IV

Clearly, none the less, there were puzzles and puzzles, and I had almost

immediately the amusement of waking up to another—this one of a

different order altogether. The point was that if the bewilderments I

have just mentioned had dropped, most other things had dropped too: the

challenge to curiosity here was in the extreme simplification of the

picture, a simplification on original lines. Not that there was not

still much to think of—if only because one had to stare at the very

wonder of a picture so simplified. The thing now was to catch this note,

to keep it in the ear and see, really, how far and how long it would

sound. The simplification, for that immediate vision, was to a broad

band of deep and clear blue sea, a blue of the deepest and clearest

conceivable, limited in one quarter by its far and sharp horizon of sky,

and in the other by its near and sharp horizon of yellow sand

over-fringed with a low woody shore; the whole seen through the

contorted cross-pieces of stunted, wind-twisted, far-spreading, quite

fantastic old pines and cedars, whose bunched bristles, at the ends of

long limbs, produced, against the light, the most vivid of all

reminders. Cape Cod, on this showing, was exactly a pendent, pictured

Japanese screen or banner; a delightful little triumph of

“impressionism,” which, during my short visit at least, never departed,

under any provocation, from its type. Its type, so easily formulated, so

completely filled, was there the last thing at night and the first thing

in the morning; there was rest for the mind—for that, certainly, of the

restless analyst—in having it so exactly under one’s hand. After that

one could read into it other meanings without straining or disturbing

it. There was a couchant promontory in particular, half bosky with the

evergreen boskage of the elegant kakemono, half bare with the bareness

of refined, the _most_ refined, New England decoration—a low, hospitable

headland projected, as by some water-colourist master of the trick, into

a mere brave wash of cobalt. It interfered, the sweet promontory, with

its generous Boston bungalow, its verandahs still haunted with old

summer-times, and so wide that the present could elbow and yet not

jostle the past—it interfered no whit, for all its purity of style, with

the human, the social question always dogging the steps of the ancient

contemplative person and making him, before each scene, wish really to

get _into_ the picture, to cross, as it were, the threshold of the

frame. It never lifts, verily, this obsession of the story-seeker,

however often it may flutter its wings, it may bruise its breast,

against surfaces either too hard or too blank. “The _manners_, the

manners: where and what are they, and what have they to tell?”—that

haunting curiosity, essential to the honour of his office, yet making it

much of a burden, fairly buzzes about his head the more pressingly in

proportion as the social mystery, the lurking human secret, seems more

shy.

Then it is that, as he says to himself, the secret must be most

queer—and it might therefore well have had, so insidiously sounded, a

supreme queerness on Cape Cod. For not the faintest echo of it trembled

out of the blankness; there were always the little white houses of the

village, there were always the elegant elms, feebler and more feathery

here than further inland; but the life of the little community was

practically locked up as tight as if it had _all_ been a question of

painted Japanese silk. And that was doubtless, for the story-seeker,

absolutely the little story: the constituted blankness was the whole

business, and one’s opportunity was all, thereby, for a study of

exquisite emptiness. This was stuff, in its own way, of a beautiful

quality; that impression came to me with a special sweetness that I have

not forgotten. The help in the matter was that I had not forgotten,

either, a small pilgrimage or two of far-away earlier years—the sense as

of absent things in other summer-times, golden afternoons that referred

themselves for their character simply to sandy roads and primitive

“farms,” crooked inlets of mild sea and, at the richest, large

possibilities of worked cranberry-swamp. I remembered, in fine,

Mattapoisett, I remembered Marion, as admirable examples of that

frequent New England phenomenon, the case the consummate example of

which I was soon again to recognize in Newport—the presence of an

_unreasoned_ appeal, in nature, to the sense of beauty, the appeal on a

basis of items that failed somehow, count and recount them as one would,

to justify the effect and make up the precious sum. The sum, at Newport

above all, as I was soon again to see, is the exquisite, the

irresistible; but you falter before beginning to name the parts of the

explanation, conscious how short the list may appear. Thus everything,

in the whole range of imagery, affirms itself and interposes; you will,

you inwardly determine, arrive at some notation of manners even if you

perish in the attempt. Thus, as I jogged southward, from Boston, in a

train that stopped and stopped again, for my fuller enlightenment, and

that insisted, the good old promiscuous American car itself, on having

as much of its native character as possible for my benefit, I already

knew I must fall back on old props of association, some revival of the

process of seeing the land grow mild and vague and interchangeably

familiar with the sea, all under the spell of the reported

“gulf-stream,” those mystic words that breathe a softness wherever they

sound.

