 | II.
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. Their wedding journey |  |
2. II.
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM.
They had waited
to see Leonard, in
order that they
might learn better
how to find his
house in the country;
and now, when
they came in upon
him at nine o'clock,
he welcomed them
with all his friendly
heart. He rose
from the pile of
morning's letters to
which he had but
just sat down; he
placed them the
easiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being a
busy hour with him, and would have had them look
upon his office, which was still damp and odorous
from the porter's broom, as a kind of down-town
parlor; but after they had briefly accounted to his
Isabel had boasted of the original fashion in which
they had that morning seen New York, they took
pity on him, and bade him adieu till evening.
They crossed from Broadway to the noisome
street by the ferry, and in a little while had taken
their places in the train on the thither side of the
water.
“Don't tell me, Basil,” said Isabel, “that Leonard
travels fifty miles every day by rail going to
and from his work!”
“I must, dearest, if I would be truthful.”
“Then, darling, there are worse things in this
world than living up at the South End, aren't
there?” And in agreement upon Boston as a place
of the greatest natural advantages, as well as all
acquirable merits, with after talk that need not be
recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little
country station near which the Leonards dwelt.
I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither,
though I do it at the cost of the reader, who suspects
the excitements which a long description of
the movement would delay. The ladies were very
old friends, and they had not met since Isabel's return
from Europe and renewal of her engagement.
Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed
with surprising ease all that she had said in
blame of Basil's conduct during the rupture, and
exacted a promise from her friend that she should
pay her the first visit after their marriage. And
was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light
to which husbands could be turned, and still found
an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard
beheld in her friend's joy the sweet reflection
of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to
look upon the prosperous marriage of the former as
the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit
and comfort, they reassured one another by every
question and answer, and in their weak content
lapsed far behind the representative women of our
age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil,
and the relation of wives to them is known to be
one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty
fogies put their heads of false hair together, they
were as silly and benighted as their great-grandmothers
could have been in the same circumstances,
and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other in
their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good
and blessed to be true. “Do you really suppose,
Basil,” Isabel would say to her oppressor, after having
given him some elegant extract from the last
conversation upon husbands, “that we shall get on
as smoothly as the Leonards when we have been
married ten years? Lucy says that things go more
hitchily the first year than ever they do afterwards,
and that people love each other better and better
just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss
does seem a little crude and garish compared with
their happiness; and yet” — she put up both her
— “there is something agreeable about it, even at
this stage of the proceedings.”
“Isabel,” said her husband, with severity, “this
is bridal!”
“No matter! I only want to seem an old married
woman to the general public. But the application
of it is that you must be careful not to contradict
me, or cross me in anything, so that we can
be like the Leonards very much sooner than they
became so. The great object is not to have any
hitchiness; and you know you are provoking — at
times.”
They both educated themselves for continued
and tranquil happiness by the example and precept
of their friends; and the time passed swiftly in the
pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led
by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer
study than can be given here, for it is the life led
by vast numbers of prosperous New Yorkers who
love both the excitement of the city and the repose
of the country, and who aspire to unite the enjoyment
of both in their daily existence. The suburbs
of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles
in every direction; and everywhere are handsome
villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men like himself,
whom strict study of the time-table enables to
spend all their working hours in the city and all
their smoking and sleeping hours in the country.
The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards
they were charmed. They all enjoyed the visit,
said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it
come to an end; yet they all resigned themselves
to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other result
than to detain the travellers into the very
heart of the hot weather. In that weather it was
easy to do anything that did not require an active
effort, and resignation was so natural with the
mercury at ninety, that I am not sure but there
was something sinful in it.
They had given up their cherished purpose of
going to Albany by the day boat, which was represented
to them in every impossible phase. It
would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it
stopped the heat would be insupportable. Besides
it would bring them to Albany at an hour when
they must either spend the night there, or push on
to Niagara by the night train. “You had better
go by the evening boat. It will be light almost
till you reach West Point, and you'll see all the
best scenery. Then you can get a good night's
rest, and start fresh in the morning.” So they
were counseled, and they assented, as they would
have done if they had been advised: “You had
better go by the morning boat. It 's deliciously
cool, travelling; you see the whole of the river;
you reach Albany for supper, and you push
through to Niagara that night and are done with
it.”
They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of
his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they
were rushing from the heat of the country into the
heat of the city, where some affairs and pleasures
were to employ them till the evening boat should
start.
Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of
the great heat brooded upon them. All abroad
burned the fierce white light of the sun, in which
not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but
the troubled respiration. Their train was full of
people who had come long journeys from broiling
cities of the West, and who were dusty and ashen
and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them
still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful
languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the
broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a
sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from
one arm to another; after every station the desperate
conductor swung through the long aisle and
punched the ticket, which each passenger seemed
to yield him with a tacit malediction; a suffering
child hung about the empty tank, which could only
gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The
wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when the
door was opened, the clatter of the rails struck
through and through the car like a demoniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the
ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its stifling
darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so
close and dead and mixed with the carbonic breath
of the locomotives was the air of the place. The
thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare of
the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; the
roof seemed to hover lower and lower, and in its
coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat
deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer,
before which every passenger, on going
mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this
fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the
mercury was above ninety, and exulting with the
pride that savages take in the cruel might of their
idols, bowed their souls to the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the
breath of the sea struck cool across their faces, and
made them forget the thermometer for the brief
time of the transit. But presently they drew near
that strange, irregular row of wooden buildings
and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New
York side, and before the boat's motion ceased the
air grew thick and warm again, and tainted with
the foulness of the street on which the buildings
front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued,
passing up through a gangway, on one side of
which a throng of return-passengers was pent by a
gate of iron bars, like a herd of wild animals.
