villas, many of them of a
squalid character, and presently we had halted at the station. About
this bleak affair was the usual gathering of peasantry and the common
people, villagers, agricultural labourers, and the like, and these at
once showed a tremendous interest in our party, many of them hailing
various members of us with a quite offensive familiarity.
Belknap-Jackson, of course, bore himself through this with a proper
aloofness, as did his wife and Mrs. Effie, but I heard the Mixer
booming salutations right and left. It was Cousin Egbert, however, who
most embarrassed me by the freedom of his manner with these persons.
He shook hands warmly with at least a dozen of them and these hailed
him with rude shouts, dealt him smart blows on the back and, forming a
circle about him, escorted him to a carriage where Mrs. Effie and I
awaited him. Here the driver, a loutish and familiar youth, also
seized his hand and, with some crude effect of oratory, shouted to the
crowd.
“What’s the matter with Sour-dough?” To this, with a flourish of their
impossible hats, they quickly responded in unison,
“He’s all right!” accenting the first word terrifically.
Then, to the immense relief of Mrs. Effie and myself, he was released
and we were driven quickly off from the raffish set. Through their
Regent and Bond streets we went, though I mean to say they were on an
unbelievably small or village scale, to an outlying region of detached
villas that doubtless would be their St. John’s Wood, but my efforts
to observe closely were distracted by the extraordinary freedom with
which our driver essayed to chat with us, saying he “guessed” we were
glad to get back to God’s country, and things of a similar intimate
nature. This was even more embarrassing to Mrs. Effie than it was to
me, since she more than once felt obliged to answer the fellow with a
feigned cordiality.
Relieved I was when we drew up before the town house of the Flouds.
Set well back from the driveway in a faded stretch of common, it was
of rather a garbled architecture, with the Tudor, late Gothic, and
French Renaissance so intermixed that one was puzzled to separate the
periods. Nor was the result so vast as this might sound. Hardly would
the thing have made a wing of the manor house at Chaynes-Wotten. The
common or small park before it was shielded from the main thoroughfare
by a fence of iron palings, and back of this on either side of a
gravelled walk that led to the main entrance were two life-sized stags
not badly sculptured from metal.
Once inside I began to suspect that my position was going to be more
than a bit dicky. I mean to say, it was not an establishment in our
sense of the word, being staffed, apparently, by two China persons who
performed the functions of cook, housemaids, footmen, butler, and
housekeeper. There was not even a billiard room.
During the ensuing hour, marked by the arrival of our luggage and the
unpacking of boxes, I meditated profoundly over the difficulties of my
situation. In a wilderness, beyond the confines of civilization, I
would undoubtedly be compelled to endure the hardships of the pioneer;
yet for the present I resolved to let no inkling of my dismay escape.
The evening meal over--dinner in but the barest technical sense--I sat
alone in my own room, meditating thus darkly. Nor was I at all cheered
by the voice of Cousin Egbert, who sang in his own room adjoining. I
had found this to be a habit of his, and his songs are always dolorous
to the last degree. Now, for example, while life seemed all too black
to me, he sang a favourite of his, the pathetic ballad of two small
children evidently begging in a business thoroughfare:
“Lone and weary through the streets we wander,
For we have no place to lay our head;
Not a friend is left on earth to shelter us,
For both our parents now are dead.”
It was a fair crumpler in my then mood. It made me wish to be out of
North America--made me long for London; London with a yellow fog and
its greasy pavements, where one knew what to apprehend. I wanted him
to stop, but still he atrociously sang in his high, cracked voice:
“Dear mother died when we were both young,
And father built for us a home,
But now he’s killed by falling timbers,
And we are left here all alone.”
I dare say I should have rushed madly into the night had there been
another verse, but now he was still. A moment later, however, he
entered my room with the suggestion that I stroll about the village
streets with him, he having a mission to perform for Mrs. Effie. I had
already heard her confide this to him. He was to proceed to the office
of their newspaper and there leave with the press chap a notice of our
arrival which from day to day she had been composing on the train.
“I just got to leave this here piece for the _Recorder_,” he
said; “then we can sasshay up and down for a while and meet some of
the boys.”
How profoundly may our whole destiny be affected by the mood of an
idle moment; by some superficial indecision, mere fruit of a transient
unrest. We lightly debate, we hesitate, we yawn, unconscious of the
brink. We half-heartedly decline a suggested course, then lightly
accept from sheer ennui, and “life,” as I have read in a quite
meritorious poem, “is never the same again.” It was thus I now toyed
there with my fate in my hands, as might a child have toyed with a
bauble. I mean to say, I was looking for nothing thick.
“She’s wrote a very fancy piece for that newspaper,” Cousin Egbert
went on, handing me the sheets of manuscript. Idly I glanced down the
pages.
