II

After that it was plain sailing; in the sense, I mean, of the

respite—temporary at least—of speculation; of feeling impressions file

in and seat themselves as quietly as decorous worshippers (say mild old

ladies with neat prayer-books) taking possession of some long-drawn

family pew. It was absurd what I made of Savannah—which consisted for me

but of a quarter of an hour’s pause of the train under the wide arch of

the station, where, in the now quite confirmed blandness of the Sunday

noon, a bright, brief morning party appeared of a sudden to have

organized itself. Where was the charm?—if it wasn’t already, supremely,

in the air, the latitude, the season, as well as in the imagination of

the pilgrim capable not only of squeezing a sense from the important

city on these easy terms and with that desperate economy, but of reading

heaven knows what instalment of romance into a mere railroad matter. It

is a mere railroad matter, in the States, that a station should appear

at a given moment to yield to the invasion of a dozen or so of

bareheaded and vociferous young women in the company of young men to

match, and that they should all treat the place, in the public eye, that

of the crowded contemplative cars, quite as familiar, domestic, intimate

ground, set apart, it might be, for the discussion and regulation of

their little interests and affairs, and for that so oddly, so innocently

immodest ventilation of their puerile privacies at which the moralizing

visitor so frequently gasps. I recall my fleeting instants of Savannah

as the taste of a cup charged to the brim; I recall the swarming, the

hatless, pretty girls, with their big-bowed cues, their romping swains,

their inveterate suggestion of their having more to say about American

manners than any other single class; I recall the thrill produced by the

hawkers of scented Southern things, sprigs and specimens of flower and

fruit that mightn’t as yet be of the last exoticism, but that were

native and fresh and over-priced, and so all that the traveller could

ask.

But most of all, I think, I recall the quite lively resolve not to give

way, under the assault of the beribboned and “shirt-waisted” fair, to

the provocation of _their_ suggestiveness—even as I had fallen,

reflectively speaking, straight into the trap set for me by the

Charleston bagmen; a resolve taken, I blush to say, as a base economic

precaution only, and not because the spectacle before me failed to make

reflections swarm. They fairly hummed, my suppressed reflections, in the

manner of bees about a flower-bed, and burying their noses as deep in

the _corollæ_ of the subject. Had I allowed myself time before the train

resumed its direction, I should have thus found myself regarding the

youths and the maidens—but especially, for many reasons, the

maidens—quite in the light of my so earnestly-considered drummers, quite

as creatures extraordinarily disconcerting, at first, as to the whole

matter of their public behaviour, but covered a little by the mantle of

charity as soon as it became clear that what, like the poor drummers,

they suffer from, is the tragedy of their social, their cruel exposure,

that treachery of fate which has kept them so out of their place. It was

a case, I more than ever saw, like the case of the bagmen; the case of

the bagmen lighted it here, in the most interesting way, by propinquity

and coincidence. If the bagmen had seemed monstrous, in their occupancy

of the scene, by their disproportioned possession of it, so was not the

hint sufficient that this also explains much of the effect of the

American girl as encountered in the great glare of her publicity, her

uncorrected, unrelated state? There had been moments, as I moved about

the country, when she had seemed to me, for affirmation of presence, for

immunity from competition, fairly to share the field but with the

bagman, and fairly to speak as my inward ear had at last heard him

speak.

“Ah, once _place_ me and you’ll see—I shall be different, I shall be

better; for since I am, with my preposterous ‘position,’ falsely

beguiled, pitilessly forsaken, thrust forth in my ignorance and folly,

what do I know, helpless chit as I can but be, about manners or tone,

about proportion or perspective, about modesty or mystery, about a

condition of things that involves, for the interest and the grace of

life, other forms of existence than this poor little mine—pathetically

broken reed as it is, just to find itself waving all alone in the wind?

How can I do _all_ the grace, _all_ the interest, as I’m expected

to?—yes, literally all the interest that isn’t the mere interest on the

money. I’m expected to supply it all—while I wander and stray in the

desert. Was there ever such a conspiracy, on the part of a whole social

order, toward the exposure of incompetence? Were ever crude youth and

crude presumption left so unadmonished as to their danger of giving

themselves away? Who, at any turn, for an hour, ever pityingly

overshadows or dispossesses me? By what combination of other presences

ever am I disburdened, ever relegated and reduced, ever restored, in a

word, to my right relation to the whole? All I want—that is all I need,

for there is perhaps a difference—is, to put it simply, that my parents

and my brothers and my male cousins should consent to exist otherwise

than occultly, undiscoverably, or, as I suppose you’d call it,

irresponsibly. That’s a trouble, yes—but we take it, so why shouldn’t

they? The rest—don’t you make it out for me?—would come of itself.