It was imperative here that they should do what they could for me, and

they must have been in full operation when, on my arrival at the small

station from which I was to drive across to Cotuit—“across the Cape,” as

who should say, romantic thought, though I strain a point geographically

for the romance—I found initiation awaiting me in the form of minimized

horse-and-buggy and minimized man. The man was a little boy in tight

knickerbockers, the horse barely an animal at all, a mere ambling spirit

in shafts on the scale of a hairpin, the buggy disembodied save for its

wheels, the whole thing the barest infraction of the road, of the void:

circumstances, altogether, that struck the note, the right, the

persistent one—that of my baffled endeavour, while in the neighbourhood,

to catch life in the fact, and of my then having to recognize it as

present _without_ facts, or with only the few (the little white houses,

the feathery elms, the band of ocean blue, the stripe of sandy yellow,

the tufted pines in angular silhouette, the cranberry-swamps stringed

across, for the picking, like the ruled pages of ledgers), that fell,

incorruptibly silent, into the picture. We were still far from our goal,

that first hour, when I had recognized the full pictorial and other

“value” of my little boy and his little accessories; had seen, in the

amiable waste that we continued to plough till we struck, almost with a

shock, the inconsistency of a long stretch of new “stone” road, that,

socially, economically, every contributive scrap of this detail was

required. I drained my small companion, by gentle pressure, of such

sidelights as he could project, consisting almost wholly, as they did,

of a prompt and shrill, an oddly-emphasized “Yes, _sir_!” to each

interrogative attempt to break ground. The summer people had already

departed—with, as it seemed to me, undue precipitation; the very hotel

offered, in its many-windowed bulk, the semblance of a mere huge brittle

sea-shell that children tired of playing with it have cast again upon

the beach; the alignments of white cottages were, once more, as if the

children had taken, for a change, to building houses of cards and then

had deserted _them_. I remember the sense that something _must_ be done

for penetration, for discovery; I remember an earnest stroll, undertaken

for a view of waterside life, which resulted in the perception of a

young man, in a spacious but otherwise unpeopled nook, a clear,

straightforward young man to converse with, for a grand opportunity,

across the water, waist-high in the quiet tide and prodding the

sea-bottom for oysters; also in the discovery of an animated centre of

industry of which oysters again were the motive: a mute citizen or two

packing them in boxes, on the beach, for the Boston market, the hammer

of some vague carpentry hard by, and, filling the air more than anything

else, the unabashed discourse of three or four school-children at

leisure, visibly “prominent” and apparently in charge of the life of the

place. I remember not less a longish walk, and a longer drive, into low

extensions of woody, piney, pondy landscape, veined with blue inlets and

trimmed, on opportunity, with blond beaches—through all of which I

pursued in vain the shy spectre of a revelation. The only revelation

seemed really to be that, quite as in New Hampshire, so many people had

“left” that the remaining characters, on the sketchy page, were too few

to form a word. With this, accordingly, of what, in the bright air, for

the charmed visitor, were the softness and sweetness of impression

_made_? I had again to take it for a mystery.

V

This was really, for that matter, but the first phase of a resumed, or

rather of a greatly-enlarged, acquaintance with the New England village

in its most exemplary state: the state of being both sunned and shaded;

of exhibiting more fresh white paint than can be found elsewhere in

equal areas, and yet of correcting that conscious, that doubtless often

somewhat embarrassed, hardness of countenance with an art of its own.

The descriptive term is of the simplest, the term that suffices for the

whole family when at its best: having spoken of them as “elm-shaded,”

you have said so much about them that little else remains. It is but a

question, throughout, of the quantity, the density, of their shade;

often so thick and ample, from May to November, that their function, in

the social, in the economic, order would seem on occasion to consist

solely of their being passive to that effect. To note the latter,

accordingly, to praise it, to respond to its appeal for admiration,

practically represents, as you pass beneath the great feathery arches,

the only comment that may be addressed to the scene. The charming

thing—if that be the best way to take it—is that the scene is everywhere

the same; whereby tribute is always ready and easy, and you are spared

all shocks of surprise and saved any extravagance of discrimination.

