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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But, in fact, the whole party seemed falsely cheered by the event of
the afternoon; and in the few moments that we sat with them on their
verandah, before going to the music at the Grand Union, I could hear
the ladies laughing together, while Deering joyously unfolded to me
his plan of going home the next morning and leaving his wife and
Miss Gage behind him. "They will stay in this hotel--they might as
well--and I guess they can get along. My wife feels more acquainted
since she met Mrs. March, and I shan't feel so much like leavin' her
among strangers here I don't know when she's taken such a fancy to
any one as she has to your wife, or Miss Gage either. I guess
she'll want to ask her about the stores."
I said that I believed the fancy was mutual, and that there was
nothing my wife liked better than telling people about stores. I
added, in generalisation, that when a woman had spent all her own
money on dress, it did her quite as much good to see other women
spending theirs; and Deering said he guessed that was about so. He
gave me a push on the shoulder to make me understand how keenly he
appreciated the joke, and I perceived that we had won his heart too.
We joined the ladies, and I thought that my sufferings for her
authorised me to attach myself more especially to Miss Gage, and to
find out all I could about her. We walked ahead of the others, and
I was aware of her making believe that it was quite the same as if
she were going to the music with a young man. Not that she seemed
disposed to trifle with my grey hairs; I quickly saw that this would
not be in character with her; but some sort of illusion was
essential to her youth, and she could not help rejuvenating me.
This was quite like the goddess she looked, I reflected, but
otherwise she was not formidably divine; and, in fact, I suppose the
goddesses were, after all, only nice girls at heart. This one, at
any rate, I decided, was a very nice girl when she was not sulking;
and she was so brightened by her little adventure, which was really
no adventure, that I could not believe I had ever seen her sulking.
The hotel people did not keep us from going into the court of the
hotel, as I was afraid they might, and we all easily found places.
In the pauses of the music I pointed out such notables and
characters as I saw about us, and tried to possess her of as much of
the Saratoga world as I knew. It was largely there in that bold
evidence it loves, and in that social solitude to which the Saratoga
of the hotels condemns the denizens of her world. I do not mean
that the Saratoga crowd is at all a fast-looking crowd. There are
sporting people and gamblers; but the great mass of the frequenters
are plain, honest Americans, out upon a holiday from all parts of
the country, and of an innocence too inveterate to have grasped the
fact that there is no fashion in Saratoga now but the fashion of the
ladies' dresses. These, I must say, are of the newest and
prettiest; the dressing of the women always strikes me there. My
companion was eager to recognise the splendours which she had heard
of, and I pointed out an old lady by the door, who sat there
displaying upon her vast person an assortment of gems and jewels
which she seemed as personally indifferent to as if she were a show-
window, and I was glad to have the girl shrink from the spectacle in
a kind of mute alarm. I tried to make her share my pleasure in a
group of Cubans--fat father, fat mother, fat daughter--who came down
the walk toward us in the halo of tropical tradition; but she had
not the taste for olives, and I saw that I failed to persuade her of
the aesthetic value of this alien element among us. She apparently
could do almost as little with some old figures of bygone beaus
spectrally revisiting the hotel haunts of their youth; but she was
charmed with the sylvan loveliness of that incomparable court. It
is, in fact, a park of the tall, slim Saratoga trees enclosed by the
quadrangle of the hotel, exquisitely kept, and with its acres of
greensward now showing their colour vividly in the light of the
electrics, which shone from all sides on the fountain flashing and
plashing in the midst. I said that here was that union of the
sylvan and the urban which was always the dream of art, and which
formed the delicate charm of pastoral poetry; and although I do not
think she quite grasped the notion, I saw that she had a pleasure in
the visible fact, and that was much better. Besides, she listened
very respectfully, and with no signs of being bored.
In the wait between the two parts of the concert I invited her to
walk around the court with me, and under the approving eye of Mrs.
March we made this expedition. It seemed to me that I could not do
a wiser thing, both for the satisfaction of my own curiosity and for
the gratification of the autobiographical passion we all feel, than
to lead her on to speak of herself. But she had little or nothing
to say of herself, and what she said of other things was marked by a
straightforward good sense, if not a wide intelligence. I think we
make a mistake when we suppose that a beautiful woman must always be
vain or conscious.
