The March Family Trilogy, Complete

W >> William Dean Howells >> The March Family Trilogy, Complete


The wedding-journeyers looked at each other with eyes of sad amaze. They
bowed themselves for a moment to the viands, and then by an equal impulse
refrained. They were sufficiently young, they were happy, they were
hungry; nature is great and strong, but art is greater, and before these
triumphs of the cook at the Albany depot appetite succumbed. By a
terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor in
their cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the character and
history of the materials of that breakfast.

Presently Isabel paused, played a little with her knife, and, after a
moment looked up at her husband with an arch regard and said: "I was
just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where
our train once stopped for breakfast. I remember the freshness and
brightness of everything on the little tables,--the plates, the napkins,
the gleaming half-bottles of wine. They seemed to have been preparing
that breakfast for us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly
seated before they served us with great cups of 'cafe-au-lait', and the
sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable
gravy, and potatoes,--such potatoes! Dear me, how little I ate of it! I
wish, for once, I'd had your appetite, Basil; I do indeed."

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despite the tragical contrast
her words had suggested, Basil finally joined. So much amazement had
probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted in that place;
but their lightness did not at all commend them. The waitress had not
liked it from the first, and had served them with reluctance; and the
proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon them as if he believed
them about to escape without payment. Here, then, they had enforced a
great fact of travelling,--that people who serve the public are kindly
and pleasant in proportion as they serve it well. The unjust and the
inefficient have always that consciousness of evil which will not let a
man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact. There was
already such heat from without, even at eight o'clock in the morning,
that they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly took
their places in the train, which had been made up for departure. They had
deliberately rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as affording a
less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of
ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite
comfortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to view the
scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much
complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open window to make
the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape
the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly
love for its mild beauty and tranquil picturesqueness, and it is in honor
of our friends that I say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any
considerable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows
and the wide meadows of a grazing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk
River rippling down through all, and at frequent intervals the life of
the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazy boats that seem not to
stir, and the horses that the train passes with a whirl, and, leaves
slowly stepping forward and swiftly slipping backward. There are farms
that had once, or still have, the romance to them of being Dutch
farms,--if there is any romance in that,--and one conjectures a Dutch
thrift in their waving grass and grain. Spaces of woodland here and there
dapple the slopes, and the cozy red farm-houses repose by the side of
their capacious red barns. Truly, there is no ground on which to defend
the idleness, and yet as the train strives furiously onward amid these
scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind it,
and to saunter at will up and down the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard
gates, and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served with cups of
buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning's work and
have leisure to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies,
with decent caps upon their gray hair, then I do not complain if the
drink is brought me by some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of
Washington Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors
my diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty awkwardness while she
waits till I have done drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as I
lounge through the barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their
family affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the
elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for
a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in
the sun before the gate. At all the places, I have the people keep bees,
and, in the garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable
world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a great bed in
which the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of
delicate spray hanging over it. I walk unmolested through the farmer's
tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of his voluble
mowing-machine, and learn to my heart's content that his name begins with
Van, and that his family has owned that farm ever since the days of the
Patroon; which I dare say is not true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of
the hayfield, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal beside that
wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only, because they
are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and
half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his anatomical
interest. The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the
rudder swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can step
on. She is laden with flour from the valley of the Genesee, and may have
started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly
manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a fiery-haired lady of
imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I explore, is plainly furnished
with a cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane language is
allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide
imperceptibly down the canal, unvexed by the far-off future of arrival.

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes, but I am aware that
less superficial spirits could not be satisfied with them, and I can not
pretend that my wedding-journeyers were so.

They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape; they invited themselves to
be reminded of passages of European travel by it; and they placed villas
and castles and palaces upon all the eligible building-sites. Ashamed of
these devices, presently, Basil patriotically tried to reconstruct the
Dutch and Indian past of the Mohawk Valley, but here he was foiled by the
immense ignorance of his wife, who, as a true American woman, knew
nothing of the history of her own country, and less than nothing of the
barbarous regions beyond the borders of her native province. She proved a
bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the events which Basil
mentioned; and she had never even heard of the massacres by the French
and Indians at Schenectady, which he in his boyhood had known so vividly
that he was scalped every night in his dreams, and woke up in the morning
expecting to see marks of the tomahawk on the head-board. So, failing at
last to extract any sentiment from the scenes without, they turned their
faces from the window, and looked about them for amusement within the
car.