These communities stray so little from the type, that you often ask

yourself by what sign or difference you know one from the other. The

goodly elms, on either side of the large straight “street,” rise from

their grassy margin in double, ever and anon in triple, file; the white

paint, on wooden walls, amid open dooryards, reaffirms itself eternally

behind them—though hanging back, during the best of the season, with a

sun-checkered, “amusing” vagueness; while the great verdurous vista, the

high canopy of meeting branches, has the air of consciously playing the

trick and carrying off the picture. “See with how little we do it; count

over the elements and judge how few they are: in other words come back

in winter, in the months of the naked glare, when the white paint looks

dead and dingy against the snow, the poor dear old white

paint—immemorial, ubiquitous, save as venturing into brown or

yellow—which is really all we have to build on!” Some such sense as that

you may catch from the murmur of the amiable elms—if you are a very

restless analyst indeed, that is a very indiscreet listener.

As you wouldn’t, however, go back in winter on any account whatever, and

least of all for any such dire discovery, the picture hangs undisturbed

in your gallery, and you even, with extended study of it, class it among

your best mementos of the great autumnal harmony. The truth is that, for

six or seven weeks after the mid-September, among the mountains of

Massachusetts and Connecticut, the mere _fusion_ of earth and air and

water, of light and shade and colour, the almost shameless tolerance of

nature for the poor human experiment, are so happily effective that you

lose all reckoning of the items of the sum, that you in short find in

your draught, contentedly, a single strong savour. By all of which I

don’t mean to say that this sweetness of the waning year has not more

taste in the presence of certain objects than in the presence of certain

others. Objects remarkable enough, objects rich and rare perhaps,

objects at any rate curious and interesting, emerge, for genial

reference, from the gorgeous blur, and would commit me, should I give

them their way, to excesses of specification. So I throw myself back

upon the fusion, as I have called it—with the rich light hanging on but

half-a-dozen spots. This renews the vision of the Massachusetts

Berkshire—land beyond any other, in America, to-day, as one was much

reminded, of leisure on the way to legitimation, of the social idyll, of

the workable, the expensively workable, American form of country life;

and, in especial, of a perfect consistency of surrender to the argument

of the verdurous vista. This is practically the last word of such

communities as Stockbridge, Pittsfield, Lenox, or of such villages as

Salisbury and Farmington, over the Connecticut border. I speak of

consistency in spite of the fact that it has doubtless here and there,

under the planted elms, suffered some injury at the hands of the summer

people; for really, beneath the wide mantle of parti-coloured Nature,

nothing matters but the accidental liability of the mantle here and

there to fall thickest. Thus it is then that you do, after a little,

differentiate, from place to place, and compare and even prefer; thus it

is that you recognize a scale and a range of amplitude—nay, more,

wonderful to say, on occasion an emergence of detail; thus it is, in

fine, that, while accepting the just eminence of Stockbridge and

Pittsfield, for instance, you treat yourself on behalf of Farmington to

something like a luxury of discrimination.

I may perhaps not go the length of asserting that Farmington might brave

undismayed the absolute removal of the mantle of charity; since the

great elm-gallery there struck me as not less than elsewhere essentially

mistress of the scene. Only there were particular felicities there

within the general—and anything very particular, in the land at large,

always gave the case an appearance of rarity. When the great elm-gallery

happens to be garnished with old houses, and the old houses happen to

show style and form and proportion, and the hand of time, further, has

been so good as to rest on them with all the pressure of protection and

none of that of interference, then it is that the New England village

may placidly await any comer. Farmington sits with this confidence on

the top of a ridge that presents itself in its fringed length—a straight

avenue seen in profile—to the visitor taking his way from the station

across a couple of miles of level bottom that speak, for New England, of

a luxury of culture; and nothing could be more fastidious and

exceptional, and thereby more impressive in advance, than such

upliftedness of posture. What is it but the note of the aristocratic in

an air that so often affects us as drained precisely, and well-nigh to

our gasping, of any exception to the common? The indication I here

glance at secures for the place in advance, as you measure its

detachment across the valley, a positively thrilled attention. Then

comes, under the canopy of autumn, your vision of the grounds of this

mild haughtiness, every one of which you gratefully allow. Stay as many

hours as you will—and my stay was but of hours—they don’t break down;

