 | I.
THE OUTSET. Their wedding journey |  |
1. I.
THE OUTSET.
They first met in
Boston, but the
match was made
in Europe, where
they afterwards
saw each other;
whither, indeed,
he followed her;
and there the
match was also
broken off. Why
it was broken off,
and why it was
renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a
long love-story, which I do not think myself qualified
to rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a
sustained or involved narration; though I am
persuaded that a skillful romancer could turn the
courtship of Basil and Isabel March to excellent
account. Fortunately for me, however, in attempting
a newly married couple, no longer very young, to
be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I
shall have nothing to do but to talk of some ordinary
traits of American life as these appeared to
them, to speak a little of well-known and easily
accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape
and now a sketch of character.
They had agreed to made their wedding-journey
in the simplest and quietest way, and as it did not
take place at once after their marriage, but some
weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy
from the outset.
“How much better,” said Isabel, “to go now,
when nobody cares whether you go or stay, than to
have started off upon a wretched wedding-breakfast,
all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting
to see you aboard the cars. Now there will not
be a suspicion of honey-moonshine about us; we
shall go just like anybody else, — with a difference,
dear, with a difference!” and she took Basil's
cheeks between her hands. In order to do this, she
had to run round the table; for they were at dinner,
and Isabel's aunt, with whom they had begun
married life, sat substantial between them. It was
rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added, with
a conscious blush, “We are past our first youth,
you know; and we shall not strike the public as
bridal, shall we? My one horror in life is an evident
bride.”
Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think
her at all too old to be taken for a bride; and for
my part I do not object to a woman's being of Isabel's
age, if she is of a good heart and temper.
Life must have been very unkind to her if at that
age she have not won more than she has lost. It
seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as
when they met first, eight years before; but he
could not help recurring with an inextinguishable
regret to the long interval of their broken engagement,
which but for that fatality they might have
spent together, he imagined, in just such rapture
as this. The regret always haunted him, more or
less; it was part of his love; the loss accounted
irreparable really enriched the final gain.
“I don't know,” he said presently, with as much
gravity as a man can whose cheeks are clasped
between a lady's hands, “you don't begin very well
for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you
behave in this way, they will put us into the `bridal
chambers' at all the hotels. And the cars — they're
beginning to have them on the palace-cars.”
Just then a shadow fell into the room.
“Wasn't that thunder, Isabel?” asked her
aunt, who had been contentedly surveying the tender
spectacle before her. “O dear! you'll never be
able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It 's
actually raining now!”
In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible
storm of June, 1870. All in a moment, out of the
quite knew that it threatened, even before we had
fairly noticed the clouds, and it went on from passion
to passion with an inexhaustible violence. In the
square upon which our friends looked out of their
dining-room windows the trees whitened in the
gusts, and darkened in the driving floods of the rainfall,
and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent
themselves in desperate submission, and then with
a great shudder rent away whole branches and flung
them far off upon the ground. Hail mingled with
the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved
the storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled
upon the pavement, where the lightning played like
flames burning from the earth, while the thunder
roared overhead without ceasing. There was something
splendidly theatrical about it all; and when a
street-car, laden to the last inch of its capacity,
came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under
the stinging blows of the hail-stones, our friends
felt as if it were an effective and very naturalistic
bit of pantomime contrived for their admiration.
Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a
potent reality in the affair, and at intervals during
the storm they debated about going at all that day,
and decided to go and not to go, according to the
changing complexion of the elements. Basil had
said that as this was their first journey together in
America, he wished to give it at the beginning as
pungent a national character as possible, and that
than a voyage to New York by a Fall River
boat, they ought to take that route thither. So
much upholstery, so much music, such variety of
company, he understood, could not be got in any
other way, and it might be that they would even
catch a glimpse of the inventor of the combination,
who represented the very excess and extremity of a
certain kind of Americanism. Isabel had eagerly
consented; but these æsthetic motives were paralyzed
for her by the thought of passing Point Judith
in a storm, and she descended from her high intents
first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence
and the orchestra, and then to the idea of going by
land in a sleeping-car. Having comfortably accomplished
this feat, she treated Basil's consent as a
matter of course, not because she did not regard
him, but because as a woman she could not conceive
of the steps to her conclusion as unknown to him,
and always treated her own decisions as the product
of their common reasoning. But her husband held
out for the boat, and insisted that if the storm fell
before seven o'clock, they could reach it at Newport
by the last express; and it was this obstinacy that,
in proof of Isabel's wisdom, obliged them to wait
two hours in the station before going by the land
route. The storm abated at five o'clock, and though
the rain continued, it seemed well by a quarter of
seven to set out for the Old Colony Depot, in sight
of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning
implore him, “O don't go by the boat!” On this,
Basil had the incredible weakness to yield; and
bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot.
It was the first swerving from the ideal in their
wedding journey, but it was by no means the last;
though it must be confessed that it was early to
begin.
They both felt more tranquil when they were
irretrievably committed by the purchase of their
tickets, and when they sat down in the waiting-room
of the station, with all the time between
seven and nine o'clock before them. Basil would
have eked out the business of checking the trunks
into an affair of some length, but the baggage-master
did his duty with pitiless celerity; and so Basil,
in the mere excess of his disoccupation, bought
an accident-insurance ticket. This employed him
half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal
contest, and went and took his place beside Isabel,
who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl, perfectly
content.
“Isn't it charming,” she said gayly, “having to
wait so long? It puts me in mind of some of those
other journeys we took together. But I can't
think of those times with any patience, when we
might really have had each other, and didn't!
Do you remember how long we had to wait at
Chambéry? and the numbers of military gentlemen
that waited too, with their little waists, and their
gentleman, with the plain wife and the two
children, and a tarnished uniform? He seemed to
be somehow in misfortune, and his mustache hung
down in such a spiritless way, while all the other
military mustaches about curled and bristled with
so much boldness. I think salles d' attente everywhere
are delightful, and there is such a community
of interest in them all, that when I come here
only to go out to Brookline, I feel myself a traveller
once more, — a blessed stranger in a strange
land. O dear, Basil, those were happy times after
all, when we might have had each other and
didn't! And now we're the more precious for having
been so long lost.”
She drew closer and closer to him, and looked at
him in a way that threatened betrayal of her bridal
character.
“Isabel, you will be having your head on my
shoulder, next,” said he.
“Never!” she answered fiercely, recovering her
distance with a start. “But, dearest, if you do see
me going to — act absurdly, you know, do stop
me.”
“I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop.
Besides, I didn't undertake to preserve the incognito
of this bridal party.”
If any accident of the sort dreaded had really
happened, it would not have mattered so much, for
as yet they were the sole occupants of the waiting-room.
the lady who checked packages left in her charge;
but these must have seen so many endearments
pass between passengers, that a fleeting caress or
pair. Yet Isabel did not so much even as put her
hand into her husband's; and as Basil afterwards
said, it was very good practice.
Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often
mirrored in all that come near us, and our friends
were fated to meet frequent parodies of their happiness
from first to last on this journey. The travesty
began with the very first people who entered
the waiting-room after themselves, and who were a
very young couple starting like themselves upon a
pleasure tour, which also was evidently one of the
first tours of any kind that they had made. It was
of modest extent, and comprised going to New
York and back; but they talked of it with a fluttered
and joyful expectation as if it were a voyage
to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque
of their happiness (but with a touch of tragedy)
in that kind of young man who is called by the females
of his class a fellow, and two young women
of that kind known to him as girls. He took a
place between these, and presently began a robust
flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself,
after a brief struggle, of her parasol, and twirled it
about, as he uttered, with a sort of tender rudeness,
inconceivable vapidities, such as you would
expect from none but a man of the highest fashion.
