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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My wife glanced from them to me, and read my cowardly mind; but she
waited till they passed, as they did after an involuntary faltering
in front of us, and were keeping on down the path, looking at the
benches, which were filled on either hand. She said, "Weren't those
your friends?"
"They were the persons of my romance."
"No matter. Go after them instantly and bring them back here, poor
things. We can make room for them."
I rose. "Isn't this a little too idyllic? Aren't you rather
overdoing it?"
"Don't speak to me, Basil! I never heard of anything so atrocious.
Go on your knees to them if they refuse! They can sit here with me,
and you and he can stand. Fly!"
I knew she was punishing me for her own reluctance; but I flew, in
that sense of the term, and easily overhauled them in the tangle of
people coming and going in the path, and the nursemaids pushing
their perambulators in either direction. Hat in hand I delivered my
message. I could see that it gave the women great pleasure and the
man some doubt. His mouth fell open a little; their cheeks flushed
and their eyes shone.
"I don't know as we better," the wife hesitated; "I'm afraid we'll
crowd you." And she looked wistfully toward my wife. The young
girl looked at her.
"Not at all!" I cried. "There's an abundance of room. My wife's
keeping the places for you,"--in fact, I saw her putting her arm out
along the bench, and explaining to a couple who had halted in front
of her that the seats were taken--"and she'll be disappointed."
"Well," the woman consented, with a little sigh of triumph that
touched me, and reanimated all my interest in her and in her friend.
She said, with a sort of shy, instinctive politeness, "I don't know
as you and Mr. Deering got acquainted last night."
"My name is March," I said, and I shook the hand of Mr. Deering. It
was rather thick.
"And this--is our friend," Mrs. Peering went on, in presentation of
me to the young lady, "Miss Gage, that's come with us."
I was delighted that I had guessed their relative qualities so
perfectly, and when we arrived at Mrs. March I glibly presented
them. My wife was all that I could have wished her to be of
sympathetic and intelligent. She did not overdo it by shaking
hands, but she made places for the ladies, smiling cordially; and
Mrs. Deering made Miss Gage take the seat between them. Her husband
and I stood awhile in front of them, and then I said we would go off
and find chairs somewhere.
We did not find any till we had climbed to the upland at the south-
east of the park, and then only two iron ones, which it was useless
to think of transporting. But there was no reason why we should not
sit in them where they were: we could keep the ladies in plain
sight, and I could not mistake "Washington Post" when the band came
to it. Mr. Deering sank into one of the chairs with a sigh of
satisfaction which seemed to complete itself when he discovered in
the thick grass at his feet a twig from one of the tall, slim pines
above us. He bent over for it, and then, as he took out his
penknife and clicked open a blade to begin whittling, he cast up a
critical glance at the trees.
"Pretty nice pines," he said; and he put his hand on the one next to
us with a sort of appreciation that interested me.
"Yes; the trees of Saratoga are the glory of the place," I returned.
"I never saw them grow anywhere else so tall and slim. It doesn't
seem the effect of crowding either. It's as if there was some
chemical force in the soil that shot them up. They're like rockets
that haven't left the ground yet."
"It's the crowding," he said seriously, as if the subject were not
to be trifled with. "It's the habit of all these trees--pines and
oaks and maples, I don't care what they are--to spread, and that's
what we tell our customers. Give the trees plenty of room; don't
plant 'em too thick if you want to get all the good out of 'em." As
if he saw a question in my eye, he went on: "We do a forest-tree
business exclusively; these shade-trees, and walnuts, hickories,
chestnuts, and all kinds. It's a big trade, getting to be, and
growing all the time. Folks have begun to find out what fools they
were to destroy the forests, and the children want to buy back what
the fathers threw away."
I scarcely needed to prompt him; he was only too glad to talk on
about his business, and he spoke with a sort of homesick fondness.
He told me that he had his nurseries at De Witt Point, up on the St.
Lawrence, where he could raise stock hardy enough for any climate,
and ship by land or water.
"I've got to be getting home right away now," he said finally,
clicking his knife-blade half shut and open with his thumb.
"It's about time for our evergreen trade, and I don't want the trees
to stay a minute in the ground after the middle of the month."
"Won't the ladies find it hard to tear themselves away from the
gaieties of Saratoga?" I asked with apparent vagueness.
