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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Of course there was pretty constant question of Kendricks in the
management of Miss Gage's amusement, for that was really what our
enterprise resolved itself into. He showed from the first the
sweetest disposition to forward all our plans in regard to her, and,
in fact, he even anticipated our wishes. I do not mean to give the
notion that he behaved from an interested motive in going to the
station the morning Mrs. Deering left, and getting her ticket for
her, and checking her baggage, and posting her in the changes she
would have to make. This was something I ought to have thought of
myself, but I did not think of it, and I am willing that he should
have all the credit.
I know that he did it out of the lovely generosity of nature which
always took me in him. Miss Gage was there with her, and she
remained to be consoled after Mrs. Deering departed. They came
straight to us from the train, and then, when he had consigned Miss
Gage to Mrs. March's care, he offered to go and see that her things
were transferred from her hotel to ours; they were all ready, she
said, and the bill was paid.
He did not come back that day, and, in fact, he delicately waited
for some sign from us that his help was wanted. But when he did
come he had formulated Saratoga very completely, and had a better
conception of doing it than I had, after my repeated sojourns.
We went very early in our explorations to the House of Pansa, which
you find in very much better repair at Saratoga than you do at
Pompeii, and we contrived to pass a whole afternoon there. My wife
and I had been there before more than once; but it always pleasantly
recalled our wander-years, when we first met in Europe, and we
suffered round after those young things with a patience which I hope
will not be forgotten at the day of judgment. When we came to a
seat we sat down, and let them go off by themselves; but my
recollection is that there is not much furniture in the House of
Pansa that you can sit down on, and for the most part we all kept
together.
Kendricks and I thought alike about the Pompeian house as a model of
something that might be done in the way of a seaside cottage in our
own country, and we talked up a little paper that might be done for
Every Other Week, with pretty architectural drawings, giving an
account of our imaginary realisation of the notion.
"Have somebody," he said, "visit people who had been boring him to
come down, or up, or out, and see them, and find them in a Pompeian
house, with the sea in front and a blue-green grove of low pines
behind. Might have a thread of story, but mostly talk about how
they came to do it, and how delightfully livable they found it. You
could work it up with some architect, who would help you to 'keep
off the grass' in the way of technical blunders. With all this
tendency to the classic in public architecture, I don't see why the
Pompeian villa shouldn't be the next word for summer cottages."
"Well, we'll see what Fulkerson says. He may see an ad. in it.
Would you like to do it?"
"Why not do it yourself? Nobody else could do it so well."
"Thanks for the taffy; but the idea was yours."
"I'll do it," said Kendricks after a moment, "if you won't."
"We'll see."
Miss Gage stared, and Mrs. March said -
"I didn't suppose the House of Pansa would lead to shop with you
two."
"You never can tell which way copy lies," I returned; and I asked
the girl, "What should YOU think, Miss Gage, of a little paper with
a thread of story, but mostly talk, on a supposititious Pompeian
cottage?"
"I don't believe I understand," said she, far too remote from our
literary interests, as I saw, to be ashamed of her ignorance.
"There!" I said to Kendricks. "Do you think the general public
would?"
"Miss Gage isn't the general public," said my wife, who had followed
the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser
and better.
"Would you allow yourself to be drawn," I asked, "dreamily issuing
from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a
Pompeian cottage?"
The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, "You needn't
pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is
making a joke."
We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done
the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in
Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the
hope that it would play "Washington Post."
My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as
we went, and she asked, "What DO you suppose she made of it all?"
"Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza."
"No; she hasn't read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It's
astonishing how much she doesn't know. What can her home life have
been like?"
"Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to
literature have no conception how far from it most people are. The
immense majority of 'homes,' as the newspapers call them, have no
books in them except the Bible and a semi-religious volume or two--
things you never see out of such 'homes'--and the State business
directory. I was astonished when it came out that she knew about
Every Other Week. It must have been by accident. The sordidness of
her home life must be something unimaginable. The daughter of a
village capitalist, who's put together his money dollar by dollar,
as they do in such places, from the necessities and follies of his
neighbours, and has half the farmers of the region by the throat
through his mortgages--I don't think that she's 'one to be desired'
any more than 'the daughter of a hundred earls,' if so much."
