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Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays

by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #614 · 363,186 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson


        
Release date: August 1, 1996 [eBook #614]
                Most recently updated: September 27, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/614

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ACROSS THE PLAINS, WITH OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS ***




                            ACROSS THE PLAINS
                                   WITH
                        OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS


                                    BY
                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                             CHATTO & WINDUS
                                   1915

                                * * * * *

                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
                    at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh




TO PAUL BOURGET


Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will never have heard
the name of Vailima, most likely not even that of Upolu, and Samoa itself
may be strange to your ears.  To these barbaric seats there came the
other day a yellow book with your name on the title, and filled in every
page with the exquisite gifts of your art.  Let me take and change your
own words: _J’ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes forces_, _c’est
avec vous que je me complais à vivre_.

                                                                  R. L. S.

VAILIMA,
      UPOLU,
         SAMOA.




LETTER TO THE AUTHOR


MY DEAR STEVENSON,

You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of these papers,
written before you departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add a
preface to the volume.  But it is your prose the public wish to read, not
mine; and I am sure they will willingly be spared the preface.
Acknowledgements are due in your name to the publishers of the several
magazines from which the papers are collected, viz. _Fraser’s_,
_Longman’s_, the _Magazine of Art_, and _Scribner’s_.  I will only add,
lest any reader should find the tone of the concluding pieces less
inspiriting than your wont, that they were written under circumstances of
especial gloom and sickness.  “I agree with you the lights seem a little
turned down,” so you write to me now; “the truth is I was far through,
and came none too soon to the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of
body and mind.  And however low the lights, the stuff is true . . .”
Well, inasmuch as the South Seas sirens have breathed new life into you,
we are bound to be heartily grateful to them, though as they keep you so
far removed from us, it is difficult not to bear them a grudge; and if
they would reconcile us quite, they have but to do two things more—to
teach you new tales that shall charm us like your old, and to spare you,
at least once in a while in summer, to climates within reach of us who
are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the Thames.

                               Yours ever,

                                                            SIDNEY COLVIN.

_February_, 1892.




CONTENTS

                                                    PAGE
        I.  ACROSS THE PLAINS                          1
       II.  THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL                   51
      III.  FONTAINEBLEAU                             72
       IV.  EPILOGUE TO “AN INLAND VOYAGE”            95
        V.  RANDOM MEMORIES                          112
       VI.  RANDOM MEMORIES CONTINUED                126
      VII.  THE LANTERN-BEARERS                      138
     VIII.  A CHAPTER ON DREAMS                      153
       IX.  BEGGARS                                  169
        X.  LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN              182
       XI.  PULVIS ET UMBRA                          193
      XII.  A CHRISTMAS SERMON                       202




I
ACROSS THE PLAINS


LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN
FRANCISCO

_Monday_.—It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were all
signalled to be present at the Ferry Depôt of the railroad.  An emigrant
ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday
morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday; and as
there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from
these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.
There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children.  The wretched
little booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger,
were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the
atmosphere of dripping clothes.  Open carts full of bedding stood by the
half-hour in the rain.  The officials loaded each other with
recriminations.  A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been
an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone,
blustering and interfering.  It was plain that the whole system, if
system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many
passengers.

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who preserved his
head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage registered, and
counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word
to move.  I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack, which I
carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of my railway rug the whole of
_Bancroft’s History of the United States_, in six fat volumes.  It was as
much as I could carry with convenience even for short distances, but it
insured me plenty of clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and
often after, useful for a stool.  I am sure I sat for an hour in the
baggage-room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was
passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was only to
exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West
Street to the river.  It was dark, the wind blew clean through it from
end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage,
hundreds of one and tons of the other.  I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed; and certainly the scene must have been
exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition.  It was a
tight jam; there was no fair way through the mingled mass of brute and
living obstruction.  Into the upper skirts of the crowd porters,
infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts.  I may say
that we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged among us like so
many maddened sheep-dogs; and I believe these men were no longer
answerable for their acts.  It mattered not what they were carrying, they
drove straight into the press, and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful.  With my own hand, for instance, I
saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother’s knee, she sitting
on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose that there
were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening.  It will
give some idea of the state of mind to which we were reduced if I tell
you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least
attention to my act.  It was not till some time after that I understood
what I had done myself, for to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment
a natural incident of human life.  Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to
progress, such as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted
the spirits.  We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the
conditions of the world.  For my part, I shivered a little, and my back
ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the
activities of my nature had become tributary to one massive sensation of
discomfort.

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the crowd
began to move, heavily straining through itself.  About the same time
some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over the shed.  We were
being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey City.  You may imagine
how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the dense, choking crush,
every one overladen with packages or children, and yet under the
necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length
for me, and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and with a
trifle of elbow-room to stretch and breathe in.  This was on the
starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port
side, by which we had entered.  In vain the seamen shouted to them to
move on, and threatened them with shipwreck.  These poor people were
under a spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot.  It rained as heavily
as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without
danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river
in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers running many
knots, and heralding their approach by strains of music.  The contrast
between these pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her
list to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was of that
glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art.

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.  I had a fixed sense
of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was common to
us all.  A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided over
the disorder of our landing.  People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their
families following how they could.  Children fell, and were picked up to
be rewarded by a blow.  One child, who had lost her parents, screamed
steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit;
an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark
her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest.  I was
so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in the
hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station, so that I
was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.  There was no
waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and for at least
another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit
platform.  I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but
as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and driven stupidly crazy by
the mismanagement to which we had been subjected, I believe they can have
been no happier than myself.  I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy,
for oranges and nuts were the only refection to be had.  As only two of
them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars,
and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the track
after my leavings.

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far from
dry.  For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers
as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the
bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour to whom I lent the
brush, appeared to take the least precaution.  As they were, they
composed themselves to sleep.  I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and
been twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I
allowed myself to follow their example.