Haven’t I, however, as it is, been too long abandoned and too _much_

betrayed? Isn’t it too late, and am I not, don’t you think, practically

lost?” Faintly and from far away, as through dense interpositions, this

questioning wail of the maiden’s ultimate distressed consciousness

seemed to reach me; but I had steeled my sense, as I have said, against

taking it in, and I did no more, at the moment, than all pensively

suffer it again to show me the American social order in the guise of a

great blank unnatural mother, a compound of all the recreant individuals

misfitted with the name, whose ear the mystic plaint seemed never to

penetrate, and whose large unseeing complacency suggested some massive

monument covered still with the thick cloth that precedes a public

unveiling. We wonder at the hidden marble or bronze; we suppose, under

the cloth, some attitude or expression appropriate to the image; but as

the removal of the cloth is perpetually postponed the character never

emerges. The American mother, enshrouded in her brown holland, has, by

this analogy, never emerged; only the daughter is meanwhile seated, for

the inspection of the world, at the base of the pedestal, hypothetically

supporting some weight, some mass or other, and we may each impute to

her, for this posture, the aspect we judge best to beseem her.

My point here, at any rate, is that I had quite forgotten her by the

time I was seated, after dinner that evening, on a bench in the small

public garden that formed a prospect for my hotel at Jacksonville. The

air was divinely soft—it was such a Southern night as I had dreamed of;

and the only oddity was that we had come to it by so simple a process.

We had travelled indeed all day, but the process seemed simple when

there was nothing of it, nothing to speak of, to remember, nothing that

succeeded in getting over the footlights, as the phrase goes, of the

great moving proscenium of the Pullman. I seemed to think of it, the

wayside imagery, as something that had been there, no doubt, as the

action or the dialogue are presumably there in some untoward drama that

spends itself at the back of the stage, that goes off, in a passion, at

side doors, and perhaps even bursts back, incoherently, through windows;

but that doesn’t reach the stall in which you sit, never quickens to

acuteness your sense of what is going on. So, as if the chair in the

Pullman had been my stall, my sense had been all day but of intervening

heads and tuning fiddles, of queer refreshments, such as only the

theatre and the Pullman know, offered, with vociferation, straight

through the performance. I was a little uncertain, afterwards, as to

when I had become distinctively aware of Florida; but the scenery of the

State, up to the point of my first pause for the night, had not got over

the footlights. I was promptly, however, to make good this loss; I felt

myself doing so quite with intensity under the hot-looking stars at

Jacksonville. I had come out to smoke for the evening’s end, and it

mattered not a scrap that the public garden was new and scant and crude,

and that Jacksonville is not a name to conjure with; I still could sit

there quite in the spirit, for the hour, of Byron’s immortal question as

to the verity of his Italian whereabouts: _was_ this the Mincio, _were_

those the distant turrets of Verona, and should I sup—well, if the train

to Palm Beach, arriving there on the morrow in time, should happen to

permit me? At Jacksonville I had, as I say, already supped, but I

projected myself, for the time, after Byron’s manner, into the exquisite

sense of the dream come true.

I was not to sup at all, as it proved, at Palm Beach—by the operation of

one of those odd, anomalous rigours that crop up even by the more

flowery paths of American travel; but I was meanwhile able, I found, to

be quite Byronically foolish about the St. John’s River and the various

structures, looming now through the darkness, that more or less adorned

its banks. The river served for my Mincio—which it moreover so greatly

surpassed in extent and beauty; while the remoter buildings figured

sufficiently any old city of the South. For that was the charm—that so

preposterously, with the essential notes of the impression so happily

struck, the velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges,

the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the

cheap and easy exoticism, the sense as of people feeding, off in the

background, very much _al fresco_, that is on queer things and with

flaring lights—one might almost have been in a corner of Naples or of

Genoa. Everything is relative—this illuminating commonplace, the clue to

any just perception of effects anywhere, came up for the thousandth

time; by the aid of which I easily made out that absolute and impeccable

poetry of site and circumstance is far to seek, but that I was now

immeasurably nearer to some poetic, or say even to some romantic, effect

in things than I had hitherto been. And I had tried to think Washington

relaxed, and Richmond itself romantic, and Charleston secretly ardent!

There always comes, to any traveller who doesn’t depart and arrive with

the mere security and punctuality of a registered letter, some moment

for his beginning to feel within him—it happens under some particular

touch—the finer vibration of a sense of the real thing. He thus knows it

when it comes, and it has the great value that it never need fail. There

is no situation, wherever he may turn, in which the note of that

especial reality, the note of character, for bliss or bale, may not

insist on emerging. The note of Florida emerged for me then on the

vulgar little dusky—and dusty—Jacksonville _piazzetta_, where other

vague persons sat about, amid those spikey sub-tropical things that show

how the South can be stiff as nothing else is stiff; while my rich sense

of it incited me to resent the fact that my visit had been denounced, in

advance, as of an ungenerous brevity. I had few days, deplorably few, no

doubt, to spend; but it was afterwards positive to me that, with my

image, as regards the essence of the matter, richly completed, I had

virtually foretasted it all on my dusky Jacksonville bench and in my

tepid Jacksonville stroll. Such reserves, in a complex of few

interweavings, must impose themselves, I think, even upon foolish

fondness, and Florida was quite remorselessly to appear to me a complex

of few interweavings.