“Yesterday saw the return to Red Gap of Mrs. Senator James Knox Floud
and Egbert G. Floud from their extensive European tour,” it began.
Farther I caught vagrant lines, salient phrases: “--the well-known
social leader of our North Side set ... planning a series of
entertainments for the approaching social season that promise to
eclipse all previous gayeties of Red Gap’s smart set ... holding the
reins of social leadership with a firm grasp ... distinguished for her
social graces and tact as a hostess ... their palatial home on Ophir
Avenue, the scene of so much of the smart social life that has
distinguished our beautiful city.”
It left me rather unmoved from my depression, even the concluding
note: “The Flouds are accompanied by their English manservant, secured
through the kind offices of the brother of his lordship Earl of
Brinstead, the well-known English peer, who will no doubt do much to
impart to the coming functions that air of smartness which
distinguishes the highest social circles of London, Paris, and other
capitals of the great world of fashion.”
“Some mess of words, that,” observed Cousin Egbert, and it did indeed
seem to be rather intimately phrased.
“Better come along with me,” he again urged. There was a moment’s
fateful silence, then, quite mechanically, I arose and prepared to
accompany him. In the hall below I handed him his evening stick and
gloves, which he absently took from me, and we presently traversed
that street of houses much in the fashion of the Floud house and
nearly all boasting some sculptured bit of wild life on their
terraces.
It was a calm night of late summer; all Nature seemed at peace. I
looked aloft and reflected that the same stars were shining upon the
civilization I had left so far behind. As we walked I lost myself in
musing pensively upon this curious astronomical fact and upon the
further vicissitudes to which I would surely be exposed. I compared
myself whimsically to an explorer chap who has ventured among a tribe
of natives and who must seem to adopt their weird manners and customs
to save himself from their fanatic violence.
From this I was aroused by Cousin Egbert, who, with sudden dismay
regarding his stick and gloves, uttered a low cry of anguish and
thrust them into my hands before I had divined his purpose.
“You’ll have to tote them there things,” he swiftly explained. “I
forgot where I was.” I demurred sharply, but he would not listen.
“I didn’t mind it so much in Paris and Europe, where I ain’t so very
well known, but my good gosh! man, this is my home town. You’ll have
to take them. People won’t notice it in you so much, you being a
foreigner, anyway.”
Without further objection I wearily took them, finding a desperate
drollery in being regarded as a foreigner, whereas I was simply alone
among foreigners; but I knew that Cousin Egbert lacked the subtlety to
grasp this point of view and made no effort to lay it before him. It
was clear to me then, I think, that he would forever remain socially
impossible, though perhaps no bad sort from a mere human point of
view.
We continued our stroll, turning presently from this residential
avenue to a street of small unlighted shops, and from this into a
wider and brilliantly lighted thoroughfare of larger shops, where my
companion presently began to greet native acquaintances. And now once
more he affected that fashion of presenting me to his friends that I
had so deplored in Paris. His own greeting made, he would call out
heartily: “Shake hands with my friend Colonel Ruggles!” Nor would he
heed my protests at this, so that in sheer desperation I presently
ceased making them, reflecting that after all we were encountering the
street classes of the town.
At a score of such casual meetings I was thus presented, for he seemed
to know quite almost every one and at times there would be a group of
natives about us on the pavement. Twice we went into “saloons,” as
they rather pretentiously style their public houses, where Cousin
Egbert would stand the drinks for all present, not omitting each time
to present me formally to the bar-man. In all these instances I was at
once asked what I thought of their town, which was at first rather
embarrassing, as I was confident that any frank disclosure of my
opinion, being necessarily hurried, might easily be misunderstood. I
at length devised a conventional formula of praise which, although
feeling a frightful fool, I delivered each time thereafter.
Thus we progressed the length of their commercial centre, the
incidents varying but little.
“Hello, Sour-dough, you old shellback! When did you come off the
trail?”
“Just got in. My lands! but it’s good to be back. Billy, shake hands
with my friend Colonel Ruggles.”
I mean to say, the persons were not all named “Billy,” that being used
only by way of illustration. Sometimes they would be called “Doc” or
“Hank” or “Al” or “Chris.” Nor was my companion invariably called
“shellback.” “Horned-toad” and “Stinging-lizard” were also epithets
much in favour with his friends.
At the end of this street we at length paused before the office, as I
saw, of “The Red Gap _Recorder_; Daily and Weekly.” Cousin Egbert
entered here, but came out almost at once.
“Henshaw ain’t there, and she said I got to be sure and give him this
here piece personally; so come on. He’s up to a lawn-feet.”
“A social function, sir?” I asked.
“No; just a lawn-feet up in Judge Ballard’s front yard to raise money
for new uniforms for the band--that’s what the boy said in there.”
“But would it not be highly improper for me to appear there, sir?” I
at once objected. “I fear it’s not done, sir.”