"She doesn't seem sordid herself."
"Oh, the taint doesn't show itself at once--
'If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that would live an hour?'
and she is a flower, beautiful, exquisite"
"Yes, and she had a mother as well as this father of hers. Why
shouldn't she be like her mother?"
I laughed. "That is true! I wonder why we always leave the mother
out of the count when we sum up the hereditary tendencies? I
suppose the mother is as much a parent as the father."
"Quite. And there is no reason why this girl shouldn't have her
mother's nature."
"We don't actually KNOW anything against her father's nature yet," I
suggested; "but if her mother lived a starved and stunted life with
him, it may account for that effect of disappointed greed which I
fancied in her when I first saw her."
"I don't call it greed in a young girl to want to see something of
the world."
"What do you call it?"
Kendricks and the girl were stopping at the gate of the pavilion,
and looking round at us. "Ah, he's got enough for one day! He's
going to leave her to us now."
When we came up he said, "I'm going to run off a moment; I'm going
up to the book-store there," and he pointed toward one that had
spread across the sidewalk just below the Congress Hall verandah,
with banks and shelves of novels, and a cry of bargains in them on
signs sticking up from their rows. "I want to see if they have the
Last Days of Pompeii."
"We will find the ladies inside the park," I said. "I will go with
you--"
"Mr. March wants to see if they have the last number of Every Other
Week," my wife mocked after us. This was, indeed, commonly a foible
of mine. I had newly become one of the owners of the periodical as
well as the editor, and I was all the time looking out for it at the
news-stands and book-stores, and judging their enterprise by its
presence or absence. But this time I had another motive, though I
did not allege it.
"I suppose it's for Miss Gage?" I ventured to say, by way of
prefacing what I wished to say. "Kendricks, I'm afraid we're
abusing your good nature. I know you're up here to look about, and
you're letting us use all your time. You mustn't do it. Women have
no conscience about these things, and you can't expect a woman who
has a young lady on her hands to spare you. I give you the hint.
Don't count upon Mrs. March in this matter."
"Oh, I think you are very good to allow me to bother round," said
the young fellow, with that indefatigable politeness of his. He
added vaguely, "It's very interesting."
"Seeing it through such a fresh mind?" I suggested. "Well, I'll own
that I don't think you could have found a much fresher one. Has she
read the Last Days of Pompeii?"
"She thought she had at first, but it was the Fall of Granada."
"How delightful! Don't you wish we could read books with that
utterly unliterary sense of them?"
"Don't you think women generally do?" he asked evasively.
"I daresay they do at De Witt Point."
He did not answer; I saw that he was not willing to talk the young
lady over, and I could not help praising his taste to myself at the
cost of my own. His delicacy forbade him the indulgence which my
own protested against in vain. He showed his taste again in buying
a cheap copy of the book, which he meant to give her, and of course
he had to be all the more attentive to her because of my deprecating
his self-devotion.
CHAPTER XI
In the intimacy that grew up between my wife and Miss Gage I found
myself less and less included. It seemed to me at times that I
might have gone away from Saratoga and not been seriously missed by
any one, but perhaps this was not taking sufficient account of my
value as a spectator, by whom Mrs. March could verify her own
impressions.
