Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting
indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out
of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to
be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the
sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They
would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but,
when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had
no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first
vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into
any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a
transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive
houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means
very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms
looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when
there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most
personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end
of it was a famous city gate--Bootham Bar, namely--with a practicable
portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into “the
chamber over the gate,” where it was once worked, and whence its lower
beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there
was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide
travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them
from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and
Bootham Bar is never closed.
The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town
on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine
that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking
it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to
give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and
top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of
England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair,
and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday
best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There
was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that
without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for
under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys,
with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a
moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it
with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were
far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and
at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to
hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque,
into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their
condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down,
perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we
made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a
barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have
commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first
time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise,
I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like
those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham
Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and
feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.
There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores,
newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and
there was one united florist’s and fruiterer’s which I particularly
liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout
man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our
speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and
wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my
breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in
England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always
fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence,
as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he
said one day, “Ah, the Americans are clever people.” Then he added,
“I hope you won’t mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are
rather harder than our English ladies, sir.”
“Yes,” I eagerly assented. “How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?”
“Well, not just that, sir.”
“More practical? More business-like?” I pursued.
“Well, I shouldn’t like to say that, sir. But--they seem rather harder,
sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather
harder, sir.”
We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I
bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September
had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter
was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty,
and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women
resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their
advantage with the summer hardness of our women.