I CONCLUDED, after all, to go North. What if father, mother and
Carlotta had travelled while I was studying in a quiet little village?
I felt equal to them in learning, and resolved that I would be in
manners and polish.
I spent a few days in New York, which was very dull, as everybody was
off at the summer resorts. With a pretty heavy draught on father’s
bankers, I filled a trunk or two with the latest styles and started
for Saratoga, where I would spend a few days before joining our family
party at Niagara.
Having paid the hackman as much again as his legal fare, and having
seen my trunks checked through, I took my seat on a stool at one
side of the already crowded deck of the Hudson river boat, which was
steaming and hissing at the wharf like a chained griffin, and gazed,
with the interest of novelty, at the scene before me. The long forests
of masts and yards, with here and there a graceful flag or long
fluttering streamer; the busy, fussy tugs, running hither and thither
like noisy gossips, coughing and sneezing with bad colds; the patient
jades of ferry boats, with their anxious human cargo, hardly waiting
for the dropping of the chains; the ocean steamer looming its dark hull
in the offing, and curling its black festoons of smoke on the morning
sky; the white sailed skiffs leaning gracefully from the wooing wind,
and the small row boat which a bare-armed sailor is sculling right
under our prow, his blue jacket lying on the seat behind him, and the
motion of his body, as he rocks from side to side, slushing the water
about in the bottom of the boat, and wetting one sleeve of the jacket
on the seat; the anchored ships, here and there, looking like immense
laundries, with their rigging and sides covered with the clothes of
the crew, all made me forget for a moment my own existence, till I was
aroused to a consciousness of it by a shrill voice piping in my ear,
“_Herald!_ _Times!_ _Tribune!_”
Having bought a paper, I turned round on my stool and commenced to
read. People continued to crowd in; a hoarse whistle from our boat, or
some other, I could not tell which, a few taps on a very hoarse bell,
and with a shiver, as if the water was cold, we glided from the wharf.
I had read, perhaps, half a column when the rustle of a dress against
my crossed feet attracted my attention, and I peeped under the edge of
my paper. It was a very handsome black silk, and, being caught up over
my foot, showed a beautiful bootee beneath it—an interesting bootee of
purple glove kid, with a dainty high heel, and a firm curving instep—a
bootee tapping the deck carelessly, as if about to execute a pirouette
on its flexible toe. Standing against the silk dress, close to the
bootee, was a pair of boots—large, dignified boots—with broad heels
and thick soles, and coming down over their flat insteps were black
pant legs. Lifting the edge of my paper a little I came in sight of the
skirt of a black cloth coat, and hanging down by the skirt of the coat
was a large white hand holding a morocco travelling bag—the hand of a
middle aged man, white on the fingers and near the thumbs, and shaded
with dark hairs on the side toward the little finger, on which was an
onyx seal ring with P. M. in monogram. I knew the bootee belonged to a
pretty woman, and the boots and hand to an intelligent elderly man, and
to confirm my surmisings I took down the paper with a rattle and looked
up at them. The lady turned her head and looked down at me the same
instant.
“Why, Mr. Smith! is it possible?” she exclaimed.
“Miss Carrover!” I said, rising and blushing.
“Mrs. Marshman, sir. Mr. Marshman! an old friend of mine, Mr. Smith, of
North Carolina.”
Mr. Marshman, a frowning man, with heavy gray brows and a grayer
moustache, gave me his hand and a “glad to know you, sir.”
“Let me make you acquainted with our party,” said Mrs. Marshman,
turning to two ladies and a gentleman, “Mr. Finnock! Mr. Smith, Miss
Sappho Finnock! Miss Stelway!”
I made my obeisance, and, completing the usual commonplace remarks,
“took in” the party.
Mrs. Marshman, as beautiful as ever, but a trifle more mature and
less dashing; Mr. Marshman, as above described; Mr. Finnock, a pale
young man, with very blue eyes and very red lids, and light mossy side
whiskers; he was exquisite in style and supercilious in demeanor, and
very much devoted to Miss Stelway, a dark skinned young lady, with a
short upper lip and very large front teeth, who looked at everything on
the river with an opera glass, and whose conversational powers seemed
limited to the constant ejaculation of:
“See there, how pretty!”
She was rich, though Finnock’s attentions _may_ have been disinterested.
