* * * * *
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
_Author’s Edition_
* * * * *
EDINBURGH
DAVID DOUGLAS, CASTLE STREET
1898
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EDINBURGH: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE for
DAVID DOUGLAS
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL AND CO.
I
THE day had been very hot under the tall trees which everywhere embower
and stifle Saratoga, for they shut out the air as well as the sun; and
after tea (they still have an early dinner at all the hotels in Saratoga,
and tea is the last meal of the day) I strolled over to the pretty
Congress Park, in the hope of getting a breath of coolness there. Mrs.
March preferred to take the chances on the verandah of our pleasant
little hotel, where I left her with the other ladies, forty fanning like
one, as they rocked to and fro under the roof lifted to the third story
by those lofty shafts peculiar to the Saratoga architecture. As far as
coolness was concerned, I thought she was wise after I reached the park,
for I found none of it there. I tried first a chair in the arabesque
pavilion (I call it arabesque in despair; it might very well be Swiss; it
is charming, at all events), and studied to deceive myself with the
fresh-looking ebullition of the spring in the vast glass bowls your
goblets are served from (people say it is pumped, and artificially
aërated); but after a few moments this would not do, and I went out to a
bench, of the rows beside the gravelled walks. It was no better there;
but I fancied it would be better on the little isle in the little lake,
where the fountain was flinging a sheaf of spray into the dull air. This
looked even cooler than the bubbling spring in the glass vases, and it
sounded vastly cooler. There would be mosquitoes there, of course, I
admitted in the debate I had with myself before I decided to make
experiment of the place, and the event proved me right. There were
certainly some mosquitoes in the Grecian temple (if it is not a Turkish
kiosk; perhaps we had better compromise, and call it a Grecian kiosk),
which you reach by a foot-bridge from the mainland, and there was a damp
in the air which might pass for coolness. There were three or four
people standing vaguely about in the kiosk; but my idle mind fixed itself
upon a young French-Canadian mother of low degree, who sat, with her
small boy, on the verge of the pavement near the water. She scolded him
in their parlance for having got himself so dirty, and then she smacked
his poor, filthy little hands, with a frown of superior virtue, though I
did not find her so very much cleaner herself. I cannot see children
beaten without a heartache, and I continued to suffer for this small
wretch even after he had avenged himself by eating a handful of peanut
shells, which would be sure to disagree with him and make his mother more
trouble. In fact, I experienced no relief till his mother, having spent
her insensate passion, gathered him up with sufficient tenderness, and
carried him away. Then, for the first time, I noticed a girl sitting in
a chair just outside the kiosk, and showing a graceful young figure as
she partly turned to look after the departing mother and her child. When
she turned again and glanced in my direction, at the noise I made in
placing my chair, I could see two things—that she had as much beauty as
grace, and that she was disappointed in me. The latter fact did not
wound me, for I felt its profound impersonality. I was not wrong in
myself; I was simply wrong in being an elderly man with a grey beard
instead of the handsome shape and phase of youth which her own young
beauty had a right to in my place. I was not only not wounded, but I was
not sorry not to be that shape and phase of youth, except as I hate to
disappoint any one.
Her face was very beautiful; it was quite perfectly beautiful, and of
such classic mould that she might well have been the tutelary goddess of
that temple (if it was a temple, and not a kiosk), in the white duck
costume which the goddesses were wearing that summer. Her features were
Greek, but her looks were American; and she was none the less a goddess,
I decided, because of that air of something exacting, of not quite
satisfied, which made me more and more willing to be elderly and
grey-bearded. I at least should not be expected to supply the worship
necessary to keep such a goddess in good humour.
