I LONGED to have the chance of bragging to my wife; but this chance did
not come till the concert was quite over, after I rejoined her with my
companion, and she could take leave of them all without seeming to
abandon them. Then I judged it best to let her have the word; for I knew
by the way she ran her hand through my arm, and began pushing me along
out of earshot, that she was full of it.
“Well, Basil, I think that is the sweetest and simplest and kindest
creature in the world, and I’m perfectly in love with her.”
I did not believe somehow that she meant the girl, but I thought it best
merely to suggest, “There are two.”
“You know very well which I mean, and I would do anything I could for
her. She’s got a difficult problem before her, and I pity her. The
girl’s very well, and she _is_ a beauty; and I suppose she _has_ been
having a dull time, and of course you couldn’t please Mrs. Deering half
so well as by doing something for her friend. I suppose you’re feeling
very proud that they’re just what you divined.”
“Not at all; I’m so used to divining people. How did you know I knew
it?”
“I saw you talking to him, and I knew you were pumping him.”
“Pumping? He asked nothing better than to flow. He would put to shame
the provoked spontaneity of any spring in Saratoga.”
“Well, did he say that he was going to leave them here?”
“He would like to do it—yes. He was very sweet and simple and kind, too,
Isabel. He complained bitterly of the goddess, and all but said she
sulked.”
“Why, I don’t know,” said my wife. “I think, considering, that she is
rather amiable. She brightened up more and more.”
“That was prosperity, or the hope of it, my dear. Nothing illumines us
like the prospect of pleasant things. She took you for society smiling
upon her, and of course she smiled back. But it’s only the first smile
of prosperity that cheers. If it keeps on smiling it ends by making us
dissatisfied again. When people are getting into society they are very
glad; when they have got in they seem to be rather gloomy. We mustn’t
let these things go too far. Now that you’ve got your friends in good
humour, the right way is to drop them—to cut them dead when you meet
them, to look the other way. That will send them home perfectly
radiant.”
“Nonsense! I am going to do all I can for them. What do you think we
can do? They haven’t the first idea how to amuse themselves here. It’s
a miracle they ever got that dress the girl is wearing. They just made a
bold dash because they saw it in a dressmaker’s window the first day, and
she had to have something. It’s killingly becoming to her; but I don’t
believe they know it, and they don’t begin to know how cheap it was: it
was simply _thrown_ away. I’m going shopping with them in the morning.”
“Oh!”
“But now the question is, what we can do to give them some little glimpse
of social gaiety. That’s what they’ve come for.”
We were passing the corner of a large enclosure which seems devoted in
Saratoga to the most distracting of its pleasures, and I said: “Well, we
might give them a turn on the circular railway or the switchback; or we
could take them to the Punch and Judy drama, or get their fortunes told
in the seeress’s tent, or let them fire in the shooting-gallery, or buy
some sweet-grass baskets of the Indians; and there is the pop-corn and
the lemonade.”
“I will tell you what,” said Mrs. March, who had not been listening to a
word I said; for if she had heard me she would not have had patience with
my ironical suggestions.
“Well, what?”
“Or, no; that wouldn’t do, either.”
“I’m glad you don’t approve of the notion, on second thoughts. I didn’t
like it from the beginning, and I didn’t even know what it was.”
“We could have them up to the house this evening, and introduce them to
some of our friends,—only there isn’t a young man in the whole place,—and
have them stay to the charades.”
“What do you think,” I said, “of their having come up this morning and
tried to get rooms at our house?”
“Yes; they told me.”
“And don’t you call that rather forth-putting? It seems to me that it
was taking a mean advantage of my brags.”
“It was perfectly innocent in them. But now, dearest, don’t be tiresome.
I know that you like them as well as I do, and I will take all your
little teasing affectations for granted. The question is, what can we do
for them?”
“And the answer is, I don’t in the least know. There isn’t any society
life at Saratoga that I can see; and if there is, we are not in it. How
could we get any one else in? I see that’s what you’re aiming at. Those
public socialities at the big hotels they could get into as well as we
could; but they wouldn’t be anywhere when they got there, and they
wouldn’t know what to do. You know what hollow mockeries those things
are. Don’t you remember that hop we went to with the young Braceys the
first summer? If those girls hadn’t waltzed with each other they
wouldn’t have danced a step the whole evening.”
“I know, I know,” sighed my wife; “it was terrible. But these people are
so very unworldly that don’t you think they could be deluded into the
belief that they were seeing society if we took a little trouble? You
used to be so inventive! You could think up something now if you tried.”
“My dear, a girl knows beyond all the arts of hoodwinking whether she’s
having a good time, and your little scheme of passing off one of those
hotel hops for a festivity would never work in the world.”