The girl had never known a mother's care, and it was affecting to
see how willing she was to be mothered by the chance kindness of a
stranger. She probably felt more and more her ignorance of the
world as it unfolded itself to her in terms so altogether strange to
the life of De Witt Point. I was not sure that she would have been
so grateful for the efforts made for her enjoyment if they had
failed, but as the case stood she was certainly grateful; my wife
said that, and I saw it. She seemed to have written home about us
to her father, for she read my wife part of a letter from him
conveying his "respects," and asking her to thank us for him. She
came to me with the cheque it enclosed, and asked me to get it
cashed for her; it was for a handsome amount. But she continued to
go about at our cost, quite unconsciously, till one day she happened
to witness a contest of civility between Kendricks and myself as to
which should pay the carriage we were dismissing. That night she
came to Mrs. March, and, with many blushes, asked to be allowed to
pay for the past and future her full share of the expense of our
joint pleasures. She said that she had never thought of it before,
and she felt so much ashamed. She could not be consoled till she
was promised that she should be indulged for the future, and that I
should be obliged to average the outlay already made and let her pay
a fourth. When she had gained her point, Mrs. March said that she
seemed a little scared, and said, "I haven't offended you, Mrs.
March, have I? Because if it isn't right for me to pay--"
"It's quite right, my dear," said my wife, "and it's very nice of
you to think of it."
"You know," the girl explained, "I've never been out a great deal at
home even; and it's always the custom there for the gentlemen to pay
for a ride--or dance--or anything; but this is different."
Mrs March said "Yes," and, in the interest of civilisation, she did
a little missionary work. She told her that in Boston the young
ladies paid for their tickets to the Harvard assemblies, and
preferred to do it, because it left them without even a tacit
obligation.
Miss Gage said she had never heard of such a thing before, but she
could see how much better it was.
I do not think she got on with the Last Days of Pompeii very
rapidly; its immediate interest was superseded by other things. But
she always had the book about with her, and I fancied that she tried
to read it in those moments of relaxation from our pleasuring when
she might better have been day-dreaming, though I dare say she did
enough of that too.
What amused me in the affair was the celerity with which it took
itself out of our hands. In an incredibly short time we had no
longer the trouble of thinking what we should do for Miss Gage; that
was provided for by the forethought of Kendricks, and our concern
was how each could make the other go with the young people on their
excursions and expeditions. We had seen and done all the things
that they were doing, and it presently bored us to chaperon them.
After a good deal of talking we arrived at a rough division of duty,
and I went with them walking and eating and drinking, and for
anything involving late hours, and Mrs. March presided at such
things as carriage exercise, concerts, and shopping.
There are not many public entertainments at Saratoga, except such as
the hotels supply; but a series of Salvation Army meetings did duty
as amusements, and there was one theatrical performance--a
performance of East Lynne entirely by people of colour. The
sentiments and incidents of the heart-breaking melodrama, as the
coloured mind interpreted them, were of very curious effect. It was
as if the version were dyed with the same pigment that darkened the
players' skins: it all came out negro. Yet they had tried to make
it white; I could perceive how they aimed not at the imitation of
our nature, but at the imitation of our convention; it was like the
play of children in that. I should have said that nothing could be
more false than the motives and emotions of the drama as the author
imagined them, but I had to own that their rendition by these
sincere souls was yet more artificial. There was nothing
traditional, nothing archaic, nothing autochthonic in their poor
art. If the scene could at any moment have resolved myself into a
walk-round, with an interspersion of spirituals, it would have had
the charm of these; it would have consoled and edified; but as it
was I have seldom been so bored. I began to make some sad
reflections, as that our American society, in its endeavour for the
effect of European society, was of no truer ideal than these
coloured comedians, and I accused myself of a final absurdity in
having come there with these young people, who, according to our
good native usage, could have come perfectly well without me. At
the end of the first act I broke into their talk with my conclusion
that we must not count the histrionic talent among the gifts of the
African race just yet. We could concede them music, I supposed, and
there seemed to be hope for them, from what they had some of them
done, in the region of the plastic arts; but apparently the stage
was not for them, and this was all the stranger because they were so
imitative. Perhaps, I said, it was an excess of self-consciousness
which prevented their giving themselves wholly to the art, and I
began to speak of the subjective and the objective, of the real and
the ideal; and whether it was that I became unintelligible as I
became metaphysical, I found Kendricks obviously not following me in
the incoherent replies he gave. Miss Gage had honestly made no
attempt to follow me. He asked, Why, didn't I think it was pretty
well done? They had enjoyed it very much, he said. I could only
stare in answer, and wonder what had become of the man's tastes or
his principles; he was either humbugging himself or he was
humbugging me. After that I left them alone, and suffered through
the rest of the play with what relief I could get from laughing when
the pathetic emotions of the drama became too poignant. I decided
that Kendricks was absorbed in the study of his companion's mind,
which must be open to his contemporaneous eye as it could never have
been to my old-sighted glasses, and I envied him the knowledge he
was gaining of that type of American girl. It suddenly came to me
that he must be finding his account in this, and I felt a little
less regret for the waste of civilities, of attentions, which
sometimes seemed to me beyond her appreciation.
