Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In New England the “town” is the township, and there are some “towns” in which there is no village at all; but at Lexington there was early a little grouping of houses; and for two hundred and fifty years the local feeling has been growing more and more intense, until it can be said at last to be now somewhat larger than the place. This is not an uncommon result; as Dr. Holmes has remarked, American cities and villages all like to think of themselves as the “good old” this and that; but at Lexington more than anywhere else out of Italy I felt that the village was to its people the patria. With us the great Republic is repeated and multiplied in several smaller and diminishing republican governments, each subordinate to the larger, all over the land; and ever since its separation from Cambridge, Lexington has, like other New England towns, had its little autonomy. Twice a year the citizens convene and legislate in town meetings; and three Selectmen annually chosen see that the popular will is carried out and transact the whole business of the town government. This microcosm of democracy is the more interesting in Lexington because it is in many things an image of what the New England town was a hundred years ago, — a sufficiently remote antiquity with us. The Irish have their foothold there as everywhere; but they have not acquired much land; and though they remain faithful Catholics, they have Americanized in such degree that it is hard to know some of them from ourselves in their slouching and nasal speech. As for the Canadian French, who abound in the valley of the Connecticut, and in all the factory towns, I saw none of them in Lexington, and there are no Germans.

  It is because of the typically New England character of Lexington village, as well as its historical note, that I ask English readers to be interested in it; and as we Americans are some times grieved by our cousins’ imperfect recollection of family troubles, I make haste to remind them that at Lexington the first blood was shed in the war of American Independence. It has a powerful hold upon the American imagination for this reason; it has therefore overloaded the gazetteer with namesakes in every part of the Union, and its celebrity is chief part of the first historical knowledge imparted to American school-boys. But the village has such a charm for me from its actual loveliness and quaintness, that I should be sorry to bring that bloody spectre of the past into the foreground of any picture, and I shall blink it as long as I can.

  It was a shrewish afternoon late in April when we arrived from Boston at the odd but very pleasant hotel where we spent our month of May. The season was very dry, and the bare landscape showed scarce a sign of spring. At that time there is usually a half-scared, experimental-looking verdure on our winter-beaten fields; but except where a forlorn hope of grass cowered in some damp hollow, the meadows were now as brown and haggard in aspect as they are when the great snows leave them in mid-March, and they lie gaunt and wasted under a high, vast blue sky, full of an ironical glitter of sunshine. The wind was sharp, and for many weary weeks yet there would be no buds on the elms that creaked overhead along the village street.

  Further north, in Maine and Canada, the spring comes with a bound after the thaw; but the region of Boston seems to me the battle-ground of all the seasons when the spring is nominally in possession. On the 18th of May this year we had a soft, sunny morning, which clouded under an east wind; a cold rain set in before noon, with hail; it snowed the greater part of the after noon, and we had an Italian sunset to the singing of the robins. This was excessive; but usually after the first relenting days the winter returns, and whips the fields with sleet and snow, storm after storm; and this martyrdom follows upon a succession of frosts and thaws, which began before Thanksgiving in November. Finally the east wind comes in, fretting the nerves and chilling the marrow, throughout April and May; even when it does not blow it remains in the air, a sentiment of icebergs and freezing sea. It is worst, of course, on the shore, and delicate people who cannot live in it there are sent to Lexington, and thrive. The air is very dry and pure, and that is perhaps the reason why even the east wind is tolerable. Lexington Common, they say, is as high as the top of Bunker Hill Monument in Boston; and the locomotive pants with difficulty up the heavy grade of the road near the village. Perhaps there is something in the grouping of the low hills — in the embrace of which the village lies on an ample plain — that gives it peculiar shelter; it is certain that beyond the eastern range there is practically another climate. This is not saying that the winter is not long and dreary there; the snows lie deep in the hollows of those hills for months, and clog the long street on which the village houses are chiefly set.

