Books: An Open Eyed Conspiracy An Idyl of Saratoga
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William Dean Howells >> An Open Eyed Conspiracy An Idyl of Saratoga
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9 AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY--AN IDYL OF SARATOGA
CHAPTER I
The day had been very hot under the tall trees which everywhere
embower and stifle Saratoga, for they shut out the air as well as
the sun; and after tea (they still have an early dinner at all the
hotels in Saratoga, and tea is the last meal of the day) I strolled
over to the pretty Congress Park, in the hope of getting a breath of
coolness there. Mrs. March preferred to take the chances on the
verandah of our pleasant little hotel, where I left her with the
other ladies, forty fanning like one, as they rocked to and fro
under the roof lifted to the third story by those lofty shafts
peculiar to the Saratoga architecture. As far as coolness was
concerned, I thought she was wise after I reached the park, for I
found none of it there. I tried first a chair in the arabesque
pavilion (I call it arabesque in despair; it might very well be
Swiss; it is charming, at all events), and studied to deceive myself
with the fresh-looking ebullition of the spring in the vast glass
bowls your goblets are served from (people say it is pumped, and
artificially aerated); but after a few moments this would not do,
and I went out to a bench, of the rows beside the gravelled walks.
It was no better there; but I fancied it would be better on the
little isle in the little lake, where the fountain was flinging a
sheaf of spray into the dull air. This looked even cooler than the
bubbling spring in the glass vases, and it sounded vastly cooler.
There would be mosquitoes there, of course, I admitted in the debate
I had with myself before I decided to make experiment of the place,
and the event proved me right. There were certainly some mosquitoes
in the Grecian temple (if it is not a Turkish kiosk; perhaps we had
better compromise, and call it a Grecian kiosk), which you reach by
a foot-bridge from the mainland, and there was a damp in the air
which might pass for coolness. There were three or four people
standing vaguely about in the kiosk; but my idle mind fixed itself
upon a young French-Canadian mother of low degree, who sat, with her
small boy, on the verge of the pavement near the water. She scolded
him in their parlance for having got himself so dirty, and then she
smacked his poor, filthy little hands, with a frown of superior
virtue, though I did not find her so very much cleaner herself. I
cannot see children beaten without a heartache, and I continued to
suffer for this small wretch even after he had avenged himself by
eating a handful of peanut shells, which would be sure to disagree
with him and make his mother more trouble. In fact, I experienced
no relief till his mother, having spent her insensate passion,
gathered him up with sufficient tenderness, and carried him away.
Then, for the first time, I noticed a girl sitting in a chair just
outside the kiosk, and showing a graceful young figure as she partly
turned to look after the departing mother and her child. When she
turned again and glanced in my direction, at the noise I made in
placing my chair, I could see two things--that she had as much
beauty as grace, and that she was disappointed in me. The latter
fact did not wound me, for I felt its profound impersonality. I was
not wrong in myself; I was simply wrong in being an elderly man with
a grey beard instead of the handsome shape and phase of youth which
her own young beauty had a right to in my place. I was not only not
wounded, but I was not sorry not to be that shape and phase of
youth, except as I hate to disappoint any one.
Her face was very beautiful; it was quite perfectly beautiful, and
of such classic mould that she might well have been the tutelary
goddess of that temple (if it was a temple, and not a kiosk), in the
white duck costume which the goddesses were wearing that summer.
Her features were Greek, but her looks were American; and she was
none the less a goddess, I decided, because of that air of something
exacting, of not quite satisfied, which made me more and more
willing to be elderly and grey-bearded. I at least should not be
expected to supply the worship necessary to keep such a goddess in
good humour.
I do not know just how I can account for a strain of compassion
which mingled with this sense of irresponsibility in me; perhaps it
was my feeling of security that attuned me to pity; but certainly I
did not look at this young girl long without beginning to grieve for
her, and to weave about her a web of possibilities, which grew
closer and firmer in texture when she was joined by a couple who had
apparently not left her a great while before, and who spoke, without
otherwise saluting her, as they sat down on either side of her. I
instantly interpreted her friends to be the young wife and middle-
aged husband of a second marriage; for they were evidently man and
wife, and he must have been nearly twice as old as she. In person
he tended to the weight which expresses settled prosperity, and a
certain solidification of temperament and character; as to his face,
it was kind, and it was rather humorous, in spite of being a little
slow in the cast of mind it suggested. He wore an iron-grey beard
on his cheeks and chin, but he had his strong upper lip clean
shaven; some drops of perspiration stood upon it, and upon his
forehead, which showed itself well up toward his crown under the
damp strings of his scanty hair. He looked at the young goddess in
white duck with a sort of trouble in his friendly countenance, and
his wife (if it was his wife) seemed to share his concern, though
she smiled, while he let the corners of his straight mouth droop.
