 | Mrs. Skaggs's husbands, and other sketches |  |
SIDEWALKINGS.
THE time occupied in walking to and from my
business I have always found to yield me
a certain mental enjoyment which no other part
of the twenty-four hours could give. Perhaps the
physical exercise may have acted as a gentle stimulant
of the brain, but more probably the comfortable
consciousness that I could not reasonably be
expected to be doing anything else — to be studying
or improving my mind, for instance — always
gave a joyous liberty to my fancy. I once thought
it necessary to employ this interval in doing sums
in arithmetic, — in which useful study I was and
still am lamentably deficient, — but after one or two
attempts at peripatetic computation, I gave it up.
I am satisfied that much enjoyment is lost to the
world by this nervous anxiety to improve our leisure
moments, which, like the “shining hours” of
Dr. Watts, unfortunately offer the greatest facilities
for idle pleasure. I feel a profound pity for those
misguided beings who are still impelled to carry
text-books with them in cars, omnibuses, and ferryboats,
and who generally manage to defraud themselves
of those intervals of rest they most require.
covers her exhausted fields with flowers instead of
grain. Deny her this, and the next crop suffers for
it. I offer this axiom as some apology for obtruding
upon the reader a few of the speculations which
have engaged my mind during these daily perambulations.
Few Californians know how to lounge gracefully.
Business habits, and a deference to the custom, even
with those who have no business, give an air of
restless anxiety to every pedestrian. The exceptions
to this rule are apt to go to the other extreme,
and wear a defiant, obtrusive kind of indolence
which suggests quite as much inward disquiet and
unrest. The shiftless lassitude of a gambler can
never be mistaken for the lounge of a gentleman.
Even the brokers who loiter upon Montgomery
Street at high noon are not loungers. Look at them
closely and you will see a feverishness and anxiety
under the mask of listlessness. They do not lounge
— they lie in wait. No surer sign, I imagine, of
our peculiar civilization can be found than this lack
of repose in its constituent elements. You cannot
keep Californians quiet even in their amusements.
They dodge in and out of the theatre, opera, and
lecture-room; they prefer the street cars to walking
because they think they get along faster. The
difference of locomotion between Broadway, New
York, and Montgomery Street, San Francisco, is a
There is a habit peculiar to many walkers, which
Punch, some years ago, touched upon satirically,
but which seems to have survived the jester's ridicule.
It is that custom of stopping friends in the
street, to whom we have nothing whatever to communicate,
but whom we embarrass for no other
purpose than simply to show our friendship. Jones
meets his friend Smith, whom he has met in nearly
the same locality but a few hours before. During
that interval, it is highly probable that no event
of any importance to Smith, nor indeed to Jones,
which by a friendly construction Jones could imagine
Smith to be interested in, has occurred, or is
likely to occur. Yet both gentlemen stop and shake
hands earnestly. “Well, how goes it?” remarks
Smith with a vague hope that something may have
happened. “So so,” replies the eloquent Jones,
feeling intuitively the deep vacuity of his friend
answering to his own. A pause ensues, in which
both gentlemen regard each other with an imbecile
smile and a fervent pressure of the hand. Smith
draws a long breath and looks up the street; Jones
sighs heavily and gazes down the street. Another
pause, in which both gentlemen disengage their
respective hands and glance anxiously around for
some conventional avenue of escape. Finally,
Smith (with a sudden assumption of having forgotten
“Well, I must be off,” — a remark instantly
echoed by the voluble Jones, and these gentlemen
separate, only to repeat their miserable formula
the next day. In the above example I have
compassionately shortened the usual leave-taking,
which, in skilful hands, may be protracted to a
length which I shudder to recall. I have sometimes,
when an active participant in these atrocious
transactions, lingered in the hope of saying something
natural to my friend (feeling that he, too,
was groping in the mazy labyrinths of his mind
for a like expression), until I have felt that we
ought to have been separated by a policeman. It
is astonishing how far the most wretched joke will
go in these emergencies, and how it will, as it were,
convulsively detach the two cohering particles. I
have laughed (albeit hysterically) at some witticism
under cover of which I escaped, that five minutes
afterward I could not perceive possessed a grain of
humor. I would advise any person who may fall
into this pitiable strait, that, next to getting in the
way of a passing dray and being forcibly disconnected,
a joke is the most efficacious. A foreign
phrase often may be tried with success; I have
sometimes known Au revoir pronounced “O-reveer,”
to have the effect (as it ought) of severing friends.
