Part 231
It happened to be at the Kaaterskill House--it might have been at the Grand, or the Overlook--that the young gentlemen in search of information saw the Catskill season get under way. The phase of American life is much the same at all these great caravansaries. It seems to the writer, who has the greatest admiration for the military genius that can feed and fight an army in the field, that not enough account is made of the greater genius that can organize and carry on a great American hotel, with a thousand or fifteen hundred guests, in a short, sharp, and decisive campaign of two months, at the end of which the substantial fruits of victory are in the hands of the landlord, and the guests are allowed to depart with only their personal baggage and side-arms, but so well pleased that they are inclined to renew the contest next year. This is a triumph of mind over mind. It is not merely the organization and the management of the army under the immediate command of the landlord, the accumulation and distribution of supplies upon this mountain-top, in the uncertainty whether the garrison on a given day will be one hundred or one thousand, not merely the lodging, rationing and amusing of this shifting host, but the satisfying of as many whims and prejudices as there are people who leave home on purpose to grumble and enjoy themselves in the exercise of a criticism they dare not indulge in their own houses. Our friends had an opportunity of seeing the machinery set in motion in one of these great establishments. Here was a vast balloon structure, founded on a rock, but built in the air, and anchored with cables, with towers and a high pillared veranda, capable, with its annex, of lodging fifteen hundred people. The army of waiters and chamber-maids, of bellboys, and scullions and porters and laundry-folk, was arriving; the stalwart scrubbers were at work, the store-rooms were filled, the big kitchen shone with its burnished coppers, and an array of white-capped and aproned cooks stood in line under their chef; the telegraph operator was waiting at her desk, the drug clerk was arranging his bottles, the newspaper stand was furnished, the post-office was open for letters. It needed but the arrival of a guest to set the machinery in motion. And as soon as the guest came the band would be there to launch him into the maddening gayety of the season. It would welcome his arrival in triumphant strains; it would pursue him at dinner, and drown his conversation; it will fill his siesta with martial dreams, and it would seize his legs in the evening, and entreat him to caper in the parlor. Everything was ready. And this was what happened. It was the evening of the opening day. The train wagons might be expected any moment. The electric lights were blazing. All the clerks stood expectant, the porters were by the door, the trim, uniformed bell-boys were all in waiting line, the register clerk stood fingering the leaves of the register with a gracious air. A noise is heard outside, the big door opens, there is a rush forward, and four people flock in a man in a linen duster, a stout woman, a lad of ten, a smartly dressed young lady, and a dog. Movement, welcome, ringing of bells, tramping of feet--the whole machinery has started. It was adjusted to crack an egg-shell or smash an iron-bound trunk. The few drops presaged a shower. The next day there were a hundred on the register; the day after, two hundred; and the day following, an excursion.
With increasing arrivals opportunity was offered for the study of character. Away from his occupation, away from the cares of the household and the demands of society, what is the self-sustaining capacity of the ordinary American man or woman? It was interesting to note the enthusiasm of the first arrival, the delight in the view--Round Top, the deep gorges, the charming vista of the lowlands, a world and wilderness of beauty; the inspiration of the air, the alertness to explore in all directions, to see the lake, the falls, the mountain paths. But is a mountain sooner found out than a valley, or is there a want of internal resources, away from business, that the men presently become rather listless, take perfunctory walks for exercise, and are so eager for meal-time and mail-time? Why do they depend so much upon the newspapers, when they all despise the newspapers? Mr. King used to listen of an evening to the commonplace talk about the fire, all of which was a dilution of what they had just got out of the newspapers, but what a lively assent there was to a glib talker who wound up his remarks with a denunciation of the newspapers! The man was no doubt quite right, but did he reflect on the public loss of his valuable conversation the next night if his newspaper should chance to fail? And the women, after their first feeling of relief, did they fall presently into petty gossip, complaints about the table, criticisms of each other's dress, small discontents with nearly everything? Not all of them.
An excursion is always resented by the regular occupants of a summer resort, who look down upon the excursionists, while they condescend to be amused by them. It is perhaps only the common attitude of the wholesale to the retail dealer, although it is undeniable that a person seems temporarily to change his nature when he becomes part of an excursion; whether it is from the elation at the purchase of a day of gayety below the market price, or the escape from personal responsibility under a conductor, or the love of being conspicuous as a part of a sort of organization, the excursionist is not on his ordinary behavior.
