After first going to the Owen, at Campobello, the Pasmers took rooms
at the Ty'n-y-Coed, which is so much gayer, even if it is not so
characteristic of the old Welsh Admiral's baronial possession of
the island. It is characteristic enough, and perched on its bluff
overlooking the bay, or whatever the body of water is, it sees a score
of pretty isles and long reaches of mainland coast, with a white marble
effect of white-painted wooden Eastport, nestled in the wide lap of the
shore, in apparent luxury and apparent innocence of smuggling and the
manufacture of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the island in
morning and evening fog temper the air of the latitude to a Newport
softness in summer, with a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarly
delicious, lulling the day with long calms and light breezes, and after
nightfall commonly sending a stiff gale to try the stops of the hotel's
gables and casements, and to make the cheerful blaze on its public
hearths acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat arrives,
with passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks or
swims half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all
night long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. The
pretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort
of feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its
fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the
aesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and
his language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the
sojourners on the island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such of
the guests as prefer to let others make their excursions into the heart
of the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night,
when the falling mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouse
to lighthouse the fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas
cede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life does
not greatly differ from other seaside hotel life on the surface, and
if one were to make distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that
hotel society there has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere,
with a little more accessibility. As the reader doubtless knows, the
great mass of Boston society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk,
transports itself down the North Shore scarcely further than Manchester
at the furthest; but there are more courageous or more detachable
spirits who venture into more distant regions. These contribute
somewhat toward peopling Bar Harbour in the summer, but they scarcely
characterise it in any degree; while at Campobello they settle in little
daring colonies, whose self-reliance will enlist the admiration of the
sympathetic observer. They do not refuse the knowledge of other colonies
of other stirps and origins, and they even combine in temporary alliance
with them. But, after all, Boston speaks one language, and New York
another, and Washington a third, and though the several dialects have
only slight differences of inflection, their moral accents render each
a little difficult for the others. In fact every society is repellant
of strangers in the degree that it is sufficient to itself, and is
incurious concerning the rest of the world. If it has not the elements
of self-satisfaction in it, if it is uninformed and new and restless,
it is more hospitable than an older society which has a sense of merit
founded upon historical documents, and need no longer go out of itself
for comparisons of any sort, knowing that if it seeks anything better
it will probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, is
as indifferent to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse the
coldness of the Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviour
toward unknown people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.
That love of independence which is notable in us even in our most
acquiescent phases at home is perhaps what brings these cultivated and
agreeable people so far away, where they can achieve a sort of sylvan
urbanity without responsibility, and without that measuring of purses
which attends the summer display elsewhere. At Campobello one might be
poor with almost as little shame as in Cambridge if one were cultivated.
Mrs. Pasmer, who seldom failed of doing just the right thing for
herself, had promptly divined the advantages of Campobello for her
family. She knew, by dint of a little inquiry, and from the volunteer
information of enthusiasts who had been there the summer before, just
who was likely to be there during the summer with which she now found
herself confronted. Campobello being yet a new thing, it was not open to
the objection that you were sure to meet such and such people, more
or less common or disagreeable, there; whatever happened, it could be
lightly handled in the retrospect as the adventure of a partial and
fragmentary summer when really she hardly cared where they went.
They did not get away from Boston before the middle of July, and after
the solitude they left behind them there, the Owen at first seemed very
gay. But when they had once or twice compared it with the Ty'n-y-Coed,
riding to and fro in the barge which formed the connecting link with
the Saturday evening hops of the latter hotel, Mrs. Pasmer decided that,
from Alice's point of view, they had made a mistake, and she repaired it
without delay. The young people were, in fact, all at the Ty'n-y-Coed,
and though she found the Owen perfectly satisfying for herself and Mr.
Pasmer, she was willing to make the sacrifice of going to a new place:
it was not a great sacrifice for one who had dwelt so long in tents.
There were scarcely any young girls at the Owen, and no young men, of
course. Even at the Ty'n-y-Coed, where young girls abounded, it would
not be right to pretend that there were young men enough. Nowhere,
perhaps, except at Bar Harbour, is the long-lost balance of the
sexes trimmed in New England; and even there the observer, abstractly
delighting in the young girls and their dresses at that grand
love-exchange of Rodick's, must question whether the adjustment is
perfectly accurate.
At Campobello there were not more than half enough young men, and there
was not enough flirtation to affect the prevailing social mood of the
place: an unfevered, expectationless tranquillity, in which to-day is
like yesterday, and to-morrow cannot be different. It is a quiet of
light reading, and slowly, brokenly murmured, contented gossip for the
ladies, of old newspapers and old stories and luxuriously meditated
cigars for the men, with occasional combinations for a steam-launch
cruise among the eddies and islands of the nearer waters, or a voyage
further off in the Bay of Fundy to the Grand Menan, and a return for the
late dinner which marks the high civilisation of Campobello, and then
an evening of more reading and gossip and cigars, while the night wind
whistles outside, and the brawl and crash of the balls among the tenpins
comes softened from the distant alleys. There are pleasant walks,
which people seldom take, in many directions, and there are drives and
bridle-paths all through the dense, sad, Northern woods which still
savagely clothe the greater part of the island to its further
shores, where there are shelves and plateaus of rock incomparable for
picnicking.