But this is a harmless habit compared to a certain
reprehensible practice in which sundry feeble-minded
in the street and enthusiastically accosted by some
fashionable young man, who has engaged me in
animated conversation, until (quite accidentally) a
certain young belle would pass, whom my friend, of
course, saluted. As, by a strange coincidence, this
occurred several times in the course of the week,
and as my young friend's conversational powers
invariably flagged after the lady had passed, I am
forced to believe that the deceitful young wretch
actually used me as a conventional background to
display the graces of his figure to the passing fair.
When I detected the trick, of course I made a point
of keeping my friend, by strategic movements,
with his back toward the young lady, while I bowed
to her myself. Since then, I understand that it is
a regular custom of these callow youths to encounter
each other, with simulated cordiality, some paces
in front of the young lady they wish to recognize,
so that she cannot possibly cut them. The corner
of California and Montgomery streets is their
favorite haunt. They may be easily detected by
their furtive expression of eye, which betrays
them even in the height of their apparent enthusiasm.
Speaking of eyes, you can generally settle the
average gentility and good breeding of the people
you meet in the street by the manner in which
they return or evade your glance. “A gentleman,”
There is just enough abstraction in his
look to denote his individual power and the capacity
for self-contemplation, while he is, nevertheless,
quietly and unobtrusively observant. He does
not seek, neither does he evade your observation.
Snobs and prigs do the first; bashful and mean
people do the second. There are some men who,
on meeting your eye, immediately assume an expression
quite different from the one which they
previously wore, which, whether an improvement
or not, suggests a disagreeable self-consciousness.
Perhaps they fancy they are betraying something.
There are others who return your look with
unnecessary defiance, which suggests a like concealment.
The symptoms of the eye are generally
borne out in the figure. A man is very apt to
betray his character by the manner in which he
appropriates his part of the sidewalk. The man
who resolutely keeps the middle of the pavement,
and deliberately brushes against you, you may be
certain would take the last piece of pie at the
hotel table, and empty the cream-jug on its way to
your cup. The man who sidles by you, keeping
close to the houses, and selecting the easiest planks,
manages to slip through life in some such way, and
to evade its sternest duties. The awkward man,
who gets in your way, and throws you back upon
the man behind you, and so manages to derange the
apt to do the same thing in political and social
economy. The inquisitive man, who deliberately
shortens his pace, so that he may participate in the
confidence you impart to your companion, has an
eye not unfamiliar to keyholes, and probably opens
his wife's letters. The loud man, who talks with
the intention of being overheard, is the same egotist
elsewhere. If there was any justice in Iago's
sneer, that there were some “so weak of soul that
in their sleep they mutter their affairs,” what shall
be said of the walking revery-babblers? I have
met men who were evidently rolling over, “like a
sweet morsel under the tongue,” some speech they
were about to make, and others who were framing
curses. I remember once that, while walking behind
an apparently respectable old gentleman, he
suddenly uttered the exclamation, “Well, I 'm
d—d!” and then quietly resumed his usual manner.
Whether he had at that moment become
impressed with a truly orthodox disbelief in his
ultimate salvation, or whether he was simply
indignant, I never could tell.
I have been hesitating for some time to speak —
or if indeed to speak at all—of that lovely and critic-defying
sex, whose bright eyes and voluble prattle
have not been without effect in tempering the austerities
of my peripatetic musing. I have been
humbly thankful that I have been permitted to
which seem to have brought the birds and flowers
of spring within the dreary limits of the town, and
— I trust I shall not be deemed unkind in saying
it — my pleasure was not lessened by the reflection
that the display, to me at least, was inexpensive.
I have walked in — and I fear occasionally on —
the train of the loveliest of her sex who has preceded
me. If I have sometimes wondered why two
young ladies always began to talk vivaciously on
the approach of any good-looking fellow; if I have
wondered whether the mirror-like qualities of all
large show-windows at all influenced their curiosity
regarding silks and calicoes; if I have ever entertained
the same ungentlemanly thought concerning
daguerreotype show-cases; if I have ever misinterpreted
the eye-shot which has passed between
two pretty women — more searching, exhaustive
and sincere than any of our feeble ogles; if I have
ever committed these or any other impertinences,
it was only to retire beaten and discomfited, and
to confess that masculine philosophy, while it soars
beyond Sirius and the ring of Saturn, stops short at
the steel periphery which encompasses the simplest
school-girl.
| Mrs. Skaggs's husbands, and other sketches | |