They were streaming with perspiration, and, according
to their different temperaments, had faces
of deep crimson or deadly pallor.
“Now the question is, my dear,” said Basil
when, free of the press, they lingered for a moment
in the shade outside, “whether we had better
walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice
of fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these
cars here, and be landed a little nearer, with half
the exertion. By this route we shall have sights
and smells which the other can't offer us, but
whichever we take we shall be sorry.”
“Then I say take this,” decided Isabel. “I
want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms,
this weather.”
They hailed the first car that passed, and got
into it. Well for them both if she could have exercised
this philosophy with regard to the whole
day's business, or if she could have given up her
plans for it with the same resignation she had
practiced in regard to the day boat! It seems to
me a proof of the small advance our race has made
in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up
doing anything we have meant to do. It matters
very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment
or of business, we feel the same bitter need of pursuing
it to the end. The mere fact of intention
gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one
may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into
our life that we have scarcely a sense any more of
the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We
will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate
dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but
blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had
been Columbus, I should have thought twice before
setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so; and
as for Plymouth Rock, I should have sternly resisted
the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation
and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward,
and as soon as ever I came in sight of their
granite perch should have turned back to England.
But it is now too late to repair these errors, and so,
my obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth
Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment
of a series of intentions, any of which had wiselier
been left unaccomplished. Isabel had said they
would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street,
and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming and staging
and variously cooling and calming by the way,
until they reached the ticket-office on Broadway,
whence they could indefinitely betake themselves
to the steamboat an hour or two before her departure.
She felt that they had yielded sufficiently to
circumstances and conditions already on this journey,
and she was resolved that the present half-day
in New York should be the half-day of her original
design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have
allowed, but it was inevitable, and it afforded
them a spectacle which is by no means wanting in
sublimity, and which is certainly unique, — the
spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of
the elements, and prospering on with every form
of labor, and at a terrible cost of life. The man
carrying the hod to the top of the walls that
rankly grow and grow as from his life's blood, will
only lay down his load when he feels the mortal
glare of the sun blaze in upon heart and brain; the
plethoric millionaire for whom he toils will plot
and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk;
the trembling beast must stagger forward while the
lash him on; in all those vast palaces of commerce
there are ceaseless sale and purchase, packing and
unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving
and departing loads; in thousands of shops is the
unspared and unsparing weariness of selling; in
the street, filled by the hurry and suffering of tens
of thousands, is the weariness of buying.
Their afternoon's experience was something that
Basil and Isabel could, when it was past, look upon
only as a kind of vision, magnificent at times, and
at other times full of indignity and pain. They
seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimage
through that squalid street by the river-side,
where presently they came to a market, opening
upon the view hideous vistas of carnage, and then
into a wide avenue, with processions of cars like
their own coming and going up and down the centre
of a foolish and useless breadth, which made
even the tall buildings (rising gauntly up among
the older houses of one or two stories) on either
hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust
that the hot breaths of wind caught up and
sent swirling into the shabby shops. Here they
dreamed of the eternal demolition and construction
of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of
granite boulders, clambered over by goats. In
their dream they had fellow-passengers, whose
sufferings made them odious and whom they were
glad to leave behind when they alighted from the
quenched themselves in the shade of the cross-street.
A little strip of shadow lay along the row
of brown-stone fronts, but there were intervals
where the vacant lots cast no shadow. With great
avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult torrents
or vast expanses of desert sand; they crept
slowly along till they came to such a place, and
dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than
before, moved on. They seemed now and then to
stand at doors, and to be told that people were out,
and again that they were in; and they had a sense
of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of light-muslined
ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water,
and then they came forth again; and evermore
“The day increased from heat to heat.”
At last they were aware of an end of their visits,
and of a purpose to go down town again, and
of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks of
brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brown-stone
flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable
uniformity, oppressed them like a procession
of houses trying to pass a given point and never
getting by. Upon these streets there was seldom
a soul to be seen, so that when their ringing at a
door had evoked answer, it had startled them with a
vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand
they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up
and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting
pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung
across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made
up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their
getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the
return down-townwards they had kept up a show of
other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and
they had wondered that the tragical character of
heat had been so little recognized. They said that
the daily New York murder might even at that
moment be somewhere taking place; and that no
murder of the whole homicidal year could have
such proper circumstance; they morbidly wondered
what that day's murder would be, and in what
swarming tenement-house, or den of the assassin
streets by the river-sides, — if indeed it did not
befall in some such high, close-shuttered, handsome
dwelling as those they passed, in whose twilight it
would be so easy to strike down the master and
leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the
family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the
seaside. They conjectured of the horror of midsummer
battles, and pictured the anguish of shipwrecked
men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy
misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of
anthracite coal at city docks. But now at last, as
they took seats opposite one another in the crowded
car, they seemed to have drifted infinite distances
and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly
across the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned
when it was and from what far city they or some
remote ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a
wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit
farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited
the end of the world.