It was in all respects an ordinary carful of human beings, and it was
perhaps the more worthy to be studied on that account. As in literature
the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an
improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to
look upon the heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his
habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at
such times very precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a man
and a brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural,
unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life
and inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved
by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by his stinted
inspirations, to share his foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse
selfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world, if you do not refuse to be
amused; and our friends were very willing to be entertained. They
delighted in the precise, thick-fingered old ladies who bought sweet
apples of the boys come aboard with baskets, and who were so long in
finding the right change, that our travellers, leaping in thought with
the boys from the moving train, felt that they did so at the peril of
their lives. Then they were interested in people who went out and found
their friends waiting for them, or else did not find them, and wandered
disconsolately up and down before the country stations, carpet-bag in
hand; in women who came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands with or
sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got seats for them, and placed
their bags or their babies in their laps, and turned for a nod at the
door; in young ladies who were seen to places by young men the latter
seemed not to care if the train did go off with them, and then threw up
their windows and talked with girl-friends, on the platform without, till
the train began to move, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and moist
red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it, and
could not calm themselves to the dull level of the travel around them; in
the conductor, coldly and inaccessibly vigilant, as he went his rounds,
reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his head
from time, to time, and listened with a faint, sarcastic smile to the
questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some
information out of him; in the trainboy, who passed through on his many
errands with prize candies, gum-drops, pop-corn, papers and magazines,
and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impartiality,
or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural perception of character in
those who received them.

A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as well
as the traits common to all railway travel; and our friends decided that
this was not a very well-dressed company, and would contrast with the
people on an express-train between Boston and New York to no better
advantage than these would show beside the average passengers between
London and Paris. And it seems true that on a westering' line, the
blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the
coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into increasing
informality of costume. I speak of the undressful sex alone: woman,
wherever she is, appears in the last attainable effects of fashion, which
are now all but telegraphic and universal. But most of the passengers
here were men, and they mere plainly of the free-and easy West rather
than the dapper East. They wore faces thoughtful with the problem of
buying cheap and selling dear, and they could be known by their silence
from the loquacious, acquaintance-making way-travellers. In these, the
mere coming aboard seemed to beget an aggressively confidential mood.
Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any means of relieving their ennui;
or they felt that they might here indulge safely in the pleasures of
autobiography, so dear to all of us; or else, in view of the many
possible catastrophes, they desired to leave some little memory of
themselves behind. At any rate, whenever the train stopped, the
wedding-journeyers caught fragments of the personal histories of their
fellow-passengers which had been rehearsing to those that sat next the
narrators. It was no more than fair that these should somewhat magnify
themselves, and put the best complexion on their actions and the worst
upon their sufferings; that they should all appear the luckiest or the
unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people that ever were, and
should all have made or lost the most money. There was a prevailing
desire among them to make out that they came from or were going to same
very large place; and our friends fancied an actual mortification in the
face of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope (or some other
insignificant classical station, in the ancient Greek and Roman part of
New York State), after having listened to the life of a somewhat
rustic-looking person who had described himself as belonging near New
York City.

Basil also found diversion in the tender couples, who publicly comported
themselves as if in a sylvan solitude, and, as it had been on the bank of
some umbrageous stream, far from the ken of envious or unsympathetic
eyes, reclined upon each other's shoulders and slept; but Isabel declared
that this behavior was perfectly indecent. She granted, of course, that
they were foolish, innocent people, who meant no offense, and did not
feel guilty of an impropriety, but she said that this sort of thing was a
national reproach. If it were merely rustic lovers, she should not care
so much; but you saw people who ought to know better, well-dressed,
stylish people, flaunting their devotion in the face of the world, and
going to sleep on each other's shoulders on every railroad train. It was
outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really infamous. Before she would
allow herself to do such a thing she would--well, she hardly knew what
she would not do; she would have a divorce, at any rate. She wondered
that Basil could laugh at it; and he would make her hate him if he kept
on.

From the seat behind their own they were now made listeners to the
history of a ten weeks' typhoid fever, from the moment when the narrator
noticed that he had not felt very well for a day or two back, and all at
once a kind of shiver took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly
insensible, and could eat nothing but a little pounded ice--and his
wife--a small woman, too--used to lift him back and forth between the bed
and sofa like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half the time
whether he was dead or alive. This history, from which not the smallest
particular or the least significant symptom of the case was omitted,
occupied an hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for the
entertainment of one who had been five minutes before it began a stranger
to the historian.

