THE next afternoon, while we were sitting in the park waiting for the
Troy band to begin playing, and I was wondering just when they would
reach the “Washington Post March,” which I like because I can always be
sure of it, my unknown friends came strolling our way. The man looked
bewildered and bored, with something of desperation in his troubled eye,
and his wife looked tired and disheartened. The young girl, still in
white duck, wore the same air of passive injury I had noted in her the
night before. Their faces all three lighted up at sight of me; but they
faded again at the cold and meagre response I made to their smiles under
correction of my wife’s fears of them. I own it was base of me; but I
had begun to feel myself that it might be too large a contract to attempt
their consolation, and, in fact, after one is fifty scarcely any romance
will keep overnight.
My wife glanced from them to me, and read my cowardly mind; but she
waited till they passed, as they did after an involuntary faltering in
front of us, and were keeping on down the path, looking at the benches,
which were filled on either hand. She said, “Weren’t those your
friends?”
“They were the persons of my romance.”
“No matter. Go after them instantly and bring them back here, poor
things. We can make room for them.”
I rose. “Isn’t this a little too idyllic? Aren’t you rather overdoing
it?”
“Don’t speak to me, Basil! I never heard of anything so atrocious. Go
on your knees to them if they refuse! They can sit here with me, and you
and he can stand. Fly!”
I knew she was punishing me for her own reluctance; but I flew, in that
sense of the term, and easily overhauled them in the tangle of people
coming and going in the path, and the nursemaids pushing their
perambulators in either direction. Hat in hand I delivered my message.
I could see that it gave the women great pleasure and the man some doubt.
His mouth fell open a little; their cheeks flushed and their eyes shone.
“I don’t know as we better,” the wife hesitated; “I’m afraid we’ll crowd
you.” And she looked wistfully toward my wife. The young girl looked at
her.
“Not at all!” I cried. “There’s an abundance of room. My wife’s keeping
the places for you,”—in fact, I saw her putting her arm out along the
bench, and explaining to a couple who had halted in front of her that the
seats were taken—“and she’ll be disappointed.”
“Well,” the woman consented, with a little sigh of triumph that touched
me, and reanimated all my interest in her and in her friend. She said,
with a sort of shy, instinctive politeness, “I don’t know as you and Mr.
Deering got acquainted last night.”
“My name is March,” I said, and I shook the hand of Mr. Deering. It was
rather thick.
“And this—is our friend,” Mrs. Peering went on, in presentation of me to
the young lady, “Miss Gage, that’s come with us.”
I was delighted that I had guessed their relative qualities so perfectly,
and when we arrived at Mrs. March I glibly presented them. My wife was
all that I could have wished her to be of sympathetic and intelligent.
She did not overdo it by shaking hands, but she made places for the
ladies, smiling cordially; and Mrs. Deering made Miss Gage take the seat
between them. Her husband and I stood awhile in front of them, and then
I said we would go off and find chairs somewhere.
We did not find any till we had climbed to the upland at the south-east
of the park, and then only two iron ones, which it was useless to think
of transporting. But there was no reason why we should not sit in them
where they were: we could keep the ladies in plain sight, and I could not
mistake “Washington Post” when the band came to it. Mr. Deering sank
into one of the chairs with a sigh of satisfaction which seemed to
complete itself when he discovered in the thick grass at his feet a twig
from one of the tall, slim pines above us. He bent over for it, and
then, as he took out his penknife and clicked open a blade to begin
whittling, he cast up a critical glance at the trees.
“Pretty nice pines,” he said; and he put his hand on the one next to us
with a sort of appreciation that interested me.
“Yes; the trees of Saratoga are the glory of the place,” I returned. “I
never saw them grow anywhere else so tall and slim. It doesn’t seem the
effect of crowding either. It’s as if there was some chemical force in
the soil that shot them up. They’re like rockets that haven’t left the
ground yet.”
“It’s the crowding,” he said seriously, as if the subject were not to be
trifled with. “It’s the habit of all these trees—pines and oaks and
maples, I don’t care what they are—to spread, and that’s what we tell our
customers. Give the trees plenty of room; don’t plant ’em too thick if
you want to get all the good out of ’em.” As if he saw a question in my
eye, he went on: “We do a forest-tree business exclusively; these
shade-trees, and walnuts, hickories, chestnuts, and all kinds. It’s a
big trade, getting to be, and growing all the time. Folks have begun to
find out what fools they were to destroy the forests, and the children
want to buy back what the fathers threw away.”
I scarcely needed to prompt him; he was only too glad to talk on about
his business, and he spoke with a sort of homesick fondness. He told me
that he had his nurseries at De Witt Point, up on the St. Lawrence, where
he could raise stock hardy enough for any climate, and ship by land or
water.
