Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  That must have been beautiful, but what event, what moment of the joyous season was not beautiful? When we came out of the theater at the modest hours which the theater keeps in Stratford we continued, as it were, a part of the cast in whatever play we had been seeing, and under the stars of the dim English heaven, or its mild moon, we took our way up the footpath of Chapel Lane, or confided ourselves fearlessly to the roadway, where a few large-eyed motors purred harmlessly among us. I may not claim that they paused to let us look about for the lame cat of New Place gardens, or deny that they sometimes urged us on with those porcine gutturals peculiar to motors. But we heard in them only the ghostly echoes from the styes which fenced New Place along Chapel Street and Chapel Lane in Shakespeare’s time. There was no ghostliest taint from these in our twentieth-century air, but the honeyed odor of the sweet alyssum from the beds beside the gates of New Place gardens stole through the grating and haunted us to our dreams.

  CHAPTER XI

  TWICE a week, in the gardens of the theater, there were Morris Dances and Country Dances by the pupil-teachers, whom we could see every morning at the lectures in the Parish Parlor. These joyous events were called by the severe and self-reproachful name of Demonstrations, but by any name they would have been enchanting, as in fact their subtitles were. What could be more quaintly dear than Beaux of London City, by the young men, or Brighton Camp by the girls, or The Rose, or Confess by both youths and maidens? There was a sword dance, and there were Morris Dances, when the dancers beat the sward with their feet to make the bells on their legs help rouse the mother earth to their adoration. For a contrast to the lusty blonde English girls, there were two lithe Greek maidens come from their far shores to fly like Mænads on a Grecian urn in the wild figures of those northern dances; but best of all there was a veteran Morris Dancer now getting in years, who had been famous in his day, and who gave the dance with a sort of dying vigor and a stiff grace of gesture very pathetic and appealing.

  The sun blazed down on the place, but there was life in the air, and by the Avon’s banks the feathery reeds swayed and tilted in the light wind and waved us to the stream. The water was alive with the punts and skiffs and canoes which are coming and going on it the whole summer; my muse must not be too fastidious to sing also the steam and motor barges which all too swiftly but very cheaply bear the poorer pleasurer to the head of navigation a few miles up. But we were not so poor as that, and we took a boat, ample but not beyond the strength of a half-grown boy who at times let his head hang heavily on his breast as if overwearied with rowing. Perhaps it was only a mute entreaty for our larger largesse in the end, and if so I must allow that it was successful; but it was not practised so much going as coming, and we mingled even gaily with the other boats and punts. In England when a youth and maiden go on a water excursion it is, as I have already noted, the convention for the youth to lie flat in the bottom of the punt and for the maiden to stand or sit at his head and push the craft along. If it is two girls who man the boat, then the weaker does the work, and the stronger does the rest; or if they are both very strong, then they both lie idling over books, and there is no telling how they get to a given point. We easily passed these brave or dear crews, and contrived not to be run down by the populous launches that passed us.

  At first as you ascend the Avon after you have cleared the two bridges arching the stream, there are pretty villas on the right, and on the left there are pleasant meadows where on the afternoon of our voyage we saw some of the folk-dancers, who were encamped there, going about their light housekeeping among the tents, in the short skirts and the long stockings of their folk-dancing costume. On the other shore the villa gardens came down to the water, and when we were past the gardens both shores were overhung with willows which twisted their roots together and kept the banks firm against the freshets seasonably overflowing them. Under the braided roots the water-rats had their holes, but kept acceptably within them, for water-rats when visible are a very loathsome sight, and I should be sorry to associate them with the river which Shakespeare was the Swan of. Other swans are not conspicuous in my remembrance, though there must have been swans, unless they had all merged their dying notes in the exultant strains of the surviving gramophones. Of the gramophones there is no manner of doubt; but we were chiefly bent in ascending the river on arriving at a certain tea-garden which we had heard was to be found midway of our course. We found it, but found it shut, and then there was nothing for us but to row, or make our boy row, a mile further to Teddington, where he was sure of a tea-house which was open.