The girl thus courted became selfishly unconscious
of everything but her own joy, and made no attempt
to bring the other girl within its warmth,
The latter sometimes leaned forward, and tried to
divert a little of the flirtation to herself, but the
flirters snubbed her with short answers, and presently
she gave up and sat still in the sad patience
of uncourted women. In this attitude she became
a burden to Isabel, who was glad when the three
took themselves away, and were succeeded by a
very stylish couple — from New York, she knew as
well as if they had given her their address on West
999th Street. The lady was not pretty, and she
was not, Isabel thought, dressed in the perfect taste
of Boston; but she owned frankly to herself that
the New-Yorkeress was stylish, undeniably effective.
The gentleman bought a ticket for New York, and
remained at the window of the office talking quite
easily with the seller.
“You couldn't do that, my poor Basil,” said
Isabel, “you'd be afraid.”
“O dear, yes; I'm only too glad to get off without
browbeating; though I must say that this officer
looks affable enough. Really,” he added, as an
acquaintance of the ticket-seller came in and nodded
to him and said “Hot, to-day!” “this is very
strange. I always felt as if these men had no private
life, no friendships like the rest of us. On
duty they seem so like sovereigns, set apart from
mankind, and above us all, that it 's quite incredible
they should have the common personal relations.”
At intervals of their talk and silence there came
thunder, very consoling to our friends, who took
them as so many compliments to their prudence in
not going by the boat, and who had secret doubts
of their wisdom whenever these acknowledgments
were withheld. Isabel went so far as to say that
she hoped nothing would happen to the boat, but I
think she would cheerfully have learnt that the
vessel had been obliged to put back to Newport, on
account of the storm, or even that it had been
driven ashore at a perfectly safe place.
People constantly came and went in the waiting-room,
which was sometimes quite full, and again
empty of all but themselves. In the course of
their observations they formed many cordial friendships
and bitter enmities upon the ground of personal
appearance, or particulars of dress, with people
whom they saw for half a minute upon an
average; and they took such a keen interest in
every one, that it would be hard to say whether
they were more concerned in an old gentleman
with vigorously upright iron-gray hair, who sat
fronting them, and reading all the evening papers,
or a young man who hurled himself through the
door, bought a ticket with terrific precipitation,
burst out again, and then ran down a departing
train before it got out of the station: they loved
the old gentleman for a certain stubborn benevolence
of expression, and if they had been friends
of the young man and his family for generations,
break the news gently to his parents, their nerves
could not have been more intimately wrought upon
by his hazardous behavior. Still, as they had their
tickets for New York, and he was going out on a
merely local train, — to Brookline, I believe, —
they could not, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling
of contempt for his unambitious destination.
They were already as completely cut off from
local associations and sympathies as if they were a
thousand miles and many months away from Boston.
They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-jets
as a gust of wind drew through the station;
they shared the gloom and isolation of a man who
took a seat in the darkest corner of the room, and
sat there with folded arms, the genius of absence.
In the patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign
country they noted and approved the vases of cut-flowers
in the booth of the lady who checked packages,
and the pots of ivy in her windows. “These
poor Bostonians,” they said, “have some love of
the beautiful in their rugged natures.”
But after all was said and thought, it was only
eight o'clock, and they still had an hour to wait.
Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a subtile
interpretation of his uneasiness, “I don't want
anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know the
weaknesses of men; and you had better go and
pass the next half-hour over a plate of something
indigestible.”
This was said con stizza, the least little suggestion
of it; but Basil rose with shameful alacrity.
“Darling, if it 's your wish” —
“It 's my fate, Basil,” said Isabel.
— “I'll go,” he exclaimed, “because it isn't
bridal, and will help us to pass for old married
people.”
“No, no, Basil, be honest; fibbing isn't your
forte: I wonder you went into the insurance business;
you ought to have been a lawyer. Go
because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps,
or think you may be so before we get to New York.
I shall amuse myself well enough here.”
I suppose it is always a little shocking and grievous
to a wife when she recognizes a rival in butchers'-meat
and the vegetables of the season. With
her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery,
and her dainty habits of lunching, she cannot reconcile
with the ideal her husband's capacity for
breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at all
hours of the day and night — as they write it on
the sign-boards of barbaric eating-houses. But
Isabel would have only herself to blame if she had
not perceived this trait of Basil's before marriage.