  Streets branch off from this thoroughfare to the right and left; but it is the newer houses which are built on these, and the more characteristic dwellings, as well as the old-fashioned shops, face the westward road along which Major Pitcairne’s red-coats marched in the early April morning a hundred years ago to destroy the Provincial stores at Concord. Here and there before you reach the village is a large old mansion rambling with successive outhouses a hundred feet back from the road or beside it, all the buildings under one roof, and having a comfortable unity and snugness; but the dwellings in the village are small and very simple, generally of but two stories, and placed each in its separate little plot of ground. Where they pretend to the dignity of mansions, they stand

  “Somewhat back from the village street,”

  like the old-fashioned country-seat in Longfellow’s poem, and have stately elms and burly maples about them; but they are mostly set close upon the road, as seems to have been everywhere the early custom in New England. They are all of wood, — there are but two brick buildings in Lexington, — and here and there one is still painted saffron, with Paris-green shutters and white window casings, — the color of Longfellow’s house and the other colonial houses in Cambridge. When the paint is not too freshly renewed, they have a suggestion of antiquity which is pleasing and satisfactory in so new a world as ours. There is no attempt at ornamentation in these unassuming houses at Lexington; that is left to the later carpentry which has produced on the intersecting streets various examples, in one story and a half, of the mansard architecture so popular in our wood-built suburbs. There is also at one point of the principal street a wooden “block,” in emulation of the conventional American city block of brick or stone; but otherwise Lexington has escaped the ravages alike of “tasliness” and of enterprise, and is as plain and sober a little town as it was fifty years ago. There are old-fashioned shops in rows, quite different from the “block,” with wooden awnings to shelter their doorways, and with well-gnawed rails and horse-posts before them there is an old tavern dating from the days when all the transportation was by stage and wagon along the good hard roads; there are several churches of a decent and wholesome ugliness; and there are everywhere trees and grass and vines and flowers. The village is conscientiously clean; but except in midsummer the English reader must imagine a bareness impossible in an English hamlet. We have no evergreen vines; the spruces and firs which we plant about our houses only emphasize the nakedness of all the other trees in winter; in the clear, cold air the landscape is as blank and open as a good conscience. The village, when the leaves fall, will be honestly of whatever color it is painted, and its outlines will be as destitute of “atmosphere” as if they were in the moon. There is no soft discoloration of decay in roof or wall; at the best you will have a weather-beaten gray.

  Lexington has a High-School house of wood upon the model of a Grecian temple; but the principal public building is the Town Hall, a shapely structure of brick, which has been put up within the last five or six years, and which unites under one roof a hall for town meetings, elections, and all sorts of civic, social, and artistic entertainments, the town offices, and the free town library. The number of books is uncommonly large and exceedingly well chosen, and the collection is the gift of a lady of the place. The library is named after her, but it is piously dedicated in an inscription over the door to the men of Lexington who fell in the first battle with the British in 1775, and in the many fields of our late civil war. S
tatues of John Hancock and Sam Adams, the patriots who had fled from arrest in Boston, and were in hiding at Lexington the night before the affair of 1775, occupy niches in the rotunda from which the library opens, and confront figures of a provincial Minute-Man and of a national volunteer beside the door. Three days in the week the library is open from one till nine o’clock, and then there is a continual coining and going of the villagers on foot, and the neighboring farmer-folks in buggies and carryalls. I noticed that these frequenters of the library, who thronged the reading-room, and kept the young lady at the desk incessantly busy recording the books they borrowed and returned, were mostly young people and mostly women. The women, in fact, are the miscellaneous readers in our country; they make or leave unmade most literary reputations; and I believe that it is usually by their advice when their work-worn fathers and husbands turn from their newspapers to the doubtful pleasure of a book. This is the case alike in city and country as regards lighter literature; and in small towns these devourers of novels and travels and magazines read so close to the bone, that sometimes being brought personally to book for my intentions in this or that passage, I have preferred to adopt their own interpretations; and when this copy of “Longman’s Magazine” is laid upon the table of the town library at Lexington, I am aware that I shall not be safe from my readers in any tortuous subtlety of phrase, but that they will search me out to the finest meaning of my commas, and the last insinuation of my semicolons. But I have a good conscience and I am not afraid.