  While he remained with his boat at the landing there we took the path which led past picturesque thatched cottages and beside green meadows, ushered onward by signboards to the inn where we were to find tea, as we hoped in the moment of its “first sprightly running.” But when we got to the inn it appeared that the gas-fixtures had suffered some disaster, and were undergoing repairs, with the tea-room in the possession of several plumberlike men whose presence boded no refection in it. Instead we were offered a small dining-room, so dismal in dark-red paper and so haunted with the memories of bad dinners, that we implored the kind, incapable-looking host to let us have our tea in the garden. We then found ourselves under a tree in the yard behind the house at a table which had known so much rustic jollity that it bore traces of the riot ineffaceable by the wet cloth smeared over it by the slattern maid. She tried to hide them with the table-cloth, but the table-cloth was in league with them, and showed worse stains, which in turn would not be hidden by the plates and cups dispersed among them. There we sat and waited, realizing more and more that the garden was an innyard and the innyard was a farmyard with evidence of every variety of poultry in it. Feathers, with straw and chips, such as chickens delight in, seemed to grow up out of the gravel under our feet. There had been a dog which went and a eat which came and went, and then there began to be more and more cocks and hens which remained from the beginning. While we waited and waited long, the chickens were reinforced in closing upon us by troops of ducks and geese from some reserve of poultry beyond the stables. A man opened a gate from the adjacent field, and entered with a flock of sheep; in the pasture beyond we heard the lowing of cows and the neighing of horses, which put their heads over the bars as if to urge a passage to our table; we heard the note of remoter swine in unseen pens; and we began to ask each other when we were, if ever, going to have tea. Secretly we had each begun to hope we were never going to have it, and inquiry at the kitchen developed the fact that the range had sympathized with the gas-fixtures, and the fire was in doubt whether it would burn or not. We decided we could not wait the result of its misgiving, and began some polite pour parlers with the landlord, we insisting that we would pay for our tea and go without waiting for it, and he insisting that we should not pay for it without having it. In the end we paid and escaped triumphing without our tea, but feeling rather sorry that we had got the better of that poor man; though now, upon reflection, I am not sure that we had got the better of him.

  It was an afternoon of anomalies, which in that neat, well-ordered England, where custom and tradition prevail as with the authority of holy writ, were startling past all former experience. When once your mind is set on tea in England, you are, though an alien, as inflexible as any born to the manner; and when we had got back to our boat we made our boy make all haste down the Avon to the pretty tea-garden we had noted lurking with its tables among leaves and flowers. But as we came in full sight of that pretty tea-garden we suffered a moment’s dismay at the sight of a punt lolling full-length at the landing, and apparently not proposing to move away for us. A youth of the usual years and an unusually elderly maiden, or say matron, occupied themselves with tea and cake in it; and when it reluctantly got from the landing, and we mounted to the garden, we were almost held from ordering tea for ourselves by the unprecedented spectacle of an elderly gentleman standing by a tea-laden table, and serving from it the youth and the maiden, or matron, in the punt with tea and bread-a
nd-butter and ultimately cake, quite as if he had himself been in the punt and they serving him. Whether to attribute the strange fact to the all-pervading balefulness of Mr. Lloyd George or not we did not know. Perhaps with his equal taxes and old-age pensions he was really bringing the landed gentry to things like this; for this gentleman looked landed gentry and county family, if ever a gentleman did. I must not push the matter too far; I must not say he looked a title, even so low as baronet; but under that he might have been anything but a knight recognized for some service to civilization He was perfectly dressed in the well-studied propriety of an English gentleman out for an afternoon’s pleasure, down to his gaiters; he stood at his quiet ease beside that table, pouring the tea and cutting the cake, with a rather dreamy air, unconscious of the curiosity to know how he happened, which tormented, and has never ceased to torment us since, concerning him. From time to time he carried a cup or a plate to the people in the punt, which had come back to its moorings, and leaned over to bestow it on one or other of them, who took it with equal calm, and let him go on serving them. But it was no servile service which he offered and they accepted; it was rather the courtesy of host and guests of the tacit, unflourishing fashion of English society where to make the thing done seem not to have been done is the fine ideal. No word passed between them; the youth did not look an invalid, the matron not quite the mother of so old a youth. But in any ease why was not she serving the two men? Why was that elder serving her, if for any reason he was serving the youth?

  The tea-maiden ran across the street and fetched our refection from the inn there, and spread our table beside the barrier opposite this strange gentleman’s, equally overhung with plum-trees and dividing him as ours divided us from borders of gay marigolds and phlox and patches of cabbage and cauliflower in the gardens beyond. The yellow-jackets, which the English call wasps, came instinctively at the call of our jam, and we saw them hovering about his fearless head as he stooped over his table or moved from it to feed or slake the famine of the people in the punt; and when we had escaped unstung from our own refreshment, we left him with his gentle riddle unread, and let our droop-headed boy pull us back to the boat-house where we had taken him. The tea at Teddington had been disappointing if it could be said to have been at all; and that last tea, which had certainly been, had left us with a thirst which I do not know how we shall ever quench. Yet that excursion up and down the Avon had been so surpassing an ideal of an excursion on the Avon, that we said, “Now we should certainly do it every day.” The surprising part is that we never did it again.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE days at Stratford were so full of breakfasting, lunching, and dining, with lectures on folk dancing and folk singing, and debates on ethical and esthetical matters between, and drives into the country, and afternoon teas and calls, that it was with difficulty I could squeeze in or out an hour for so favorite diversion of mine as the Moving Picture Show. But at last the hour lent itself to the desire, and I went to that Picture Theater which does not feel itself too presumptuous in almost fronting the Shakespeare Monument. Perhaps it is kept in countenance by the badness of the monument in one art and its own excellence in another, but if I ventured into the Picture Theater without knowing its grounds for selfconfidence my own trust in it was rewarded by the prevalence, so flattering to my patriotism, the almost exclusive prevalence, of American films in its events. The events were of that romantic character so easily attributable to the life of our Far West, and especially that life as it was touched, by the only a little more distinctively romantic life of our aborigines, still supposed to linger in a tribal condition before merging in our body politic as landholders in severalty and prospective citizens. In this condition they were provisionally making war on the white men, galloping round on their ponies along the brows and summits of hills which threw them into strong relief, and permitted them a splendor of action equally glorious in advance and retreat. Their forays were connected with the love-interest embodied in the reciprocal passion of a young lieutenant and the daughter of the commanding general, who conspired with an elderly colonel to frustrate their affection by throwing the lieutenant into the power of the savages, and securing his betrothed for his ranking officer. The betrayal and the rescue were effected with the incessant discharge of firearms, sensible to the eye only, between Indians and cowboys and cavalrymen, which eventuated in the triumph of the American forces with much waving of star-spangled banners.