I, for my part, gave myself to the study of the types about me, and
I dwelt long and luxuriously upon the vision of a florid and massive
matron in diaphanous evening dress, whom I imagined to be revisiting
the glimpses of her girlhood in the ancient watering-place, and to
be getting all the gaiety she could out of it. These are the
figures one mostly sees at Saratoga; there is very little youth of
the present day there, but the youth of the past abounds, with the
belated yellow hair and the purple moustaches, which gave a notion
of greater wickedness in a former generation.
I made my observation that the dress, even in extreme cases of
elderly prime, was very good--in the case of the women, I mean; the
men there, as everywhere with us, were mostly slovens; and I was
glad to find that the good taste and the correct fashion were
without a colour-line; there were some mulatto ladies present as
stylish as their white sisters, or step-sisters.
The most amiable of the human race is in great force at Saratoga,
where the vast hotel service is wholly in its hands, and it had
honoured the effort of the comedians that night with a full house of
their own complexion. We who were not of it showed strangely enough
in the dark mass, who let us lead the applause, however, as if
doubtful themselves where it ought to come in, and whom I found
willing even to share some misplaced laughter of mine. They formed
two-thirds of the audience on the floor, and they were a cloud in
the gallery, scarcely broken by a gleam of white.
I entertained myself with them a good deal, and I thought how much
more delightful they were in their own kindly character than in
their assumption of white character, and I tried to define my
suffering from the performance as an effect from my tormented
sympathies rather than from my offended tastes. When the long
stress was over, and we rose and stood to let the crowd get out, I
asked Miss Gage if she did not think this must be the case. I do
not suppose she was really much more experienced in the theatre than
the people on the stage, some of whom I doubted to have ever seen a
play till they took part in East Lynne. But I thought I would ask
her that in order to hear what she would say; and she said very
simply that she had seen so few plays she did not know what to think
of it, and I could see that she was abashed by the fact. Kendricks
must have seen it too, for he began at once to save her from
herself, with all his subtle generosity, and to turn her shame to
praise. My heart, which remained sufficiently cold to her, warmed
more than ever to him, and I should have liked to tell her that here
was the finest and rarest human porcelain using itself like common
clay in her behalf, and to demand whether she thought she was worth
it.
I did not think she was, and I had a lurid moment when I was tempted
to push on and make her show herself somehow at her worst. We had
undertaken a preposterous thing in befriending her as we had done,
and our course in bringing Kendricks in was wholly unjustifiable.
How could I lead her on to some betrayal of her essential
Philistinism, and make her so impossible in his eyes that even he,
with all his sweetness and goodness, must take the first train from
Saratoga in the morning?
We had of course joined the crowd in pushing forward; people always
do, though they promise themselves to wait till the last one is out.
I got caught in a dark eddy on the first stair-landing; but I could
see them farther down, and I knew they would wait for me outside the
door.
When I reached it at last they were nowhere to be seen; I looked up
this street and down that, but they were not in sight.