_Tuesday_.—When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing idle;
I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling to and fro
about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan
by the wayside.  We were near no station, nor even, as far as I could
see, within reach of any signal.  A green, open, undulating country
stretched away upon all sides.  Locust trees and a single field of Indian
corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land
were soft and English.  It was not quite England, neither was it quite
France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes.  And it was in
the sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.
Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the
sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe.  There is
more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,
brown, and smoky orange in those of the new.  It may be from habit, but
to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it
has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit
some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were in
fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the
springs of day.  I thought so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania,
and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the
continent.  If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in
which my eyesight is accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage by
the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it was
for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of “All
aboard!” and went on again upon our way.  The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic
hours into arrear.  We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals
all that day.  Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had
a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches
for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at
every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow
my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer’s day.  There was not
a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among
which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness
till late in the afternoon.  It had an inland sweetness and variety to
one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth.
These, though in so far a country, were airs from home.  I stood on the
platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages,
carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and
cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining
blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his
light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,
I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had
come into a rich estate.  And when I had asked the name of a river from
the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty
of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land.  As
when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word
Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy.  That was the name, as no
other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure
in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the
United States of America.  All times, races, and languages have brought
their contribution.  Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with
Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.  Chelsea, with its London associations
of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own suburb to
stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated
names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;
{8} and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed
men, in the horror and isolation of a plague.  Old, red Manhattan lies,
like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified New York.
The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet
and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota,
Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a
nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer
shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be enriched, his
pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would
strike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg.  I had
now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children;
these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance farther
on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I
left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself.  I mention this
meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for about
thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a
coloured gentleman.  He did me the honour to wait upon me after a
fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture
marched me farther into the country of surprise.  He was indeed
strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy
Minstrels of my youth.  Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but
of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd
foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners so
patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel in
England.  A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, but then he
sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is
often moved to admire.  And again, the abstract butler never stoops to
familiarity.  But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time;
he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like
Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff.  He makes himself at home and
welcome.  Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout
that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting
master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid.  I had come prepared
to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand
condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I
assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the
grace to be pleased with that result.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of
etiquette: if one should offer to tip the American waiter?  Certainly
not, he told me.  Never.  It would not do.  They considered themselves
too highly to accept.  They would even resent the offer.  As for him and
me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in particular, had
found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one
of those rare conjunctures....  Without being very clear seeing, I can
still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly
pocketed a quarter.

_Wednesday_.—A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on
board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio.  This had early been
a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the
week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person
being still unbreeched.  My preference was founded on a work which
appeared in _Cassell’s Family Paper_, and was read aloud to me by my
nurse.  It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in
the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and
became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him.  The
idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a
baronet, was one which my mind rejected.  It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from
uninhabited islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.  We were now on those great
plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains.  The country was
flat like Holland, but far from being dull.  All through Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in
my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance
peculiar to itself.  The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were
graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas;
and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and
pleasant summer evenings on the stoop.  It was a sort of flat paradise;
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.  That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart and
seemed to travel with the blood.  Day came in with a shudder.  White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more often
on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up,
leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon to
horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that this paradise
was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria.  The fences along the line
bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos,
and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague.  At the point of day,
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the
state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a doctoral
air, “a fever and ague morning.”

The Dutch widow was a person of some character.  She had conceived at
first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at no
pains to conceal.  But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no
difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her
children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep
upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat.  Nay, she was such
a rattle by nature, and, so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk,
that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into confidence and
tell me the story of her life.  I heard about her late husband, who
seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on
Sundays.  I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her
fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of
particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to friends.  At
one station, she shook up her children to look at a man on the platform
and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had
been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded, and
how it was because of his desistance that she was now travelling to the
West.  Then, when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my
judgment on that type of manly beauty.  I admired it to her heart’s
content.  She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but
broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her
past; yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these
confidences, steadily aware of her aversion.  Her parting words were
ingeniously honest.  “I am sure,” said she, “we all _ought_ to be very
much obliged to you.”  I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease; but I
had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike.  A poor nature would
have slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a sort of
worthless toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening.  I was turned out of the cars, bundled
into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a
different railroad.  Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city.  I remember
having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street of
ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would
be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at the
least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner.  But there was no word of
restitution.  I was that city’s benefactor, yet I was received in a
third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of
ham and eggs at my own expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in
Chicago.  When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man
in a dream.  It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after
car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but overflowing.  My
valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was
a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by
gas.  When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle
of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my
consciousness dwindled within me to a mere pin’s head, like a taper on a
foggy night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down
beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in
drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they say.  I
did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if
something depended upon that.  I heard him relate, among many other
things, that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed
a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught the
words, I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning;
and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.
What else he talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of
words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly
explanatory: but no more.  And I suppose I must have shown my confusion
very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has
conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing perhaps that I
was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in despair, he rose
and left me.  I felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too crushing for
delay, and, stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench,
I was received at once into a dreamless stupor.

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs
after a _diner fin_, and was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted.  Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant,
who had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than
myself.  Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when we
scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man.  After trying
him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman
flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and departed from that car
in quest of livelier society.  Poor little gentleman!  I suppose he
thought an emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a
flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments
of digestion.

_Thursday_.—I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling,
for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate
a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot
cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi.  Another long day’s ride
followed, with but one feature worthy of remark.  At a place called
Creston, a drunken man got in.  He was aggressively friendly, but,
according to English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train.  For
one stage he eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were
beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the
conductor.  There was a word or two of talk; and then the official had
the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through
the car, and sent him flying on to the track.  It was done in three
motions, as exact as a piece of drill.  The train was still moving
slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his
feet without a fall.  He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his
cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys.  It was the first
indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some
emotion.  The conductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip,
looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,
for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering along the
track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.
They were speaking English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign
land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific
Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri
river.  Here we were to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai, set
apart for emigrants.  But I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated
myself from my companions, and marched with my effects into the Union
Pacific Hotel.  A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain
European way, I should call the boots, were installed behind a counter
like bank tellers.  They took my name, assigned me a number, and
proceeded to deal with my packages.  And here came the tug of war.  I
wished to give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go
to bed.  And this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my
unfamiliarity with the language.  For although two nations use the same
words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the
dictionary.  The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set
phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification.  Some
international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman
at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural
to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency.  He refused, and that with
the plainness of the West.  This American manner of conducting matters of
business is, at first, highly unpalatable to the European.  When we
approach a man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired servant.
But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk
with a view to exchanging favours if they shall agree to please.  I know
not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the more truly
courteous.  The English stiffness unfortunately tends to be continued
after the particular transaction is at an end, and thus favours class
separations.  But on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave
an open field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s refusal, and unbuttoned my
wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.  I knew nothing, I
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no desire to give
trouble.  If there was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let
him say the word, and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfully
obey.

He burst into a shout of laughter.  “Ah!” said he, “you do not know about
America.  They are fine people in America.  Oh! you will like them very
well.  But you mustn’t get mad.  I know what you want.  You come along
with me.”