  The audience was composed almost wholly of schoolchildren; I was the only spectator distinctly in the decline of life; and among the children there was one of years so few and sensibilities so tender, that in spite of his sympathy with the American forces, he damped the general joy by bursting into a cry of alarm at the moment of their triumph, and having to be led howling up the aisle into the safety of the outer air. His grief touched me so that I could not take the pride I might have wished in the fact that of the six dramas presented that afternoon four were shown from American films, and two from French ones, with not a single English film among them, not even of those municipal receptions of royalty which the English fondness commonly wreaks itself in reproducing on the cinematographic screen, with little variety of costume for the king and an inflexible devotion to one walking - dress and one austere, reproving hat in the queen.

  I could not remain after this tragic incident, and I followed the emotional sufferer out, hoping to supply the reassurance which seemed to fail from his more immediate friends. But before I reached the door I was aware of one of these mystical presences at my shoulder which I was now grown used to, and which I supposed of course was Shakespeare. On the contrary, as I looked round, I saw that it was Bacon, and I said with surprise: “Oh! You here?”

  “Yes,” he said, with some resentment of my tone, “I am here a good deal, first and last.”

  “Yes?” I queried, to gain time, without committing myself further.

  “Why don’t these stupid people say something to comfort that little boy?” he demanded, without noting my query, and I perceived that his shadowy shape was in a quiver of compassion for the sensitive youngster. This ought not to have surprised me, and upon reflection I perceived that it was the logic of a man who had often been so pitiless in this life that he should be all pity in another life; that would be not only his eager atonement, his expiation; it would be his privilege, his highest happiness. To go through eternity compassionating every form of suffering here would be a refuge from vain regrets, and such solace as comes to us whenever we disown some misdeed by doing the opposite. I wished to speak with him on this point, but I saw he was not concerned with me; he was somehow addressing himself to the terrified child, who suddenly stopped his roaring and looked round smiling as if he expected to see a kind face at his shoulder. I knew he would see none, and Bacon instantly ceased to occupy himself with him.

  “Yes,” he resumed with me, “I think there is a great deal to be hoped from this sort of show, and I am interested in every advance made in its art. If I were in authority here I would not permit these spectacles of battle, or any terrifying circumstance. There is an infinite range of subjects which could be shown for the instruction as well as the delight of those little ones; all ‘the fairy tales of science,’ all the works of nature, all the beautiful and cheering events of history.”

  “I’m afraid the Shakespeareans would say,” I answered, “that you don’t show the author-actor’s instinct in that notion, and that such a notion alone was enough to disprove your friends’ claim to your authorship of the plays. You know how bloody his scene is — and advisedly so. We like a noble terror — all but our young friend here.” He did not reply, but said: “I believe that in the United States you now have the characters in the films speaking: talking-movies, I think you call them. You are very graphic, you Americans!”

  “Oh, thank you! They’re not quite satisfactory, yet. There is speech, but it doesn’t seem somehow to come from the speakers, though their lips move.”

  “You
must trust your Mr. Edison to bring the affair to perfection. A most ingenious man; a sort of up-to-date version of your great Franklin. I don’t wonder your people value him and have voted him one of your supreme benefactors.”

  “Your lordship must excuse me,” I said, “if I’m still a little surprised that a philosopher like yourself, who changed the whole course, if not the nature, of philosophy, should be so much interested in people who are after all merely inventors, however beneficent.”

  “Have you read your Macaulay to so little purpose,” he rejoined, “as not to have seen how he distinguishes between the new and the old philosophies in his essay on me by pointing out that my philosophy dedicated itself to use, while that of the Greeks disdained the practical as something beneath the notice of the idealist?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, “I certainly remember that; and here I hesitated from an embarrassing recollection of the severity of Macaulay’s essay on the facts of Bacon’s career.

  “I know he was terribly hard upon me in the first half of his essay,” Bacon returned, as if I had spoken. “But he let me have the last word, as it were. The whole second half of his essay is devoted to the recognition of my claim upon the forgiveness — I won’t say gratitude — of mankind because of my wish to serve them in any humblest fashion, of my will always to hitch a star to my wagon, if I may transpose the saying of your Emerson: a very different sort of idealist, by the way, from Plato.”