 | V.
THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. Their wedding journey |  |
5. V.
THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.
They knew
none of the hotels
in Rochester,
and they
had chosen a
certain one in
reliance upon
their handbook.
When
they named it,
there stepped
forth a porter
of an incredibly cordial and pleasant countenance,
who took their travelling-bags, and led them to
the omnibus. As they were his only passengers,
the porter got inside with them, and seeing their
interest in the streets through which they rode,
he descanted in a strain of cheerful pride upon
the city's prosperity and character, and gave
the names of the people who lived in the finer
houses, just as if it had been an Old-World town,
and he some eager historian expecting reward for
his comment upon it. He cast quite a glamour
bordered by houses, and overlooked by odd balconies
and galleries, and crossed in the distance by
a bridge upon which other houses were built, they
boldly declared, being at their wit's end for a comparison,
and taken with the unhoped-for picturesqueness,
that it put them in mind of Verona.
Thus they reached their hotel in almost a spirit of
foreign travel, and very willing to verify the pleasant
porter's assurance that they would like it, for
everybody liked it; and it was with a sudden sinking
of the heart that Basil beheld presiding over
the register the conventional American hotel clerk.
He was young, he had a neat mustache and well-brushed
hair; jeweled studs sparkled in his shirtfront,
and rings on his white hands; a gentle
disdain of the travelling public breathed from his
person in the mystical odors of Ihlang ihlang. He
did not lift his haughty head to look at the wayfarer
who meekly wrote his name in the register;
he did not answer him when he begged for a cool
room; he turned to the board on which the keys
hung, and, plucking one from it, slid it towards
Basil on the marble counter, touched a bell for a
call-boy, whistled a bar of Offenbach, and as he
wrote the number of the room against Basil's name,
said to a friend lounging near him, as if resuming a
conversation, “Well, she 's a mighty pooty gul,
any way, Chawley!”
When I reflect that this was a type of the hotel
unnumbered registers at this moment he is snubbing
travellers into the dust, and that they are suffering
and perpetuating him, I am lost in wonder at
the national meekness. Not that I am one to refuse
Abjectly I take my key, and creep off up stairs
after the call-boy, and try to give myself the genteel
air of one who has not been stepped upon.
But I think homicidal things all the same, and I
rejoice that in the safety of print I can cry out
against the despot, whom I have not the presence
to defy. “You vulgar and cruel little soul,” I say,
and I imagine myself breathing the words to his
teeth, “why do you treat a weary stranger with this
ignominy? I am to pay well for what I get, and
I shall not complain of that. But look at me, and
own my humanity; confess by some civil action,
by some decent phrase, that I have rights and that
they shall be respected. Answer my proper questions;
respond to my fair demands. Do not slide
my key at me; do not deny me the poor politeness
of a nod as you give it in my hand. I am not your
equal; few men are; but I shall not presume upon
your clemency. Come, I also am human!”
Basil found that, for his sin in asking for a cool
room, the clerk had given them a chamber into
which the sun had been shining the whole afternoon;
but when his luggage had been put in it
seemed useless to protest, and like a true American,
like you, like me, he shrank from asserting himself.
When the sun went down it would be cool enough;
and they turned their thoughts to supper, not venturning
to hope that, as it proved, the handsome
clerk was the sole blemish of the house.
Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evidences
of luxury afforded by all the appointments
of a hotel so far west of Boston, and they both began
to feel that natural ease and superiority which
an inn alwansnspires in its guests, and which our
great hotelsZZ, far from impairing, enhance in flattering
degree; in fact, the clerk once forgotten, I protest,
for my own part, I am never more conscious of
my merits and riches in any other place. One has
there the romance of being a stranger and a mystery
to every one else, and lives in the alluring possibility
of not being found out a most ordinary person.
They were so late in coming to the supper-room,
that they found themselves alone in it. At the door
they had a bow from the head-waiter, who ran before
them and drew out chairs for them at a table,
and signaled waiters to serve them, first laying before
them with a gracious flourish the bill of fare.