She recurred now, as his figure disappeared down
the station, to memorable instances of his appetite
in their European travels during their first engagement.
“Yes, he ate terribly at Susa, when I was
too full of the notion of getting into Italy to care
for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I
wild-boar; and at Heidelberg, the sausage and the
ham! — how could he, in my presence? But I
took him with all his faults, — and was glad to get
him,” she added, ending her meditation with a
little burst of candor; and she did not even think
of Basil's appetite when he reappeared,
With the thronging of many sorts of people, in
parties and singly, into the waiting room, they became
once again mere observers of their kind, more
or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so
of multitude. Even then, they could catch glimpses
of faces so sweet or fine that they made themselves
felt like moments of repose in the tumult, and here
and there was something so grotesque in dress or
manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The
ticket-seller's stamp clicked incessantly as he sold
tickets to all points South and West: to New
York, Philadelphia, Charleston; to New Orleans,
Chicago, Omaha; to St. Paul, Duluth, St. Louis;
and it would not have been hard to find in that
anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness, an image
of the whole busy affair of life. It was not a particularly
sane spectacle, that impatience to be off
to some place that lay not only in the distance, but
also in the future — to which no line of road carries
you with absolute certainty across an interval of
time full of every imaginable chance and influence.
It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but
it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that
all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?
In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last
an old woman, so very infirm that she had to be
upheld on either hand by her husband and the
hackman who had brought them, while a young
girl went before with shawls and pillows which she
arranged upon the seat. There the invalid lay
down, and turned towards the crowd a white, suffering
face, which was yet so heavenly meek and
peaceful that it comforted whoever looked at it.
it and owned that there was something better than
happiness in it.
“What is it like, Isabel?”
“O, I don't know, darling,” she said; but she
thought, “Perhaps it is like some blessed sorrow
that takes us out of this prison of a world, and sets
us free of our every-day hates and desires, our
aims, our fears, ourselves. Maybe a long and mortal
sickness might come to wear such a face in one
of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret
the poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had
fallen away.”
She rose and went over to the sick woman, on
whose face beamed a tender smile, as Isabel spoke
to her. A chord thrilled in two lives hitherto unknown
to each other; but what was said Basil
would not ask when the invalid had taken Isabel's
hand between her own, as for adieu, and she came
back to his side with swimming eyes. Perhaps his
wife could have given no good reason for her emotion,
if he had asked it. But it made her very
sweet and dear to him; and I suppose that when a
tolerably unselfish man is once secure of a woman's
love, he is ordinarily more affected by her compassion
and tenderness for other objects than by her
feelings towards himself. He likes well enough to
think, “She loves me,” but still better, “How kind
and good she is!”
They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of
again. The man at the wicket-gate leading to the
train had thrown it up, and the people were pressing
furiously through as if their lives hung upon
the chance of instant passage. Basil had secured
his ticket for the sleeping-car, and so he and Isabel
stood aside and watched the tumult. When the
rush was over they passed through, and as they
walked up and down the platform beside the train,
“I was thinking,” said Isabel, “after I spoke to
that poor old lady, of what Clara Williams says:
that she wonders the happiest women in the world
can look each other in the face without bursting
into tears, their happiness is so unreasonable, and so
built upon and hedged about with misery. She
declares that there 's nothing so sad to her as a
bride, unless it 's a young mother, or a little girl
growing up in the innocent gayety of her heart.
She wonders they can live through it.”
“Clara is very much of a reformer, and would
make an end of all of us men, I suppose, — except
her father, who supports her in the leisure that enables
her to do her deep thinking. She little
knows what we poor fellows have to suffer, and
how often we break down in business hours, and
sob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady
talk to you in the same strain?”
“O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness,
and said she had lived a blessed life. Perhaps it
seemed a very religious person.”
“Yes,” said Basil, “it is almost a pity that religion
is going out. But then you are to have the
franchise.”
“All aboard!”