“Well, I think it is too bad! What has become of all the easy gaiety
there used to be in the world?”
“It has been starched and ironed out of it, apparently. Saratoga is
still trying to do the good old American act, with its big hotels and its
heterogeneous hops, and I don’t suppose there’s ever such a thing as a
society person at any of them. That wouldn’t be so bad. But the
unsociety people seem to be afraid of one another. They feel that there
is something in the air—something they don’t and can’t understand;
something alien, that judges their old-fashioned American impulse to be
sociable, and contemns it. No; we can’t do anything for our hapless
friends—I can hardly call them our acquaintances. We must avoid them,
and keep them merely as a pensive colour in our own vivid memories of
Saratoga. If we made them have a good time, and sent them on their way
rejoicing, I confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it
is, they’re a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the
minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot summer
weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer registers
eighty-nine. Don’t you see the advantage of that? I believe I can
ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can think of a fitting
fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in _Every Other Week_. He’ll
get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and strike the hotels and
springs for ad’s.”
“Well,” said Mrs. March, “I wish I had never seen them; and it’s all your
fault, Basil. Of course, when you played upon my sympathies so about
them, I couldn’t help feeling interested in them. We are a couple of
romantic old geese, my dear.”
“Not at all, or at least I’m not. I simply used these people
conjecturally to give myself an agreeable pang. I didn’t want to know
anything more about them than I imagined, and I certainly didn’t dream of
doing anything for them. You’ll spoil everything if you turn them from
fiction into fact, and try to manipulate their destiny. Let them alone;
they will work it out for themselves.”
“You know I can’t let them alone now,” she lamented. “I am not one of
those who can give themselves an agreeable pang with the unhappiness of
their fellow-creatures. I’m not satisfied to study them; I want to
relieve them.”
She went on to praise herself to my disadvantage, as I notice wives will
with their husbands, and I did not attempt to deny her this source of
consolation. But when she ended by saying, “I believe I shall send you
alone,” and explained that she had promised Mrs. Deering we would come to
their hotel for them after tea, and go with them to hear the music at the
United States and the Grand Union, I protested. I said that I always
felt too sneaking when I was prowling round those hotels listening to
their proprietary concerts, and I was aware of looking so sneaking that I
expected every moment to be ordered off their piazzas. As for convoying
a party of three strangers about alone, I should certainly not do it.
“Not if I’ve a headache?”
“Not if you’ve a headache.”
“Oh, very well, then.”
“What are you two quarrelling about?” cried a gay voice behind us, and we
looked round into the laughing eyes of Miss Dale. She was the one
cottager we knew in Saratoga, but when we were with her we felt that we
knew everybody, so hospitable was the sense of world which her kindness
exhaled.
“It was Mrs. March who was quarrelling,” I said. “I was only trying to
convince her that she was wrong, and of course one has to lift one’s
voice. I hope I hadn’t the effect of halloaing.”
“Well, I merely heard you above the steam harmonicon at the switchback,”
said Miss Dale. “I don’t know whether you call _that_ holloaing.”
“Oh, Miss Dale,” said my wife, “we are in such a fatal—”
“Pickle,” I suggested, and she instantly adopted the word in her
extremity.
“—pickle with some people that Providence has thrown in our way, and that
we want to do something for”; and in a labyrinth of parentheses that no
man could have found his way into or out of, she possessed Miss Dale of
the whole romantic fact. “It was Mr. March, of course, who first
discovered them,” she concluded, in plaintive accusation.
“Poor Mr. March!” cried Miss Dale. “Well, it is a pathetic case, but it
isn’t the only one, if that’s any comfort. Saratoga is reeking with just
such forlornities the whole summer long; but I can quite understand how
you feel about it, Mrs. March.” We came to a corner, and she said
abruptly: “Excuse my interrupting your quarrel! Not quite so _loud_, Mr.
March!” and she flashed back a mocking look at me as she skurried off
down the street with astonishing rapidity.
“How perfectly heartless!” cried my wife. “I certainly thought she would
suggest something—offer to do something.”
“I relied upon her, too,” I said; “but now I have my doubts whether she
was really going down that street till she saw that it was the best way
to escape. We’re certainly in trouble, my dear, if people avoid us in
this manner.”
V
“I AM doing it entirely on Mrs. Deering’s account,” said my wife that
evening after tea, as we walked down the side-street that descended from
our place to Broadway. “She has that girl on her hands, and I know she
must be at her wits’ end.”
“And I do it entirely on Deering’s account,” I retorted. “He has both of
those women on _his_ hands.”