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailed forth in accents of
desperation the words, "O, disgusting!" The monotony of the narrative in
the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat of the day, had lulled
her into slumbers from which she awoke at the stopping of the train, to
find her head resting tenderly upon her husband's shoulder.

She confronted his merriment with eyes of mournful rebuke; but as she
could not find him, or the harshest construction, in the least to blame,
she was silent.

"Never mind, dear, never mind," he coaxed, "you were really not
responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune,--whatever you
like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare say
it is sheer, disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard,
swinging from the roof: 'This train stops twenty minutes for dinner at
Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have anything
edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could dine at the
Albany station, even."

In a little while they found themselves in an airy, comfortable
dining-room, eating a dinner, which it seemed to them France in the flush
of her prosperity need not have blushed to serve; for if it wanted a
little in the last graces of art, it redeemed itself in abundance,
variety, and wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famishing passenger
stood a beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and
jacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindliness and grace which
make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his calling, which
disenthrall it of servility, and constitute him your eager host, not your
menial, for the moment. From table to table passed a calming influence in
the person of the proprietor, who, as he took his richly earned money,
checked the rising fears of the guests by repeated proclamations that
there was plenty of time, and that he would give them due warning before
the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with
beak and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon everything in reach,
remained to eat like Christians; and even a poor, scantily-Englished
Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars
stopped and in looking at his watch, made a good dinner in spite of
himself.

"O Basil, Basil!" cried Isabel, when the train was again in motion, "have
we really dined once more? It seems too good to be true. Cleanliness,
plenty, wholesomeness, civility! Yes, as you say, they cannot be civil
where they are not just; honesty and courtesy go together; and wherever
they give you outrageous things to eat, they add indigestible insults.
Basil, dear, don't be jealous; I shall never meet him again; but I'm in
love with that black waiter at our table. I never saw such perfect
manners, such a winning and affectionate politeness. He made me feel that
every mouthful I ate was a personal favor to him. What a complete
gentleman. There ought never to be a white waiter. None but negroes are
able to render their service a pleasure and distinction to you."

So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness to be satisfied, a homage
perhaps beyond its desert to the good dinner and the decent service of
it. But here they erred in the right direction, and I find nothing more
admirable in their behavior throughout a wedding journey which certainly
had its trials, than their willingness to make the very heat of whatever
would suffer itself to be made anything at all of. They celebrated its
pleasures with magnanimous excess, they passed over its griefs with a
wise forbearance. That which they found the most difficult of management
was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who write
their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the
fact that it is so typical, in this respect. I even imagine that ideal
reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the
life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their
own silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when there was
absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their
love, which they were never tired of hearing as they severally knew it.
Let it not be a reproach to human nature or to me if I say that there was
something in the comfort of having well dined which now touched the
springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that they had never so
rejoiced in these tender reminiscences.

They had planned to stop over at Rochester till the morrow, that they
might arrive at Niagara by daylight, and at Utica they had suddenly
resolved to make the rest of the day's journey in a drawing-room car. The
change gave them an added reason for content; and they realized how much
they had previously sacrificed to the idea of travelling in the most
American manner, without achieving it after all, for this seemed a touch
of Americanism beyond the old-fashioned car. They reclined in luxury upon
the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs; they surveyed with infinite
satisfaction the elegance of the flying-parlor in which they sat, or
turned their contented regard through the broad plate-glass windows upon
the landscape without. They said that none but Americans or enchanted
princes in the "Arabian Nights" ever travelled in such state; and when
the stewards of the car came round successively with tropical fruits,
ice-creams, and claret-punches, they felt a heightened assurance that
they were either enchanted princes--or Americans. There were more ladies
and more fashion than in the other cars; and prettily dressed children
played about on the carpet; but the general appearance of the passengers
hardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere; and they were plainly in
that car because they were of the American race, which finds nothing too
good for it that its money can buy.




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 over Rochester, so that in
passing a body of water, 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 shirt-front, 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 clerk throughout the
United States, that behind 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 the humble pie his jeweled fingers offer me. 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 venturing 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 always
inspires in its guests, and which our great hotels, 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.