"Well, that's it," said Mr. Deering; and he shut his knife and
slipped it into his pocket, in order to take his knee between his
clasped hands and lift his leg from the ground. I have noticed that
this is a philosophical attitude with some people, and I was
prepared by it for some thoughtful generalising from my companion.
"Women would be willing to stay on in a place for a year to see if
something wouldn't happen; and if you take 'em away before anything
happens, they'll always think that if they'd stayed something would
have happened the next day, or maybe the day they left."
He stared upward into the pine boughs, and I said: "Yes, that's so.
I suppose we should be like them if we had the same conditions.
Their whole life is an expectation of something to happen. Men have
the privilege of making things happen--or trying to."
"Oh, I don't know as I want to criticise 'em. As you say, I guess
WE should be just so." He dropped his leg, and bent over as if to
examine the grass; he ended by taking a blade of it between his
teeth before he spoke again, with his head still down. "I don't
want to hurry 'em; I want to give 'em a fair show now we're here,
and I'll let the stock go as long as I can. But I don't see very
much gaiety around."
I laughed. "Why, it's all gaiety, in one way. Saratoga is a
perpetual Fourth of July, we think."
"Oh yes; there's enough going on, and my wife and me we could enjoy
it first rate."
"If the young lady could?" I ventured, with a smile of sympathetic
intelligence.
"Well, yes. You see, we don't know anybody, and I suppose we didn't
take that into account. Well, I suppose it's like this: they
thought it would be easy to get acquainted in the hotel, and
commence having a good time right away. I don't know; my wife had
the idea when they cooked it up amongst 'em that she was to come
with us. But I SWEAR _I_ don't know how to go about it. I can't
seem to make up my mouth to speak to folks first; and then you can't
tell whether a man ain't a gambler, or on for the horse-races
anyway. So we've been here a week now, and you're the first ones
we've spoken to besides the waiters since we came."
I couldn't help laughing, their experience was so exactly as I had
imagined it when I first saw this disconsolate party. In my triumph
at my own penetration, I would not have had their suffering in the
past one pang the less; but the simple frankness of his confession
fixed me in the wish that the future might be brighter for them. I
thought myself warranted by my wife's imprudence in taking a step
toward their further intimacy on my own account, and I said:
"Well, perhaps I ought to tell you that I haven't been inside the
Saratoga Club or bet on the races since I've been here. That's my
name in full,"--and I gave him my card,--"and I'm in the literary
line; that is, I'm the editor of a magazine in New York--the Every
Other Week."
"Oh yes; I know who you are," said my companion, with my card in his
hand. "Fact is, I was round at your place this morning trying to
get rooms, and the clerk told me all about you from my description.
I felt as mean as pu'sley goin'; seemed to be takin' kind of an
advantage of you."
"Not at all; it's a public house," I interrupted; but I thought I
should be stronger with Mrs. March if I did not give the fact away
to her, and I resolved to keep it.
"But they couldn't rest easy till I tried, and I was more than half
glad there wasn't any rooms."
"Oh, I'm very sorry," I said; and I indulged a real regret from the
vantage I had. "It would have been very pleasant to have you there.
Perhaps later--we shall be giving up our rooms at the end of the
month."
"No," he said, with a long breath. "If I've got to leave 'em, I
guess it'll be just as well to leave 'em where they're acquainted
with the house anyway." His remark betrayed a point in his thinking
which had not perhaps been reached in his talk with the ladies.
"It's a quiet place, and they're used to it; and I guess they
wouldn't want to stay through the rest of the month, quite. I don't
believe my wife would, anyway."
He did not say this very confidently, but hopefully rather, and I
thought it afforded me an opening to find out something yet more
definite about the ladies.
"Miss Gage is remarkably fine-looking," I began.
"Think so?" he answered. "Well, so does my wife. I don't know as I
like her style exactly," he said, with a kind of latent grudge.
"Her style is magnificent," I insisted.
"Well, maybe so. I guess she's good enough looking, if that's what
you mean. But I think it's always a kind of a mistake for three
persons to come off together, I don't care who they are. Then
there's three opinions. She's a nice girl, and a good girl, and she
don't put herself forward. But when you've got a young lady on your
hands, you've GOT her, and you feel bound to keep doin' something
for her all the time; and if you don't know what to do yourself, and
your wife can't tell--"
I added intelligently, "Yes."
