The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  So it was that upon alighting at the pavilion at Bailey’s Beach, he had played the kindly seigneur with the governesses, helping them carry the children’s things out onto the beach. Neither too patrician, nor too plebeian, he hoped, just a touch of genteel condescension authorized by the democracy of bathing. He was charming and considerate to all, was Franklin Drexel.

  Those who thought they might bathe took to the bathhouses to change. Franklin helped the more stolid faction set up the canvas chairs, remarking how he wouldn’t be caught in his coffin wearing—here straightening up with his hands on his hips and gazing down at the bathers standing in the surf—those absurd striped “pullovers” and the accompanying shorts that assaulted the world with one’s spindly legs. Even a straw boater, he said—with here a charming smile toward Mr. Ryckman and his boater—would make him lose all self-respect. Consequently here he was in his top hat. And he gave the silk thing a pat.

  At which the Smith girls laughed.

  His top hat was, of course, quite absurd for the beach. It was the sort of thing that would end up in TOWN TOPICS. Mr. Franklin Drexel, the gay gadabout, was seen at exclusive Bailey’s Beach, etc. But it furnished forth its own evidence, did it not? For what man, so absurdly dressed, could be suspected of lying in wait for—could be suspected of having in his “sights”—a wealthy widow? He almost wanted to point it out to Ryckman. The cleverness, the finesse, the tactical coup de maître. The man was never going to see it on his own.

  They fell into a desultory mood with the sun and the sand and the sounds of the ocean. Briggs had brought the Times with him, and happening upon an article on the Newport season, began reading to them selected tidbits. In another corner of the conversation the Smith girls were full of the tableaux vivants they had all seen the previous evening at the Casino and were speaking to the Garretts about them. The children—James and Sarah, and the three Garrett progeny—were down along the water’s edge with the governesses in their wool bathing dresses. In the distance there were sails and overhead the sky was blue and cloudless.

  Hobson had begun musing on the name of Mrs. Newcombe’s estate. Wasn’t that writer fellow, that playwright, the English one who was tried last year for—oh, what did they call it?—for “acts of gross indecency.” Wasn’t one of his plays about a Lady Windermere? What were acts of gross indecency anyway? Eh, Drexel?

  “Irish,” Franklin corrected, unperturbed, pouring a lemonade for Mrs. Newcombe. “Not English.” And before Hobson had a chance at a rejoinder: “And now: Miss Gould, Miss Stanton—” turning to the Smith girls—“I overheard you speaking of last night’s tableaux vivants. Which did you find most charming?”

  It was Miss Gould and Miss Stanton’s opinion that the Fragonard had been the evening’s greatest success. “The Stolen Kiss!” they cried with a sweeping look around the group. The beautiful young lady had been Miss Stoughton surely! But who, they wondered, had been the young man behind the drapery reaching out and taking hold of her?

  “I believe it was Bobby Hobson,” one of them said, pointedly not looking at Hobson. “That boy has as many hands as the Buddha!”

  “Not the Buddha, dear! Surely!” said the other.

  “Vishnu,” put in that pedant Briggs, not looking up from his paper.

  Franklin had been there. He had escorted Mrs. Newcombe to the Casino because her father had earlier expressed a distaste for such displays (although in the end he had accompanied them all the same). They had had their own table out on the ballroom’s parquet floor, as did others of society, while in the gallery the denizens of the hotels who had paid five dollars for entry stood and looked on. On the stage there was a raised platform, and off to the side an artist’s easel upon which a placard was placed with the title of each tableau. The stage would go dark, there would be a rustle of movement, then expectant quiet, and then the electric lights would come up to a collective “Oh!” from the audience and then applause. They had had Rembrandt and Gérôme and Delacroix. Part of what Franklin supposed was the evening’s fun was trying to identify who partook, who among the Four Hundred had put on a servant’s garb, a soldier’s armor, a toga or chiton. Most delightfully, there had been the half scandal of a Velázquez depicting a black handmaiden (whose servant was she?) pouring a jug of wine.

