XI
There came, indeed, about the middle of September a sudden rude shock of cold, which seemed to express an impatience with the dying hotel, hitherto unknown to the gently varying moods of nature. The wind blew for a day from the northwest, and stiffened its wasted and flaccid frame until one fancied its teeth chattering, as it were; but even then the sea did not share the harsh sentiment of the inland weather. It lay smiling as serenely as ever, and the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners that began to flock before our beach about the end of August rocked and tilted, like things in a dream, as they had for the last fortnight. It was said that one of them dragged her anchor and came ashore in the night, but this happened in the dark, and we knew of it only by hearsay, after she had got off and sailed away. A day later they were all there again, and some flew in close to the beach, and skimmed back and forth, as fearless of its ever-shifting sands as the fish-hawks that sailed the deeps of blue air above them.
The water remained as warm as ever; warmer, they said, who tried it in a bath. I did not. The next to the last time I bathed I had for sole companion a literary clergyman, with whom I walked down to the beach discussing the amusing aspects of the Ninth Crusade, which the Venetians so cannily turned aside from the conquest of the Holy Land to the conquest of Constantinople. The New York Dump was unpleasantly evident in the sea that day; and the last time the Dump had the sea all to itself. It is not agreeable to bathe among old brooms, bottles, decayed fruit, trunk lids, vegetable cans, broken boxes, and the other refuse of the ash-barrel, and I came out almost before the life-guard could get ready to throw me a life-preserver.
He was not the gaudy giant of bronze who posed between the life-lines at the height of the bathing season, when twoscore spectators on the benches provided for them watched a half-dozen men and women weltering in the surf, or popping up and down after the manner of ladies taking a sea-bath. But I dare say he was quite as efficient, and, as I had the good-fortune to make his acquaintance, I liked him better. I specially liked his pelting about the bathing-pavilion before he went on duty with me, in his bare legs and feet, and wearing over his bathing-tights a cutaway coat, with a derby hat, to complete his ceremonial costume.
He was not so much in keeping with the inlander’s ideal of bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in the waves or loll upon the sands in the flirtatious poses familiar to the observer of them in the illustrated papers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting cap, his black jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown arms folded upon his breast, where they half revealed, half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a far fitter figure. But for the real bathers I think the guard in the cut-away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be trusted; he was simple, substantial, and unpretentious; and surf-bathing, let me whisper in the innumerable ear of the inland myriads who have never seen it, is not often the gay frolic they have fancied: rather, it is sober, serious, sloppy.
XII
At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the closing hotel was one of heroic self-applause. We wore a brave and smiling front; we said it was so much nicer than when the house was full, than when there were a thousand or even a hundred in it; and we all declared that we were going to stay as long as the landlord would let us. But from time to time there were defections; one table after another was dismantled; face after face vanished; first a white face, then a black face. I do not think we were so smiling after four of the beach trains were taken off; secretly, I think each of us wondered, What if we should stay till the last train was taken off and we could not get away! What should we do then?
We have become rather more serious; we do not talk trivially when we talk, and we scarcely talk at all; we have traversed each other’s conversable territory so often that there is no longer the hope of discovery in it. We have not only become serious; I have reached the point where I have asked in thought if we are not a little absurd. Why should we stay? What is keeping us? The waves of autumn will soon reach the kitchen fires; and then? —
Last night our waiter said he was going on Monday. This morning the newsboy passed through the office on his way to serve the cottagers with the papers. Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests, he went on without answering. It may be because he is an officer of a railroad, whose officers reluctantly answer questions; but perhaps he has come to feel a ghostly quality in us, and regard us as so many simulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men.
The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner yesterday; the halls gloomed like illimitable caverns late in the gathered dusk.
Shall I he able to stay till Friday? We shall see.
XIII
A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the reaches of space.
The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the sun slants upon it, and reflects the rays from myriad facets of steel. You cannot look at it long there, but now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant when he called it
“The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land.”
All day yesterday, which was the great day for the arriving European steamers, they came hurrying in. We counted ten or twelve, each blocking the length of an express train out of the rim of the horizon. Today there are none: only a few far - off full - sailed ships, and nearer shore the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners, tilting and swaying, and now and then flying in so close to the beach that we can see the men on board, and trailing their small boats through a drift of foamy sea.
There are twenty-three guests in the house now — the house that holds a thousand! Two hunters came down with their guns Friday night and re-enforced us. After breakfast a gay group gathered on the great midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men told the ladies stories and made them laugh. Every one is acquainted now, and speaks freely to every one else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if we were normally conditioned?
We have a very good two-o’clock dinner: the cook still remembers it is Sunday. After dinner two of us go down to the bathing-beach, and from the spectators’ benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bathing and is now lying in the warm sand where the rising tide has flung him. We wait to see it reach him again and draw him back, but it does not. It seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take a stick and tilt him into the sea. I do not know whether he likes that, either; but he cannot help himself. He could not help himself in the sun.
XIV
It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped in cold gray clouds, which seem to have meant something unpleasant to the fishing-craft, for they have all vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath of the sea, rises steadily, and bemoans itself in all the angles and projections of the house. The lanterns of the veranda, which have not been lighted for a week, rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long line of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of ladies used to sit and gossip together stretches emptily away. The wind pushes against the tall hacks of the chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if the ghosts of the gossipers invisibly filled them and still inaudibly babbled on. Where some of the chairs are grouped facing one another, the effect is very creepy. Will they keep up their spectral colloquies all winter?