An excursion numbering several hundreds, gathered along the river towns by the benevolent enterprise of railway officials, came up to the mountain one day. The officials seemed to have run a drag-net through factories, workshops, Sunday-schools, and churches, and scooped in the weary workers at homes and in shops unaccustomed to a holiday. Our friends formed a part of a group on the hotel piazza who watched the straggling arrival of this band of pleasure. For by this time our two friends had found a circle of acquaintances, with the facility of watering-place life, which in its way represented certain phases of American life as well as the excursion. A great many writers have sought to classify and label and put into a paragraph a description of the American girl. She is not to be disposed of by any such easy process. Undoubtedly she has some common marks of nationality that distinguish her from the English girl, but in variety she is practically infinite, and likely to assume almost any form, and the characteristics of a dozen nationalities. No one type represents her. What, indeed, would one say of this little group on the hotel piazza, making its comments upon the excursionists? Here is a young lady of, say, twenty-three years, inclining already to stoutness, domestic, placid, with matron written on every line of her unselfish face, capable of being, if necessity were, a notable housekeeper, learned in preserves and jellies and cordials, sure to have her closets in order, and a place for every remnant, piece of twine, and all odds and ends. Not a person to read Browning with, but to call on if one needed a nurse, or a good dinner, or a charitable deed. Beside her, in an invalid's chair, a young girl, scarcely eighteen, of quite another sort, pale, slight, delicate, with a lovely face and large sentimental eyes, all nerves, the product, perhaps, of a fashionable school, who in one season in New York, her first, had utterly broken down into what is called nervous prostration. In striking contrast was Miss Nettie Sumner, perhaps twenty-one, who corresponded more nearly to what the internationalists call the American type; had evidently taken school education as a duck takes water, and danced along in society into apparent robustness of person and knowledge of the world. A handsome girl, she would be a comely woman, good-natured, quick at repartee, confining her knowledge of books to popular novels, too natural and frank to be a flirt, an adept in all the nice slang current in fashionable life, caught up from collegians and brokers, accustomed to meet men in public life, in hotels, a very "jolly" companion, with a fund of good sense that made her entirely capable of managing her own affairs. Mr. King was at the moment conversing with still another young lady, who had more years than the last-named-short, compact figure, round girlish face, good, strong, dark eyes, modest in bearing, self-possessed in manner, sensible-who made ready and incisive comments, and seemed to have thought deeply on a large range of topics, but had a sort of downright practicality and cool independence, with all her femininity of bearing, that rather, puzzled her interlocutor. It occurred to Mr. King to guess that Miss Selina Morton might be from Boston, which she was not, but it was with a sort of shock of surprise that he learned later that this young girl, moving about in society in the innocent panoply of girlhood, was a young doctor, who had no doubt looked through and through him with her keen eyes, studied him in the light of heredity, constitutional tendencies, habits, and environment, as a possible patient. It almost made him ill to think of it. Here were types enough for one morning; but there was still another.
The artist had seated himself on a rock a little distance from the house, and was trying to catch some of the figures as they appeared up the path, and a young girl was looking over his shoulder with an amused face, just as he was getting an elderly man in a long flowing duster, straggling gray hair, hat on the back of his head, large iron-rimmed spectacles, with a baggy umbrella, who stopped breathless at the summit, with a wild glare of astonishment at the view. This young girl, whom the careless observer might pass without a second glance, was discovered on better acquaintance to express in her face and the lines of her figure some subtle intellectual quality not easily interpreted. Marion Lamont, let us say at once, was of Southern origin, born in London during the temporary residence of her parents there, and while very young deprived by death of her natural protectors. She had a small, low voice, fine hair of a light color, which contrasted with dark eyes, waved back from her forehead, delicate, sensitive features--indeed, her face, especially in conversation with any one, almost always had a wistful, appealing look; in figure short and very slight, lithe and graceful, full of unconscious artistic poses, fearless and sure-footed as a gazelle in climbing about the rocks, leaping from stone to stone, and even making her way up a tree that had convenient branches, if the whim took her, using her hands and arms like a gymnast, and performing whatever feat of. daring or dexterity as if the exquisitely molded form was all instinct with her indomitable will, and obeyed it, and always with an air of refinement and spirited breeding. A child of nature in seeming, but yet a woman who was not to be fathomed by a chance acquaintance.