I do not know just how I can account for a strain of compassion which
mingled with this sense of irresponsibility in me; perhaps it was my
feeling of security that attuned me to pity; but certainly I did not look
at this young girl long without beginning to grieve for her, and to weave
about her a web of possibilities, which grew closer and firmer in texture
when she was joined by a couple who had apparently not left her a great
while before, and who spoke, without otherwise saluting her, as they sat
down on either side of her. I instantly interpreted her friends to be
the young wife and middle-aged husband of a second marriage; for they
were evidently man and wife, and he must have been nearly twice as old as
she. In person he tended to the weight which expresses settled
prosperity, and a certain solidification of temperament and character; as
to his face, it was kind, and it was rather humorous, in spite of being a
little slow in the cast of mind it suggested. He wore an iron-grey beard
on his cheeks and chin, but he had his strong upper lip clean shaven;
some drops of perspiration stood upon it, and upon his forehead, which
showed itself well up toward his crown under the damp strings of his
scanty hair. He looked at the young goddess in white duck with a sort of
trouble in his friendly countenance, and his wife (if it was his wife)
seemed to share his concern, though she smiled, while he let the corners
of his straight mouth droop. She was smaller than the young girl, and I
thought almost as young; and she had the air of being somehow responsible
for her, and cowed by her, though the word says rather more than I mean.
She was not so well dressed; that is, not so stylishly, though doubtless
her costume was more expensive. It seemed the inspiration of a village
dressmaker; and her husband’s low-cut waistcoat, and his expanse of
plaited shirt-front, betrayed a provincial ideal which she would never
decry—which she would perhaps never find different from the most worldly.
He had probably, I swiftly imagined, been wearing just that kind of
clothes for twenty years, and telling his tailor to make each new suit
like the last; he had been buying for the same period the same shape of
Panama hat, regardless of the continually changing type of straw hats on
other heads. I cannot say just why, as he tilted his chair back on its
hind-legs, I felt that he was either the cashier of the village bank at
home, or one of the principal business men of the place. Village people
I was quite resolute to have them all; but I left them free to have come
from some small manufacturing centre in western Massachusetts or southern
Vermont or central New York. It was easy to see that they were not in
the habit of coming away from their place, wherever it was; and I
wondered whether they were finding their account in the present
excursion.
I myself think Saratoga one of the most delightful spectacles in the
world, and Mrs. March is of the same mind about it. We like all the
waters, and drink them without regard to their different properties; but
we rather prefer the Congress spring, because it is such a pleasant place
to listen to the Troy military band in the afternoon, and the more or
less vocal concert in the evening. All the Saratoga world comes and goes
before us, as we sit there by day and by night, and we find a perpetual
interest in it. We go and look at the deer (a herd of two, I think)
behind their wire netting in the southward valley of the park, and we
would feed the trout in their blue tank if we did not see them suffering
with surfeit, and hanging in motionless misery amid the clear water under
a cloud of bread crumbs. We are such devotees of the special attractions
offered from time to time that we do not miss a single balloon ascension
or pyrotechnic display. In fact, it happened to me one summer that I
studied so earnestly and so closely the countenance of the lady who went
up (in trunk-hose), in order to make out just what were the emotions of a
lady who went up every afternoon in a balloon, that when we met near the
end of the season in Broadway I thought I must have seen her somewhere in
society, and took off my hat to her (she was not at the moment in
trunk-hose). We like going about to the great hotels, and sponging on
them for the music in the forenoon; we like the gaudy shops of modes kept
by artists whose addresses are French and whose surnames are Irish; and
the bazaars of the Armenians and Japanese, whose rugs and bric-à-brac are
not such bargains as you would think. We even go to the races sometimes;
we are not sure it is quite right, but as we do not bet, and are never
decided as to which horse has won, it is perhaps not so wrong as it might
be.
Somehow I could not predicate these simple joys of the people I have been
talking of, for the very reason, that they were themselves so simple. It
was our sophistication which enabled us to taste pleasures which would
have been insipidities to them. Their palates would have demanded other
flavours—social excitements, balls, flirtations, almost escapades. I
speak of the two women; the man, doubtless, like most other Americans of
his age, wanted nothing but to get back to business in the small town
where he was important; and still more I speak of the young girl; for the
young wife I fancied very willing to go back to her house-keeping, and to
be staying on in Saratoga only on her friend’s account.