One need ask nothing better, in fact, than to stroll down the sylvan
road that leads to the Owen, past the little fishing-village with its
sheds for curing herring; and the pale blue smoke and appetising savour
escaping from them; and past the little chapel with which the old
Admiral attested his love of the Established rite. On this road you may
sometimes meet a little English bishop from the Provinces, in his apron
and knee-breeches; and there is a certain bridge over a narrow estuary,
where in the shallow land-locked pools of the deeply ebbing tide you may
throw stones at sculpin, and witness the admirable indifference of those
fish to human cruelty and folly. In the middle distance you will see
a group of herring weirs, which with their coronals of tufted saplings
form the very most picturesque aspect of any fishing industry. You may,
now and then find an artist at this point, who, crouched over his easel,
or hers, seems to agree with you about the village and the weirs.
But Alice Pasmer cared little more for such things than her mother did,
and Mrs. Pasmer regarded Nature in all her aspects simply as an adjunct
of society, or an occasional feature of the entourage. The girl had
no such worldly feeling about it, but she found slight sympathy in the
moods of earth and sky with her peculiar temperament. This temperament,
whose recondite origin had almost wholly broken up Mrs. Pasmer's faith
in heredity, was like other temperaments, not always in evidence, and
Alice was variously regarded as cold, of shy, or proud, or insipid, by
the various other temperaments brought in contact with her own. She
was apt to be liked because she was as careful of others as she was of
herself, and she never was childishly greedy about such admiration as
she won, as girls often are, perhaps because she did not care for it.
Up to this time it is doubtful if her heart had been touched even by the
fancies that shake the surface of the soul of youth, and perhaps it was
for this reason that her seriousness at first fretted Mrs. Pasmer with a
vague anxiety for her future.
Mrs. Pasmer herself remained inalienably Unitarian, but she was aware of
the prodigious-growth which the Church had been making in society, and
when Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not at
all as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it did
not seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughter
should have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.
In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several of
the ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owen
chapel--ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits long
widowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies,
younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alice
was especially a favourite with the three or four who represented their
class and condition at the Ty'n-y Coed, and who read the best books read
there, and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreement
among these ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in the
temperaments of the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did not
understand Alice; but probably there were very few people except herself
whom Mrs. Pasmer did not understand quite well. She understood these
ladies and their compassion for Alice, and she did not in the least
resent it. She was willing that people should like Alice for any reason
they chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter of
futile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and her
trust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the
cult of Alice's friends, as she did at the girl's seriousness, which
also she felt herself able to keep from going too far.
While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whatever
inspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew up
contemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular and
practical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one of
those instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observance
a strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through the
difference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference between
idealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-aged
Boston women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sad
in the beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly owned
that she had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there,
and she knew in a minute she never got those things on this side; her
obeisances and genuflections throughout the service, much more profound
and punctilious than those of any one else there, had apparently not
prevented her from making a thorough study of Alice's costume and a
correct conjecture as to its authorship.
Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook,
tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her
in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood,
with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left
her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in
suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting
over its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave her
profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that
nose to be either irresolute or commonplace, and for good or for ill
Miss Anderson was decided and original. She carried her figure, which
was no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness;
she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies and
tangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with tones
like a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of the
perfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous,
feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.
She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice at
an early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had a
patronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herself
less fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping with
actualities.
“I think she's moybid, Alice is,” she said. “She isn't moybid in the
usual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of the
woyld generally than anybody's going to get out of it. She thinks she's
going to get as much as she gives, and that's a great mistake, Mrs.
Pasmer,” she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letter
which the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would be
tiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.
“Oh yes, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat,
and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss
Anderson's.
“Now, even at church--she carries the same spirit into the church. She
doesn't make allowance for human nature, and the church does.”
“Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Pasmer agreed.
“She isn't like a person that's been brought up in the church. It's more
like the old Puritan spirit.--Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!”
“Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!” said Mrs.
Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care
for them.
“I always forget that you're a Bostonian,” Miss Anderson apologized.
“Oh, thank you!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.
“I'm going to try to make her like other girls,” continued Miss
Anderson.
“Do,” said Alice's mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the
undertaking.
“If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and
a little under fifty, it would be easier,” said Miss Anderson
thoughtfully. “But how are you going to make a girl like other girls
when there are no young men?”
“That's very true,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of
course did her best to make impersonal. “Do you think there will be
more, later on?”
“They will have to Huey up if they are comin',” said Miss Anderson.
“It's the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in
September.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared
over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and
departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.
She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly
that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of
the broad hotel steps.
“What is it, Alice?”
“Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat.”
“Mr. Munt?”
“Yes.” She would not stay for further question.
Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till
she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down
near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on
the balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the
precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a
polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful
astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to
see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was
pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with
her daughter's being, after all, like other girls, when it came to
essentials.