She was smaller than the young girl, and I thought almost as young;
and she had the air of being somehow responsible for her, and cowed
by her, though the word says rather more than I mean. She was not
so well dressed; that is, not so stylishly, though doubtless her
costume was more expensive. It seemed the inspiration of a village
dressmaker; and her husband's low-cut waistcoat, and his expanse of
plaited shirt-front, betrayed a provincial ideal which she would
never decry--which she would perhaps never find different from the
most worldly. He had probably, I swiftly imagined, been wearing
just that kind of clothes for twenty years, and telling his tailor
to make each new suit like the last; he had been buying for the same
period the same shape of Panama hat, regardless of the continually
changing type of straw hats on other heads. I cannot say just why,
as he tilted his chair back on its hind-legs, I felt that he was
either the cashier of the village bank at home, or one of the
principal business men of the place. Village people I was quite
resolute to have them all; but I left them free to have come from
some small manufacturing centre in western Massachusetts or southern
Vermont or central New York. It was easy to see that they were not
in the habit of coming away from their place, wherever it was; and I
wondered whether they were finding their account in the present
excursion.
I myself think Saratoga one of the most delightful spectacles in the
world, and Mrs. March is of the same mind about it. We like all the
waters, and drink them without regard to their different properties;
but we rather prefer the Congress spring, because it is such a
pleasant place to listen to the Troy military band in the afternoon,
and the more or less vocal concert in the evening. All the Saratoga
world comes and goes before us, as we sit there by day and by night,
and we find a perpetual interest in it. We go and look at the deer
(a herd of two, I think) behind their wire netting in the southward
valley of the park, and we would feed the trout in their blue tank
if we did not see them suffering with surfeit, and hanging in
motionless misery amid the clear water under a cloud of bread
crumbs. We are such devotees of the special attractions offered
from time to time that we do not miss a single balloon ascension or
pyrotechnic display. In fact, it happened to me one summer that I
studied so earnestly and so closely the countenance of the lady who
went up (in trunk-hose), in order to make out just what were the
emotions of a lady who went up every afternoon in a balloon, that
when we met near the end of the season in Broadway I thought I must
have seen her somewhere in society, and took off my hat to her (she
was not at the moment in trunk-hose). We like going about to the
great hotels, and sponging on them for the music in the forenoon; we
like the gaudy shops of modes kept by artists whose addresses are
French and whose surnames are Irish; and the bazaars of the
Armenians and Japanese, whose rugs and bric-a-brac are not such
bargains as you would think. We even go to the races sometimes; we
are not sure it is quite right, but as we do not bet, and are never
decided as to which horse has won, it is perhaps not so wrong as it
might be.
Somehow I could not predicate these simple joys of the people I have
been talking of, for the very reason, that they were themselves so
simple. It was our sophistication which enabled us to taste
pleasures which would have been insipidities to them. Their palates
would have demanded other flavours--social excitements, balls,
flirtations, almost escapades. I speak of the two women; the man,
doubtless, like most other Americans of his age, wanted nothing but
to get back to business in the small town where he was important;
and still more I speak of the young girl; for the young wife I
fancied very willing to go back to her house-keeping, and to be
staying on in Saratoga only on her friend's account.
CHAPTER II
I had already made up my mind that they had been the closest
friends before one of them married, and that the young wife still
thought the young girl worthy of the most splendid fate that
marriage could have in store for any of her sex. Women often make
each other the idols of such worship; but I could not have justified
this lady's adoration so far as it concerned the mental and moral
qualities of her friend, though I fully shared it in regard to her
beauty. To me she looked a little dull and a little selfish, and I
chose to think the husband modestly found her selfish, if he were
too modest to find her dull.