"Well, that's just where it is. Sometimes I wish the whole dumb
town would burn up." I laughed and laughed; and my friend, having
begun to unpack his heart, went on to ease it of the rest of its
load. I had not waited for this before making some reflections
concerning him, but I now formulated them to myself. He really had
none of that reserve I had attributed to him the night before; it
was merely caution and this is the case with most country people.
They are cautious, but not reserved; if they think they can trust
you, they keep back none of their affairs; and this is the American
character, for we are nearly all country people. I understood him
perfectly when he said, "I ruther break stone than go through what I
have been through the last week! You understand how it is. 'Tain't
as if she said anything; I wish she would; but you feel all the
while that it ain't what she expected it to be, and you feel as if
it was you that was to blame for the failure. By George! if any man
was to come along and make an offer for my contract I would sell out
cheap. It's worse because my wife asked her to come, and thought
she was doin' her all kinds of a favour to let her. They've always
been together, and when we talked of coming to Saratoga this summer,
nothing would do my wife but Julia must come with us. Her and her
father usually take a trip off somewhere in the hot weather, but
this time he couldn't leave; president of our National Bank, and
president of the village, too." He threw in the fact of these
dignities explanatorily, but with a willingness, I could see, that
it should affect me. He went on: "They're kind of connections of
my first wife's. Well, she's a nice girl; too nice, I guess, to get
along very fast. I see girls all the way along down gettin'
acquainted on the cars and boats--we come east on the Ogdensburg
road to Rouse's Point, and then took the boat down Lake Champlain
and Lake George--but she always seemed to hold back. I don't know's
she's proud either; I can't make it out. It balls my wife all up,
too. I tell her she's fretted off all the good her trip's goin' to
do her before she got it."
He laughed ruefully, and just then the band began to play the
"Washington Post."
"What tune's that?" he demanded.
"'Washington Post,'" I said, proud of knowing it.
"By George! that tune goes right to a fellow's legs, don't it?"
"It's the new march," I said.
He listened with a simple joy in it, and his pleasure strengthened
the mystic bond which had formed itself between us through the
confidences he had made me, so flatteringly corroborative of all my
guesses concerning him and his party.
CHAPTER IV
I longed to have the chance of bragging to my wife; but this chance
did not come till the concert was quite over, after I rejoined her
with my companion, and she could take leave of them all without
seeming to abandon them. Then I judged it best to let her have the
word; for I knew by the way she ran her hand through my arm, and
began pushing me along out of earshot, that she was full of it.
"Well, Basil, I think that is the sweetest and simplest and kindest
creature in the world, and I'm perfectly in love with her."
I did not believe somehow that she meant the girl, but I thought it
best merely to suggest, "There are two."
"You know very well which I mean, and I would do anything I could
for her. She's got a difficult problem before her, and I pity her.
The girl's very well, and she IS a beauty; and I suppose she HAS
been having a dull time, and of course you couldn't please Mrs.
Deering half so well as by doing something for her friend. I
suppose you're feeling very proud that they're just what you
divined."
"Not at all; I'm so used to divining people. How did you know I
knew it?"
"I saw you talking to him, and I knew you were pumping him."
"Pumping? He asked nothing better than to flow. He would put to
shame the provoked spontaneity of any spring in Saratoga."
"Well, did he say that he was going to leave them here?"
"He would like to do it--yes. He was very sweet and simple and
kind, too, Isabel. He complained bitterly of the goddess, and all
but said she sulked."
"Why, I don't know," said my wife. "I think, considering, that she
is rather amiable. She brightened up more and more."
"That was prosperity, or the hope of it, my dear. Nothing illumines
us like the prospect of pleasant things. She took you for society
smiling upon her, and of course she smiled back. But it's only the
first smile of prosperity that cheers. If it keeps on smiling it
ends by making us dissatisfied again. When people are getting into
society they are very glad; when they have got in they seem to be
rather gloomy. We mustn't let these things go too far. Now that
you've got your friends in good humour, the right way is to drop
them--to cut them dead when you meet them, to look the other way.
That will send them home perfectly radiant."
"Nonsense! I am going to do all I can for them. What do you think
we can do? They haven't the first idea how to amuse themselves
here. It's a miracle they ever got that dress the girl is wearing.
They just made a bold dash because they saw it in a dressmaker's
window the first day, and she had to have something. It's killingly
becoming to her; but I don't believe they know it, and they don't
begin to know how cheap it was: it was simply THROWN away. I'm
going shopping with them in the morning."
"Oh!"
"But now the question is, what we can do to give them some little
glimpse of social gaiety. That's what they've come for."