you trace them into fifty minor titles and dignities, all charming

aspects and high refinements of the older New England domestic

architecture. Not only, moreover, are the best houses so “good”—the good

ones are so surprisingly numerous. That is all they seem together to

say. “We are good, yes—we are excellent; though, if we know it very

well, we make no vulgar noise about it: we only just stand here, in our

long double line, in the manner of mature and just slightly-reduced

gentlewomen seated against the wall at an evening party (some party

where mature gentlewomen unusually abound), and neither too boldly

affront the light nor shrink from the favouring shade.” That again, on

the spot, is the discreet voice of the air—which quavered away, for me,

into still other admissions.

It takes but the barest semitone to start the story-seeker curious of

manners—the story-seeker impenitent and uncorrected, as happened in this

case, by a lesson unmistakably received, or at least intended, a short

time before. He had put a question, on that occasion, with an expectancy

doubtless too crude; he had asked a resident of a large city of the

middle West what might be, credibly, the conditions of the life

“socially” led there. He had not, at Farmington, forgotten the ominous

pause that had preceded the reply: “The conditions of the life? Why, the

same conditions as everywhere else.” He had not forgotten, either, the

thrill of his sense of this collapse of his interlocutor: the case

being, obviously, that it is of the very nature of conditions, as

reported on by the expert—and it was to the expert he had appealed—to

vary from place to place, so that they fall into as many groups, and

constitute as many stamps, as there are different congregations of men.

His interlocutor was not of the expert—_that_ had really been the

lesson; and it was with a far different poetry, the sweet shyness of

veracity, that Farmington confessed to idiosyncrasies. I have too little

space, however, as I had then too little time, to pretend to have lifted

more than the smallest corner of this particular veil; besides which, if

it is of the essence of the land, in these regions, to throw you back,

after a little, upon the possible humanities, so it often results from

the social study, too baffling in many a case, that you are thrown back

upon the land. That agreeable, if sometimes bewildering, seesaw is

perhaps the best figure, in such conditions, for the restless analyst’s

tenor of life. It was an effect of the fusion he has endeavoured to

suggest; it is certainly true, at least, that, among the craggy hills,

among little mountains that turned so easily, at any opening, to

clearness of violet and blue, among the wood-circled dells that seemed

to wait as for afternoon dances, among the horizons that recalled at

their will the Umbrian note and the finer drawing, every ugliness melted

and dropped, any wonderment at the other face of the medal seemed more

trouble than it was worth. It was enough that the white village or the

painted farm could gleam from afar, on the faintly purple slope, like a

thing of mystery or of history; it was enough that the charming

hill-mass, happily presented and foreshortened, should lie there like

some beast, almost heraldic, resting his nose on his paws.

Those images, for retrospect, insistently supplant the others; though I

have notes enough, I find, about the others too—about the inscrutability

of the village street in general, for instance, in any relation but its

relation to its elms. What _they_ seemed to say is what I have

mentioned; but what secrets, meanwhile, did the rest of the scene keep?