Yet, after all, I tacitly argued with him, why should we call her
selfish? It was perfectly right and fit that, as a young girl with
such great personal advantages, she should wish to see the world--
even to show herself to the world,--and find in it some agreeable
youth who should admire her, and desire to make her his own for
ever. Compare this simple and natural longing with the insatiate
greed and ambition of one of our own sex, I urged him, and then talk
to me, if you can, of this poor girl's selfishness! A young man has
more egoism in an hour than a young girl has in her whole life. She
thinks she wishes some one to be devoted to her, but she really
wishes some one to let her be devoted to him; and how passively, how
negatively, she must manage to accomplish her self-sacrifice! He,
on the contrary, means to go conquering and enslaving forward; to be
in and out of love right and left, and to end, after many years of
triumph, in the possession of the best and wisest and fairest of her
sex. I know the breed, my dear sir; I have been a young man myself.
We men have liberty, we have initiative; we are not chaperoned; we
can go to this one and that one freely and fearlessly. But women
must sit still, and be come to or shied off from. They cannot cast
the bold eye of interest; they can at most bridle under it, and
furtively respond from the corner of the eye of weak hope and gentle
deprecation. Be patient, then, with this poor child if she darkles
a little under the disappointment of not finding Saratoga so
personally gay as she supposed it would be, and takes it out of you
and your wife, as if you were to blame for it, in something like
sulks.
He remained silent under these tacit appeals, but at the end he
heaved a deep sigh, as he might if he were acknowledging their
justice, and were promising to do his very best in the
circumstances. His wife looked round at him, but did not speak. In
fact, they none of them spoke after the first words of greeting to
the girl, as I can very well testify; for I sat eavesdropping with
all my might, resolved not to lose a syllable, and I am sure I lost
none.
The young girl did not look round at that deep-drawn sigh of the
man's; she did not lift her head even when he cleared his throat:
but I was intent upon him, for I thought that these sounds preluded
an overture (I am not sure of the figure) to my acquaintance, and in
fact he actually asked, "Do you know just when the concert begins?"
I was overjoyed at his question, for I was poignantly interested in
the little situation I had created, and I made haste to answer:
"Well, nominally at eight o'clock; but the first half-hour is
usually taken up in tuning the instruments. If you get into the
pavilion at a quarter to nine you won't lose much. It isn't so bad
when it really begins."
The man permitted himself a smile of the pleasure we Americans all
feel at having a thing understated in that way. His wife asked
timidly, "Do we have to engage our seats in the--pavilion?"
"Oh, no," I laughed; "there's no such rush as that. Haven't you
been at the concerts before?"
The man answered for her: "We haven't been here but a few days. I
should think," he added to her, "it would be about as comfortable
outside of the house." I perceived that he maintained his
independence of my superior knowledge by refusing to say "pavilion";
and in fact I do not know whether that is the right name for the
building myself.
"It will be hot enough anywhere," I assented, as if the remark had
been made to me; but here I drew the line out of self-respect, and
resolved that he should make the next advances.
The young girl looked up at the first sound of my voice, and
verified me as the elderly man whom she had seen before; and then
she looked down at the water again. I understood, and I freely
forgave her. If my beard had been brown instead of grey I should
have been an adventure; but to the eye of girlhood adventure can
never wear a grey beard. I was truly sorry for her; I could read in
the pensive droop of her averted face that I was again a
disappointment.
They all three sat, without speaking again, in the mannerless
silence of Americans. The man was not going to feel bound in
further civility to me because I had civilly answered a question of
his. I divined that he would be glad to withdraw from the overture
he had made; he may have thought from my readiness to meet him half
way that I might be one of those sharpers in whom Saratoga probably
abounded. This did not offend me; it amused me; I fancied his
confusion if he could suddenly know how helplessly and irreparably
honest I was.
"I don't know but it's a little too damp here, Rufus," said the
wife.
"I don't know but it is," he answered; but none of them moved, and
none of them spoke again for some minutes. Then the wife said
again, but this time to the friend, "I don't know but it's a little
too damp here, Julia," and the friend answered, as the husband had -
"I don't know but it is."