I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and in the corridor, three up-town blocks away, I behold a small chambermaid balancing herself against a large bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic.
The wind rises, and by mid-afternoon blows half a gale. The sea froths and roars and tumbles on the beach, and far out the serried breakers toss their white-caps against the sky-line, like so many cooks abandoning the hotel kitchen.
About three o’clock the life-guard of the bathing-beach, having cast his derby and cutaway, appears with three other men in tights and pul
ls in the life-lines and the buoys. Now the Dump will have the ocean for its own. —
A stranded boat which lies on the beach to the northward came ashore in the gale last night from some of the fishermen. It is in good condition, and if the trains should stop running before noon to-morrow we can be taken off in it. Eighteen of our number went away this morning; and there are now but four of us left. We could easily get away in that boat.
XV
The wind rose till nightfall, and then its passion broke in tears. A tempestuous night threatened; but — the weather changed its mind as swiftly as a woman, and the day dawned as sweetly and softly this morning as a day of young June. The sea is again a shining level, veiled in a tender mist. Out of this the fishing-sail come stealing silently one after another till again a fleet of them is tilting and swaying in front of the hotel. One large, goblin sail, which remained throughout the threats of the weather, looks like the picture of the goblin in the “Bab Ballad” which tries to frighten the image before the tobacconist’s shop.
The gang of Italians who have toiled for three months to hide the infamies of the Dump, burying them in the sand as fast as the sea cast them ashore, are taking up the plank walks to the bathing-beach. The season is over. The barrel which formed the outermost buoy swings monumentally (if monuments can swing) at anchor among the breakers.
At the station the railroad people have become unnaturally amiable. They call me by name; they take a personal interest in getting off my telegrams and express packages. In one of my visits to them I meet the life-guard in full citizen’s dress, with even shoes on. He salutes me, but I have to look twice before I know him.
XVI
A generous contention has arisen between ourselves and the other remaining family as to which shall be last to leave the hotel. They go on the 10.25, and we have outstayed them! We are the last guests in the house. The landlord’s Italian greyhound seems instinctively to feel our pathetic distinction. He rushes upon me from far down the veranda and fawns upon me.
The cook and a last helper of some unknown function carry our trunks to the station. But it has now suddenly become a question whether we shall go on the 12.20 or wait for the 5.20. It depends finally upon our getting a last lunch at the restaurant of the bathing-beach. We ask, limiting our demands to a clam-chowder. We are answered that there are still clams, but the man who knows how to make chowder is gone. The restaurant family are going to lunch upon a ham-bone, which is now being scraped for them. We refuse to share it, with many thanks, and decide to go on the 12.20.
I have paid my last bill.
On the 10th of August a pomp of liveried menials met me as I alighted from the train and contented for the honor and profit of carrying my umbrella into the hotel.
On the 17th of September I myself carry a heavy satchel in each hand out through the echoing corridors down the wide veranda stairs to the train, unattended by a single fee-taker.
The hotel is closed.
GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK
THIS morning, as I sat on a bench in one of the most frequented walks of Central Park, I could almost have touched the sparrows on the sprays about me; a squirrel, foraging for nuts, climbed on my knees as if to explore my pockets. Of course, there is a policeman at every turn to see that no wrong is done these pretty creatures, and that no sort of trespass is committed by any in the domain of all; but I like to think that the security and immunity of the Park is proof of something besides the vigilance of its guardians; that it is a hint of a growing sense in Americans that what is common is the personal charge of every one in the community.
As I turn from my page and look out upon it, I see the domes and spires of its foliage beginning to feel the autumn and taking on the wonderful sunset tints of the year in its decline; when I stray through its pleasant paths, I feel the pathos of the tender October air; but, better than these sensuous delights, in everything of it and in it, I imagine a prophecy of the truer state which I believe America is destined yet to see established. It cannot be that the countless thousands who continually visit it, and share equally in its beauty, can all come away insensible of the meaning of it; here and there some one must ask himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life should not be as generous and as just as this part of it; why he should not have a country as palpably his own as the Central Park is, where his ownership excludes the ownership of no other. Some workman out of work, as he trudges aimlessly through its paths, must wonder why the city cannot minister to his need as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof from him till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it can give him this magnificent garden for his forced leisure, why cannot it give him a shop where he can go in extremity to earn his bread?
I
I may he mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all. The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing different. But this is what I think for poor people in the Park, not alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble in New York; you cannot anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered, so that they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the rich have gone since the beginning of time. Sometimes I think that as Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor are “but as pictures” to one another without vital reality.
Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their reality, and this is why I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets of the city, for the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been treated with the artistic sense which always finds its best expression in the service of the community, but I do not think we generally understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in us yet; and I doubt if the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given the chance to serve the community. When this chance offers, however, it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in New York.
Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a mood, where it is not merely puerile. The footways have been asphalted, and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place, but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is in no wise taken away from Nature, but is rendered back to her, when all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart of the city — a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure. They are very simple woodland paths, but for the asphalt; though here and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; and I like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one place and come upon a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might in an old Italian garden. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is an excess in the viaduct, with its sweeping stairways and carven freestone massiveness; but it is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze angle atop,
who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is, in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which I am glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the landscape-gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men came.
II
This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s prototype in the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers free to the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses. The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good-fellowship which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me from tigers and lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much for the wallowing hippopotamuses and the lumbering elephants and the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the American pioneers; I have rather a preference for going and musing upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions of their kind which a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty left; for, of all the forces of our plutocratic conditions, so few are conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned American mechanic, proud of his independence and glorying in his citizenship.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1419