I fancy that a beauty is quite as often a solid and sensible person,
with no inordinate wish to be worshipped, and this young lady struck
me as wholly unspoiled by flattery. I decided that she was not the
type that would take the fancy of De Witt Point, and that she had
grown up without local attention for that reason, or possibly
because a certain coldness in her overawed the free spirit of rustic
love-making. No doubt she knew that she was beautiful, and I began
to think that it was not so much disappointment at finding Saratoga
as indifferent as De Witt Point which gave her the effect of disgust
I had first noted in her the night before. That might rather have
come from the sense of feeling herself a helpless burden on her
friends, and from that young longing for companionship which is as
far as may be from the desire of conquest, of triumph. Finding her
now so gratefully content with the poor efforts to amuse her which
an old fellow like me could make, I perceived that the society of
other girls would suffice to make Saratoga quite another thing for
her, and I cast about in my mind to contrive this somehow.
I confess that I liked her better and better, and before the evening
was out I had quite transferred my compassion from the Deerings to
her. It WAS forlorn and dreary for her to be attached to this good
couple, whose interests were primarily in each other, and who had
not the first of those arts which could provide her with other
company. She willingly told about their journey to Saratoga, and
her story did not differ materially from the account Deering had
already given me; but even the outward form of adventure had fallen
from their experience since they had come to Saratoga. They had
formed the habit of Congress Park by accident; but they had not been
to the lake, or the races, or the House of Pansa, or Mount M'Gregor,
or Hilton Park, or even the outlying springs. It was the first time
they had been inside of the Grand Union. "Then you have never seen
the parlour?" I asked; and after the concert I boldly led the way
into the parlour, and lavished its magnificence upon them as if I
had been the host, or one of the hotel guests at the very least. I
enjoyed the breathlessness of the Deerings so much, as we walked up
and down the vast drawing-rooms accompanied by our images in the
mirrors, that I insisted upon sitting down with them all upon some
of the richest pieces of furniture; and I was so flown with my
success as cicerone that I made them come with me to the United
States. I showed them through the parlours there, and then led them
through to the inner verandah, which commanded another wooded court
like that of the Grand Union. I tried to make them feel the
statelier sentiment of the older hotel, and to stir their
imaginations with a picture of the old times, when the Southern
planters used to throng the place, and all that was gay and
brilliant in fashionable society was to be seen there some time
during the summer. I think that I failed in this, but apparently I
succeeded in giving them an evening of dazzling splendour.
"Well, sir, this has been a great treat," said Mr. Deering, when he
bade us goodbye as well as good-night; he was going early in the
morning.
The ladies murmured their gratitude, Mrs. Deering with an emotion
that suited her thanks, and Miss Gage with a touch of something
daughterly toward me that I thought pretty.
CHAPTER VI
"Well, what DID you make of her, my dear?" Mrs. March demanded the
instant she was beyond their hearing. "I must say, you didn't spare
yourself in the cause; you did bravely. What is she like?"
"Really, I don't know," I answered, after a moment's reflection. "I
should say she was almost purely potential. She's not so much this
or that kind of girl; she's merely a radiant image of girlhood."
"Now, your chicquing it, you're faking it," said Mrs. March,
borrowing the verbs severally from the art editor and the publisher
of Every Other Week. "You have got to tell me just how much and how
little there really is of her before I go any further with them. Is
she stupid?"
"No--no; I shouldn't say stupid exactly. She is--what shall I say?-
-extremely plain-minded. I suppose the goddesses were plain-minded.
I'm a little puzzled by her attitude toward her own beauty. She
doesn't live her beauty any more than a poet lives his poetry or a
painter his painting; though I've no doubt she knows her gift is
hers just as they do."
"I think I understand. You mean she isn't conscious."
"No. Conscious isn't quite the word," I said fastidiously. "Isn't
there some word that says less, or more, in the same direction?"
"No, there isn't; and I shall think you don't mean anything at all
if you keep on. Now, tell me how she really impressed you. Does
she know anything? Has she read anything? Has she any ideas?"
"Really, I can't say whether they were ideas or not. She knew what
Every Other Week was; she had read the stories in it; but I'm not
sure she valued it at its true worth. She is very plain-minded."