“Shucks!” he insisted, “don’t talk foolish that way. You’re a peach of
a little mixer all right. Come on! Everybody goes. They’ll even let me
in. I can give this here piece to Henshaw and then we’ll spend a
little money to help the band-boys along.”
My misgivings were by no means dispelled, yet as the affair seemed to
be public rather than smart, I allowed myself to be led on.
Into another street of residences we turned, and after a brisk walk I
was able to identify the “front yard” of which my companion had
spoken. The strains of an orchestra came to us and from the trees and
shrubbery gleamed the lights of paper lanterns. I could discern tents
and marquees, a throng of people moving among them. Nearer, I observed
a refreshment pavilion and a dancing platform.
Reaching the gate, Cousin Egbert paid for us an entrance fee of two
shillings to a young lady in gypsy costume whom he greeted cordially
as Beryl Mae, not omitting to present me to her as Colonel Ruggles.
We moved into the thick of the crowd. There was much laughter and
hearty speech, and it at once occurred to me that Cousin Egbert had
been right: it would not be an assemblage of people that mattered, but
rather of small tradesmen, artisans, tenant-farmers and the like with
whom I could properly mingle.
My companion was greeted by several of the throng, to whom he in turn
presented me, among them after a bit to a slight, reddish-bearded
person wearing thick nose-glasses whom I understood to be the pressman
we were in search of. Nervous of manner he was and preoccupied with a
notebook in which he frantically scribbled items from time to time.
Yet no sooner was I presented to him than he began a quizzing sort of
conversation with me that lasted near a half-hour, I should say. Very
interested he seemed to hear of my previous life, having in full
measure that naïve curiosity about one which Americans take so little
pains to hide. Like the other natives I had met that evening, he was
especially concerned to know what I thought of Red Gap. The chat was
not at all unpleasant, as he seemed to be a well-informed person, and
it was not without regret that I noted the approach of Cousin Egbert
in company with a pleasant-faced, middle-aged lady in Oriental garb,
carrying a tambourine.
“Mrs. Ballard, allow me to make you acquainted with my friend Colonel
Ruggles!” Thus Cousin Egbert performed his ceremony. The lady grasped
my hand with great cordiality.
“You men have monopolized the Colonel long enough,” she began with a
large coquetry that I found not unpleasing, and firmly grasping my arm
she led me off in the direction of the refreshment pavilion, where I
was playfully let to know that I should purchase her bits of
refreshment, coffee, plum-cake, an ice, things of that sort. Through
it all she kept up a running fire of banter, from time to time
presenting me to other women young and old who happened about us, all
of whom betrayed an interest in my personality that was not
unflattering, even from this commoner sort of the town’s people.
Nor would my new friend release me when she had refreshed herself, but
had it that I must dance with her. I had now to confess that I was
unskilled in the native American folk dances which I had observed
being performed, whereupon she briskly chided me for my backwardness,
but commanded a valse from the musicians, and this we danced together.
I may here say that I am not without a certain finesse on the
dancing-floor and I rather enjoyed the momentary abandon with this
village worthy. Indeed I had rather enjoyed the whole affair, though I
felt that my manner was gradually marking me as one apart from the
natives; made conscious I was of a more finished, a suaver formality
in myself--the Mrs. Ballard I had met came at length to be by way of
tapping me coquettishly with her tambourine in our lighter moments.
Also my presence increasingly drew attention, more and more of the
village belles and matrons demanding in their hearty way to be
presented to me. Indeed the society was vastly more enlivening, I
reflected, than I had found it in a similar walk of life at home.
Rather regretfully I left with Cousin Egbert, who found me at last in
one of the tents having my palm read by the gypsy young person who had
taken our fees at the gate. Of course I am aware that she was probably
without any real gifts for this science, as so few are who undertake
it at charity bazaars, yet she told me not a few things that were
significant: that my somewhat cold exterior and air of sternness were
but a mask to shield a too-impulsive nature; that I possessed great
firmness of character and was fond of Nature. She added peculiarly at
the last “I see trouble ahead, but you are not to be downcast--the
skies will brighten.”
It was at this point that Cousin Egbert found me, and after he had
warned the young woman that I was “some mixer” we departed. Not until
we had reached the Floud home did he discover that he had quite
forgotten to hand the press-chap Mrs. Effie’s manuscript.
“Dog on the luck!” said he in his quaint tone of exasperation, “here
I’ve went and forgot to give Mrs. Effie’s piece to the editor.” He
sighed ruefully. “Well, to-morrow’s another day.”
And so the die was cast. To-morrow was indeed another day!
Yet I fell asleep on a memory of the evening that brought me a sort of
shamed pleasure--that I had falsely borne the stick and gloves of
Cousin Egbert. I knew they had given me rather an air.