The old man with the spectacles was presently overtaken by a stout, elderly woman, who landed in the exhausted condition of a porpoise that has come ashore, and stood regardless of everything but her own weight, while member after member of the party straggled up. No sooner did this group espy the artist than they moved in his direction. "There's a painter." "I wonder what he's painting." "Maybe he'll paint us." "Let's see what he's doing." "I should like to see a man paint." And the crowd flowed on, getting in front of the sketcher, and creeping round behind him for a peep over his shoulder. The artist closed his sketch-book and retreated, and the stout woman, balked of that prey, turned round a moment to the view, exclaimed, "Ain't that elegant!" and then waddled off to the hotel.
"I wonder," Mr. King was saying, "if these excursionists are representative of general American life?"
"If they are," said the artist, "there's little here for my purpose. A good many of them seem to be foreigners, or of foreign origin. Just as soon as these people get naturalized, they lose the picturesqueness they had abroad."
"Did it never occur to your highness that they may prefer to be comfortable rather than picturesque, and that they may be ignorant that they were born for artistic purposes?" It was the low voice of Miss Lamont, and that demure person looked up as if she really wanted information.
"I doubt about the comfort," the artist began to reply.
"And so do I," said Miss Sumner. "What on earth do you suppose made those girls come up here in white dresses, blowing about in the wind, and already drabbled? Did you ever see such a lot of cheap millinery? I haven't seen a woman yet with the least bit of style."
"Poor things, they look as if they'd never had a holiday before in their lives, and didn't exactly know what to do with it," apologized Miss Lamont.
"Don't you believe it. They've been to more church and Sunday-school picnics than you ever attended. Look over there!"
It was a group seated about their lunch-baskets. A young gentleman, the comedian of the patty, the life of the church sociable, had put on the hat of one of the girls, and was making himself so irresistibly funny in it that all the girls tittered, and their mothers looked a little shamefaced and pleased.
"Well," said Mr. King, "that's the only festive sign I've seen. It's more like a funeral procession than a pleasure excursion. What impresses me is the extreme gravity of these people--no fun, no hilarity, no letting themselves loose for a good time, as they say. Probably they like it, but they seem to have no capacity for enjoying themselves; they have no vivacity, no gayety--what a contrast to a party in France or Germany off for a day's pleasure--no devices, no resources."
"Yes, it's all sad, respectable, confoundedly uninteresting. What does the doctor say?" asked the artist.
"I know what the doctor will say," put in Miss Summer, "but I tell you that what this crowd needs is missionary dressmakers and tailors. If I were dressed that way I should feel and act just as they do. Well, Selina?"
"It's pretty melancholy. The trouble is constant grinding work and bad food. I've been studying these people. The women are all--"
"Ugly," suggested the artist.
"Well, ill-favored, scrimped; that means ill-nurtured simply. Out of the three hundred there are not half a dozen well-conditioned, filled out physically in comfortable proportions. Most of the women look as if they had been dragged out with indoor work and little intellectual life, but the real cause of physical degeneration is bad cooking. If they lived more out-of-doors, as women do in Italy, the food might not make so much difference, but in our climate it is the prime thing. This poor physical state accounts for the want of gayety and the lack of beauty. The men, on the whole, are better than the women, that is, the young men. I don't know as these people are overworked, as the world goes. I dare say, Nettie, there's not a girl in this crowd who could dance with you through a season. They need to be better fed, and to have more elevating recreations-something to educate their taste."
"I've been educating the taste of one excursionist this morning, a good-faced workman, who was prying about everywhere with a curious air, and said he never'd been on an excursion before. He came up to me in the office, deferentially asked me if I would go into the parlor with him, and, pointing to something hanging on the wall, asked, 'What is that?' 'That,' I said, 'is a view from Sunset Rock, and a very good one.' 'Yes,' he continued, walking close up to it, 'but what is it?' 'Why, it's a painting.' 'Oh, it isn't the place?' 'No, no; it's a painting in oil, done with a brush on a piece of canvas--don't you see--,made to look like the view over there from the rock, colors and all.' 'Yes, I thought, perhaps--you can see a good ways in it. It's pooty.' 'There's another one,' I said--'falls, water coming down, and trees.' 'Well, I declare, so it is! And that's jest a make-believe? I s'pose I can go round and look?' 'Certainly.' And the old fellow tiptoed round the parlor, peering at all the pictures in a confused state of mind, and with a guilty look of enjoyment. It seems incredible that a person should attain his age with such freshness of mind. But I think he is the only one of the party who even looked at the paintings."