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like an old
acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.

“There,” said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, “go and have a
drink!”



THE EMIGRANT TRAIN


All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might meet
with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table.  I had been
but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once more, and put apart
with my fellows.  It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I
found myself in front of the Emigrant House, with more than a hundred
others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey.  A white-haired official,
with a stick under one arm, and a list in the other hand, stood apart in
front of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command.  At
each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run
for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon
concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children.  The
second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling
alone, and the third to the Chinese.  The official was easily moved to
anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were both quick at answering
their names, and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on board.

The families once housed, we men carried the second car without ceremony
by simultaneous assault.  I suppose the reader has some notion of an
American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed
Noah’s ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage
down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand.  Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme
plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution,
and for the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed
but a dying glimmer even while they burned.  The benches are too short
for anything but a young child.  Where there is scarce elbow-room for two
to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie.  Hence the
company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer
Station, the company’s servants, have conceived a plan for the better
accommodation of travellers.  They prevail on every two to chum together.
To each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed
with straw, and covered with thin cotton.  The benches can be made to
face each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible.  On the approach
of night the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide
enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middle height; and the
chums lie down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the
conductor’s van and the feet to the engine.  When the train is full, of
course this plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to
every bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.  It
was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired official now
bestirred himself.  He made a most active master of ceremonies,
introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the amiability and
honesty of each.  The greater the number of happy couples the better for
his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds.  His
price for one board and three straw cushions began with two dollars and a
half; but before the train left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had
purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half.

The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I
showed myself too eager for union at any price; but certainly the first
who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the honour without
thanks.  He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland,
looked me all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse himself
in broken phrases.  He didn’t know the young man, he said.  The young man
might be very honest, but how was he to know that?  There was another
young man whom he had met already in the train; he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole.  All this without any
sort of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent.  I began to
tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left rejected.
But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his
manner.  To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy.  But that was all
one; he had at least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted
the match, and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial
benediction, and pocketed his fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.  I am afraid
to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine, certainly a score;
then came the Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was
brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his
caboose.  The class to which I belonged was of course far the largest,
and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.
But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight
or nine who had the whooping-cough.  At last, about six, the long train
crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river to
Omaha, westward bound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.  There was thunder
in the air, which helped to keep us restless.  A man played many airs
upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came to
“Home, sweet home.”  It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at
that, and the faces began to lengthen.  I have no idea whether musically
this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of
art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.
Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment.  If you wallow naked in
the pathetic, like the author of “Home, sweet home,” you make your
hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved,
they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness.  It did
not come to tears that night, for the experiment was interrupted.  An
elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about as much
appearance of sentiment an you would expect from a retired slaver, turned
with a start and bade the performer stop that “damned thing.”  “I’ve
heard about enough of that,” he added; “give us something about the good
country we’re going to.”  A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the
performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then
struck into a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled
immediately the emotion he had raised.

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off
next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing “The Sweet By-and-bye” with very tuneful voices; the chums began
to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at
an end.  But it was not so; for, the train stopping at some station, the
cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young
men and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some with
stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale.  Their charge began with
twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to
fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had
paid for mine at the Transfer.  This is my contribution to the economy of
future emigrants.

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.  He sells books
(such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee,
tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon.  Early
next morning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a more
extended principle became the order of the hour.  It requires but a
copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried
on most economically by a syndicate of three.  I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque.  Shakespeare was my own nickname
on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of
a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together.  I have never seen
tobacco so sillily abused.  Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap.  The partners used
these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers.  Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the
stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the
car.  There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the
woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash
his face and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train
is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the
cars.  Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and
coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with
little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards.  It was the pleasantest
hour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside: a breakfast in the
morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from five
to eight or nine at night.  We had rarely less than twenty minutes for
each; and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting for
some express upon a side track among miles of desert, we might have taken
an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time.  For
haste is not the foible of an emigrant train.  It gets through on
sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren;
should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they
cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or
so.  Civility is the main comfort that you miss.  Equality, though
conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an
emigrant.  Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of “All aboard!”
recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as I was alone
with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I
found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the station
without note of warning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while
you ate.  The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both wanton
and petty.

Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an emigrant.  I
asked a conductor one day at what time the train would stop for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a third
time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly
in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away.  I
believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person
made the same inquiry, although he still refused the information, he
condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice loud
enough for me to hear.  It was, he said, his principle not to tell people
where they were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as
what o’clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not
afford to be eternally worried.

As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal of
your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy.  He has it in his
power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant’s lot.  The
newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying,
contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs.  Indeed, in
his case, matters came nearly to a fight.  It happened thus: he was going
his rounds through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming to
a party who were at _Seven-up_ or _Cascino_ (our two games), upon a
bed-board, slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking
one man’s hand to the floor.  It was the last straw.  In a moment the
whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was
ordered to “get out of that directly, or he would get more than he
reckoned for.” The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off,
and was less openly insulting in the future.  On the other hand, the lad
who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento made himself
the friend of all, and helped us with information, attention, assistance,
and a kind countenance.  He told us where and when we should have our
meals, and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table for those
who were delayed, and watched that we should neither be left behind nor
yet unnecessarily hurried.  You, who live at home at ease, can hardly
realise the greatness of this service, even had it stood alone.  When I
think of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright
face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the
benefactor of his kind.  Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps
troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old
Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few
cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man’s work, and
bettering the world.

I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy.  I tell it
because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the
American, which is perhaps their most bewildering character to one newly
landed.  It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train; and I am
told I looked like a man at death’s door, so much had this long journey
shaken me.  I sat at the end of a car, and the catch being broken, and
myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for
the sake of air.  In this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his
box of merchandise.  I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he
was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he came upon
me unawares.  On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside; and
though I myself apologised, as if to show him the way, he answered me
never a word.  I chafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have
come to words.  But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large
juicy pear was put into my hand.  It was the newsboy, who had observed
that I was looking ill, and so made me this present out of a tender
heart.  For the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child; he
lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on
their sale, and came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.



THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA


It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday
without a cloud.  We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on
the plains of Nebraska.  I made my observatory on the top of a
fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to
spy in vain for something new.  It was a world almost without a feature;
an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway
stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on
either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.
Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a
crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen
upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and
again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more
and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins,
and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their
surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board.  The
train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing
moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our
regard.  It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a
step of the horizon.  Even my own body or my own head seemed a great
thing in that emptiness.  I note the feeling the more readily as it is
the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others.  Day and
night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the
incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise like the winding up of countless
clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that
land.