  One of the Smith girls politely asked Mr. Ryckman what had been his favorite, to which the industrialist responded that though the electric lights had impressed him, he preferred more invigorating diversion such as the races, or a polo match, or even the lawn tennis. These tableaux of the night before, he said, were too dilettantish for his taste.

  “You’re a painter, Drexel,” Hobson had to put in. “What did you think?”

  Drexel took a sip of his lemonade and said that he thought perhaps he agreed with Mr. Ryckman, that the tableaux tried to mix art and life in a way that trivialized both.

  “But do you know what I was thinking?” he went on, turning to the girls with his handsome smile. “Last night, while I watched? I was thinking that the finest thing would be to try to live one’s life as if it were a work of art! What do you think of that?”

  What a beautiful idea! the girls cried.

  “And I was thinking,” Franklin went on, taking his top hat off and putting it on one of the girl’s heads as if to show he was just having a lark, “is it not possible that God has made the world as a great work of art and that we disappoint Him when we go about blindly as some people do in a museum? And that it is our moral duty to look about us and try to see the world. And in turn to try to add ourselves—to add our lives—to the great museum. How will you, Miss Stanton, Miss Gould, make of your life a thing of beauty? You cannot do it with paint and line and volume, so with what?”

  They looked for a moment blankly at him, and then Miss Gould—or was it Miss Stanton?—was saying she was quite hopeless as an artist! Why, she couldn’t even draw a straight line, and was forever dripping watercolor on her crinoline!

  “But you would not be drawing or painting,” Franklin felt called upon to point out. “You would be living. You would be living your life as if it were an endless, ongoing painting!”

  The girls were silent at that, and then they were wondering what painting they would live their endless lives in if they could choose. “Salome!” one of them screamed and they were off laughing. Hobson reached out and took hold of the top hat and placed it back on Franklin’s head as if it were a dunce’s cap.

  But an hour later up on the Cliff Walk, Mr. Ryckman picked the idea up. They were walking in twos and threes, in single file when the path narrowed, the cliff on their right falling away to the ocean. The Smith girls had their parasols deployed.

  “This business about living one’s life as if it were a work of art,” Ryckman called from the back of the group. Franklin could hear him swatting the grass with his cane. “I’m afraid I don’t understand that. Surrounding oneself with beauty, with paintings and sculpture, with gardens or a fine home, I appreciate that. But to live as if you were yourself a painting, Mr. Drexel? What good does that do anyone?”

  But Mr. Drexel did not take him up. To the east a racing yacht heeled and unfurled a spinnaker.

  “In order for your life to be beautiful,” Ryckman went on, “d’you not need to align yourself in some way with the good? D’you not need to make the world a better place?”

  “Drexel makes the world a better place simply by being Drexel,” Hobson called back. “Just ask TOWN TOPICS.”

  “But surely in order for an action to be considered beautiful, it must improve people’s lives.”

  “Oh, Daddy, we are all too delightfully tired.”

  “Eh, Drexel?”

  They had come to a little opening in the path and had slowed and turned to face one another. Franklin said he had just been spinning out an idle thought, that it was just a way of seeing things. But to fold into his idle thought Mr. Ryckman’s belief that the bea
utiful must be in some way ethical—which he understood Mr. Ryckman to be saying; perhaps in reference to Mr. Keats’s ode?—he supposed that instead of paint and line and volume, one might live with love and compassion and generosity. Perhaps moral qualities along those lines might make up the materials of a life lived as a work of art.

  “But even so,” Ryckman pressed, “how would any of that benefit society?”

  “It would benefit those of us in the museum, those of us who are looking at the artworks, who care about beauty and truth and style,” Franklin said, and then: “It would benefit me.”

  “Exactly, sir!”