This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy
he might have been about to utter; and presently
the train carried them out into the gas-sprinkled
darkness, with an ever-growing speed that
soon left the city lamps far behind. It is a phenomenon
whose commonness alone prevents it from
being most impressive, that departure of the night-express.
The two hundred miles it is to travel
stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to
lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many
dangers. The draw-bridges that gape upon the
way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming
on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so
long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut
where the overhanging mass of rock trembles to its
fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have
placed in your path, — you think of these after
the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your
fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness
in any circumstances is so perfect that it
begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security;
and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping
car, and feel yourself hurled forward through
the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you
that you can endure it; and some such condition
as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic facts
in the world. To the fantastic mood which possesses
you equally, sleeping or waking, the stoppages
of the train have a weird character; and
Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford
are rather points in dream-land than well-known
towns of New England. As the train stops you
drowse if you have been waking, and wake if you
have been in a doze; but in any case you are aware
of the locomotive hissing and coughing beyond the
station, of flaring gas-jets, of clattering feet of passengers
getting on and off; then of some one, conductor
or station-master, walking the whole length
of the train; and then you are aware of an insane
satisfaction in renewed flight through the darkness.
You think hazily of the folk in their beds in the
town left behind, who stir uneasily at the sound of
your train's departing whistle; and so all is a blank
vigil or a blank slumber.
By daylight Basil and Isabel found themselves
at opposite ends of the car, struggling severally
with the problem of the morning's toilet. When
the combat was ended, they were surprised at the
decency of their appearance, and Isabel said, “I
think I'm presentable to an early Broadway public,
and I've a fancy for not going to a hotel. Lucy
will be expecting us out there before noon; and we
can pass the time pleasantly enough for a few hours
loved any cheap defiance
of custom, and
she had an agreeable
sense of adventure in
what she proposed. Besides,
she felt that nothing
could be more in
the unconventional spirit
in which they meant
to make their whole
journey than a stroll
about New York at half-past
six in the morning.
“Delightful!” answered
Basil, who was
always charmed with
these small originalities.
“You look well enough
for an evening party;
and besides, you won't
meet one of your own
critical class on Broadway
at this hour. We
will breakfast at one of
those gilded metropolitan
restaurants, and
then go round to Leonard's, who will be able to
give us just three unhurried seconds. After that
we'll push on out to his place.”
At that early hour there were not many people
astir on the wide avenue down which our friends
strolled when they left the station; but in the aspect
of those they saw there was something that told of
a greater heat than they had yet known in Boston,
and they were sensible of having reached a more
southern latitude. The air, though freshened by
the over-night's storm, still wanted the briskness
and sparkle and pungency of the Boston air, which
is as delicious in summer as it is terrible in winter;
and the faces that showed themselves were sodden
from the yesterday's heat and perspiration. A
corner-grocer, seated in a sort of fierce despondency
upon a keg near his shop door, had lightly equipped
himself for the struggle of the day in the battered
armor of the day before, and in a pair of roomy
pantaloons, and a baggy shirt of neutral tint, —
perhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst
the siege of the hot weather lasted, — now confronted
the advancing sunlight, before which the
long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring.
A marketing mother of a family paused at a provision-store,
and looking weakly in at the white-aproned
butcher among his meats and flies, passed
without an effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied
shop-girls tripped by in the draperies that betrayed
their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby; from
a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those
cool young New Yorkers whom no circumstances
can oppress: breezy-coated, white-linened, clean,
upon the elbow of one of the arms holding up the
paper from which the morning's news is snatched,
whilst the person sways lightly with the walk; in
the street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were
rows of people with baskets between their legs and
peculiarity of air or dress the excess of heat which
they had already borne, and to which they seemed
to look forward, and gave by the scantiness of their
number a vivid impression of the uncounted thousands
within doors prolonging, before the day's
terror began, the oblivion of sleep.