To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this
spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole
arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon.  Yet
one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there
in old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams,
and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they
steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride.  They had nothing,
it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no
sight for repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the
dead green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon.  But the
eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the worst
the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil.  It is the
settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel.  Our
consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety.
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?  What livelihood can repay
a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness?  He is cut off
from books, from news, from company, from all that can relieve existence
but the prosecution of his affairs.  A sky full of stars is the most
varied spectacle that he can hope.  He may walk five miles and see
nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he
is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to
the one object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his
advance.  We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers,
and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative
surroundings.  But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler?  His is a
wall-paper with a vengeance—one quarter of the universe laid bare in all
its gauntness.

His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the
visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by
distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs into his
cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand.  Hence, I am
told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer and winter, cattle, wife
and family, the settler may create a full and various existence.  One
person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to
her lot.  This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk.
She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; she had that
great rarity—a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind,
dark, and steady.  She sold milk with patriarchal grace.  There was not a
line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but
spoke of an entire contentment with her life.  It would have been fatuous
arrogance to pity such a woman.  Yet the place where she lived was to me
almost ghastly.  Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all
nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines.  Each stood
apart in its own lot.  Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if
it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that had been set
down upon it ready made.  Her own, into which I looked, was clean but
very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.  This
extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong
impression of artificiality.  With none of the litter and discoloration
of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from
the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic.  The mind is loth
to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life
can go on with so few properties, or the great child, man, find
entertainment in so bare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least
it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised.  At
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass
the milk-jug.  This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a
respectable appearance; a darkish man, high spoken, eating as though he
had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first speaker with
extraordinary vehemence of tone—

“There’s a waiter here!” he cried.

“I only asked you to pass the milk,” explained the first.

Here is the retort verbatim—

“Pass!  Hell!  I’m not paid for that business; the waiter’s paid for it.
You should use civility at table, and, by God, I’ll show you how!”

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on with his
supper as though nothing had occurred.  It pleases me to think that some
day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney; and that perhaps both
may fall.



THE DESERT OF WYOMING


To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains.  I longed
for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like
an ice-bound whaler for the spring.  Alas! and it was a worse country
than the other.  All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad
mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair match
to them for misery of aspect.  Hour after hour it was the same unhomely
and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that
drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications—how drearily,
how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch
of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush,
eternal sage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring,
grays warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole
sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and there, but
at incredible intervals, a creek running in a cañon.  The plains have a
grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a contorted
smallness.  Except for the air, which was light and stimulating, there
was not one good circumstance in that God-forsaken land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at last,
whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick outright.  That
was a night which I shall not readily forget.  The lamps did not go out;
each made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood, and the shadows were
confounded together in the long, hollow box of the car.  The sleepers lay
in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like
dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his
arm; there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench.
The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of
the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out their arms like
children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep;
and as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate, and caught now
a snore, now a gasp, now a half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the
worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle.  Although it was chill,
I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon
became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of
life.  Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills
shoot by unweariedly into our wake.  They that long for morning have
never longed for it more earnestly than I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly
quarter of the world.  Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a
river.  Only down the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting and
awoke the resting echo.  That train was the one piece of life in all the
deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed
in this paralysis of man and nature.  And when I think how the railroad
has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage
tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some £12 from the Atlantic to
the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring,
impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then
died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in
these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with
border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed
dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like
wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last
fastness, the scream of the “bad medicine waggon” charioting his foes;
and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was
conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more
extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to
me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age
in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of
the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great
writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an
enduring literary work.  If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be
heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?  But, alas! it is
not these things that are necessary—it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us
swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils.  Thirst,
hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more feared, so
lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely
through the hurricane and past the shark.  Yet we should not be forgetful
of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I
have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more
than was enough, let me add an original document.  It was not written by
Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty
years ago.  I shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the
spelling.

    “_My dear Sister Mary_,—_I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when
    you read my letter_.  _If Jerry_” (_the writer’s eldest brother_)
    “_has not written to you before now_, _you will be surprised to heare
    that we are in California_, _and that poor Thomas_” (_another
    brother_, _of fifteen_) “_is dead_.  _We started from_ — _in July_,
    _with plenly of provisions and too yoke oxen_.  _We went along very
    well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of California_,
    _when the Indians attacked us_.  _We found places where they had
    killed the emigrants_.  _We had one passenger with us_, _too guns_,
    _and one revolver_; _so we ran all the lead We had into bullets_
    (_and_) _hung the guns up in the wagon so that we could get at them
    in a minit_.  _It was about two o’clock in the afternoon_; _droave
    the cattel a little way_; _when a prairie chicken alited a little way
    from the wagon_.

    “_Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it_, _and told Tom drive
    the oxen_.  _Tom and I drove the oxen_, _and Jerry and the passenger
    went on_.  _Then_, _after a little_, _I left Tom and caught up with
    Jerry and the other man_.  _Jerry stopped Tom to come up_; _me and
    the man went on and sit down by a little stream_.  _In a few
    minutes_, _we heard some noise_; _then three shots_ (_they all struck
    poor Tom_, _I suppose_); _then they gave the war hoop_, _and as many
    as twenty of the redskins came down upon us_.  _The three that shot
    Tom was hid by the side of the road in the bushes_.

    “_I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot_; _so I told the other man
    that Tom and Jerry were dead_, _and that we had better try to
    escape_, _if possible_.  _I had no shoes on_; _having a sore foot_,
    _I thought I would not put them on_.  _The man and me run down the
    road_, _but We was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony_.  _We then
    turend the other way_, _and run up the side of the Mountain_, _and
    hid behind some cedar trees_, _and stayed there till dark_.  _The
    Indians hunted all over after us_, _and verry close to us_, _so close
    that we could here there tomyhawks Jingle_.  _At dark the man and me
    started on_, _I stubing my toes against sticks and stones_.  _We
    traveld on all night_; _and next morning_, _just as it was getting
    gray_, _we saw something in the shape of a man_.  _It layed Down in
    the grass_.  _We went up to it_, _and it was Jerry_.  _He thought we
    ware Indians_.  _You can imagine how glad he was to see me_.  _He
    thought we was all dead but him_, _and we thought him and Tom was
    dead_.  _He had the gun that he took out of the wagon to shoot the
    prairie Chicken_; _all he had was the load that was in it_.