  “I think,” Ellen interrupted, stepping back from where she had been at the head of the party and giving her father a dark look, “that what Mr. Drexel means is that the cultivation of a personal view based upon an appreciation of that which is beautiful and truthful is in and of itself a way of living ethically. That to cultivate oneself along the lines of love and compassion and generosity is to add strength to the fabric of society. And that having thus cultivated such a personal view, one may then act upon it.”

  “I think we all understand Drexel to be acting upon his personal view,” Hobson put in.

  “Mr. Drexel,” she said with a look at Hobson that came near to knocking him off the cliff, “is even now engaged with me in raising money to help the poor of Newport. We go this Wednesday to the Point in the company of a wagonload of groceries. And he is also engaged in mounting a show of his watercolors for the benefit of the Redwood Library. Those are both, I believe, beneficent actions that grow out of his personal view. Do you have any such to match, Mr. Hobson?”

  At which the Smith girls laughed and wagged their fingers scoldingly at Hobson.

  “Now, Miss Gould and Miss Stanton—” she said, adopting a tone that signaled the subject closed; Franklin was not used to women coming to his rescue and it quite took his breath away—“has anyone recounted to you the horrors attendant upon public access to the Cliff Walk?”

  Goodness, the girls said, spinning their parasols, no one had!

  So she related to them—all the while with her father walking in a glower behind her—how the walk was protected by law as a public right of way, yet the owners of the cottages believed it represented an unwarranted intrusion upon their privacy. An unwarranted intrusion, she repeated. One of the papers had joked that Mrs. Vanderbilt had once sat down to her morning peaches at the Breakers and found herself being stared at by an insurance man from Hartford! Indeed, she (Mrs. Newcombe) had had all sorts strolling across her lawn, going in and out of her gardens. She wouldn’t stand for that sort of intrusion, she said. There was talk now of putting up a wire fence the three-mile length of the walk, something at least to demarcate the private from the public.

  “Which I hope,” she said with a glance back at her father, “will not be necessary.”

  Oh, the Smith girls said, they could understand how vexing it all was. Yet it was so pleasant, was it not, to be able to stroll along such a dramatic cliff, with the frightening ocean below and the wide, beautiful lawns and the distant mansions?

  “Does ownership of the lawn,” Ryckman pointedly asked, poking his cane into the turf, “entail ownership of the view?”

  “Ah!” cried Franklin, for he could feel Ellen rise beside him. “Here’s something I haven’t thought of in years!” And he took her by the arm and related to them all how when he had first visited Newport he had made the faux pas of going upon the Cliff Walk on a Sunday afternoon and finding himself in the company of butlers and maids on their day off.

  “Fortunately, I look rather like a butler myself. Don’t you think, Miss Gould?” he said to one of the college girls, both of whom broke out laughing.

  “I’m Miss Gould. She’s Miss Stanton.”

  “And a poor butler at that!” said Franklin with his beautiful smile.

  1863

  ~Today a colored “hall boy” from the Ocean came to the house with a note. Mother has just delivered it to me. She begs my pardon, says the envelope was addressed to Mr. Henry James, and that they had assumed it was meant for Mr. Henry James, Senior, but they could make neither “heads nor tails” of who had written it and what it proposed so had understood their error. She left hanging in the air an opportunity for me to explain myself, but I adopted an air of mystery and merely took the note from her.

  It is from Mrs. Taylor, who writes that a party from the hotel will be taking the ferry to the war hospital at Portsmouth Grove. That she and her daughter, having wavered in their resolve of going the last time a party visited, have determined that this time they will do their duty to bring what comfort they may to the sick and wounded. Knowing that the James family is so intimately involved with the prosecution of the war, she asks whether I would like to accompany them. The party is for this Thursday. After which, it is expected Mr. Taylor will be joining them from Waterbury. She adds that the trip would not be suitable for young Harry and young Alice.

  One must take care that one’s life does not begin to resemble the plot of a novel.