As they turned into one of the numerical streets
to cross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet
deeper seclusion, Basil began to utter in a musing
tone: —
Lost in some desert, far from Time,
Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
Have only sifted sands and dew, —
Yet still a marble hand of man
Lying on all the haunted plan;
The passions of the human heart
Beating the marble breast of Art, —
Were not more lone to one who first
Upon its giant silence burst,
Than this strange quiet, where the tide
Of life, upheaved on either side,
Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat
With human waves the Morning Street.”
“How lovely!” said Isabel, swiftly catching at
her skirt, and deftly escaping contact with one of a
long row of ash-barrels posted sentinel-like on the
edge of the pavement. “Whose is it, Basil?”
“Ah! a poet's,” answered her husband, “a man
of whom we shall one day any of us be glad to say
that we liked him before he was famous. What a
clear, cool light of day-break in the last!”
“You could have been as good a poet as that,
Basil,” said the ever-personal and concretely-speaking
Isabel, who could not look at a mountain without
thinking what Basil might have done in that
way, if he had tried.
“O no, I couldn't, dear. It 's very difficult being
any poet at all, though it's easy to be like one. But
I've done with it; I broke with the Muse the day
you accepted me. She came into my office, looking
so shabby, — not unlike one of those poor shop-girls;
and as I was very well dressed from having
just been to see you, why, you know, I felt the difference.
`Well, my dear?' said I, not quite liking
the look of reproach she was giving me. `You are
going to leave me,' she answered sadly. `Well,
yes; I suppose I must. You see the insurance business
is very absorbing; and besides, it has a bad
appearance, you're coming about so in office hours,
and in those clothes.' `O,' she moaned out, `you
used to welcome me at all times, out in the country,
and thought me prettily dressed.' `Yes, yes; but
this is Boston; and Boston makes a great difference
in one's ideas; and I'm going to be married, too.
Come, I don't want to seem ungrateful; we have
had many pleasant times together, I own it; and
I've no objections to your being present at Christmas
and Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I
must draw the line there.' She gave me a look
my desk and took out of a pigeon-hole a lot of papers,
— odes upon your cruelty, Isabel; songs to
you; sonnets, — the sonnet, a mighty poor one, I 'd
made the day before, — and threw them all into the
grate. Then she turned to me again, signed adieu
with mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the
bottom wire of the poor thing's hoop-skirt clicking
against each step of the stairway, as she went
slowly and heavily down to the street.”
“O don't — don't, Basil,” said his wife, “it
seems like something wrong. I think you ought to
have been ashamed.”
“Ashamed! I was heart-broken. But it had
to come to that. As I got hopeful about you, the
Muse became a sad bore; and more than once I
found myself smiling at her when her back was
turned. The Muse doesn't like being laughed at
any more than another woman would, and she
would have left me shortly. No, I couldn't be a
poet like our Morning-Street friend. But see! the
human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement
with cooks and second-girls.”
They were frowzy serving-maids and silent;
each swept down her own door steps and the pavement
in front of her own house, and then knocked
her broom on the curbstone and vanished into the
house, on which the hand of change had already
fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to
the domestic gods, but had been invaded at more
in such streets the irregular, inspired doctors and
doctresses come first with inordinate door-plates;
then a milliner filling the parlor window with new
bonnets; here even a publisher had hung his sign
beside a door, through which the feet of young
ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children to
patter. Here and there stood groups of dwellings
unmolested as yet outwardly; but even these had
a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew
themselves to be cheapish boarding-houses or furnished
lodgings for gentlemen, and were trying to
hide it. To these belonged the frowzy serving-women;
to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which
the decrepit children and mothers of the streets
were clawing for bits of coal.
By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway
there were already some omnibuses beginning their
long day's travel up and down the handsome, tiresome
length of that avenue; but for the most part
it was empty. There was, of course, a hurry of
foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but these were
sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper
was still fast asleep. The waiter at the restaurant
into which our friends stepped was so well aware
of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of
the city, that he could not forbear a little patronage
of them, which they did not resent. He
brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric
abundance, and charged for it with barbaric splendor.
well with your waiter: I have myself been often
treated with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet
I have never been able to withhold the douceur
that marked me for a gentleman in their eyes, and
entitled me to their dishonorable esteem. Basil
was not superior to this folly, and left the waiter
with the conviction that, if he was not a New
Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the world at
any rate.
Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this
man of the world continued his pilgrimage down
Broadway, which even in that desert state was full
of a certain interest. Troops of laborers straggled
along the pavements, each with his dinner-pail in
hand; and in many places the eternal building up
and pulling down was already going on; carts
were struggling up the slopes of vast cellars, with
loads of distracting rubbish; here stood the half-demolished
walls of a house, with a sad variety of
wall-paper showing in the different rooms; there
clinked the trowel upon the brick, yonder the hammer
on the stone; overhead swung and threatened
the marble block that the derrick was lifting to its
place. As yet these forces of demolition and construction
had the business of the street almost to
themselves.
“Why, how shabby the street is!” said Isabel,
at last. “When I landed, after being abroad, I
remember that Broadway impressed me with its
splendor.”
“Ah! but you were merely coming from Europe
then; and now you arrive from Boston, and
are contrasting this poor Broadway with Washington
Street. Don't be hard upon it, Isabel; every
street can't be a Boston street, you know,” said
Basil. Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great intensity
both by birth and conviction, believed her
husband the only man able to have thoroughly
baffled the malignity of the stars in causing him
to be born out of Boston; yet he sometimes trifled
with his hardly achieved triumph, and even showed
an indifference to it, with an insincerity of which
there can be no doubt whatever.
“O stuff!” she retorted, “as if I had any of
that silly local pride! Though you know well
enough that Boston is the best place in the world.
But Basil! I suppose Broadway strikes us as so
fine, on coming ashore from Europe, because we
hardly expect anything of America then.”
“Well, I don't know. Perhaps the street has
some positive grandeur of its own, though it needs
a multitude of people in it to bring out its best
effects. I'll allow its disheartening shabbiness and
meanness in many ways; but to stand in front of
Grace Church, on a clear day, — a day of late
September, say, — and look down the swarming
length of Broadway, on the movement and the
numbers, while the Niagara roar swelled and
swelled from those human rapids, was always like
strong new wine to me. I don't think the world
such times, I'd have been willing to be an Irish
councilman, that I might have some right to the
pride I felt in the capital of the Irish Republic.
What a fine thing it must be for each victim of six
centuries of oppression to reflect that he owns at
least a dozen Americans, and that, with his fellows,
he rules a hundred helpless millionaires!”
Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel
knew nothing about politics, and she felt that she
was getting into deep water; she answered buoyantly,
but she was glad to make her weariness the
occasion of hailing a stage, and changing the conversation.
The farther down town they went the
busier the street grew; and about the Astor House,
where they alighted, there was already a bustle
that nothing but a fire could have created at the
same hour in Boston. A little farther on the
steeple of Trinity rose high into the scorching sunlight,
while below, in the shadow that was darker
than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among
their flowers.
“How still they lie!” mused the happy wife,
peering through the iron fence in passing.
“Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poor
things!” said Basil; and through both their minds
flashed the wonder if they should ever come to
something like that; but it appeared so impossible
that they both smiled at the absurdity.
“It 's too early yet for Leonard,” continued
We could spend the time so delightfully in it.
But, never mind; let us go down to the Battery,
— it 's not a very pleasant place, but it 's near, and
it 's historical, and it 's open, — where these drowsy
friends of ours used to take the air when they were
in the fashion, and had some occasion for the element
in its freshness. You can imagine — it 's
cheap — how they used to see Mr. Burr and Mr.
Hamilton down there.”