_Were_ there any secrets at all, or had the outward blankness, the

quantity of absence, as it were, in the air, its inward equivalent as

well? There was the high, thin church, made higher, made highest, and

sometimes, as at Farmington, made as pretty as a monstrous Dutch toy, by

its steeple of quaint and classic carpentry; but this monument appeared

to _testify_ scarce more than some large white card, embellished with a

stencilled border, on which a message or a sentence, an invitation or a

revelation, might be still to be inscribed. The present, the positive,

was mainly represented, ever, by the level railway-crossing, gaining

expression from its localization of possible death and destruction,

where the great stilted, strident, yet so almost comically impersonal

train, which, with its so often undesignated and so always unservanted

stations, and its general air of “bossing” the neighbourhoods it warns,

for climax of its characteristic curtness, to “look out” for its rush,

is everywhere a large contribution to one’s impression of a kind of

monotony of acquiescence. This look as of universal acquiescence plays

somehow through the visible vacancy—seems a part of the thinness, the

passivity, of that absence of the settled standard which contains, as I

more and more felt, from day to day, the germ of the most final of all

my generalizations. I needn’t be too prompt with it—so much higher may

it hold its head, I foresee, when it flowers, perfectly, as a

conclusion, than when it merely struggles through the side of the

subject as a tuft for provisional clutching. It sprouts in that soil,

none the less, betimes, this apprehension that the “common man” and the

common woman have here their appointed paradise and sphere, and that the

sign of it is the abeyance, on many a scene, of any wants, any tastes,

any habits, any traditions but theirs. The bullying railway orders them

off their own decent avenue without a fear that they will “stand up” to

it; the tone of the picture is the pitch of their lives, and when you

listen to what the village street seems to say, marking it, at the end,

with your “Is that _all_?” it is as if you had had your account of a

scheme fashioned preponderantly in their image.

I mean in _theirs_ exactly, with as little provision for what is too

foul for them as for what is too fair: the very middle, the golden mean,

of the note of the common, to which the two extremes of condition are

equally wanting; though with the mark strongest, if anywhere, against

dusky misfortune and precarious dependence. The romance of costume, for

better or worse, the implication of vices, accomplishments, manners,

accents, attitudes, is as absent for evil as for good, for a low

connection as for a high: which is why the simplification covers so much

ground, that of public houses, that of kinds of people, that of

suggestions, however faint, of discernible opportunity, of any

deviation, in other words, into the _un_common. There are no “kinds” of

people; there are simply people, very, very few, and all of one kind,

the kind who thus simply invest themselves for you in the grey truth

that they don’t go to the public house. It’s a negative garment, but it

must serve you; which it makes shift to do while you keep on asking,

from the force of acquired habit, what may be behind, what beneath, what

within, what may represent, in such conditions, the appeal of the senses

or the tribute to them; what, in such a show of life, may take the place

(to put it as simply as possible) of amusement, of social and sensual

margin, overflow and by-play. Of course there is by-play here and there;

here and there, of course, extremes _are_ touched: otherwise, the whole

concretion, in its thinness, would crack, and the fact is that two or

three of these strong patches of surface-embroidery remain with me as

curious and interesting. Never was such by-play as in a great new house

on a hilltop that overlooked the most composed of communities; a house

apparently conceived—and with great felicity—on the lines of a magnified

Mount Vernon, and in which an array of modern “impressionistic”

pictures, mainly French, wondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude

Monet, of Whistler, of other rare recent hands, treated us to the

momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning,

between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition. One hadn’t

quite known one was starved, but the morsel went down by the mere

authority of the thing consummately _prepared_. Nothing else had been,

in all the circle, prepared to anything like the same extent; and though

the consequent taste, as a mixture with the other tastes, was of the

queerest, no proof of the sovereign power of art could have been, for

the moment, sharper. It happened to be that particular art—it might as

well, no doubt, have been another; it made everything else shrivel and

fade: it was like the sudden trill of a nightingale, lord of the hushed

evening.

These appeared to be, over the land, always possible adventures;