  Some friends, who compassionated the extremity of an author with an unfinished novel on his hands in the penetrating disquiet of a country hotel, lent me the keys to the Town Hall, and I had the library to myself on the days when it was not open to the public, and wrote there every morning amid the books, and the memorials of Lexington’s great day, and every sort of colonial bric-a-brac. On one side of the door was the gun carried by a Provincial (whose name I read whenever I lifted my eyes from my work, and now marvel that I should have forgotten) during the fight, and which being “brought back from Concord busted,” was thriftily sawed off just short of the fracture and afterwards used by his descendants; on the other side was a musket taken from the body of a British soldier who fell in the retreat; the sign of the old Monroe Tavern, where Earl Percy made his headquarters when he came out to support Major Pitcairne’s men, swung from the ceiling near these trophies; in glass cases on my right were collections of smaller relics, including shot from Percy’s cannon, the tongue of the bell that called the villagers from their slumbers the night before the attack; the pistols, richly chased and mounted, from which Pitcairne fired the first bullet in the war that made us two peoples; the hanger worn by the sexton when he went to light the signal lantern for Paul Revere in the belfry of the Old North Church in Boston, and sent him galloping out on his midnight ride through the sleeping land with the news that the King’s troops had begun their march on Concord; the broadside issued in the British interest, giving an account of the day’s fight with divers shoe-buckles, rings, knives, platters, and profiles cut out of black paper, belonging to the colonial period. No motive of patriotism shall induce me to represent these collections as very rich, or in themselves very interesting, and I am aware that I cannot give them great adventitious importance by grouping them with the rude writing-desk of one of the old Puritan ministers of Lexington, or the foot-stove which one of his congregation probably carried to meeting and warmed his poor feet with while he thawed his imagination at the penal fires painted as the last end of sinners in the sermon; the sincere home-made lantern of a later date, and the spinning-wheel of an uncertain epoch do not commend themselves to me as much more hopeful material for an effective picture. But all the more pathetic from their paucity did I find these few and simple records of the hard, laborious past of the little town, which flowered after a century’s toil and privation into an hour of supreme heroism. For whatever may be the several minds of my readers and myself concerning their right, there can be no question between us that it was sublime for forty unwarlike farmers to stand up and take the fire of six hundred disciplined troops in defence of what they believed their right: it was English to do that, it was American, and these plain martyr-folk were both. I own that I sympathized with the piety that has treasured every relic connected, however remotely, with that time; and that I took an increasing pleasure in showing off the trophies to such comers as tried the library door when nobody had any right there but myself. I was quite master to let them in or not, but I always opened, and waited for them to overcome their polite reluctance to disturb me at my writing. Their questions succeeded upon a proper interval of fidgeting and whispering, and then I confirmed orally all the written statements of the placards on the objects, and found my account in listening to the laudable endeavors of my visitors to connect their family history somehow with them. They were people of all ages and conditions; but they all had these facts by heart, and were proud of them, though with a pride unqualified by any foolish rancor. Most of all they were interested in the portrait of a young and handsome British officer in the uniform of the last century, whose sensitive face looks down from the library wall upon the records of the fight; and when I said that this was a portrait of Earl Percy, who commanded the British artillery, and explained (as I am afraid I have not the right to explain fully here) how it came to be given to a gentleman of Lexington by the present Duke of Northumberland, I elicited nothing but praises of the Earl’s good looks or expressions of satisfaction that his portrait should be there. No one apparently regarded him as out of sympathy with themselves, and I believe indeed that this generous foe acted only as a soldier on that day, and thought the measures used against the Provincials neither wise nor just. One small boy dwelt upon the portrait with delays that passed even the patriotic patience of the cicerone, and left it at last with a sigh of gratified wonder. “And he was a Britisher !” I give his language because, contrary to the experience of English observers among us, I never heard any other American say Britisher; and this small boy was unmistakably of Irish parentage.