  ~We have had a letter from Wilky in his encampment somewhere in the Carolinas. How these letters upbraid me with their exploits! He eats hardtack and drinks coffee out of a tin dipper!

  Is it possible for a man to discover himself in war? For Wilky, who was forever (and l’ingénieux petit Bob even more so!) in the shadow of his older brothers, has cohered as a young soldier, has effortlessly taken on qualities which were most certainly not learned at Geneva or at Father’s supper table, but were perhaps always there, cocooned within him and only awaiting this apt (if terrible!) moment of metamorphosis.

  When I visited him this past spring at Camp Meigs in Readville, how struck I was at seeing the soft companion of my childhood hardened into a supple manhood and so at ease with the fellowship of soldiering! It was a bright breezy day, quite luminous and beautiful and radiant with the laughing, welcoming vivacity of the sunburnt young men. Whether it was a true revelation of their inner selves or a façade of handsome carelessness I know not, but they treated their circumstances almost as a frolic, with so little apparent consciousness of the desperate, momentous occasion that brought them together, and of the great test they were about to embark upon and which was the very cause, the impregnating origin as it were, of their brotherhood. I remember too my sense of exclusion, for I was reduced to watching, envying, applauding, and finally pitying (as I am now, reading again Wilky’s letter) all from the security of my Newport life, my Chateaubriand, the quiet insects here in our garden, and the golden sunshine.

  A great action is expected for the Negro regiment. It is in all the papers, a cause célèbre, and the James family is paralyzed with worry.

  ~In my idleness I have reread my earlier entry detailing our hike to the breakwater, and I find that last impression of myself and Miss Taylor standing at the end of the jetty gazing out over the surging sea has acquired a radiance in my imagination. For I feel almost as if we are still there, as if (striking conceit!) we had been imprisoned there in our freedom by some unknown painter (La Farge on one of his plein air excursions!), painted and so forever caught, and even though we have still our free selves (Harry James here in his room and Miss Taylor on the veranda of the Ocean), yet are we forever unfree, varnished into a painting which the world will view and sigh: Young Love upon the Jetty.

  So lovely is this vision of life as art (or rather the manner in which art traduces life!) that I hesitate to spoil it by recounting the conversation Miss Taylor and I had on our return hike. We were by then all very tired, and Miss Taylor was carrying her bonnet in her hand, and her face was flushed and her hair a little disheveled. I looked to amuse her and so told her I had a confession to make, namely that I had been engaged in duplicity as regards her person, for I had been surreptitiously observing her and taking notes on her behavior that I might use her—had she never guessed?—as a character in a story. But
now that I knew her, now that she was my friend, I supposed I must give that over. But, I wondered aloud, if she was not to be used as a subject in a novel, what was I to do with her?

  “Do?” she responded. “Do you need to do something with me?”

  “Which would you prefer?” I gaily asked. “A light comedy? Or should I employ you in a fine tragedy?”

  At this she let a mordant smile come upon her lips, but kept her face turned to the watery horizon. “Well, if you must do something with me,” she said finally with that light satiric air she has, “then I suppose you must marry me.”

  “Marry you, my dear Miss Taylor?” I replied, trying to match her tone, but feeling the first adumbration of alarm.

  “I believe,” she went on, “that is typically what young American gentlemen do to young American ladies.”

  “Ah!”

  “I’m led to believe it is something of a custom of the country,” she added.

  “Ah!” I stupidly repeated, and then hurrying on: “But I expect you are already much besieged with talented, acclaimed, accomplished, marriageable young men back in Waterbury.”

  She let loose then her lovely, renouncing laugh. “The talents of the marriageable young men of Waterbury are all inclined toward lathes and milling machines and the brass foundry. They can bat up a storm when the topic of discussion is bevel gears and escapement wheels.” And she let those terms lie between us a moment and then said in a voice more taut: “They do not interest me.”