"Don't keep repeating that! What do you mean by plain-minded?"
"Well, honest, single, common-sense, coherent, arithmetical."
"Horrors! Do you mean that she is MANNISH?"
"No, not mannish. And yet she gave me the notion that, when it came
to companionship, she would be just as well satisfied with a lot of
girls as young men."
Mrs. March pulled her hand out of my arm, and stopped short under
one of those tall Saratoga shade-trees to dramatise her inference.
"Then she is the slyest of all possible pusses! Did she give you
the notion that she would be just as well satisfied with you as with
a young man!"
"She couldn't deceive me so far as THAT, my dear."
"Very well; I shall take her in hand myself to-morrow, and find out
what she really is."
Mrs. March went shopping the next forenoon with what was left of the
Deering party; Deering had taken the early train north, and she
seemed to have found the ladies livelier without him. She formed
the impression from their more joyous behaviour that he kept his
wife from spending as much money as she would naturally have done,
and that, while he was not perhaps exactly selfish, he was forgetful
of her youth, of the difference in years between them, and of her
capacity for pleasures which he could not care for. She said that
Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage now acted like two girls together, and,
if anything, Miss Gage seemed the elder of the two.
"And what did you decide about her?" I inquired.
"Well, I helped her buy a hat and a jacket at one of those nice
shops just below the hotel where they're stopping, and we've started
an evening dress for her. She can't wear that white duck morning,
noon, and night."
"But her character--her nature?"
"Oh! Well, she is rather plain-minded, as you call it. I think she
shows out her real feelings too much for a woman."
"Why do you prefer dissimulation in your sex, my dear?"
"I don't call it dissimulation. But of course a girl ought to hide
her feelings. Don't you think it would have been better for her not
to have looked so obviously out of humour when you first saw her the
other night?"
"She wouldn't have interested me so much, then, and she probably
wouldn't have had your acquaintance now."
"Oh, I don't mean to say that even that kind of girl won't get on,
if she gives her mind to it; but I think I should prefer a little
less plain-mindedness, as you call it, if I were a man."
I did not know exactly what to say to this, and I let Mrs. March go
on.
"It's so in the smallest thing. If you're choosing a thing for her,
and she likes another, she lets you feel it at once. I don't mean
that she's rude about it, but she seems to set herself so square
across the way, and you come up with a kind of bump against her. I
don't think that's very feminine. That's what I mean by mannish.
You always know where to find her."
I don't know why this criticism should have amused me so much, but I
began to laugh quite uncontrollably, and I laughed on and on. Mrs.
March kept her temper with me admirably. When I was quiet again,
she said -
"Mrs. Deering is a person that wins your heart at once; she has that
appealing quality. You can see that she's cowed by her husband,
though he means to be kind to her; and yet you may be sure she gets
round him, and has her own way all the time. I know it was her idea
to have him go home and leave them here, and of course she made him
think it was his. She saw that as long as he was here, and anxious
to get back to his 'stock,' there was no hope of giving Miss Gage
the sort of chance she came for, and so she determined to manage it.
At the same time, you can see that she is true as steel, and would
abhor anything like deceit worse than the pest."
"I see; and that is why you dislike Miss Gage?"
"Dislike her? No, I don't dislike her; but she is disappointing.
If she were a plain girl her plain-mindedness would be all right; it
would be amusing; she would turn it to account and make it seem
humorous. But it doesn't seem to go with her beauty; it takes away
from that--I don't know how to express it exactly."
"You mean that she has no charm."
"No; I don't mean that at all. She has a great deal of charm of a
certain kind, but it's a very peculiar kind. After all, the truth
is the truth, Basil, isn't it?"
"It is sometimes, my dear," I assented.
"And the truth has its charm, even when it's too blunt."
"Ah, I'm not so sure of that."
"Yes--yes, it has. You mustn't say so, Basil, or I shall lose all
my faith in you. If I couldn't trust you, I don't know what I
should do."
"What are you after now, Isabel?"
"I am not after anything. I want you to go round to all the hotels
and see if there is not some young man you know at one of them.
There surely must be."
"Would one young man be enough?"
"If he were attentive enough, he would be. One young man is as good
as a thousand if the girl is the right kind."