Miss Sappho Finnock was a little lady, not very young, with thin, sandy
hair, which she plastered, classically, around her forehead, and wore
in wiry little curls around the back of her neck. Her eyes were as blue
as her brother’s, and were “near” in their sight, so that she wore
circular gold-rimmed glasses, that magnified her eyes ludicrously when
seen through them. She wore fawn gauntlets, and her fingers, when she
drew off her gloves, were thin and bluish towards the ends. Her waist
was straight from her arms to her skirt, and her neck long and corded.
She was constantly taking notes in a gilt-edged book, and peeping at
me sideways under her glasses, as I sat by her, which I did most of
the way up the river. She opened her eyes a little wider whenever she
spoke, as if she was surprised at her own voice, and spoke with a
sudden quickness and a little jerk out of her head, as if she wanted
to throw the words at you. I soon found that as Mr. Marshman would not
give up Lillian, nor Finnock Miss Stelway, Miss Sappho Finnock was
to be my companion for the voyage. I was not displeased, for she was
entertaining for her very sentimentality, and was not disposed to laugh
at any ignorance of the world I might betray, or any social solecism I
might commit.
In reply to Mrs. Marshman’s inquiries, I informed her that I was going
first to Saratoga to spend a few days, thence to Niagara, where I would
meet our family, just returned from Europe. At the mention of Europe,
Finnock and Miss Stelway regarded me with more interest, and Miss
Finnock increased her smiles and side glances.
We all talked together for some time, when Mr. Marshman left us to
go to his state room, Lillian took a novel from the morocco bag, and
Finnock and Miss Stelway going to the railing to lean over the water,
nothing was left for Miss Finnock and myself, but to walk to the prow
of the boat and take a couple of vacant seats that were there.
“I always think of the Culprit Fay when I pass old Crow Nest” she said,
arranging her skirt. “Are you not fond of poetry? I am, passionately.”
“I enjoy poetry very much,” I said, not knowing how tame the reply
would sound till I had made it.
“I declare I almost cry when I think of that dear little Fay cleaving
the waters to catch the crystal drop, while the great monsters swarm
after him. What do you think is the most descriptive line in the poem,
Mr. Smith.”
“Confound Rodman Drake!” I muttered to myself, for I had not read his
poem, having scarcely touched anything save my text-books since I
had been at Chapel Hill. Fortunately, I remembered a lecture of our
Professor of Rhetoric, on American poetry, in which he had quoted from
the poem in question; I therefore replied, pausing as if to consider:
“Really, Miss Finnock, the whole poem is so full of vivid descriptions
and striking thoughts that it is hard to make a selection; but I think
perhaps the finest passage is that which describes the firefly steed
flinging a glittering spark behind.”
“Ah, yes,” she replied, “I remember that. But I think the tiniest,
sweetest idea is, ‘their wee faces giggling above the brine.’” To
express the _tinyness_ of an idea, she squinted her eyes painfully, and
squeezed her forefingers and thumb together, as if she were holding a
flea.
“To tell the truth, Miss Finnock,” I said, hoping to take her out of
her depth and thereby change the subject, “I greatly prefer the old
classic writers, or even the earlier English poets, to the maudlin
sentimentalists of the present day.”
“Oh, you prefer the classics, do you?” she exclaimed, brightening
her dim looking eyes, “then I am glad we are congenial. Homer is
too nervous in his style, but Pindar is so sweet; and Sappho—do
you know I am named for her?—isn’t her poetry rapturous? and dear
Horace, how pointed and terse he is. Do you know I have studied harder
than anything his Art of Poetry, for I sometimes try to write verses
myself. Did you ever write poetry? It is really difficult. And you
say, too, you like the old English poets? How glad I am! I have a copy
of Chaucer in my trunk, and we can read over some of his Canterbury
Tales together. Then there’s Spencer; isn’t his Fairy Queen perfectly
charming? And Sydney’s Arcadia, do you like that? Sometimes, when I am
sad and gloomy, I even like to read the melancholy musings of poor John
Ford. You’ve read Ford, have you not? and Marlowe?”
Great Heaven! thought I; take her out of her depth indeed! I have only
taken her into it. My only hope to change the subject, and prevent an
exposure of my ignorance, is to speak of her own verses, as I know
she will not quit that theme as long as I appear interested. I said,
therefore, as soon as she ceased speaking,
“You say that you write verses, Miss Finnock? I am sure they are
lovely; and I would esteem it a very high honor and privilege to be
permitted to read your composition.”
“Oh, I could not think of it,” she said, with an attempt at a blush;
“besides, my portfolio is in my trunk, and therefore inaccessible.”