CHAPTER XII
I did not afflict myself very much, nor pretend to do so. They knew
the way home, and after I had blundered about in search of them
through the lampshot darkness, I settled myself to walk back at my
leisure, comfortably sure that I should find them on the verandah
waiting for me when I reached the hotel. It was quite a thick
night, and I almost ran into a couple at a corner of our quieter
street when I had got to it out of Broadway. They seemed to be
standing and looking about, and when the man said, "He must have
thought we took the first turn," and the woman, "Yes, that must have
been the way," I recognised my estrays.
I thought I would not discover myself to them, but follow on, and
surprise them by arriving at our steps at the same moment they did,
and I prepared myself to hurry after them. But they seemed in no
hurry, and I had even some difficulty in accommodating my pace to
the slowness of theirs.
"Won't you take my arm, Miss Gage?" he asked as they moved on.
"It's so VERY dark," she answered, and I knew she had taken it. "I
can hardly see a step, and poor Mr. March with his glasses--I don't
know what he'll do."
"Oh, he only uses them to read with; he can see as well as we can in
the dark."
"He's very young in his feelings," said the girl; "he puts me in
mind of my own father."
"He's very young in his thoughts," said Kendricks; "and that's much
more to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men
of his age who keep in touch with the times as he does."
"Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don't you think? I
wonder how soon they begin to feel old?"
"Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It's a good deal
in temperament. I don't suppose that either of them realises yet
that they're old, and they must be nearly fifty."
"How strange it must be," said the girl, "fifty years old! Twenty
seems old enough, goodness knows."
"How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?" Kendricks
asked, and she laughed at his joke.
"I don't suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man."
I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I
would drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously
intimate for me to be put apart in the minds of these young people
on account of my years as not of the same race or fate as
themselves, there was nothing in what they said that I might not
innocently overhear, as far as they were concerned, and I listened
on.
But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some
mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment,
and then he said soberly, "There's something fine in this isolation
the dark gives you, isn't there? You're as remote in it from our
own time and place as if you were wandering in interplanetary
space."
"I suppose we ARE doing that all the time--on the earth," she
suggested.
"Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now.
Sometimes I have a sense of it, though, when the moon breaks from
one flying cloud to another. Then it seems as if I were a passenger
on some vast, shapeless ship sailing through the air. What," he
asked, with no relevancy that I could perceive, "was the strangest
feeling YOU ever had?" I remembered asking girls such questions
when I was young, and their not apparently thinking it at all odd.
"I don't know," she returned thoughtfully. "There was one time when
I was little, and it had sleeted, and the sun came out just before
it set, and seemed to set all the woods on fire. I thought the
world was burning up."
"It must have been very weird," said Kendricks; and I thought, "Oh,
good heavens! Has he got to talking of weird things?"
"It's strange," he added, "how we all have that belief when we are
children that the world is going to burn up! I don't suppose any
child escapes it. Do you remember that poem of Thompson's--the City
of Dreadful Night man--where he describes the end of the world?"
"No, I never read it."
"Well, merely, he says when the conflagration began the little
flames looked like crocuses breaking through the sod. If it ever
happened I fancy it would be quite as simple as that. But perhaps
you don't like gloomy poetry?"
'Yes, yes, I do. It's the only kind that I care about."
"Then you hate funny poetry?"
"I think it's disgusting. Papa is always cutting it out of the
papers and wanting to send it to me, and we have the greatest
TIMES!"
"I suppose," said Kendricks, "it expresses some moods, though."
"Oh yes; it expresses some moods; and sometimes it makes me laugh in
spite of myself, and ashamed of anything serious."
"That's always the effect of a farce with me."
"But then I'm ashamed of being ashamed afterward," said the girl.
"I suppose you go to the theatre a great deal in New York."
"It's a school of life," said Kendricks. "I mean the audience."
"I would like to go to the opera once. I am going to make papa take
me in the winter." She laughed with a gay sense of power, and he
said -
"You seem to be great friends with your father."
"Yes, we're always together. I always went everywhere with him;
this is the first time I've been away without him. But I thought
I'd come with Mrs. Deering and see what Saratoga was like; I had
never been here."
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