    “_We traveld on till about eight o’clock_, _We caught up with one
    wagon with too men with it_.  _We had traveld with them before one
    day_; _we stopt and they Drove on_; _we knew that they was ahead of
    us_, _unless they had been killed to_.  _My feet was so sore when we
    caught up with them that I had to ride_; _I could not step_.  _We
    traveld on for too days_, _when the men that owned the cattle said
    they would_ (_could_) _not drive them another inch_.  _We unyoked the
    oxen_; _we had about seventy pounds of flour_; _we took it out and
    divided it into four packs_.  _Each of the men took about 18 pounds
    apiece and a blanket_.  _I carried a little bacon_, _dried meat_,
    _and little quilt_; _I had in all about twelve pounds_.  _We had one
    pint of flour a day for our alloyance_.  _Sometimes we made soup of
    it_; _sometimes we_ (_made_) _pancakes_; _and sometimes mixed it up
    with cold water and eat it that way_.  _We traveld twelve or fourteen
    days_.  _The time came at last when we should have to reach some
    place or starve_.  _We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks_.  _The
    morning come_, _we scraped all the flour out of the sack_, _mixed it
    up_, _and baked it into bread_, _and made some soup_, _and eat
    everything we had_.  _We traveld on all day without anything to eat_,
    _and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train of eight wagons_.
    _We traveld with them till we arrived at the settlements_; _and know
    I am safe in California_, _and got to good home_, _and going to
    school_.

    “_Jerry is working in_ —.  _It is a good country_.  _You can get from
    50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking_.  _Tell me all about the affairs
    in the States_, _and how all the folks get along_.”

And so ends this artless narrative.  The little man was at school again,
God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.



FELLOW-PASSENGERS


At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific
line of railroad.  The change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had
better cars on the new line; and, second, those in which we had been
cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably.  Several
yards away, as we returned, let us say from dinner, our nostrils were
assailed by rancid air.  I have stood on a platform while the whole train
was shunting; and as the dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a
whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of
monkeys.  I think we are human only in virtue of open windows.  Without
fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the
Queen’s English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering,
human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence.  I do
my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than
the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train.  But one
thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive.

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so
proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us all a
sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew out and
joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for bed boards; and
there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and opened
at night.

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was
among.  They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met on
board ship while crossing the Atlantic.  They were mostly lumpish
fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I should
say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and little interest in
their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external
curiosity.  If they heard a man’s name and business, they seemed to think
they had the heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to know that
much as they were indifferent to the rest.  Some of them were on nettles
till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but
beyond that, whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce
or friendly, was all one to them.  Others who were not so stupid,
gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly.  A favourite
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of  “All aboard!” while
the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the general
discomfort.  Such a one was always much applauded for his high spirits.
When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was astonished—fresh from the
eager humanity on board ship—to meet with little but laughter.  One of
the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very
easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to
think, for he expected me to join the laugh.  I did so, but it was
phantom merriment.  Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent
epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to
help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case
evoked among his fellow-passengers.  “Oh, I hope he’s not going to die!”
cried a woman; “it would be terrible to have a dead body!”  And there was
a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station.
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.

There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,
little but silence.  In this society, more than any other that ever I was
in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the narrative.  It was
rarely that any one listened for the listening.  If he lent an ear to
another man’s story, it was because he was in immediate want of a hearer
for one of his own.  Food and the progress of the train were the subjects
most generally treated; many joined to discuss these who otherwise would
hold their tongues.  One small knot had no better occupation than to worm
out of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed I
grew to baffle them.  They assailed me with artful questions and
insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was perpetually
on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward laughter.  I am sure
Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for the secret.  He owed me far
more, had he understood life, for thus preserving him a lively interest
throughout the journey.  I met one of my fellow-passengers months after,
driving a street tramway car in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now
out of season, told him my name without subterfuge.  You never saw a man
more chapfallen.  But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a
mystery he had still been disappointed.

There were no emigrants direct from Europe—save one German family and a
knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New
Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing
privately the secrets of their old-world, mysterious race.  Lady Hester
Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my
part, I can make nothing of them at all.  A division of races, older and
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart
from neighbouring Englishmen.  Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign
in my eyes.  This is one of the lessons of travel—that some of the
strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every quarter
of that Continent.  All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains with me.  From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New
York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the
Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves—some one or two were fleeing in
quest of a better land and better wages.  The talk in the train, like the
talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope
that moves ever westward.  I thought of my shipful from Great Britain
with a feeling of despair.  They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far
enough.  Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to welcome
them at Sandy Hook.  Where were they to go?  Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa,
Kansas?  These were not places for immigration, but for emigration, it
appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up his heel
and left it for an ungrateful country.  And it was still westward that
they ran.  Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like the
sun, and the evening was made of edible gold.  And, meantime, in the car
in front of me, were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite
quarter?  Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates
in search of provender, had here come face to face.  The two waves had
met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been
prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till one
could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home.
Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and more
disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward toward the land of
gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey
east; and these were as crowded as our own.  Had all these return
voyagers made a fortune in the mines?  Were they all bound for Paris, and
to be in Rome by Easter?  It would seem not, for, whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through the windows,
in a kind of wailing chorus, to “come back.”  On the plains of Nebraska,
in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my
heart, “Come back!”  That was what we heard by the way “about the good
country we were going to.”  And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San
Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other
side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how
many thousands would regret the bargain!  But wages, indeed, are only one
consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change
and travel for themselves.



DESPISED RACES


Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards
our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.
They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of
them, but hated them _a priori_.  The Mongols were their enemies in that
cruel and treacherous battle-field of money.  They could work better and
cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too
idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe.  They declared
them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when
they beheld them.  Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so
like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and
suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an
instant been deceived by the resemblance.  I do not say it is the most
attractive class of our women, but for all that many a man’s wife is less
pleasantly favoured.  Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese were
dirty.  I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the
journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us
to shame.  We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and
faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed.  But
the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing
their feet—an act not dreamed of among ourselves—and going as far as
decency permitted to wash their whole bodies.  I may remark by the way
that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their
sense of modesty.  A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse; but he who
is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.
Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the
surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which
stank.  I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the
freshest of the three.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America.  The
Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English.  They are held to be base, because their dexterity and
frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian.  They
are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that.  They
are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each
reflect before he bears the accusation.  I am told, again, that they are
of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and
dangerous class in the Celestial Empire.  But if this be so, what
remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the
industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go.  Such is
the cry.  It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to
immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and
resistance to either but legitimate defence.  Yet we may regret the free
tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates.  And certainly, as a man who believes that he
loves freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred
name misused in the contention.  It was but the other day that I heard a
vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring for arms and butchery.  “At the call of Abraham Lincoln,” said
the orator, “ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can
ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?”