“I’ve got to be getting home right away now,” he said finally, clicking
his knife-blade half shut and open with his thumb.
“It’s about time for our evergreen trade, and I don’t want the trees to
stay a minute in the ground after the middle of the month.”
“Won’t the ladies find it hard to tear themselves away from the gaieties
of Saratoga?” I asked with apparent vagueness.
“Well, that’s it,” said Mr. Deering; and he shut his knife and slipped it
into his pocket, in order to take his knee between his clasped hands and
lift his leg from the ground. I have noticed that this is a
philosophical attitude with some people, and I was prepared by it for
some thoughtful generalising from my companion. “Women would be willing
to stay on in a place for a year to see if something wouldn’t happen; and
if you take ’em away before anything happens, they’ll always think that
if they’d stayed something would have happened the next day, or maybe the
day they left.”
He stared upward into the pine boughs, and I said: “Yes, that’s so. I
suppose we should be like them if we had the same conditions. Their
whole life is an expectation of something to happen. Men have the
privilege of making things happen—or trying to.”
“Oh, I don’t know as I want to criticise ’em. As you say, I guess _we_
should be just so.” He dropped his leg, and bent over as if to examine
the grass; he ended by taking a blade of it between his teeth before he
spoke again, with his head still down. “I don’t want to hurry ’em; I
want to give ’em a fair show now we’re here, and I’ll let the stock go as
long as I can. But I don’t see very much gaiety around.”
I laughed. “Why, it’s all gaiety, in one way. Saratoga is a perpetual
Fourth of July, we think.”
“Oh yes; there’s enough going on, and my wife and me we could enjoy it
first rate.”
“If the young lady could?” I ventured, with a smile of sympathetic
intelligence.
“Well, yes. You see, we don’t know anybody, and I suppose we didn’t take
that into account. Well, I suppose it’s like this: they thought it would
be easy to get acquainted in the hotel, and commence having a good time
right away. I don’t know; my wife had the idea when they cooked it up
amongst ’em that she was to come with us. But I _swear I_ don’t know how
to go about it. I can’t seem to make up my mouth to speak to folks
first; and then you can’t tell whether a man ain’t a gambler, or on for
the horse-races anyway. So we’ve been here a week now, and you’re the
first ones we’ve spoken to besides the waiters since we came.”
I couldn’t help laughing, their experience was so exactly as I had
imagined it when I first saw this disconsolate party. In my triumph at
my own penetration, I would not have had their suffering in the past one
pang the less; but the simple frankness of his confession fixed me in the
wish that the future might be brighter for them. I thought myself
warranted by my wife’s imprudence in taking a step toward their further
intimacy on my own account, and I said:
“Well, perhaps I ought to tell you that I haven’t been inside the
Saratoga Club or bet on the races since I’ve been here. That’s my name
in full,”—and I gave him my card,—“and I’m in the literary line; that is,
I’m the editor of a magazine in New York—the _Every Other Week_.”
“Oh yes; I know who you are,” said my companion, with my card in his
hand. “Fact is, I was round at your place this morning trying to get
rooms, and the clerk told me all about you from my description. I felt
as mean as pu’sley goin’; seemed to be takin’ kind of an advantage of
you.”
“Not at all; it’s a public house,” I interrupted; but I thought I should
be stronger with Mrs. March if I did not give the fact away to her, and I
resolved to keep it.
“But they couldn’t rest easy till I tried, and I was more than half glad
there wasn’t any rooms.”
“Oh, I’m very sorry,” I said; and I indulged a real regret from the
vantage I had. “It would have been very pleasant to have you there.
Perhaps later—we shall be giving up our rooms at the end of the month.”
“No,” he said, with a long breath. “If I’ve got to leave ’em, I guess
it’ll be just as well to leave ’em where they’re acquainted with the
house anyway.” His remark betrayed a point in his thinking which had not
perhaps been reached in his talk with the ladies. “It’s a quiet place,
and they’re used to it; and I guess they wouldn’t want to stay through
the rest of the month, quite. I don’t believe my wife would, anyway.”
He did not say this very confidently, but hopefully rather, and I thought
it afforded me an opening to find out something yet more definite about
the ladies.
“Miss Gage is remarkably fine-looking,” I began.
“Think so?” he answered. “Well, so does my wife. I don’t know as I like
her style exactly,” he said, with a kind of latent grudge.
“Her style is magnificent,” I insisted.
“Well, maybe so. I guess she’s good enough looking, if that’s what you
mean. But I think it’s always a kind of a mistake for three persons to
come off together, I don’t care who they are. Then there’s three
opinions. She’s a nice girl, and a good girl, and she don’t put herself
forward. But when you’ve got a young lady on your hands, you’ve _got_
her, and you feel bound to keep doin’ something for her all the time; and
if you don’t know what to do yourself, and your wife can’t tell—”