We emerged into the glistening thoroughfare in front of the vast hotels,
and I was struck, as I never fail to be, with its futile and unmeaning
splendour. I think there is nothing in our dun-coloured civilisation
prettier than that habit the ladies have in Saratoga of going out on the
street after dark in their bare heads. When I first saw them wandering
about so in the glitter of the shop-windows and the fitful glare of the
electrics everywhere, I thought they must be some of those
Spanish-Americans mistaking the warm, dry air of the Northern night for
that of their own latitudes; but when I came up with them I could hear,
if I could not see, that they were of our own race. Those flat and
shapeless tones could come through the noses of no other. The beauty and
the elegance were also ours, and the fearless trust of circumstance.
They sauntered up and down before the gaunt, high porticoes of the
hotels, as much at home as they could have been in their own houses, and
in much the same dress as if they had been receiving there. The effect
is one of incomparable cheer, and is a promise of social brilliancy which
Saratoga no more keeps than she does that of her other characteristic
aspects; say the forenoon effect of the same thoroughfare, with the
piazzas banked with the hotel guests, and the street full of the light
equipages which seem peculiar to the place passing and repassing, in the
joyous sunlight and out of it, on the leaf-flecked street. Even the
public carriages of Saratoga have a fresh, unjaded air; and to issue from
the railway station in the midst of those buoyant top-phaetons and
surreys, with their light-limbed horses, is to be thrilled by some such
insensate expectation of pleasure as fills the heart of a boy at his
first sally into the world. I always expect to find my lost youth
waiting for me around the corner of the United States Hotel, and I accuse
myself of some fault if it disappoints me, as it always does. I can
imagine what gaudy hopes by day and by night the bright staging of the
potential drama must awaken in the breast of a young girl when she first
sees it, and how blank she must feel when the curtain goes down and there
has been no play. It was a real anguish to me when that young girl with
the Deerings welcomed my wife and me with a hopeful smile, as if we were
the _dramatis personæ_, and now the performance must be going to begin.
I could see how much our chance acquaintance had brightened the
perspective for her, and how eagerly she had repaired all her illusions;
and I thought how much better it would have been if she had been left to
the dull and spiritless resignation in which I had first seen her. From
that there could no fall, at least, and now she had risen from it only to
sink again.
But, in fact, the whole party seemed falsely cheered by the event of the
afternoon; and in the few moments that we sat with them on their
verandah, before going to the music at the Grand Union, I could hear the
ladies laughing together, while Deering joyously unfolded to me his plan
of going home the next morning and leaving his wife and Miss Gage behind
him. “They will stay in this hotel—they might as well—and I guess they
can get along. My wife feels more acquainted since she met Mrs. March,
and I shan’t feel so much like leavin’ her among strangers here I don’t
know when she’s taken such a fancy to any one as she has to your wife, or
Miss Gage either. I guess she’ll want to ask her about the stores.”
I said that I believed the fancy was mutual, and that there was nothing
my wife liked better than telling people about stores. I added, in
generalisation, that when a woman had spent all her own money on dress,
it did her quite as much good to see other women spending theirs; and
Deering said he guessed that was about so. He gave me a push on the
shoulder to make me understand how keenly he appreciated the joke, and I
perceived that we had won his heart too.
We joined the ladies, and I thought that my sufferings for her authorised
me to attach myself more especially to Miss Gage, and to find out all I
could about her. We walked ahead of the others, and I was aware of her
making believe that it was quite the same as if she were going to the
music with a young man. Not that she seemed disposed to trifle with my
grey hairs; I quickly saw that this would not be in character with her;
but some sort of illusion was essential to her youth, and she could not
help rejuvenating me. This was quite like the goddess she looked, I
reflected, but otherwise she was not formidably divine; and, in fact, I
suppose the goddesses were, after all, only nice girls at heart. This
one, at any rate, I decided, was a very nice girl when she was not
sulking; and she was so brightened by her little adventure, which was
really no adventure, that I could not believe I had ever seen her
sulking.