I protested my readiness to go below and have her trunk opened, that I
might satisfy my desire to read her beautiful thoughts, and I insisted
so earnestly that she would give me her keys and permit me to search,
that she said, while she thanked me for my obliging spirit, she would
not trouble me any farther than to get her reticule from Mrs. Marshman,
for, if she was not mistaken, she had in that some verses on the Hudson
that she had composed the summer before.
Of course I was delighted to bring it to her; when she opened it and
took out a yard and a quarter of printed poetry, which she commenced to
read, first making me promise, a naughty boy, not to laugh at anything
in it.
She read the entire yard and a quarter with heaving bosom and unusually
dilated optics; but I cannot inflict upon my readers more than an inch
or two.
The theme of the poem was the launching of the first steamboat, and in
her eyes it seemed an epic fit for Virgil. The lines were these:
THE HUDSON.
“Oh thou mighty, sweeping, rushing river,
Through thy cloud-reflecting bosom grand,
With unfledged wheels the first steamboat proud-
Ly plows, while on its trembling bulwarks stand
The gay, triumphant and prophetic crowd.”
“Oh, that is perfectly enchanting,” I exclaimed, when she had completed
the ninety-third and last verse, feeling assured that, when she thought
so highly of the effort herself, no commendation could be fulsome.
“Pardon the abrupt praise, but Mrs. Browning could not have expressed
the idea of the untried wheels more strikingly than you did, by the
single word ‘unfledged.’”
“You flatter me, indeed, sir,” she said, looking immensely pleased;
“but, to be candid with you, I thought myself that the expression was
original and effective. Can you imagine how I got such an idea?”
“Not unless the fairies brought it to you,” I said, gallantly.
“I was at Yonkers last summer, while composing this piece, and saw a
young duck, with unfledged wings, learning to swim, and immediately I
thought of the steamboat. Remarkable coincidence, was it not?”
“Very remarkable, and all the more striking from that very fact,” I
replied.
“But the most striking stanza in the poem,” she continued, running her
little thin fingers down the paper, and pinching it at a certain verse,
“is the sixty-eighth. Do you remember it?”
“They are all stamped so indelibly on my mind, by their wondrous power
and beauty, that I cannot distinguish them by mere numbers; but I can
easily recognize it if you will read it again.” This I said leaning
forward with an increased air of attention and interest.
“There is no merit about the lines, except that they convey to the mind
a vivid impression of the circumstances,” she said, with a preparatory
cough, and read:
“And should a comet from the starry sky
Fall with its fiery tail along thy bed,
Oh! what a yawning, cracking chasm dry
Would stretch from parched mouth to fountain head.”
“Miss Finnock!” I said, rapturously, “you are as daring as Milton in
your conceptions. Even Dante does not surpass the appalling picture you
draw. I can almost see the long, rugged chasm down which the ships are
rolling over and over, snapping off their masts, the fish floundering
in the steaming pools, while the red serpent of desolation winds its
way down the hissing bed.”
I did not deem it necessary to correct her astronomy by a hint at the
nebulosity of comets, or at the absurdity of the idea that a tail, ten
millions of miles long and half as many broad, could be squeezed into
the channel of the Hudson. I could only admit to myself that if the
tail of a comet was red hot, and small enough to fit the river, her
picture of the effect of its fall was graphic.
She thanked me with many blushes, and as I paused in my comments she
folded up her poetry reluctantly, and returned it to her reticule. As
the bag opened I saw a book in it, and my respect for her erudition,
before which I positively trembled as she ran through the names I
have mentioned, was considerably lessened as I recognized Spalding’s
English Literature, and felt that her learning was “crammed.”
As I felt as confident in my smattering as hers; I talked more boldly,
and we spent the morning in a conversation on literature that would
have made Porson envious at our attainments.
When dinner was announced our party had a private table in the saloon,
and I was embarrassed to find that Mr. Finnock and Miss Stelway were
regarding my table deportment as if that was the Shibboleth on which
they would cut or notice me. Miss Finnock, however, kept me more
employed in attentions to the outer woman than to the inner man, so
that I got on very well, except pouring her glass too full of wine and
making too loud a sip when I tasted mine.
Mr. Marshman had invited an elderly gentleman to dine with him, and was
so absorbed in a political discussion that he completely ignored my
presence; indeed, he seemed to forget that there was any one present
except himself and his patient listener.
Mrs. M. was much annoyed by his neglect of his guests, and wasted many
nods and frowns on him. As he paid no attention to them she spoke to
him:
“Mr. Marshman, pass the claret to Mr. Smith.”