We were passing the corner of a large enclosure which seems devoted
in Saratoga to the most distracting of its pleasures, and I said:
"Well, we might give them a turn on the circular railway or the
switchback; or we could take them to the Punch and Judy drama, or
get their fortunes told in the seeress's tent, or let them fire in
the shooting-gallery, or buy some sweet-grass baskets of the
Indians; and there is the pop-corn and the lemonade."
"I will tell you what," said Mrs March, who had not been listening
to a word I said; for if she had heard me she would not have had
patience with my ironical suggestions.
"Well, what?"
"Or, no; that wouldn't do, either."
"I'm glad you don't approve of the notion, on second thoughts. I
didn't like it from the beginning, and I didn't even know what it
was."
"We could have them up to the house this evening, and introduce them
to some of our friends,--only there isn't a young man in the whole
place,--and have them stay to the charades."
"What do you think," I said, "of their having come up this morning
and tried to get rooms at our house?"
"Yes; they told me."
"And don't you call that rather forth-putting? It seems to me that
it was taking a mean advantage of my brags."
"It was perfectly innocent in them. But now, dearest, don't be
tiresome. I know that you like them as well as I do, and I will
take all your little teasing affectations for granted. The question
is, what can we do for them?"
"And the answer is, I don't in the least know. There isn't any
society life at Saratoga that I can see; and if there is, we are not
in it. How could we get any one else in? I see that's what you're
aiming at. Those public socialities at the big hotels they could
get into as well as we could; but they wouldn't be anywhere when
they got there, and they wouldn't know what to do. You know what
hollow mockeries those things are. Don't you remember that hop we
went to with the young Braceys the first summer? If those girls
hadn't waltzed with each other they wouldn't have danced a step the
whole evening."
"I know, I know," sighed my wife; "it was terrible. But these
people are so very unworldly that don't you think they could be
deluded into the belief that they were seeing society if we took a
little trouble? You used to be so inventive! You could think up
something now if you tried."
"My dear, a girl knows beyond all the arts of hoodwinking whether
she's having a good time, and your little scheme of passing off one
of those hotel hops for a festivity would never work in the world."
"Well, I think it is too bad! What has become of all the easy
gaiety there used to be in the world?"
"It has been starched and ironed out of it, apparently. Saratoga is
still trying to do the good old American act, with its big hotels
and its heterogeneous hops, and I don't suppose there's ever such a
thing as a society person at any of them. That wouldn't be so bad.
But the unsociety people seem to be afraid of one another. They
feel that there is something in the air--something they don't and
can't understand; something alien, that judges their old-fashioned
American impulse to be sociable, and contemns it. No; we can't do
anything for our hapless friends--I can hardly call them our
acquaintances. We must avoid them, and keep them merely as a
pensive colour in our own vivid memories of Saratoga. If we made
them have a good time, and sent them on their way rejoicing, I
confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it is,
they're a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the
minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot
summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer
registers eighty-nine. Don't you see the advantage of that? I
believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can
think of a fitting fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in Every
Other Week. He'll get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and
strike the hotels and springs for ad's."
"Well," said Mrs. March, "I wish I had never seen them; and it's all
your fault, Basil. Of course, when you played upon my sympathies so
about them, I couldn't help feeling interested in them. We are a
couple of romantic old geese, my dear."
"Not at all, or at least I'm not. I simply used these people
conjecturally to give myself an agreeable pang. I didn't want to
know anything more about them than I imagined, and I certainly
didn't dream of doing anything for them. You'll spoil everything if
you turn them from fiction into fact, and try to manipulate their
destiny. Let them alone; they will work it out for themselves."
"You know I can't let them alone now," she lamented. "I am not one
of those who can give themselves an agreeable pang with the
unhappiness of their fellow-creatures. I'm not satisfied to study
them; I want to relieve them."
She went on to praise herself to my disadvantage, as I notice wives
will with their husbands, and I did not attempt to deny her this
source of consolation. But when she ended by saying, "I believe I
shall send you alone," and explained that she had promised Mrs.
Deering we would come to their hotel for them after tea, and go with
them to hear the music at the United States and the Grand Union, I
protested. I said that I always felt too sneaking when I was
prowling round those hotels listening to their proprietary concerts,
and I was aware of looking so sneaking that I expected every moment
to be ordered off their piazzas. As for convoying a party of three
strangers about alone, I should certainly not do it.