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the
Chinese.  Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to
keep pigs.  Gun-powder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and
a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire
to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity.  They walk the earth
with us, but it seems they must be of different clay.  They hear the
clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch.  They travel
by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course.  Whatever is
thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so
old that our language looks a halfing boy alongside; philosophy so wise
that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this
travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain.
Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or
whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the
same world out of the railway windows.  And when either of us turned his
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there
not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray,
castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain
flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next
car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of
porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.

Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the
Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man
of old story—over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all
these days.  I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that
such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way
stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed
out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the
emigrants.  The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic
degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking
creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a
truly Cockney baseness.  I was ashamed for the thing we call
civilisation.  We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of
our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts
of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after
step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the
States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these
hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves
invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers?  The eviction of
the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents,
the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the
ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up
a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways
base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.  These old,
well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the
independent.  That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the
Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of
the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed,
honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not
personal to him who cherishes the indignation.



TO THE GOLDEN GATES


A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular
impressions on the mind.  By an early hour on Wednesday morning we
stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying
plateau in Nevada.  The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some
advice on the country I was now entering.  “You see,” said he, “I tell
you this, because I come from your country.”  Hail, brither Scots!

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world.
There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is
revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon
strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental
arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred
halfpence.  In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for
complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no
longer exists—the _bit_, or old Mexican real.  The supposed value of the
bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar.  When it comes to
two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount.  But how
about an odd bit?  The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a
fifth.  That, then, is called a _short_ bit.  If you have one, you lay it
triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents.  But if you have not,
and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a
dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is called a _long
bit_, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short
bit, five cents.  In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing
lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost
of life; as even for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or
sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case may be.  You would say that this system
of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but I have discovered a
plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public.  It is brief
and simple—radiantly simple.  There is one place where five cents are
recognised, and that is the post-office.  A quarter is only worth two
bits, a short and a long.  Whenever you have a quarter, go to the
post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you will receive
in change two dimes, that is, two short bits.  The purchasing power of
your money is undiminished.  You can go and have your two glasses of beer
all the same; and you have made yourself a present of five cents worth of
postage-stamps into the bargain.  Benjamin Franklin would have patted me
on the head for this discovery.

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time to Elko.  As we were standing, after our manner,
outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the
cars, and take to their heels across country.  They were tramps, it
appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night
before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen and
conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano.  These land
stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked
dearly to become acquainted with them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me.  I was coming out from supper,
when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others
taller and ruddier than himself.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be going on?”

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from
that intention.  He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to
terms, why, good and well.  “You see,” he continued, “I’m running a
theatre here, and we’re a little short in the orchestra.  You’re a
musician, I guess?”

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with “Auld Lang
Syne” and “The Wearing of the Green,” I had no pretension whatever to
that style.  He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his taller
companions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.

“You see, sir,” added the latter to me, “he bet you were a musician; I
bet you weren’t.  No offence, I hope?”

“None whatever,” I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume
the debt was liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers, who
thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-begging.
But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.  Indeed, I am more
than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet.

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons,
that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and
desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary.  But some time after I had
fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions.  It was
in vain that I resisted.  A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his
eyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must come forth
upon the platform and see with my own eyes.  The train was then, in its
patient way, standing halted in a by-track.  It was a clear, moonlit
night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and
only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the
blackness of the pines.  A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the
mountains.  The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the
nostrils—a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere.  I was dead sleepy, but I
returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were
day or night, for the illumination was unusual.  I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and
suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next
length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine
upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires
of dawn.  I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you
will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this.  It was like meeting
one’s wife.  I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts to the
green and habitable corners of the earth.  Every spire of pine along the
hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to
me than a blood relation.  Few people have praised God more happily than
I did.  And thenceforward, down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all
the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping
thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but
all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and
weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes
upon the platform and became new creatures within and without.  The sun
no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the
mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee.  At every
turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures.  At
every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air,
and crowing for the new day and the new country.  For this was indeed our
destination; this was “the good country” we had been going to so long.

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain of
corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the Oakland
side of San Francisco Bay.  The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry;
the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was
perfect—not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything
was waiting, breathless, for the sun.  A spot of cloudy gold lit first
upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its shapely
shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly

    “The tall hills Titan discovered,”

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit
from end to end with summer daylight.

                                                                   [1879.]




II
THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL


THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC


THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General
Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important
than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for
topography.  Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the
Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is cosily
ensconced beside the barb.  Thus the ancient capital of California faces
across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and
forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying surf.  In front
of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and
then westward to enclose the bay.  The waves which lap so quietly about
the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you can
see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the outline of
the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying
foam; and from all round, even in quiet weather, the distant, thrilling
roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like
smoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.  It would be hard to
find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the mind.
Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.  Sandpipers trot in and
out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of
infinitesimal song.  Strange sea-tangles, new to the European eye, the
bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale’s carcase, white with
carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there along
the sands.  The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their
translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing
and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach.  The foam of
these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis,
swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.
The interest is perpetually fresh.  On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean’s greatness,
such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in the sound.
The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.  Here and there a
lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters.  A rough,
undergrowth partially conceals the sand.  The crouching, hardy live-oaks
flourish singly or in thickets—the kind of wood for murderers to crawl
among—and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from
the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with
Spaniard’s Beard.  Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near
to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City—though that and so many
other things are now for ever altered—and it was from here that you had
the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first fogs of
the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the
ocean.  A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the
inland cañons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of
Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have but
to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific.  You pass out of
the town to the south-west, and mount the hill among pine-woods.  Glade,
thicket, and grove surround you.  You follow winding sandy tracks that
lead nowhither.  You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises.  But the
sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind
among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length
you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour
that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you
are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts
to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your
right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from down before
you to the mouth of the Carmello river.  The whole woodland is begirt
with thundering surges.  The silence that immediately surrounds you where
you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this distant,
circling rumour.  It sets your senses upon edge; you strain your
attention; you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near
at hand; you walk listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the
Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn homeward.
All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was the surf
that particularly invited me to prolong my walks.  I would push straight
for the shore where I thought it to be nearest.  Indeed, there was scarce
a direction that would not, sooner or later, have brought me forth on the
Pacific.  The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and
discovery in these excursions.  I never in all my visits met but one man.
He was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried
an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek for straying
cattle.  I asked him what o’clock it was, but he seemed neither to know
nor care; and when he in his turn asked me for news of his cattle, I
showed myself equally indifferent.  We stood and smiled upon each other
for a few seconds, and then turned without a word and took our several
ways across the forest.