A force of servants flocked about them, as if to contest
the honor of ordering their supper; one set
upon the table a heaping vase of strawberries, another
flanked it with flagons of cream, a third accompanied
it with cates of varied flavor and device;
a fourth obsequiously smoothed the table-cloth; a
fifth, the youngest of the five, with folded arms
stood by and admired the satisfaction the rest
were giving. When these had been dispatched for
steak, for broiled white-fish of the lakes, — noblest
and delicatest of the fish that swim, — for broiled
chicken, for fried potatoes, for muffins, for whatever
wayfarers could suggest, this fifth waiter remained
to tempt them to further excess, and vainly proposed
some kind of eggs, — fried eggs, poached
eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, or omelette.
“O, you're sure, dearest, that this isn't a vision
of fairy-land, which will vanish presently, and leave
us empty and forlorn?” plaintively murmured Isabel,
as the menial train reappeared, bearing the
supper they had ordered and set it smoking down.
Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon
her face, and she let fall her knife and fork. “You
don't think, Basil,” she faltered, “that they could
have found out we're a bridal party, and that
they're serving us so magnificently because — because
— O, I shall be miserable every moment
we're here!” she concluded desperately.
She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a
woman with so much broiled white-fish on her
plate, and such a banquet array about her; and
her husband made haste to reassure her. “You're
still demoralized, Isabel, by our sufferings at the
Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings we
enjoy, though I should be sorry to undervalue them.
I suspect it 's the custom to use people well at this
hotel; or if we are singled out for uncommon favor,
I think I can explain the cause. It has been discovered
by the register that we are from Boston,
and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection,
and homage which the name everywhere commands.
intellectual and moral virtue of Boston. This supper
is not a tribute to you as a bride, but as a Bostonian.”
It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it
served. It kindled the local pride of Isabel to self-defense,
and in the distraction of the effort she forgot
her fears; she returned with renewed appetite
to the supper, and in its excellence they both let fall
their dispute, — which ended, of course, in Basil's
abject confession that Boston was the best place in
the world, and nothing but banishment could make
him live elsewhere, — and gave themselves up, as
usual, to the delight of being just what and where
they were. At last, the natural course brought
them to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter
approached from the corner of the table at which he
stood, to place the vase near them, he did not retire
at once, but presently asked if they were from
the West.
Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were
from the East.
He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if
he went further, but took heart, then, and asked,
“Don't you think this is a pretty nice hotel” —
hastily adding as a concession of the probable existance
of much finer things at the East — “for a
small hotel?”
They imagined this waiter as new to his station
in life, as perhaps just risen to it from some country
seemed their sympathetic presence. They were
charmed to have invited his guileless confidence, to
have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his
soul; it was what might have happened in Italy,
only there so much naïveté would have meant
money; they looked at each other with rapture,
and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed
as at a personal compliment: “Yes, it 's a nice hotel;
one of the best I ever saw, East or West, in
Europe or America.”
They rose and left the room, and were bowed out
by the head-waiter.
“How perfectly idyllic!” cried Isabel. “Is
this Rochester, New York, or is it some vale of
Arcady? Let 's go out and see.”
They walked out into the moonlit city, up and
down streets that seemed very stately and fine,
amidst a glitter of shop-window lights; and then,
less of their own motion than of mere error, they
quitted the business quarter, and found themselves
in a quiet avenue of handsome residences, — the
Beacon Street of Rochester, whatever it was called.
They said it was a night and a place for lovers, for
none but lovers, for lovers newly plighted, and they
made believe to bemoan themselves that, hold each
other dear as they would, the exaltation, the thrill,
the glory of their younger love was gone. Some of
the houses had gardened spaces about them, from
which stole, like breaths of sweetest and saddest regret,
despair of the rose for the bud. As they passed a
certain house, a song fluttered out of the open window
and ceased, the piano warbled at the final rush
of fingers over its chords, and they saw her with
her fingers resting lightly on the keys, and her
graceful head lifted to look into his; they saw him
with his arm yet stretched across to the leaves of
music he had been turning, and his face lowered to
meet her gaze.
“Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there!”
“And if they knew that we, on our wedding
journey, stood outside, would not they wish it was
they, here?”