"Not if I've a headache?"
"Not if you've a headache."
"Oh, very well, then."
"What are you two quarrelling about?" cried a gay voice behind us,
and we looked round into the laughing eyes of Miss Dale. She was
the one cottager we knew in Saratoga, but when we were with her we
felt that we knew everybody, so hospitable was the sense of world
which her kindness exhaled.
"It was Mrs. March who was quarrelling," I said. "I was only trying
to convince her that she was wrong, and of course one has to lift
one's voice. I hope I hadn't the effect of halloaing."
"Well, I merely heard you above the steam harmonicon at the
switchback," said Miss Dale. "I don't know whether you call THAT
holloaing."
"Oh, Miss Dale," said my wife, "we are in such a fatal--"
"Pickle," I suggested, and she instantly adopted the word in her
extremity.
"--pickle with some people that Providence has thrown in our way,
and that we want to do something for"; and in a labyrinth of
parentheses that no man could have found his way into or out of, she
possessed Miss Dale of the whole romantic fact. "It was Mr. March,
of course, who first discovered them," she concluded, in plaintive
accusation.
"Poor Mr. March!" cried Miss Dale. "Well, it is a pathetic case,
but it isn't the only one, if that's any comfort. Saratoga is
reeking with just such forlornities the whole summer long; but I can
quite understand how you feel about it, Mrs. March." We came to a
corner, and she said abruptly: "Excuse my interrupting your
quarrel! Not quite so LOUD, Mr. March!" and she flashed back a
mocking look at me as she skurried off down the street with
astonishing rapidity.
"How perfectly heartless!" cried my wife. "I certainly thought she
would suggest something--offer to do something."
"I relied upon her, too," I said; "but now I have my doubts whether
she was really going down that street till she saw that it was the
best way to escape. We're certainly in trouble, my dear, if people
avoid us in this manner."
CHAPTER V
"I am doing it entirely on Mrs. Deering's I account," said my wife
that evening after tea, as we walked down the side-street that
descended from our place to Broadway. "She has that girl on her
hands, and I know she must be at her wits' end."
"And I do it entirely on Deering's account," I retorted. "He has
both of those women on HIS hands."
We emerged into the glistening thoroughfare in front of the vast
hotels, and I was struck, as I never fail to be, with its futile and
unmeaning splendour. I think there is nothing in our dun-coloured
civilisation prettier than that habit the ladies have in Saratoga of
going out on the street after dark in their bare heads. When I
first saw them wandering about so in the glitter of the shop-windows
and the fitful glare of the electrics everywhere, I thought they
must be some of those Spanish-Americans mistaking the warm, dry air
of the Northern night for that of their own latitudes; but when I
came up with them I could hear, if I could not see, that they were
of our own race. Those flat and shapeless tones could come through
the noses of no other. The beauty and the elegance were also ours,
and the fearless trust of circumstance. They sauntered up and down
before the gaunt, high porticoes of the hotels, as much at home as
they could have been in their own houses, and in much the same dress
as if they had been receiving there. The effect is one of
incomparable cheer, and is a promise of social brilliancy which
Saratoga no more keeps than she does that of her other
characteristic aspects; say the forenoon effect of the same
thoroughfare, with the piazzas banked with the hotel guests, and the
street full of the light equipages which seem peculiar to the place
passing and repassing, in the joyous sunlight and out of it, on the
leaf-flecked street. Even the public carriages of Saratoga have a
fresh, unjaded air; and to issue from the railway station in the
midst of those buoyant top-phaetons and surreys, with their light-
limbed horses, is to be thrilled by some such insensate expectation
of pleasure as fills the heart of a boy at his first sally into the
world. I always expect to find my lost youth waiting for me around
the corner of the United States Hotel, and I accuse myself of some
fault if it disappoints me, as it always does. I can imagine what
gaudy hopes by day and by night the bright staging of the potential
drama must awaken in the breast of a young girl when she first sees
it, and how blank she must feel when the curtain goes down and there
has been no play. It was a real anguish to me when that young girl
with the Deerings welcomed my wife and me with a hopeful smile, as
if we were the dramatis personae, and now the performance must be
going to begin. I could see how much our chance acquaintance had
brightened the perspective for her, and how eagerly she had repaired
all her illusions; and I thought how much better it would have been
if she had been left to the dull and spiritless resignation in which
I had first seen her. From that there could no fall, at least, and
now she had risen from it only to sink again.
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