I had two surprises in this slight event. I could never have
imagined that the girl had so brunette a name as Julia, or anything
less blond in sound than, say, Evadne, at the very darkest; and I
had made up my mind--Heaven knows why--that her voice would be
harsh. Perhaps I thought it unfair that she should have a sweet
voice added to all that beauty and grace of hers; but she had a
sweet voice, very tender and melodious, with a plangent note in it
that touched me and charmed me. Beautiful and graceful as she was,
she had lacked atmosphere before, and now suddenly she had
atmosphere. I resolved to keep as near to these people as I could,
and not to leave the place as long as they stayed; but I did not
think it well to let them feel that I was aesthetically shadowing
them, and I got up and strolled away toward the pavilion, keeping an
eye in the back of my head upon them.
I sat down in a commanding position, and watched the people
gathering for the concert; and in the drama of a group of Cubans, or
of South Americans, I almost forgot for a moment the pale idyl of my
compatriots at the kiosk. There was a short, stout little Spanish
woman speaking in the shapely sentences which the Latin race
everywhere delights in, and around her was an increasing number of
serious Spanish men, listening as if to important things, and paying
her that respectful attention which always amuses and puzzles me.
In view of what we think their low estimate of women, I cannot make
out whether it is a personal tribute to some specific woman whom
they regard differently from all the rest of her sex, or whether
they choose to know in her for the nouce the abstract woman who is
better than woman in the concrete. I am sure I have never seen men
of any other race abandon themselves to such a luxury of respect as
these black and grey bearded Spaniards of leaden complexion showed
this dumpy personification of womanhood, with their prominent eyes
bent in homage upon her, and their hands trembling with readiness to
seize their hats off in reverence. It appeared presently that the
matter they were all canvassing so devoutly was the question of
where she should sit. It seemed to be decided that she could not do
better than sit just at that point. When she actually took a chair
the stately convocation ended, and its members, with low obeisances,
dispersed themselves in different directions. They had probably all
been sitting with her the whole afternoon on the verandah of the
Everett House, where their race chiefly resorts in Saratoga, and
they were availing themselves of this occasion to appear to be
meeting her, after a long interval, in society.
I said to myself that of course they believed Saratoga was still
that centre of American fashion which it once was, and that they
came and went every summer, probably in the belief that they saw a
great deal of social gaiety there. This made me think, by a natural
series of transitions, of the persons of my American idyl, and I
looked about the pavilion everywhere for them without discovering,
till the last, that they were just behind me.
I found the fact touching. They had not wished to be in any wise
beholden to me, and had even tried to reject my friendly readiness
to know them better; but they had probably sought my vicinity in a
sense of their loneliness and helplessness, which they hoped I would
not divine, but which I divined instantly. Still, I thought it best
not to show any consciousness of them, and we sat through the first
part of the concert without taking notice of one another. Then the
man leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder.
"Will you let me take your programme a minute?"
"Why, certainly," said I.
He took it, and after a vague glance at it he passed it to his wife,
who gave it in turn to the young girl. She studied it very briefly,
and then, after a questioning look, offered it back to me.
"Won't you keep it?" I entreated. "I've quite done with it."
"Oh, thank you," she answered in her tender voice, and she and the
wife looked hard at the man, whom they seemed to unite in pushing
forward by that means.
He hemmed, and asked, "Have you been in Saratoga much?"
"Why, yes," I said; "rather a good deal. My wife and I have been
here three or four summers."
At the confession of my married state, which this statement
implicated, the women exchanged a glance, I fancied, of triumph, as
if they had been talking about me, and I had now confirmed the
ground they had taken concerning me. Then they joined in goading
the man on again with their eyes.
"Which hotel," he asked, "should you say had the most going on?"
The young girl and the wife transferred their gaze to me, with an
intensified appeal in it. The man looked away with a certain shame-
-the shame of a man who feels that his wife has made him make an ass
of himself. I tried to treat his question, by the quantity and
quality of my answer, as one of the most natural things in the
world; and I probably deceived them all by this effort, though I am
sure that I was most truthful and just concerning the claims of the
different hotels to be the centre of excitement. I thought I had
earned the right to ask at the end, "Are you stopping at the Grand
Union?"
"No," he said; and he mentioned one of the smaller hotels, which
depend upon the great houses for the entertainment of their guests.
"Are you there?" he asked, meaning the Grand Union.