One day—I shall never forget it—I had taken a trail that was new to me.
After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer hand.  I
came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile.  A step or two farther,
and, without leaving the woods, I found myself among trim houses.  I
walked through street after street, parallel and at right angles, paved
with sward and dotted with trees, but still undeniable streets, and each
with its name posted at the corner, as in a real town.  Facing down the
main thoroughfare—“Central Avenue,” as it was ticketed—I saw an open-air
temple, with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra.  The
houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but of
the waves, no moving thing.  I have never been in any place that seemed
so dreamlike.  Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its
antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this town had
plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been deserted
overnight.  Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as like a
scene upon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards.  The
barking of a dog led me at last to the only house still occupied, where a
Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theatre.
The place was “The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort.”
Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism,
religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and
agreeable.  The neighbourhood at least is well selected.  The Pacific
booms in front.  Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a
wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in
amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and
interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals.  To the east, and
still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a haven
among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-gulls.  Such scenes are
very similar in different climates; they appear homely to the eyes of
all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland.  And yet the boats
that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you walk
into the hamlet, you will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue
that are unfamiliar to the memory.  The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe
is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper—prayers,
you would say, that had somehow missed their destination—and a man
guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the sheet, writes
home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard
region.  On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell salt
from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of
the other.  For days together a hot, dry air will overhang the town,
close as from an oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils.  The
cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is
blowing from the hills.  These fires are one of the great dangers of
California.  I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,
by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the
distance.  A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be
favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse.  The
inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the
pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally
at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up
perennial fountains.  California has been a land of promise in its time,
like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may
become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece of
experience.  The fire passes through the underbrush at a run.  Every here
and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit,
scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly.  But
this last is only in semblance.  For after this first squib-like
conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a
deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree.  The
resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole
and in the spreading roots.  Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing
flames, which are only as the match to the explosion, have already
scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but beginning
for this giant of the woods.  You may approach the tree from one side,
and see it scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of
the peril.  Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the column,
is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer; while
underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being eaten out
by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface.  A
little while, and, without a nod of warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off
short across the ground and falls prostrate with a crash.  Meanwhile the
fire continues its silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash;
and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with
radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these subterranean
spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree instead of the print of
an old one.  These pitch-pines of Monterey are, with the single exception
of the Monterey cypress, the most fantastic of forest trees.  No words
can give an idea of the contortion of their growth; they might figure
without change in a circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and
at the rate at which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and
gallop through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time
when there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their
nativity.  At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but
perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death; while it
is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of the nobler
redwood.  Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard
California may be as bald as Tamalpais.

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near to
lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have retained a thrill
from the experience.  I wished to be certain whether it was the moss,
that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed up so
rapidly when the flame first touched the tree.  I suppose I must have
been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece
for my experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a
portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike a
match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels.  The tree went
off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of
fire.  Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at work
combating the original conflagration.  I could see the waggon that had
brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could even catch
the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into the
sunlight.  Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was
literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate
expostulation I should have been run up to convenient bough.

    To die for faction is a common evil;
    But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day.  At night I went out
of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite distinct from the
other, and burning as I thought with even greater vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power
upon the climate.  At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy
fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.  From the hill-top above
Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad.  The upper
air is still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon the Gabelano
Peak; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in
scarves among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds of a
gigantic size and often of a wild configuration; to the south, where they
have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they
double back and spire up skyward like smoke.  Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world.  The air grows chill and deadly as they
advance.  The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all the
windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their
cisterns with the brackish water of the sands.  It takes but a little
while till the invasion is complete.  The sea, in its lighter order, has
submerged the earth.  Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick,
wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; and before
the sun’s rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to
the bosom of the sea.  And yet often when the fog is thickest and most
chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be
dry and warm and full of inland perfume.



MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS


The history of Monterey has yet to be written.  Founded by Catholic
missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a
Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an
American capital when the first House of Representatives held its
deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the
State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its
charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline
is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families
in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which
the soil has changed-hands.  The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and
landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold
themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of
their ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were
watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by
fissures four or five feet deep.  There were no street lights.  Short
sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for
they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could
tell where they would be likely to begin or end.  The houses were, for
the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new
a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely
rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the
heart.  At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a
graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the
chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat
almost all day long playing cards.  The smallest excursion was made on
horseback.  You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse
or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings.  It struck me oddly to come across some of the _Cornhill_
illustrations to Mr. Blackmore’s _Erema_, and see all the characters
astride on English saddles.  As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a
rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, a thing unknown in all
the rest of California.  In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey,
you saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding—men always at
the hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory
spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face
in a square yard.  The type of face and character of bearing are
surprisingly un-American.  The first ranged from something like the pure
Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian,
although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all
the country.  As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to
find, in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of
deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and
decorum.  In dress they ran to colour and bright sashes.  Not even the
most Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose
into his hat-band.  Not even the most Americanised would descend to wear
the vile dress hat of civilisation.  Spanish was the language of the
streets.  It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that
language for an occasion.  The only communications in which the
population joined were with a view to amusement.  A weekly public ball
took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes
in private houses.  There was a really fair amateur brass band.  Night
after night serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a
company and with several instruments and voice together, sometimes
severally, each guitar before a different window.  It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar
accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount
into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that
high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely
human but altogether sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all
the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the
same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were
selected.  This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old
family estates, not one rood of which remained to him.  You would ask him
how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from
which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men,
and the Mexicans greedy like children, but no other certain fact.  Their
merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former
landholders.  It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with
the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that in a
way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft.  Suppose they
have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other party
to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay, suppose them to
observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from
delicacy to object to it.  I know I am speaking within the mark, for I
have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of
his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.  To have spoken
in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that
he had seen a lawyer, would have “been like doubting his word.”  The
scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought up to
understand all business as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to
be a virtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation of
agreements.  This single unworldly trait will account for much of that
revolution of which we are speaking.  The Mexicans have the name of being
great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts both ways.  In a
contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed into
the hands of the more scupulous race.