"But you have just been implying that Miss Gage is cold and selfish
and greedy. Shall I go round exploring hotel registers for a victim
to such a divinity as that?"
"No; you needn't go till I have had a talk with her. I am not sure
she is worth it; I am not sure that I want to do a single thing for
her."
CHAPTER VII
The next day, after another forenoon's shopping with her friends,
Mrs. March announced: "Well, now, it has all come out, Basil, and I
wonder you didn't get the secret at once from your Mr. Deering.
Have you been supposing that Miss Gage was a poor girl whom the
Deerings had done the favour of bringing with them?"
"Why, what of it?" I asked provisionally.
"She is very well off. Her father is not only the president, as
they call it, of the village, but he's the president of the bank."
"Yes; I told you that Deering told me so--"
"But he is very queer. He has kept her very close from the other
young people, and Mrs. Deering is the only girl friend she's ever
had, and she's grown up without having been anywhere without him.
They had to plead with him to let her come with them--or Mrs.
Deering had,--but when he once consented, he consented handsomely.
He gave her a lot of money, and told them he wanted her to have the
best time that money could buy; and of course you can understand how
such a man would think that money would buy a good time anywhere.
But the Deerings didn't know how to go about it. She confessed as
much when we were talking the girl over. I could see that she stood
in awe of her somehow from the beginning, and that she felt more
than the usual responsibility for her. That was the reason she was
so eager to get her husband off home; as long as he was with them
she would have to work everything through him, and that would be
double labour, because he is so hopelessly villaginous, don't you
know, that he never could rise to the conception of anything else.
He took them to a cheap, second-class hotel, and he was afraid to go
with them anywhere because he never was sure that it was the right
thing to do; and he was too proud to ask, and they had to keep
prodding him all the time."
"That's delightful!"
"Oh, I dare say you think so; but if you knew how it wounded a
woman's self-respect you would feel differently; or you wouldn't,
rather. But now, thank goodness; they've got him off their hands,
and they can begin to breathe freely. That is, Mrs. Deering could,
if she hadn't her heart in her mouth all the time, wondering what
she can do for the girl, and bullying herself with the notion that
she is to blame if she doesn't have a good time. You can understand
just how it was with them always. Mrs. Deering is one of those meek
little things that a great, splendid, lonely creature like Miss Gage
would take to in a small place, and perfectly crush under the weight
of her confidence; and she would want to make her husband live up to
her ideal of the girl, and would be miserable because he wouldn't or
couldn't."
"I believe the good Deering didn't even think her handsome."
"That's it. And he thought anything that was good enough for his
wife was good enough for Miss Gage, and he'd be stubborn about doing
things on her account, even to please his wife."
"Such conduct is imaginable of the good Deering. I don't think he
liked her."
"Nor she him. Mrs. Deering helplessly hinted as much. She said he
didn't like to have her worrying so much about Miss Gage's not
having a good time, and she couldn't make him feel as she did about
it, and she was half glad for his own sake that he had to go home."
"Did she say that?"
"Not exactly; but you could see that she meant it. Do you think it
would do for them to change from their hotel, and go to the Grand
Union or the States or Congress Hall?"
"Have you been putting them up to that, Isabel?"
"I knew you would suspect me, and I wouldn't have asked for your
opinion if I had cared anything for it, really. What would be the
harm of their doing it?"
"None whatever, if you really want my worthless opinion. But what
could they do there?"
"They could see something if they couldn't do anything, and as soon
as Miss Gage has got her new gowns I'm going to tell them you
thought they could do it. It was their own idea, at any rate."
''Miss Gage's?"
"Mrs. Deering's. She has the courage of a--I don't know what. She
sees that it's a desperate case, and she wouldn't stop at anything."
"Now that her husband has gone home."
"Well, which hotel shall they go to?"
"Oh, that requires reflection."
"Very well, then, when you've reflected I want you to go to the
hotel you've chosen, and introduce yourself to the clerk, and tell
him your wife has two friends coming, and you want something very
pleasant for them. Tell him all about yourself and Every Other
Week."
"He'll think I want them deadheaded."
"No matter, if your conscience is clear; and don't be so shamefully
modest as you always are, but speak up boldly. Now, will you?