obviously I should have others of the same kind; I could let them, in

all confidence, accumulate and wait. But, if that was one kind of

extreme, what meanwhile was the other kind, the kind portentously

alluded to by those of the sagacious who had occasionally put it before

me that the village street, the arched umbrageous vista, half so candid

and half so cool, is too frequently, in respect to “morals,” but a

whited sepulchre? They had so put it before me, these advisers, but they

had as well, absolutely and all tormentingly, so left it: partly as if

the facts were too abysmal for a permitted distinctness, and partly, no

doubt, as from the general American habit of indirectness, of positive

primness, of allusion to those matters that are sometimes collectively

spoken of as “the great facts of life.” It had been intimated to me that

the great facts of life are in high fermentation on the other side of

the ground glass that never for a moment flushes, to the casual eye,

with the hint of a lurid light: so much, at least, one had no

alternative, under pressure, but to infer. The inference, however, still

left the question a prey to vagueness—it being obvious that vice

requires forms not less than virtue, or perhaps even more, and that

forms, up and down the prospect, were exactly what one waited in vain

for. The theory that no community _can_ live wholly without by-play, and

the confirmatory word, for the particular case, of more initiated

reporters, these things were all very well; but before a scene peeled as

bare of palpable pretext as the American sky is often peeled of clouds

(in the interest of the slightly acid juice of its light), where and how

was the application to be made? It came at last, the application—that, I

mean, of the portentous hint; and under it, after a fashion, the

elements fell together. Why the picture _shouldn’t_ bristle with the

truth—that was all conceivable; that the truth could only strike inward,

horribly inward, not playing up to the surface—this too needed no

insistence; what was sharpest for reflection being, meanwhile, a couple

of minor appearances, which one gathered as one went. That our little

arts of pathetic, of humorous, portrayal may, for all their claim to an

edifying “realism,” have on occasion small veracity and courage—that

again was a remark pertinent to the matter. But the strangest link in

the chain, and quite the horridest, was this other, of high value to the

restless analyst—that, as the “interesting” puts in its note but where

it can and where it will, so the village street and the lonely farm and

the hillside cabin became positively richer objects under the smutch of

imputation; twitched with a grim effect the thinness of their mantle,

shook out of its folds such crudity and levity as they might, and

borrowed, for dignity, a shade of the darkness of Cencidrama, of

monstrous legend, of old Greek tragedy, and thus helped themselves out

for the story-seeker more patient almost of anything than of flatness.

There was not flatness, accordingly, though there might be dire

dreariness, in some of those impressions gathered, for a climax, in the

Berkshire country of Massachusetts, which forced it upon the fancy that

here at last, in far, deep mountain valleys, where the winter is fierce

and the summer irresponsible, was that heart of New England which makes

so pretty a phrase for print and so stern a fact, as yet, for feeling.

During the great loops thrown out by the lasso of observation from the

wonder-working motor-car that defied the shrinkage of autumn days, this

remained constantly the best formula of the impression and even of the

emotion; it sat in the vehicle with us, but spreading its wings to the

magnificence of movement, and gathering under them indeed most of the

meanings of the picture. The heart of New England, at this rate, was an

ample, a generous, heart, the largest demands on which, as to extent and

variety, seemed not to overstrain its capacity. But it was where the

mountain-walls rose straight and made the valleys happiest or

saddest—one couldn’t tell which, as to the felicity of the image, and it

didn’t much matter—that penetration was, for the poetry of it, deepest;

just as generalization, for an opposite sort of beauty, was grandest on

those several occasions when we perched for a moment on the summit of a

“pass,” a real little pass, slowly climbed to and keeping its other

side, with an art all but Alpine, for a complete revelation, and hung

there over the full vertiginous effect of the long and steep descent,

the clinging road, the precipitous fall, the spreading, shimmering land

bounded by blue horizons. We liked the very vocabulary, reduced to

whatever minimum, of these romanticisms of aspect; again and again the

land would do beautifully, if that were all that was wanted, and it

deserved, the dear thing, thoroughly, any verbal caress, any tenderness

of term, any share in a claim to the grand manner, to which we could

responsively treat it. The grand manner was in the winding ascent, the

rocky defile, the sudden rest for wonder, and all the splendid reverse

of the medal, the world belted afresh as with purple sewn with

pearls—melting, in other words, into violet hills with vague white towns

on their breasts.

That was, at the worst, for October afternoons, the motor helping, our

frequent fare; the habit of confidence in which was, perhaps, on no

occasion so rewarded as on that of a particular plunge, from one of the

highest places, through an ebbing golden light, into the great Lebanon

“bowl,” the vast, scooped hollow in one of the hither depths of which

(given the quarter of our approach) we found the Shaker settlement once

more or less, I believe, known to fame, ever so grimly planted. The

grimness, even, was all right, when once we had admiringly dropped down

and down and down; it would have done for that of a Buddhist monastery

in the Himalayas—though more savagely clean and more economically

impersonal, we seemed to make out, than the communities of older faiths

are apt to show themselves. I remember the mere chill of contiguity,

like the breath of the sepulchre, as we skirted, on the wide, hard floor

of the valley, the rows of gaunt windows polished for no whitest,

stillest, meanest face, even, to look out; so that they resembled the

parallelograms of black paint criss-crossed with white lines that

represent transparency in Nuremberg dolls’-houses. It wore, the whole

settlement, as seen from without, the strangest air of active, operative

death; as if the state of extinction were somehow, obscurely,

administered and applied—the final hush of passions, desires, dangers,

converted into a sort of huge stiff brush for sweeping away rubbish, or

still more, perhaps, into a monstrous comb for raking in profit. The

whole thing had the oddest appearance of mortification made to “pay.”