The hotel people did not keep us from going into the court of the hotel,
as I was afraid they might, and we all easily found places. In the
pauses of the music I pointed out such notables and characters as I saw
about us, and tried to possess her of as much of the Saratoga world as I
knew. It was largely there in that bold evidence it loves, and in that
social solitude to which the Saratoga of the hotels condemns the denizens
of her world. I do not mean that the Saratoga crowd is at all a
fast-looking crowd. There are sporting people and gamblers; but the
great mass of the frequenters are plain, honest Americans, out upon a
holiday from all parts of the country, and of an innocence too inveterate
to have grasped the fact that there is no fashion in Saratoga now but the
fashion of the ladies’ dresses. These, I must say, are of the newest and
prettiest; the dressing of the women always strikes me there. My
companion was eager to recognise the splendours which she had heard of,
and I pointed out an old lady by the door, who sat there displaying upon
her vast person an assortment of gems and jewels which she seemed as
personally indifferent to as if she were a show-window, and I was glad to
have the girl shrink from the spectacle in a kind of mute alarm. I tried
to make her share my pleasure in a group of Cubans—fat father, fat
mother, fat daughter—who came down the walk toward us in the halo of
tropical tradition; but she had not the taste for olives, and I saw that
I failed to persuade her of the æsthetic value of this alien element
among us. She apparently could do almost as little with some old figures
of bygone beaus spectrally revisiting the hotel haunts of their youth;
but she was charmed with the sylvan loveliness of that incomparable
court. It is, in fact, a park of the tall, slim Saratoga trees enclosed
by the quadrangle of the hotel, exquisitely kept, and with its acres of
greensward now showing their colour vividly in the light of the
electrics, which shone from all sides on the fountain flashing and
plashing in the midst. I said that here was that union of the sylvan and
the urban which was always the dream of art, and which formed the
delicate charm of pastoral poetry; and although I do not think she quite
grasped the notion, I saw that she had a pleasure in the visible fact,
and that was much better. Besides, she listened very respectfully, and
with no signs of being bored.
In the wait between the two parts of the concert I invited her to walk
around the court with me, and under the approving eye of Mrs. March we
made this expedition. It seemed to me that I could not do a wiser thing,
both for the satisfaction of my own curiosity and for the gratification
of the autobiographical passion we all feel, than to lead her on to speak
of herself. But she had little or nothing to say of herself, and what
she said of other things was marked by a straightforward good sense, if
not a wide intelligence. I think we make a mistake when we suppose that
a beautiful woman must always be vain or conscious.
I fancy that a beauty is quite as often a solid and sensible person, with
no inordinate wish to be worshipped, and this young lady struck me as
wholly unspoiled by flattery. I decided that she was not the type that
would take the fancy of De Witt Point, and that she had grown up without
local attention for that reason, or possibly because a certain coldness
in her overawed the free spirit of rustic love-making. No doubt she knew
that she was beautiful, and I began to think that it was not so much
disappointment at finding Saratoga as indifferent as De Witt Point which
gave her the effect of disgust I had first noted in her the night before.
That might rather have come from the sense of feeling herself a helpless
burden on her friends, and from that young longing for companionship
which is as far as may be from the desire of conquest, of triumph.
Finding her now so gratefully content with the poor efforts to amuse her
which an old fellow like me could make, I perceived that the society of
other girls would suffice to make Saratoga quite another thing for her,
and I cast about in my mind to contrive this somehow.
I confess that I liked her better and better, and before the evening was
out I had quite transferred my compassion from the Deerings to her. It
_was_ forlorn and dreary for her to be attached to this good couple,
whose interests were primarily in each other, and who had not the first
of those arts which could provide her with other company. She willingly
told about their journey to Saratoga, and her story did not differ
materially from the account Deering had already given me; but even the
outward form of adventure had fallen from their experience since they had
come to Saratoga. They had formed the habit of Congress Park by
accident; but they had not been to the lake, or the races, or the House
of Pansa, or Mount M’Gregor, or Hilton Park, or even the outlying
springs. It was the first time they had been inside of the Grand Union.
“Then you have never seen the parlour?” I asked; and after the concert I
boldly led the way into the parlour, and lavished its magnificence upon
them as if I had been the host, or one of the hotel guests at the very
least. I enjoyed the breathlessness of the Deerings so much, as we
walked up and down the vast drawing-rooms accompanied by our images in
the mirrors, that I insisted upon sitting down with them all upon some of
the richest pieces of furniture; and I was so flown with my success as
cicerone that I made them come with me to the United States. I showed
them through the parlours there, and then led them through to the inner
verandah, which commanded another wooded court like that of the Grand
Union. I tried to make them feel the statelier sentiment of the older
hotel, and to stir their imaginations with a picture of the old times,
when the Southern planters used to throng the place, and all that was gay
and brilliant in fashionable society was to be seen there some time
during the summer. I think that I failed in this, but apparently I
succeeded in giving them an evening of dazzling splendour.
“Well, sir, this has been a great treat,” said Mr. Deering, when he bade
us goodbye as well as good-night; he was going early in the morning.
The ladies murmured their gratitude, Mrs. Deering with an emotion that
suited her thanks, and Miss Gage with a touch of something daughterly
toward me that I thought pretty.