A Belated Guest

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IV.

The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst
trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he
could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
happiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the
fondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station;
there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the
host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
cigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
the rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that he
was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
picturesque farewell from the platform.

Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long
after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
to death between a moving train and such an archway.

Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
in the world,

"In life's morning march when his bosom was young,"

and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to
join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
blithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains
the witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from
the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellow
cordial of a voice that was like no other.

[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
writes the best prose. D.W.]




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
Express the appreciation of another's fit word
Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens