Part 230

When they were well away from the booths and bath-houses, Mr. King saw in the distance two ladies. There was no mistaking one of them--the easy carriage, the grace of movement. No such figure had been afield all day. The artist was quick to see that. Presently they came up with them, and found them seated on a bench, looking off upon Brigantine Island, a low sand dune with some houses and a few trees against the sky, the most pleasing object in view.

Mrs. Benson did not conceal the pleasure she felt in seeing Mr. King again, and was delighted to know his friend; and, to say the truth, Miss Irene gave him a very cordial greeting.

"I'm 'most tired to death," said Mrs. Benson, when they were all seated. "But this air does me good. Don't you like Atlantic City?"

"I like it better than I did at first." If the remark was intended for Irene, she paid no attention to it, being absorbed in explaining to Mr. Forbes why she preferred the deserted end of the promenade.

"It's a place that grows on you. I guess it's grown the wrong way on Irene and father; but I like the air--after the South. They say we ought to see it in August, when all Philadelphia is here."

"I should think it might be very lively."

"Yes; but the promiscuous bathing. I don't think I should like that. We are not brought up to that sort of thing in Ohio."

"No? Ohio is more like France, I suppose?"

"Like France!" exclaimed the old lady, looking at him in amazement--"like France! Why, France is the wickedest place in the world."

"No doubt it is, Mrs. Benson. But at the sea resorts the sexes bathe separately."

"Well, now! I suppose they have to there."

"Yes; the older nations grow, the more self-conscious they become."

"I don't believe, for all you say, Mr. King, the French have any more conscience than we have."

"Nor do I, Mrs. Benson. I was only trying to say that they pay more attention to appearances."

"Well, I was brought up to think it's one thing to appear, and another thing to be," said Mrs. Benson, as dismissing the subject. "So your friend's an artist? Does he paint? Does he take portraits? There was an artist at Cyrusville last winter who painted portraits, but Irene wouldn't let him do hers. I'm glad we've met Mr. Forbes. I've always wanted to have--"

"Oh, mother," exclaimed Irene, who always appeared to keep one ear for her mother's conversation, "I was just saying to Mr. Forbes that he ought to see the art exhibitions down at the other end of the promenade, and the pictures of the people who come here in August. Are you rested?"

The party moved along, and Mr. King, by a movement that seemed to him more natural than it did to Mr. Forbes, walked with Irene, and the two fell to talking about the last spring's trip in the South.

"Yes, we enjoyed the exhibition, but I am not sure but I should have enjoyed New Orleans more without the exhibition. That took so much time. There is nothing so wearisome as an exhibition. But New Orleans was charming. I don't know why, for it's the flattest, dirtiest, dampest city in the world; but it is charming. Perhaps it's the people, or the Frenchiness of it, or the tumble-down, picturesque old creole quarter, or the roses; I didn't suppose there were in the world so many roses; the town was just wreathed and smothered with them. And you did not see it?"

"No; I have been to exhibitions, and I thought I should prefer to take New Orleans by itself some other time. You found the people hospitable?"

"Well, they were not simply hospitable; they were that, to be sure, for father had letters to some of the leading men; but it was the general air of friendliness and good-nature everywhere, of agreeableness--it went along with the roses and the easy-going life. You didn't feel all the time on a strain. I don't suppose they are any better than our people, and I've no doubt I should miss a good deal there after a while--a certain tonic and purpose in life. But, do you know, it is pleasant sometimes to be with people who haven't so many corners as our people have. But you went south from Fortress Monroe?"

"Yes; I went to Florida."

"Oh, that must be a delightful country!"

"Yes, it's a very delightful land, or will be when it is finished. It needs advertising now. It needs somebody to call attention to it. The modest Northerners who have got hold of it, and staked it all out into city lots, seem to want to keep it all to themselves."

"How do you mean 'finished'?"

"Why, the State is big enough, and a considerable portion of it has a good foundation. What it wants is building up. There's plenty of water and sand, and palmetto roots and palmetto trees, and swamps, and a perfectly wonderful vegetation of vines and plants and flowers. What it needs is land--at least what the Yankees call land. But it is coming on. A good deal of the State below Jacksonville is already ten to fifteen feet above the ocean."

"But it's such a place for invalids!"

"Yes, it is a place for invalids. There are two kinds of people there --invalids and speculators. Thousands of people in the bleak North, and especially in the Northwest, cannot live in the winter anywhere else than in Florida. It's a great blessing to this country to have such a sanitarium. As I said, all it needs is building up, and then it wouldn't be so monotonous and malarious."

"But I had such a different idea of it!"

"Well, your idea is probably right. You cannot do justice to a place by describing it literally. Most people are fascinated by Florida: the fact is that anything is preferable to our Northern climate from February to May."

"And you didn't buy an orange plantation, or a town?"

"No; I was discouraged. Almost any one can have a town who will take a boat and go off somewhere with a surveyor, and make a map."

The truth is--the present writer had it from Major Blifill, who runs a little steamboat upon one of the inland creeks where the alligator is still numerous enough to be an entertainment--that Mr. King was no doubt malarious himself when he sailed over Florida. Blifill says he offended a whole boatfull one day when they were sailing up the St. John's. Probably he was tired of water, and swamp and water, and scraggy trees and water. The captain was on the bow, expatiating to a crowd of listeners on the fertility of the soil and the salubrity of the climate. He had himself bought a piece of ground away up there somewhere for two hundred dollars, cleared it up, and put in orange-trees, and thousands wouldn't buy it now. And Mr. King, who listened attentively, finally joined in with the questioners, and said, "Captain, what is the average price of land down in this part of Florida by the--gallon?"

They had come down to the booths, and Mrs. Benson was showing the artist the shells, piles of conchs, and other outlandish sea-fabrications in which it is said the roar of the ocean can be heard when they are hundreds of miles away from the sea. It was a pretty thought, Mr. Forbes said, and he admired the open shells that were painted on the inside --painted in bright blues and greens, with dabs of white sails and a lighthouse, or a boat with a bare-armed, resolute young woman in it, sending her bark spinning over waves mountain-high.

"Yes," said the artist, "what cheerfulness those works of art will give to the little parlors up in the country, when they are set up with other shells on the what-not in the corner! These shells always used to remind me of missionaries and the cause of the heathen; but when I see them now I shall think of Atlantic City."

"But the representative things here," interrupted Irene, "are the photographs, the tintypes. To see them is just as good as staying here to see the people when they come."

"Yes," responded Mr. King, "I think art cannot go much further in this direction."

If there were not miles of these show-cases of tintypes, there were at least acres of them. Occasionally an instantaneous photograph gave a lively picture of the beach, when the water was full of bathers-men, women, children, in the most extraordinary costumes for revealing or deforming the human figure--all tossing about in the surf. But most of the pictures were taken on dry land, of single persons, couples, and groups in their bathing suits. Perhaps such an extraordinary collection of humanity cannot be seen elsewhere in the world, such a uniformity of one depressing type reduced to its last analysis by the sea-toilet. Sometimes it was a young man and a maiden, handed down to posterity in dresses that would have caused their arrest in the street, sentimentally reclining on a canvas rock. Again it was a maiden with flowing hair, raised hands clasped, eyes upturned, on top of a crag, at the base of which the waves were breaking in foam. Or it was the same stalwart maiden, or another as good, in a boat which stood on end, pulling through the surf with one oar, and dragging a drowning man (in a bathing suit also) into the boat with her free hand. The legend was, "Saved." There never was such heroism exhibited by young women before, with such raiment, as was shown in these rare works of art.

As they walked back to the hotel through a sandy avenue lined with jig-saw architecture, Miss Benson pointed out to them some things that she said had touched her a good deal. In the patches of sand before each house there was generally an oblong little mound set about with a rim of stones, or, when something more artistic could be afforded, with shells. On each of these little graves was a flower, a sickly geranium, or a humble marigold, or some other floral token of affection.

Mr. Forbes said he never was at a watering-place before where they buried the summer boarders in the front yard. Mrs. Benson didn't like joking on such subjects, and Mr. King turned the direction of the conversation by remarking that these seeming trifles were really of much account in these days, and he took from his pocket a copy of the city newspaper, 'The Summer Sea-Song,' and read some of the leading items: "S., our eye is on you." "The Slopers have come to their cottage on Q Street, and come to stay." "Mr. E. P. Borum has painted his front steps." "Mr. Diffendorfer's marigold is on the blow." And so on, and so on. This was probably the marigold mentioned that they were looking at.

The most vivid impression, however, made upon the visitor in this walk was that of paint. It seemed unreal that there could be so much paint in the world and so many swearing colors. But it ceased to be a dream, and they were taken back into the hard, practical world, when, as they turned the corner, Irene pointed out her favorite sign:

Silas Lapham, mineral paint. Branch Office.

The artist said, a couple of days after this morning, that he had enough of it. "Of course," he added, "it is a great pleasure to me to sit and talk with Mrs. Benson, while you and that pretty girl walk up and down the piazza all the evening; but I'm easily satisfied, and two evenings did for me."

So that, much as Mr. King was charmed with Atlantic City, and much as he regretted not awaiting the arrival of the originals of the tintypes, he gave in to the restlessness of the artist for other scenes; but not before he had impressed Mrs. Benson with a notion of the delights of Newport in July.

III

THE CATSKILLS

The view of the Catskills from a certain hospitable mansion on the east side of the Hudson is better than any mew from those delectable hills. The artist said so one morning late in June, and Mr. King agreed with him, as a matter of fact, but would have no philosophizing about it, as that anticipation is always better than realization; and when Mr. Forbes went on to say that climbing a mountain was a good deal like marriage --the world was likely to look a little flat once that cerulean height was attained--Mr. King only remarked that that was a low view to take of the subject, but he would confess that it was unreasonable to expect that any rational object could fulfill, or even approach, the promise held out by such an exquisite prospect as that before them.

The friends were standing where the Catskill hills lay before them in echelon towards the river, the ridges lapping over each other and receding in the distance, a gradation of lines most artistically drawn, still further refined by shades of violet, which always have the effect upon the contemplative mind of either religious exaltation or the kindling of a sentiment which is in the young akin to the emotion of love. While the artist was making some memoranda of these outlines, and Mr. King was drawing I know not what auguries of hope from these purple heights, a young lady seated upon a rock near by--a young lady just stepping over the border-line of womanhood--had her eyes also fixed upon those dreamy distances, with that look we all know so well, betraying that shy expectancy of life which is unconfessed, that tendency to maidenly reverie which it were cruel to interpret literally. At the moment she is more interesting than the Catskills--the brown hair, the large eyes unconscious of anything but the most natural emotion, the shapely waist just beginning to respond to the call of the future--it is a pity that we shall never see her again, and that she has nothing whatever to do with our journey. She also will have her romance; fate will meet her in the way some day, and set her pure heart wildly beating, and she will know what those purple distances mean. Happiness, tragedy, anguish--who can tell what is in store for her? I cannot but feel profound sadness at meeting her in this casual way and never seeing her again. Who says that the world is not full of romance and pathos and regret as we go our daily way in it? You meet her at a railway station; there is the flutter of a veil, the gleam of a scarlet bird, the lifting of a pair of eyes--she is gone; she is entering a drawing-room, and stops a moment and turns away; she is looking from a window as you pass--it is only a glance out of eternity; she stands for a second upon a rock looking seaward; she passes you at the church door--is that all? It is discovered that instantaneous photographs can be taken. They are taken all the time; some of them are never developed, but I suppose these impressions are all there on the sensitive plate, and that the plate is permanently affected by the impressions. The pity of it is that the world is so full of these undeveloped knowledges of people worth knowing and friendships worth making.

The comfort of leaving same things to the imagination was impressed upon our travelers when they left the narrow-gauge railway at the mountain station, and identified themselves with other tourists by entering a two-horse wagon to be dragged wearily up the hill through the woods. The ascent would be more tolerable if any vistas were cut in the forest to give views by the way; as it was, the monotony of the pull upward was only relieved by the society of the passengers. There were two bright little girls off for a holiday with their Western uncle, a big, good-natured man with a diamond breast-pin, and his voluble son, a lad about the age of his little cousins, whom he constantly pestered by his rude and dominating behavior. The boy was a product which it is the despair of all Europe to produce, and our travelers had great delight in him as an epitome of American "smartness." He led all the conversation, had confident opinions about everything, easily put down his deferential papa, and pleased the other passengers by his self-sufficient, know-it-all air. To a boy who had traveled in California and seen the Alps it was not to be expected that this humble mountain could afford much entertainment, and he did not attempt to conceal his contempt for it. When the stage reached the Rip Van Winkle House, half-way, the shy schoolgirls were for indulging a little sentiment over the old legend, but the boy, who concealed his ignorance of the Irving romance until his cousins had prattled the outlines of it, was not to be taken in by any such chaff, and though he was a little staggered by Rip's own cottage, and by the sight of the cave above it which is labeled as the very spot where the vagabond took his long nap, he attempted to bully the attendant and drink-mixer in the hut, and openly flaunted his incredulity until the bar-tender showed him a long bunch of Rip's hair, which hung like a scalp on a nail, and the rusty barrel and stock of the musket. The cabin is, indeed, full of old guns, pistols, locks of hair, buttons, cartridge-boxes, bullets, knives, and other undoubted relics of Rip and the Revolution. This cabin, with its facilities for slaking thirst on a hot day, which Rip would have appreciated, over a hundred years old according to information to be obtained on the spot, is really of unknown antiquity, the old boards and timber of which it is constructed having been brought down from the Mountain House some forty years ago.

