 | Saratoga in 1901 |  |
MR. PERKINS MOURNS BECAUSE HE DOES NOT
DANCE THE ROUND DANCES.
Congress Hall, Aug. 18.
I arrived here from the Clarendon this morning. I brought
my things with me. When it leaked out that I absented myself
from the hotel to spend an afternoon with Mr. Billings, they said
I must go. The pedigree committee said, “There is no use
trying to make Mr. Perkins aristocratic. He is wedded to his
idols. He is so fond of fun—so fond of people of wit and
intellect, that he will find them, even if he has to go among the
vulgar. He will go and talk to people who write for magazines,
who write books, and among young ladies who talk satire, sing
opera, and tell anecdotes. He prefers enjoying himself to being
aristocratic.”
These ladies got pretty near the truth.
While I like the idea of being aristocratic I find it very stupid
business to keep it up for any length of time.
I do not enjoy dreary people. I don't enjoy dreary newspapers,
like the National Intelligencer and the Post. So I sighed
secretly for the wit, the sentiment, and the sparkling eyes of
Congress Hall.
TERRIBLE DEVELOPMENT.
In my Clarendon investigations I was ably assisted by the
ladies. They told me everything about everybody in the hotel—
how long Mr. Green had been divorced, about Mrs. Smith's dyed
hair, and how Mrs. Brown enamelled.
They said one old husband did scold his
wife horribly, but that the wife got even
by flirting with a young Englishman when
the governor went to New York. They
told me how Mrs. Thompson wore a dress
on which was $3,000 worth of real lace;
and how somebody had been seen coming
out of somebody else's room at twelve
o'clock at night.
This is the way the old aristocratic
ladies went on.
THE YOUNG LADIES
were full of small statistics, but
they did not gossip on so large a
scale. They told me where to buy
six-button gloves, who made the
best caramels, and who wore the
first Cretonne suits in New
York.
“Do you read the papers?” I
asked.
“O, yes; we read all about the weddings, and the parties, the
engagements, and the fashionable news.”
“Do you like `Dame Europa's School?”'
“No, we don't like any school except dancing school.”
“How do you like `Ginx's Baby?' ”
“Oh we think all babies are dreadful. Does Mrs. Ginx bring
her baby to the table? Mother keeps Johnny with the nurse all
the time. We never see him.”
“Did you read All the Year Round?”
“All the year round! Good gracious! Do you think we are
blue stockings?”
“Do you read Once a Week?”
“Well, sometimes not half as often as that, especially in winter,
when there are so many parties. Oh, parties are so lovely—
perfectly divine!”
“I suppose you used to read Every Saturday?”
“O yes, we read the society papers every Saturday. They say
awful nice things—how a certain young lady was `much admired,'
and how `Miss Snow is a great favorite in society.' Dear me,
some of us had our names in twenty-seven times last winter! Oh,
they are jolly nice.”
“What do you think of the Nation?”
“O dear! we don't think of anything outside of our set. We
perfectly dreadful!”
“Do you like the Atlantic?”
“O my! we never went out any further than the Branch and
down to the Fort Hamilton hops. Those officers do dance too
lovely! And such nice flirts—perfectly atrocious!”
And so the aristocratic young ladies went on.
ELI IN TEARS.
I was very much amused and instructed. I wanted to stay
with them forever. It did me good to sit at the fountain of wisdom,
to drink in a perpetual flow of soul, and to feast on reason
I felt that my early education had been neglected—that I had
read Homer and Virgil in vain—that when I was standing in
Moscow and in the dazzling court of St. Petersburg, it were better
had I been in the whirl of the Fort Hamilton round-dances—at
the Branch—on Avenue V, reading society newspapers. O! I
sigh, in the anguish of my heart,—would that I had directed my
education in other channels—would that every book was in the
middle of the sea—would that art and architecture had not drawn
me aside from the festive dance—would that the palaces of the
Cæsars, the Milan cathedrals, the ruins of Keckler, and the great
dome of St. Paul's were in chaos! Would that Dickens and Ruskin
and Humboldt, and old Hugh Miller had never lived—and that
the coloring of Rembrandt and Raphael and Rubens had
gone out like the colors of a rainbow! How will it profit a man
if he gains the whole world—and fails to dance the German?
After death, comes the judgment. How can I die without learning
to dance the round-dances? I am a hopeless, ruined man.
I have cultivated my brain, while my heels have rested idly in
my boots. I can write—I have made a book—I can demonstrate
the XXXVI of Euclid, but I cannot dance the “dip!” May
the Lord have mercy on me, and not utterly cast me off because
I have not learned these things. Amen!
So I went on
| Saratoga in 1901 | |