  The hotel in which we stayed had a characteristically American history, though it could not relate itself in any way to the revolutionary fame of Lexington, as I fancied most buildings in Lexington would have liked to do. It was the house put up by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the use of its officers and agents at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, in Philadelphia. When the exhibition ended, the house was sold to a citizen of Lexington, who took it down piecemeal, and brought it round by ship to Boston, whence it was forwarded by rail to Lexington, and reconstructed there. This was a simpler and easier process than first appears, for the edifice was what we call a shell; it was not plastered, and the several portions being marked and numbered were easily put together again. I believe that as a speculation the removal and rebuilding did not pay; but when the house was rendered winter-proof, and heated with steam, it became at once the most picturesque and delightful country hotel. Outwardly it abounded in porches, in broken roofs and gables, and inwardly it was huge and rambling, with unexpected staircases and passages, and chambers of all manner of shapes and sizes, lit with transoms of colored glass; but its most charming feature was the vast hall, running the whole length of the building and occupying the greater part of the ground floor. You entered this from the street, and wandered about in it at will till some one in authority accidentally discovered you there, and having directed you to the hotel register lying open on the piano, assigned you a room; so vague and slight in everything was the conformity to ordinary hotel usage in that pleasant house. It was like arriving at some enchanted castle; or, if it were not, so much the worse for the enchanted castle. Enchanted castles, or even those of another sort, had not a railroad, as our hotel had, at their postern gate, — a railroad that was on domestic and almost affectionate terms with us all. When the trains came scuffling and wheezing up the incline from Boston, the sound was as if the friendly locomotive were mounting the back stairs, and might be e
xpected to walk in without ceremony, and sit down at the fire like any other boarder. We could see the trains backing and filling at the station as we sat at breakfast, and such of us as were going to town could time ourselves to the last half-minute, and count upon some sympathetic delay when we were late. Saturday evening, the trains all drew in with the air of having done an honest week’s work, and the engines having run their empty cars up the siding, found their way to the locomotive house at their leisure, as if they were going to wash up there for Sunday, while a Sabbath peace settled with the nightfall upon the village.

  I dare say I shall not be able, in this much-served England, to make it plain that our Lexington hotel was charming almost in proportion to the wide freedom granted every comer of taking care of himself; yet it was largely on account of this rather slipshod ease that it was so pleasant In the end one was very comfortable: the beds were good, the rooms were clean, the table was plentiful; you had what you wanted if you would take the trouble to get it, and much more than half the time it was got for you. Moreover, you were brevetted partner in the enterprise with a hearty good-will that could not have been bought for money, and with so much amiability, and so much real regard for your welfare, that you must have been a very extraordinary American indeed if you did not willingly accept the situation as you found it. A fire was burning all the month of May in the prodigious fireplace midway of the hall at our hotel; and if neither host nor servitor came after a reasonable time to receive the stranger, some hospitable boarder rose from the circle about the hearth, and welcomed him to one of the great Shaker rocking-chairs before the fire, while he went in search of the housekeeper or hostler. The fireplace would take in a back-log big enough to smoulder and inwardly burn for days, and it had a stomach for the largest stumps from the neighboring fields, which it devoured together with all blocks and fragments too tough for the axe and wedge. Sometimes, as the landlord remarked, there was more wood than fire; but ordinarily a roaring blaze was not wanting, and with this, and the elk’s head and antlers on the chimney-piece, the armor (brought home by one of the boarders from some joust with a bric-a-brac dealer abroad) on the opposite wall, and all the rude gothic of the architecture, which showed the beams and rafters as in a Venetian palace, we had very little difficulty in feeling baronial. It was probably a mistaken emotion; and I am not prepared to defend its genuineness against all comers. The ladies used to bring out their sewing or knitting, and chat round the fire; the men had their newspapers and cigars; as the evening wore on there was whist or euchre at the tables; sometimes people from the outside world dropped in; and if you went down late (as hours go with us in the country), you were likely to find the landlord and his brother smoking before the fire and telling stories of Lexington as they remembered it when boys. They were born on that spot, their family had owned the land for two hundred years, and they loved their native place with a tenderness very uncommon among Americans. I remember from those drowsy hours many stories, as of the frenzy of a family cat amidst the pyrotechnic rejoicings of a Fourth of July, and the unseemly behavior of a Lexington man’s horse, who brought his owner to shame before a Boston audience by backing down stairs into a huckster’s cellar in Dock Square; but I am withheld from repeating them here by that English scrupulosity regarding the facts of private life which I am naturally anxious to emulate in writing for an English magazine. I do not know whether I am bound by the same extreme of civilization not to speak of the old lantern which the landlord sometimes showed to guests of a very exacting patriotism as the very lantern which Paul Revere carried on his midnight ride from Boston to Concord. They found nothing odd in the suggestion that he should have carried a lantern, and no hesitation in receiving the relic as historical.