The old Mountain House, standing upon its ledge of rock, from which one looks down upon a map of a considerable portion of New York and New England, with the lake in the rear, and heights on each side that offer charming walks to those who have in contemplation views of nature or of matrimony, has somewhat lost its importance since the vast Catskill region has come to the knowledge of the world. A generation ago it was the centre of attraction, and it was understood that going to the Catskills was going there. Generations of searchers after immortality have chiseled their names in the rock platform, and one who sits there now falls to musing on the vanity of human nature and the transitoriness of fashion. Now New York has found that it has very convenient to it a great mountain pleasure-ground; railways and excellent roads have pierced it, the varied beauties of rocks, ravines, and charming retreats are revealed, excellent hotels capable of entertaining a thousand guests are planted on heights and slopes commanding mountain as well as lowland prospects, great and small boarding-houses cluster in the high valleys and on the hillsides, and cottages more thickly every year dot the wild region. Year by year these accommodations will increase, new roads around the gorges will open more enchanting views, and it is not improbable that the species of American known as the "summer boarder" will have his highest development and apotheosis in these mountains.

Nevertheless Mr. King was not uninterested in renewing his memories of the old house. He could recall without difficulty, and also without emotion now, a scene on this upper veranda and a moonlight night long ago, and he had no doubt he could find her name carved on a beech-tree in the wood near by; but it was useless to look for it, for her name had been changed. The place was, indeed, full of memories, but all chastened and subdued by the indoor atmosphere, which impressed him as that of a faded Sunday. He was very careful not to disturb the decorum by any frivolity of demeanor, and he cautioned the artist on this point; but Mr. Forbes declared that the dining-room fare kept his spirits at a proper level. There was an old-time satisfaction in wandering into the parlor, and resting on the haircloth sofa, and looking at the hair-cloth chairs, and pensively imagining a meeting there, with songs out of the Moody and Sankey book; and he did not tire of dropping into the reposeful reception-room, where he never by any chance met anybody, and sitting with the melodeon and big Bible Society edition of the Scriptures, and a chance copy of the Christian at Play. These amusements were varied by sympathetic listening to the complaints of the proprietor about the vandalism of visitors who wrote with diamonds on the window-panes, so that the glass had to be renewed, or scratched their names on the pillars of the piazza, so that the whole front had to be repainted, or broke off the azalea blossoms, or in other ways desecrated the premises. In order to fit himself for a sojourn here, Mr. King tried to commit to memory a placard that was neatly framed and hung on the veranda, wherein it was stated that the owner cheerfully submits to all necessary use of the premises, "but will not permit any unnecessary use, or the exercise of a depraved taste or vandalism." There were not as yet many guests, and those who were there seemed to have conned this placard to their improvement, for there was not much exercise of any sort of taste. Of course there were two or three brides, and there was the inevitable English nice middle-class tourist with his wife, the latter ram-roddy and uncompromising, in big boots and botanical, who, in response to a gentleman who was giving her information about travel, constantly ejaculated, in broad English, "Yas, yas; ow, ow, ow, really!"

And there was the young bride from Kankazoo, who frightened Mr. King back into his chamber one morning when he opened his door and beheld the vision of a woman going towards the breakfast-room in what he took to be a robe de nuit, but which turned out to be one of the "Mother-Hubbards" which have had a certain celebrity as street dresses in some parts of the West. But these gayeties palled after a time, and one afternoon our travelers, with their vandalism all subdued, walked a mile over the rocks to the Kaaterskill House, and took up their abode there to watch the opening of the season. Naturally they expected some difficulty in transferring their two trunks round by the road, where there had been nothing but a wilderness forty years ago; but their change of base was facilitated by the obliging hotelkeeper in the most friendly manner, and when he insisted on charging only four dollars for moving the trunks, the two friends said that, considering the wear and tear of the mountain involved, they did not see how he could afford to do it for such a sum, and they went away, as they said, well pleased.