“I suppose so, dearest, and yet, once-upon-a-time
was sweet. Pass on; and let us see what
charm we shall find next in this enchanted city.”
“Yes, it is an enchanted city to us,” mused Basil,
aloud, as they wandered on, “and all strange cities
are enchanted. What is Rochester to the Rochesterese?
A place of a hundred thousand people, as
we read in our guide, an immense flour interest, a
great railroad entrepôt, an unrivaled nursery trade,
a university, two commercial colleges, three collegiate
institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free
library. I dare say any respectable resident would
laugh at us sentimentalizing over his city. But
Rochester is for us, who don't know it at all, a city
of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers
hovering over piano-fortes, of a palatial hotel with
streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of
the golden age. The only definite association with
it in our minds is the tragically romantic thought
that here Sam Patch met his fate.”
“And who in the world was Sam Patch?”
“Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American
woman should be proud of distresses me. Have
you really, then, never heard of the man who invented
the saying, `Some things can be done as
well as others,' and proved it by jumping over
Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this belief,
he attempted the leap of the Genesee Falls. The
leap was easy enough, but the coming up again
was another matter. He failed in that. It was
the one thing that could not be done as well as
others.”
“Dreadful!” said Isabel, with the cheerfullest
satisfaction. “But what has all that to do with
Rochester?”
“Now, my dear! You don't mean to say you
didn't know that the Genesee Falls were at Rochester?
Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we're
within ten minutes' walk of them now.”
“Then walk to them at once!” cried Isabel,
wholly unabashed, and in fact unable to see what
he had to be ashamed of. “Actually, I believe
you would have allowed me to leave Rochester
without telling me the falls were here, if you hadn't
happened to think of Sam Patch.”
Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief
object of their journey had been to visit the scene
of Sam Patch's fatal exploit, and she drew Basil
with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the
railroad station, beyond which he said were the
falls. Presently, after threading their way among
a multitude of locomotives, with and without trains
attached, that backed and advanced, or stood still,
hissing impatiently on every side, they passed
through the station to a broad planking above the
river on the other side, and thence, after encounter
of more locomotives, they found, by dint of much
asking, a street winding up the hill-side to the left,
and leading to the German Bierhaus that gives
access to the best view of the cataract.
The Americans have characteristically bordered
the river with manufactures, making every drop
work its passage to the brink; while the Germans
have as characteristically made use of the beauty
left over, and have built a Bierhaus where they
may regale both soul and sense in the presence of
the cataract. Our travellers might, in another
mood and place, have thought it droll to arrive at
that sublime spectacle through a Bierhaus, but in
this enchanted city it seemed to have a peculiar
fitness.
A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival space
occupied by many tables, each of which was surrounded
by a group of clamorous Germans of either
sex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lager
flamed the gas in globes of varicolored glass; the
fatherland; and the wedding-journeyers were fain
to linger on their way, to dwell upon that scene
of honest enjoyment, to inhale the mingling odors
of beer and of pipes, and of the pungent cheeses
in which the children of the fatherland delight.
Amidst the inspiriting clash of plates and glasses,
the rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse rush
of gutturals, they could catch the words Franzosen,
Kaiser, König, and Schlacht, and they knew that
festive company to be exulting in the first German
triumphs of the war, which were then the day's
news; they saw fists shaken at noses in fierce exchange
of joy, arms tossed abroad in wild congratulation,
and health-pouring goblets of beer lifted in
air. Then they stepped into the moonlight again,
and heard only the solemn organ stops of the cataract.
Through garden-ground they were led by
the little maid, their guide, to a small pavilion that
stood on the edge of the precipitous shore, and
commanded a perfect view of the falls. As they
entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly
lovers, passed out, and they were left alone with
that sublime presence. Something of definiteness
was to be desired in the spectacle, but there was
ample compensation in the mystery with which the
broad effulgence and the dense unluminous shadows
of the moonshine invested it. The light touched
all the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe
away from the brink of the cataract, and then desperately
disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom
of the vast and deep ravine through which the river
rushed away. Now the waters seemed to mass
themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy
compactness, now to disperse into their multitudinous
particles and hang like some vaporous cloud
from the cliff. Every moment renewed the vision
of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape; and
its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the great town
on the other shore, the station with its bridge and
its trains, the mills that supplied their feeble little
needs from the cataract's strength.