"Oh no," I said; "we couldn't do that sort of thing, even if we
wanted." And in my turn I named the modest hotel where we were, and
said that I thought it by all odds the pleasantest place in
Saratoga. "But I can't say," I added, "that there is a great deal
going on there, either. If you want that sort of thing you will
have to go to some of the great hotels. We have our little
amusements, but they're all rather mild." I kept talking to the
man, but really addressing myself to the women. "There's something
nearly every evening: prestidigitating, or elocutioning, or a
little concert, or charades, or impromptu theatricals, or something
of that sort. I can't say there's dancing, though really, I
suppose, if any one wanted to dance there would be dancing."
I was aware that the women listened intelligently, even if the man
did not. The wife drew a long breath, and said, "It must be very
pleasant."
The girl said--rather more hungrily, I fancied--"Yes, indeed."
I don't know why their interest should have prompted me to go on and
paint the lily a little, but I certainly did so. I did not stop
till the music began again, and I had to stop. By the time the
piece was finished I had begun to have my misgivings, and I profited
by the brief interval of silence to say to the young girl, "I
wouldn't have you think we are a whirl of gaiety exactly."
"Oh no," she answered pathetically, as if she were quite past
expecting that or anything like it.
We were silent again. At the end of the next piece they all rose,
and the wife said timidly to me, "Well, good-evening," as if she
might be venturing too far; and her husband came to her rescue with
"Well, good-evening, sir." The young girl merely bowed.
I did not stay much longer, for I was eager to get home and tell my
wife about my adventure, which seemed to me of a very rare and
thrilling kind. I believed that if I could present it to her duly,
it would interest her as much as it had interested me. But somehow,
as I went on with it in the lamplight of her room, it seemed to lose
colour and specific character.
"You are always making up these romances about young girls being off
and disappointed of a good time ever since we saw that poor little
Kitty Ellison with her cousins at Niagara," said Mrs. March. "You
seem to have it on the brain."
"Because it's the most tragical thing in the world, and the
commonest in our transition state," I retorted. I was somewhat
exasperated to have my romance treated as so stale a situation,
though I was conscious now that it did want perfect novelty. "It's
precisely for that reason that I like to break my heart over it. I
see it every summer, and it keeps me in a passion of pity.
Something ought to be done about it."
"Well, don't YOU try to do anything, Basil, unless you write to the
newspapers."
"I suppose," I said, "that if the newspapers could be got to take
hold of it, perhaps something might be done." The notion amused me;
I went on to play with it, and imagined Saratoga, by a joint effort
of the leading journals, recolonised with the social life that once
made it the paradise of young people.
"I have been writing to the children," said my wife, "and telling
them to stay on at York Harbour if the Herricks want them so much.
They would hate it here. You say the girl looked cross. I can't
exactly imagine a cross goddess."
"There were lots of cross goddesses," I said rather crossly myself;
for I saw that, after having trodden my romance in the dust, she was
willing I should pick it up again and shake it off, and I wished to
show her that I was not to be so lightly appeased.
"Perhaps I was thinking of angels," she murmured.
"I distinctly didn't say she was an angel," I returned.
"Now, come, Basil; I see you're keeping something back. What did
you try to do for those people? Did you tell them where you were
stopping?"
"Yes, I did. They asked me, and I told them."
"Did you brag the place up?"
"On the contrary, I understated its merits."
"Oh, very well, then," she said, quite as if I had confessed my
guilt; "they will come here, and you will have your romance on your
hands for the rest of the month. I'm thankful we're going away the
first of August."
CHAPTER III
The next afternoon, while we were sitting in the park waiting for
the Troy band to begin playing, and I was wondering just when they
would reach the "Washington Post March," which I like because I can
always be sure of it, my unknown friends came strolling our way.
The man looked bewildered and bored, with something of desperation
in his troubled eye, and his wife looked tired and disheartened.
The young girl, still in white duck, wore the same air of passive
injury I had noted in her the night before. Their faces all three
lighted up at sight of me; but they faded again at the cold and
meagre response I made to their smiles under correction of my wife's
fears of them. I own it was base of me; but I had begun to feel
myself that it might be too large a contract to attempt their
consolation, and, in fact, after one is fifty scarcely any romance
will keep overnight.
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