"I think it's just pathetic," said Miss Lamont. "Don't you, Mr. Forbes?"
"No; I think it's encouraging. It's a sign of an art appreciation in this country. That man will know a painting next time he sees one, and then he won't rest till he has bought a chromo, and so he will go on."
"And if he lives long enough, he will buy one of Mr. Forbes's paintings."
"But not the one that Miss Lamont is going to sit for."
When Mr. King met the party at the dinner-table, the places of Miss Lamont and Mr. Forbes were still vacant. The other ladies looked significantly at them, and one of them said, "Don't you think there's something in it? don't you think they are interested in each other?" Mr. King put down his soup-spoon, too much amazed to reply. Do women never think of anything but mating people who happen to be thrown together? Here were this young lady and his friend, who had known each other for three days, perhaps, in the most casual way, and her friends had her already as good as married to him and off on a wedding journey. All that Mr. King said, after apparent deep cogitation, was, "I suppose if it were here it would have to be in a traveling-dress," which the women thought frivolous.
Yet it was undeniable that the artist and Marion had a common taste for hunting out picturesque places in the wood-paths, among the rocks, and on the edges of precipices, and they dragged the rest of the party many a mile through wildernesses of beauty. Sketching was the object of all these expeditions, but it always happened--there seemed a fatality in it that whenever they halted anywhere for a rest or a view, the Lamont girl was sure to take an artistic pose, which the artist couldn't resist, and his whole occupation seemed to be drawing her, with the Catskills for a background. "There," he would say, "stay just as you are; yes, leaning a little so"--it was wonderful how the lithe figure adapted itself to any background--"and turn your head this way, looking at me." The artist began to draw, and every time he gave a quick glance upwards from his book, there were the wistful face and those eyes. "Confound it! I beg your pardon-the light. Will you please turn your eyes a little off, that way-so." There was no reason why the artist should be nervous, the face was perfectly demure; but the fact is that art will have only one mistress. So the drawing limped on from day to day, and the excursions became a matter of course. Sometimes the party drove, extending their explorations miles among the hills, exhilarated by the sparkling air, excited by the succession of lovely changing prospects, bestowing their compassion upon the summer boarders in the smartly painted boarding-houses, and comparing the other big hotels with their own. They couldn't help looking down on the summer boarders, any more than cottagers at other places can help a feeling of superiority to people in hotels. It is a natural desire to make an aristocratic line somewhere. Of course they saw the Kaaterskill Falls, and bought twenty-five cents' worth of water to pour over them, and they came very near seeing the Haines Falls, but were a little too late.
"Have the falls been taken in today?" asked Marion, seriously.
"I'm real sorry, miss," said the proprietor, "but there's just been a party here and taken the water. But you can go down and look if you want to, and it won't cost you a cent."
They went down, and saw where the falls ought to be. The artist said it was a sort of dry-plate process, to be developed in the mind afterwards; Mr. King likened it to a dry smoke without lighting the cigar; and the doctor said it certainly had the sanitary advantage of not being damp. The party even penetrated the Platerskill Cove, and were well rewarded by its exceeding beauty, as is every one who goes there. There are sketches of all these lovely places in a certain artist's book, all looking, however, very much alike, and consisting principally of a graceful figure in a great variety of unstudied attitudes.
"Isn't this a nervous sort of a place?" the artist asked his friend, as they sat in his chamber overlooking the world.
"Perhaps it is. I have a fancy that some people are born to enjoy the valley, and some the mountains."
"I think it makes a person nervous to live on a high place. This feeling of constant elevation tires one; it gives a fellow no such sense of bodily repose as he has in a valley. And the wind, it's constantly nagging, rattling the windows and banging the doors. I can't escape the unrest of it." The artist was turning the leaves and contemplating the poverty of his sketch-book. "The fact is, I get better subjects on the seashore."
"Probably the sea would suit us better. By the way, did I tell you that Miss Lamont's uncle came last night from Richmond? Mr. De Long, uncle on the mother's side. I thought there was French blood in her."
"What is he like?"
"Oh, a comfortable bachelor, past middle age; business man; Southern; just a little touch of the 'cyar' for 'car.' Said he was going to take his niece to Newport next week. Has Miss Lamont said anything about going there?"
"Well, she did mention it the other day."