At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the
middle of the fall, from which Sam Patch had made
his fatal leap; but Isabel refused to admit that
tragical figure to the honors of her emotions. “I
don't care for him!” she said fiercely. “Patch!
What a name to be linked in our thoughts with
this superb cataract.”
“Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust. It's
as good a name as Leander, to my thinking, and
it was immortalized in support of a great idea, —
the feasibility of all things; while Leander's has
come down to us as that of the weak victim of a
passion. We shall never have a poetry of our own
till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts,
till we make the ideal embrace and include the real,
till we consent to face the music in our simple common
names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones
and in them you find facts and dreams continually
blended and confronted. Here is a fortunate illustration.
The people we met coming out of this
pavilion were lovers, and they had been here sentimentalizing
on this superb cataract, as you call it,
with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be
named. No doubt they had been quoting Uhland
or some other of their romantic poets, perhaps singing
some of their tender German love-songs, — the
tenderest, unearthliest love-songs in the world. At
the same time they did not disdain the matter-of-fact
corporeity in which their sentiment was enshrined;
they fed it heartily and abundantly with
the banquet whose relics we see here.”
On a table before them stood a pair of beer-glasses,
in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the
foam of the generous liquor lately brimming them;
some shreds of sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese,
bits of cold ham, crusts of bread, and the ashes of
a pipe.
Isabel shuddered at the spectacle, but made no
comment, and Basil went on: “Do you suppose
they scorned the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed
upon the falls? On the contrary, I've no doubt
that he recalled to her the ballad which a poet of
their language made about him. It used to go the
rounds of the German newspapers, and I translated
it, a long while ago, when I thought that I too was
in Arkadien geboren.
By the Falls of the Genesee:
From the Table-Rock in the middle
Leaps a figure bold and free.
“`Aloof in the air it rises
O'er the rush, the plunge, the death;
On the througing banks of the river
There is neither pulse nor breath.
Aloof in the moonlit air;
As light as mist from the rapids,
As heavy as nightmare.
“`In anguish I cry to the people,
The long-since vanished hosts;
I see them stretch forth in answer,
The helpless hands of ghosts.'
I once met the poet who wrote this. He drank too
much beer.”
“I don't see that he got in the name of Sam
Patch, after all,” said Isabel.
“O yes, he did; but I had to yield to our taste,
and where he said, `Springt der Sam Patsch kühn
und frei,' I made it `Leaps a figure bold and
free.”'
As they passed through the house on their way
out, they saw the youth and maiden they had met
at the pavilion door. They were seated at a table;
two glasses of beer towered before them; on their
plates were odorous crumbs of Limburger cheese.
They both wore a pensive air.
The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the
whole earth was gone with the moonlight. By nine
o'clock, when the wedding-journeyers resumed their
way toward Niagara, the heat had already set in
with the effect of ordinary midsummer's heat at
high noon. The car into which they got had come
the past night from Albany, and had an air of almost
The seats were covered with cinders, which also
crackled under foot. Dust was on everything,
especially the persons of the crumpled and weary
passengers of overnight. Those who came aboard
at Rochester failed to lighten the spiritual gloom,
and presently they sank into the common bodily
wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated,
and as it drew nearer Buffalo they knew the conductor
to have abandoned himself to that blackest
of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt
of the ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant
shudder and a quick lateral motion. The air within
the cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a
storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts
caught away the breath. So they sat with closed
windows, sweltering and stifling, and all the faces
on which a lively horror was not painted were dull
and damp with apathetic misery.
The incidents were in harmony with the abject
physical tone of the company. There was a quarrel
between a thin, shrill-voiced, highly dressed, much-bedizened
Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy
old woman, half asleep, and a boy with large pink
transparent ears that stood out from his head like
the handles of a jar, on the other side, about a seat
which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others
had kept filled with packages on the pretense that
it was engaged. It was a loud and fierce quarrel
enough, but it won no sort of favor; and when the
old woman was no lady, and the boy, who disputed
in an ironical temper, replied, “Highly complimentary,
I must say,” there was no sign of relief or
other acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that
there had been a quarrel.