Promise me you will!"
"I will try, as the good little boy says. But, Isabel, we don't
know these people except from their own account."
"And that is quite enough."
"It will be quite enough for the hotel-keeper if they run their
board. I shall have to pay it."
"Now, Basil dear, don't be disgusting, and go and do as you're bid."
It was amusing, but it was perfectly safe, and there was no reason
why I should not engage rooms for the ladies at another hotel. I
had not the least question of them, and I had failed to worry my
wife with a pretended doubt. So I decided that I would go up at
once and inquire at the Grand Union. I chose this hotel because,
though it lacked the fine flower of the more ancient respectability
and the legendary charm of the States, it was so spectacular that it
would be in itself a perpetual excitement for those ladies, and
would form an effect of society which, with some help from us, might
very well deceive them. This was what I said to myself, though in
my heart I knew better. Whatever Mrs. Deering might think, that
girl was not going to be taken in with any such simple device, and I
must count upon the daily chances in the place to afford her the
good time she had come for.
As I mounted the steps to the portico of the Grand Union with my
head down, and lost in a calculation of these chances, I heard my
name gaily called, and I looked up to see young Kendricks, formerly
of our staff on Every Other Week, and still a frequent contributor,
and a great favourite of my wife's and my own. My heart gave a
great joyful bound at sight of him.
"My dear boy, when in the world did you come?"
"This morning by the steamboat train, and I am never, never going
away!"
"You like it, then?"
"Like it! It's the most delightful thing in the universe. Why, I'm
simply wild about it, Mr. March. I go round saying to myself, Why
have I thrown away my life? Why have I never come to Saratoga
before? It's simply supreme, and it's American down to the ground.
Yes; that's what makes it so delightful. No other people could have
invented it, and it doesn't try to be anything but what we made it."
"I'm so glad you look at it in that way. WE like it. We discovered
it three or four years ago, and we never let a summer slip, if we
can help it, without coming here for a week or a month. The place,"
I enlarged, "has the charm of ruin, though it's in such obvious
repair; it has a past; it's so completely gone by in a society
sense. The cottage life here hasn't killed the hotel life, as it
has at Newport and Bar Harbour; but the ideal of cottage life
everywhere else has made hotel life at Saratoga ungenteel. The
hotels are full, but at the same time they are society solitudes."
"How gay it is!" said the young fellow, as he gazed with a pensive
smile into the street, where all those festive vehicles were coming
and going, dappled by the leaf-shadows from the tall trees overhead.
"What air! what a sky!" The one was indeed sparkling, and the other
without a cloud, for it had rained in the night, and it seemed as if
the weather could never be hot and close again.
I forgot how I had been sweltering about, and said: "Yes; it is a
Saratoga day. It's supposed that the sparkle of the air comes from
the healthful gases thrown off by the springs. Some people say the
springs are doctored; that's what makes their gases so healthful."
"Why, anything might happen here," Kendricks mused, unheedful of me.
"What a scene! what a stage! Why has nobody done a story about
Saratoga?" he asked, with a literary turn I knew his thoughts would
be taking. All Gerald Kendricks's thoughts were of literature, but
sometimes they were not of immediate literary effect, though that
was never for long.
"Because," I suggested, "one probably couldn't get his young lady
characters to come here if they were at all in society. But of
course there must be charming presences here accidentally. Some
young girl, say, might come here from a country place, expecting to
see social gaiety--"
"Ah, but that would be too heart-breaking!"
"Not at all. Not if she met some young fellow accidentally--don't
you see?"
"It would be difficult to manage; and hasn't it been done?"
"Everything has been done, my dear fellow. Or, you might suppose a
young lady who comes on here with her father, a veteran politician,
delegate to the Republican or Democratic convention--all the
conventions meet in Saratoga,--and some ardent young delegate falls
in love with her. That would be new ground. There you would have
the political novel, which they wonder every now and then some of us
don't write." The smile faded from Kendricks's lips, and I laughed.
"Well, then, there's nothing for it but the Social Science Congress.
Have a brilliant professor win the heart of a lovely sister-in-law
of another member by a paper he reads before the Congress. No?
You're difficult. Are you stopping here?"
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