This was really, however, sounding the heart of New England beyond its

depth, for I am not sure that the New York boundary had not been, just

there, overpassed; there flowered out of that impression, at any rate,

another adventure, the very bravest possible for a shortened day, of

which the motive, whether formulated or not, had doubtless virtually

been to feel, with a far-stretched arm, for the heart of New York. _Had_

New York, the miscellaneous monster, a heart at all?—this inquiry, amid

so much encouraged and rewarded curiosity, might have been well on the

way to become sincere, and we kept groping, between a prompt start and

an extremely retarded return, for any stray sign of an answer.

The answer, perhaps, in the event, still eluded us, but the pursuit

itself, away across State lines, through zones of other manners, through

images of other ideals, through densities of other values, into a

separate sovereign civilization in short—this, with “a view of the

autumnal Hudson” for an added incentive, became, in all the conditions,

one of the finer flowers of experience. To be on the lookout for

differences was, not unnaturally, to begin to meet them just over the

border and see them increase and multiply; was, indeed, with a mild

consistency, to feel it steal over us that we were, as we advanced, in a

looser, shabbier, perhaps even rowdier world, where the roads were of an

easier virtue and the “farms” of a scantier pride, where the absence of

the ubiquitous sign-post of New England, joy of lonely corners, left the

great spaces with an accent the less; where, in fine, the wayside

bravery of the commonwealth of Massachusetts settled itself, for memory,

all serenely, to suffer by no comparison whatever. And yet it wasn’t,

either, that this other was not also a big, bold country, with ridge

upon ridge and horizon by horizon to deal with, insistently, pantingly,

puffingly, pausingly, before the great river showed signs of taking up

the tale with its higher hand; it wasn’t, above all, that the most

striking signs by which the nearness of the river was first announced,

three or four fine old houses overlooking the long road, reputedly Dutch

manors, seats of patriarchs and patroons, and unmistakably rich “values”

in the vast, vague scene, had not a nobler archaic note than even the

best of the New England colonial; it wasn’t that, finally, the Hudson,

when we reached the town that repeats in so minor a key the name of the

stream, was not autumnal indeed, with majestic impenetrable mists that

veiled the waters almost from sight, showing only the dim Catskills, off

in space, as perfunctory graces, cheaply thrown in, and leaving us to

roam the length of a large straight street which was, yes, decidedly,

for comparison, for curiosity, not as the streets of Massachusetts.

The best here, to speak of, was that the motor underwent repair and that

its occupants foraged for dinner—finding it indeed excellently at a

quiet cook-shop, about the middle of the long-drawn way, after we had

encountered coldness at the door of the main hotel by reason of our

French poodle. This personage had made our group, admirably composed to

our own sense as it was, only the more illustrious; but minds

indifferent to an opportunity of intercourse, if but the intercourse of

mere vision, with fine French poodles, may be taken always as suffering

where they have sinned. The hospitality of the cook-shop was meanwhile

touchingly, winningly unconditioned, yet full of character, of local, of

national truth, as we liked to think: documentary, in a high degree—we

talked it over—for American life. Wasn’t it interesting that with

American life so personally, so freely affirmed, the superstition of

cookery should yet be so little denied? It was the queer old complexion

of the long straight street, however, that most came home to me: Hudson,

in the afternoon quiet, seemed to stretch back, with fumbling friendly

hand, to the earliest outlook of my consciousness. Many matters had come

and gone, innumerable impressions had supervened; yet here, in the stir

of the senses, a whole range of small forgotten things revived, things

intensely Hudsonian, more than Hudsonian; small echoes and tones and

sleeping lights, small sights and sounds and smells that made one, for

an hour, _as_ small—carried one up the rest of the river, the very river

of life indeed, as a thrilled, roundabouted pilgrim, by primitive

steamboat, to a mellow, mediæval Albany.