All places that fashion has once loved and abandoned
are very melancholy; but of all such places,
I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are there
some sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous
and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots? I
believe so, but I do not make sure; I am certain
only of the mangy grass-plots, or rather the spaces
between the paths, thinly overgrown with some
kind of refuse and opprobrious weed, a stunted
and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New
York Battery. At that hour of the summer morning
when our friends, with the aimlessness of
strangers who are waiting to do something else,
saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed
little boys and girls were wandering over
this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly
to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of
their costumes. One of these little creatures wore,
with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off
best dress of some happier child, a gay little garment
which gave her the grotesque effect of having been
at a party the night before. Presently came two
jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that
appeared, when they had crawled out of their beds,
to have put on only so much clothing as the law
compelled. They abandoned themselves upon the
green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean
hands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared,
silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the
heart of the terrible furnace, into which in those
days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while
the child which the younger woman had brought
with her feebly wailed unheeded at her side. On
one side of these women were the shameless houses
out of which they might have crept, and which
somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation; on
the other side were those houses in which had once
dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now
dropping down the boarding-house scale through
various unhomelike occupations to final dishonor
and despair. Down nearer the water, and not far
from the castle that was once a playhouse and is
now the depot of emigration, stood certain express-wagons,
and about these lounged a few hard-looking
men. Beyond laughed and danced the fresh
blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and smokestacks.
“Well,” said Basil, “I think if I could choose,
I should like to be a friendless German boy, setting
Fancy his rapture on beholding this lovely spot, and
these charming American faces! What a smiling
aspect life in the New World must wear to his
young eyes, and how his heart must leap within
him!”
“Yes, Basil; it 's all very pleasing, and thank you
for bringing me. But if you don't think of any
other New York delights to show me, do let us go
and sit in Leonard's office till he comes, and then
get out into the country as soon as possible.”
Basil defended himself against the imputation
that he had been trying to show New York to his
wife, or that he had any thought but of whiling
away the long morning hours, until it should be
time to go to Leonard. He protested that a knowledge
of Europe made New York the most uninteresting
town in America, and that it was the
last place in the world where he should think of
amusing himself or any one else; and then they
both upbraided the city's bigness and dullness with
an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know.
They particularly derided the notion of New York's
being loved by any one. It was immense, it was
grand in some ways, parts of it were exceedingly
handsome; but it was too vast, too coarse, too restless.
They could imagine its being liked by a successful
young man of business, or by a rich young
girl, ignorant of life and with not too nice a taste
in her pleasures; but that it should be dear to any
that they could not imagine. They could not
think of any one's loving New York as Dante loved
Florence, or as Madame de Staël loved Paris, or as
Johnson loved black, homely, home-like London.
And as they twittered their little dispraises, the
giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and
more conscious of herself, waking from her night's
sleep and becoming aware of her fleets and trains,
and the myriad hands and wheels that throughout
the whole sea and land move for her, and do her
will even while she sleeps. All about the wedding-journeyers
swelled the deep tide of life back from
its night-long ebb. Broadway had filled her length
with people; not yet the most characteristic New
York crowd, but the not less interesting multitude
of strangers arrived by the early boats and trains,
and that easily distinguishable class of lately New-Yorkized
people from other places, about whom in
the metropolis still hung the provincial traditions of
early rising; and over all, from moment to moment,
the eager, audacious, well-dressed, proper life of the
mighty city was beginning to prevail, — though
this was not so notable where Basil and Isabel had
paused at a certain window. It was the office of
one of the English steamers, and he was saying,
“It was by this line I sailed, you know,” — and
she was interrupting him with, “When who could
have dreamed that you would ever be telling me of
it here?” So the old marvel was wondered over
room for nothing but the strangeness that they
should have loved each other so long and not made
it known, that they should ever have uttered it, and
that, being uttered, it should be so much more and
better than ever could have been dreamed. The
broken engagement was a fable of disaster that only
made their present fortune more prosperous. The
city ceased about them, and they walked on up the
street, the first man and first woman in the garden
of the new-made earth. As they were both very
conscious people, they recognized in themselves
some sense of this, and presently drolled it away,
in the opulence of a time when every moment
brought some beautiful dream, and the soul could
be prodigal of its bliss.
“I think if I had the naming of the animals over
again, this morning, I shouldn't call snakes snakes;
should you, Eve?” laughed Basil in intricate acknowledgment
of his happiness.
“O no, Adam; we'd look out all the most graceful
euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn't
hurt the feelings of a spider.”
| I.
THE OUTSET. Their wedding journey | |