But she might as well have addressed the post of the saloon, for
Marshman was at that moment closing his most forcible argument in favor
of his assumption.
“Mr. _Marshman!_” exclaimed Lillian, a flush on her cheek and a flash
in her eye, “do you know where you are? Mr. Smith’s glass is empty.”
“Oh!—yes—pardon me, my dear,” turning with a confused smile to her,
and anything but a smile to me as he ran my glass over with the crimson
fluid.
For a while there was an awkward pause, during which I felt very much
embarrassed, as having been the innocent cause of the disturbance.
Mrs. M. soon resumed her smile, and said:
“Mr. Marshman thinks he is on the floor of the House whenever he gets
to talking, and forgets his surroundings.”
“Well, my dear,” he said, pouring out a glass of brandy, “excuse my
absent-mindedness. Come, Mr. Debait, since they will not let us finish
our discussion, we will have to join the young folks.”
Mrs. Marshman gave him a sign to notice me, and he said, in a
patronizing, Congressional way:
“What are the times in North Carolina, Mr. Smith? Whom will your people
support in the next Presidential election?”
I was informing him that, as a student, I had not taken much interest
in politics, when Mrs. M. cut in:
“Mr. Marshman, you ought to observe Mr. Smith very closely. He is the
only one who ever really flirted with me.”
“Is he?” returned Mr. Marshman, trying to keep his good humor, though
evidently disliking me. “What did _I_ do with your heart?”
“_You_ flirt? Oh, life!” and Lillian laughed scornfully, as she looked
around at us all. “I was afraid I was getting a little _passé_, and
just took you when you proposed, which you did, you remember, with much
agitation and tremulous fervor.”
We all smiled, as was expected, except Mr. Marshman, who only drew his
bushy brows a little nearer together.
Lillian went on (as what woman will not when she is succeeding in a
tease?).
“You know, Pam, I put you off indefinitely; and, strange to tell, I
received your first letter the very night Mr. Smith and I came so near
loving. If he had talked differently then, perhaps the answer you
received would have been different. You really owe him thanks.”
But Mr. Marshman, instead of taking the jest, grew very red in the
face, and, pushing his chair back, said, angrily:
“You can make the change now, madam, if you desire it,” and left the
saloon.
We looked at Mrs. Marshman, but she was not in the least disconcerted.
“Poor, dear Pam,” she said, running a spoon under the peel of an
orange, “he loves me so dearly that he is morbidly jealous. I’ll have
him pleasant by tea.”
Miss Finnock occupied the remainder of the hour by making original
remarks and comparisons, if similes without a shadow of similarity
could be called original. She said the nut crackers were like
adversity, because their crushing discovered the sound fruit; that
Italian cream was like a coquette’s cheek, both pink and cold; that the
heart of the melon was the heart of humanity, and the black seed black
thoughts; that the lemon floating in the finger bowls was like the
selfishness that mingles with the purest waters of life; and much more
to the same effect.
As Finnock preferred Miss Stelway to the wine, we left the table with
the ladies, and going up on deck I excused myself for my siesta.
As I turned over to the cool side of my pillow, and slid back the
shutter to get the river breeze, I murmured as I dozed off:
“If little Sappho won’t get in earnest I’ll make love to her, just for
the fun of it.”
Late in the afternoon we all met again on deck, and, to my surprise,
Mr. Marshman was by Mrs. Marshman’s side, full of smiles and urbanity.
I could not help thinking of Themistocles’ chain of government.
Miss Finnock was unusually sentimental, and her style of conversation
was a continual flow of heroic verse, with all the necessary inversions
and syncope. She said that the river flashed its wavelet eyes beneath
the sunset’s golden veil, that the mountains donned their purpled
robes, their bald, bare summits, glory crowned: that the houses
nestled ‘long the shore like white ducks resting from their sport; the
steamboats puffed like wearied beasts, the sail boats glided, graceful
swans; and I have no doubt she would have gone on to personalities
about her lonely heart and mine, had not her brother called her to Miss
Stelway.
As they had to spend a day in Albany, we parted there with many
promises to renew our acquaintance at the Springs. The next day found
me with good rooms at the Union Hotel, Saratoga. As I did not know a
single person there, I found it, of course, very dull, and spent the
day sauntering around to look at the various objects of interest. That
night there was a ball at the Union, but there was such a press in the
ball room that I might as well have been in the Mammoth Cave without a
light, for all I could see.
I retired early, leaving directions to the servant to call me soon in
the morning.