When they alighted, they took their way up
through one of the streets of the great wholesale
businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a
throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlading;
bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead;
the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every
shape and size: there was no flagging of the pitiless
energy that moved all forward, no sign of how
heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking faces
of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-journeyers
emerged upon Broadway, the other
passages and incidents of their dream faded before
the superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was
four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer
day. The spiritless air seemed to have a
quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom
of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in
shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine
itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own
had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick,
warm wind blew across the great avenue at the
corners of the intersecting streets. In the upward
distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier
roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the
livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length
of the street swept a stream of tormented life.
All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous
among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted
stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man
who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella,
aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of
death in his heart for the crowding passengers
within, when one of them pulled the strap about
his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the
foot-passengers kept to the shady side, and to the
unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not
less in number than at any other time, though
there were fewer women among them. Indomitably
resolute of soul, they held their course with the
swift pace of custom, and only here and there they
showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless,
with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back
from his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white
flabby face, and set down one foot after the
other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another,
as they passed him, was saying huskily to
the friend at his side, “I can't stand this much
longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to
sleep; my heart —” But still the multitude hurried
on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading,
vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them,
dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out
of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder
with singular fascination, and in its effect of
universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last
phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They
who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, —
though there was no reason for this, — looked on it
amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished,
of purpose, they cried with one voice, that it was
a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in
the nearest place where the soda-fountain sparkled.
It was a vain desire. At the front door of the
apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they entered
they heard the next comer cry out with a
maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind,
“Ninety-seven degrees!” Behind them at the door
there poured in a ceaseless stream of people, each
pausing at the shrine of heat, before he tossed off
the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped
boys served them from either side of the fountain.
Then in the order of their coming they issued
through another door upon the side street, each, as
he disappeared, turning his face half round, and
casting a casual glance upon a little group near
another counter. The group was of a very patient,
half-frightened, half-puzzled looking gentleman who
sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood
beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief
full of pounded ice, and easing one hand with
the other when the first became tired. Basil drank
his soda and paused to look upon this group, which
he felt would commend itself to realistic sculpture
as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as
“The Sunstroke” would sell enormously in the hot
season. “Better take a little more of that,” the
apothecary said, looking up from his prescription,
and, as the organized sympathy of the seemingly
who thereupon tasted something in the glass
the humane authority. “Slightly, now and then,”
answered the other, “but I'm hanging on hard to
the bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda-fountain,
and I feel that I'm all right as long as I
can see that. The people get rather hazy, occasionally,
and have no features to speak of. But I
don't know that I look very impressive myself,” he
added in the jesting mood which seems the natural
condition of Americans in the face of all embarrassments.
“O, you'll do!” the apothecary answered, with
a laugh; but he said, in answer to an anxious question
from the lady, “He mustn't be moved for an
hour yet,” and gayly pestled away at a prescription,
while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded
ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isabel
offered her the commiseration of friendly words,
and of looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they
could do nothing, she and Basil fell into the endless
procession, and passed out of the side door. “What
a shocking thing!” she whispered. “Did you see
how all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently
at that couple, and evidently forgot them
the next instant? It was dreadful. I shouldn't
like to have you sun-struck in New York.”
“That 's very considerate of you; but place for
place, if any accident must happen to me among
strangers, I think I should prefer to have it in New
York. The biggest place is always the kindest as
of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite
would be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, it
requires peculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a
choice in the matter, then I say, give me the busiest
part of Broadway for a sun-stroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardly
fall the first victim to any misfortune. Probably
the gentleman at the apothecary's was merely exhausted
by the heat, and ran in there for revival.
The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands
every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do.
The crowd may be a little ennuyé of sun-strokes,
and to that degree indifferent, but they most likely
know that they can only do harm by an expression
of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as they
have delegated their helpfulness to the proper
authority, and go about their business. If a man
was overcome in the middle of a village street, the
blundering country druggist wouldn't know what
to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd
about so that no breath of air could reach the
victim.”
“May be so, dear,” said the wife, pensively;
“but if anything did happen to you in New York,
I should like to have the spectators look as if they
saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps I'm a little
exacting.”
“I think you are. Nothing is so hard as to
understand that there are human beings in this
be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and I there
in the apothecary's shop, as it might very well be;
and let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and
end this horrible midsummer-day's dream. We
must have a carriage,” he added with tardy wisdom,
hailing an empty hack, “as we ought to have had
all day; though I'm not sorry, now the worst 's over,
to have seen the worst.”
| II.
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. Their wedding journey | |