There was a little more interest taken in the misfortune
of an old purblind German and his son,
who were found by the conductor to be a few hundred
miles out of the direct course to their destination,
and were with some trouble and the aid of an
Americanized fellow-countryman made aware of the
fact. The old man then fell back in the prevailing
apathy, and the child naturally cared nothing. By
and by came the unsparing train-boy on his rounds,
bestrewing the passengers successively with papers,
magazines, fine-cut tobacco, and packages of candy.
He gave the old man a package of candy, and passed
on. The German took it as the bounty of the American
people, oddly manifested in a situation where
he could otherwise have had little proof of their
care. He opened it and was sharing it with his son
when the train-boy came back, and metallically, like
a part of the machinery, demanded, “Ten cents!”
The German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated,
“Ten cents! ten cents!” with tiresome patience,
while the other passengers smiled. When it had
passed through the alien's head that he was to pay
for this national gift and he took with his tremulous
fingers from the recesses of his pocket-book a tencent
the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and
Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other with
eyes of mutual reproach.
“Well, upon my word, my dear,” he said, “I
think we've fallen pretty low. I've never felt such
a poor, shabby ruffian before. Good heavens! To
think of our immortal souls being moved to mirth
by such a thing as this, — so stupid, so barren of all
reason of laughter. And then the cruelty of it!
What ferocious imbeciles we are! Whom have
I married? A woman with neither heart nor
brain!”
“O Basil, dear, pay him back the money — do.”
“I can't. That 's the worst of it. He 's money
enough, and might justly take offense. What
breaks my heart is that we could have the depravity
to smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who
supposed he had at last met with an act of pure
kindness. It 's a thing to weep over. Look at
these grinning wretches! What a fiendish effect
their smiles have, through their cinders and sweat!
O, it 's the terrible weather; the despotism of the
dust and heat; the wickedness of the infernal air.
What a squalid and loathsome company!”
At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found
themselves with several hours' time on their hands
before the train started for Niagara, and in the first
moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into saying,
directly from Rochester to the Falls, instead of coming
this way?”
“Why certainly. I didn't propose coming this
way.”
“I know it, dear. I was only asking,” said Isabel,
meekly. “But I should think you'd have generosity
enough to take a little of the blame, when I
wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you.”
This romantic feeling referred to the fact that,
many years before, when Basil made his first visit
to Niagara, he had approached from the west by
way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged
his having existed before she knew him, and longed
to ally herself retrospectively with his past, was resolved
to draw near the great cataract by no other
route.
She fetched a little sigh which might mean the
weather or his hard-heartedness. The sigh touched
him, and he suggested a carriage-ride through the
city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what
she had been thinking of. She had never seen a
lakeside city before, and she was taken by surprise.
“If ever we leave Boston,” she said, “we will not
live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we'll
come to Buffalo.” She found that the place had
all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the ugliness
that attends the rising and falling tides. A
delicious freshness breathed from the lake, which
lying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, with no
from dreaming. But the color was the most
charming thing, that delicate blue of the lake,
without the depth of the sea-blue, but infinitely
softer and lovelier. The nearer expanses rippled
with dainty waves, silver and lucent; the further
levels made, with the sun-dimmed summer sky, a
vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the
white sails of ships, and stained by the smoke of
steamers.
“Take me away now,” said Isabel, when her
eyes had feasted upon all this, “and don't let me
see another thing till I get to Niagara. Nothing
less sublime is worthy the eyes that have beheld
such beauty.”
However, on the way to Niagara she consented
to glimpses of the river which carries the waters of
the lake for their mighty plunge, and which shows
itself very nobly from time to time as you draw
toward the cataract, with wooded or cultivated islands,
and rich farms along its low shores, and at
last flashes upon the eye the shining white of the
rapids, — a hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness
to be revealed.
| V.
THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. Their wedding journey | |