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely seen how
far they have themselves been morally conquered.  This is, of course, but
a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being
solved in the various States of the American Union.  I am reminded of an
anecdote.  Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were
purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh.  The
agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what
possible use he could have for such material.  He was shown, by way of
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to
imperial Tokay, were fermenting together.  “And what,” he asked, “do you
propose to call this?”  “I’m no very sure,” replied the grocer, “but I
think it’s going to turn out port.”  In the older Eastern States, I think
we may say that this hotch-potch of races in going to turn out English,
or thereabout.  But the problem is indefinitely varied in other zones.
The elements are differently mingled in the south, in what we may call
the Territorial belt and in the group of States on the Pacific coast.
Above all, in these last, we may look to see some monstrous
hybrid—Whether good or evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original
and all their own.  In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down
to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a
Mexican, and a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from
Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese;
and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country
ranches for the night.  No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign
land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race contributes
something of its own.  Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of
California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing use of opium.
And chief among these influences is that of the Mexicans.

The Mexicans although in the State are out of it.  They still preserve a
sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to
themselves.  Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the bandit, his troops
being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of
California, returned to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in her
streets and saloons, fearing no man.  The year that I was there, there
occurred two reputed murders.  As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile
speakers of each other and of every one behind his back, it is not
possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these
reports; but in the one case every one believed, and in the other some
suspected, that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an
instant of taking the authorities into their counsel.  Now this is, of
course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy
feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in
this inaction.  Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed
not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the traditions of their
own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost
entirely in their business transactions upon each other’s worthless
paper.  Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally
penniless Miguel.  It is a sort of local currency by courtesy.  Credit in
these parts has passed into a superstition.  I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing
but an exchange of waste paper.  The very storekeepers are averse to
asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased when they
are offered.  They fear there must be something under it, and that you
mean to withdraw your custom from them.  I have seen the enterprising
chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on,
although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness
of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican
tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be
notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for
the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey.  Now this villainous
habit of living upon “tick” has grown into Californian nature.  I do not
mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax
as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State
expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a
thought for consequences.  Jew storekeepers have already learned the
advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into
irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave
hopelessly grinding in the mill.  So the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may
see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had
formerly bound the Mexican.  It seems as if certain sorts of follies,
like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the
race that holds and tills it for the moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County.  The new
county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character.  The land is
held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which are another
legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief danger and disgrace of
California; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth.  We
have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which
flow from the existence of these large landholders—land-thieves,
land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly called.
Thus the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man.  How
they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or
wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred.  His life has been
repeatedly in danger.  Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was
stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen
thirsting for his blood.  A certain house on the Salinas road, they say,
he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him
warning long ago.  But a year since he was publicly pointed out for death
by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney.  Kearney is a man too well
known in California, but a word of explanation is required for English
readers.  Originally an Irish dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad
language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there
for six months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and
conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed
by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own
ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and
had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the
hands of his rebellious followers.  It was while he was at the top of his
fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-cry against Chinese
labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his one
articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to “hang David Jacks.”  Had the
town been American, in my private opinion, this would have been done
years ago.  Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the West,
and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a
competition of titles with the face of a captain going into battle and
his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old
friend, the truck system, in full operation.  Men live there, year in
year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in
supplies.  The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper
they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new country, where
labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which
explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue
Kearney.

In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers
of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel.  The valley drained by
the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with
chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills.  The Carmel runs by
many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and
at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,
passes a ruined mission on a hill.  From the mission church the eye
embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous
sound of distant breakers on the shore.  But the day of the Jesuit has
gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to
care for the converted savage.  The church is roofless and ruinous,
sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine,
daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall.  As
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to
preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been
its portion.  There is no sign of American interference, save where a
headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets.  So
it is with the Indians for whom it was erected.  Their lands, I was told,
are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American proprietor,
and with that exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of
Carmel.  Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the
_padre_ drives over the hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is
the only covered portion of the church, is filled with seats and
decorated for the service; the Indians troop together, their bright
dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there,
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God
served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple
under heaven.  An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years of age,
conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they have the
Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin so
correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang.  The
pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato.  “In
sæcula sæculoho-horum,” they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every
additional syllable.  I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with
joy than the faces of these Indian singers.  It was to them not only the
worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better
days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art
and letters was united and expressed.  And it made a man’s heart sorry
for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to
read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away from
all authority and influence in that land—to be succeeded by greedy
land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots.  So ugly a thing may our
Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of
Jesus.

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution.  All that I say in
this paper is in a paulo-past tense.  The Monterey of last year exists no
longer.  A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway.  Three
sets of diners sit down successively to table.  Invaluable toilettes
figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is
advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway
stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion.  Alas for the little town!
it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting
caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of
Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire
vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

                                                                   [1880.]




III
FONTAINEBLEAU
VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS


I


THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart.  It is a place that people
love even more than they admire.  The vigorous forest air, the silence,
the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the
great age and dignity of certain groves—these are but ingredients, they
are not the secret of the philtre.  The place is sanative; the air, the
light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony.
The artist may be idle and not fear the “blues.”  He may dally with his
life.  Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of
the very essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most
smiling forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember.  Even on the
plain of Biére, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of
fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in
the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria.
There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their
youth, or the old better contented with their age.

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this country
to the artist.  The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still
raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art—Millet who
loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped
in the glamour of the ancients.  It was chosen before the day of that
strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the
culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures—that voluntary aversion
of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful effects—that
disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint
the river-side primrose.  It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris.
And for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of
to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it.  There is in France scenery
incomparable for romance and harmony.  Provence, and the valley of the
Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of masterpieces waiting
for the brush.  The beauty is not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a
tale to the imagination, and surprises while it charms.  Here you shall
see castellated towns that would befit the scenery of dreamland; streets
that glow with colour like cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite
proportions; flowers of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.
All these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door
of the modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot
cascade in Cernay valley.  Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even in
Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered.  But one
thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to paint and in
whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell among graceful
shapes.  Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is classically
graceful; and though the student may look for different qualities, this
quality, silently present, will educate his hand and eye.

But, before all its other advantages—charm, loveliness, or proximity to
Paris—comes the great fact that it is already colonised.  The institution
of a painters’ colony is a work of time and tact.  The population must be
conquered.  The innkeeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the
lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to welcome as a favoured
guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat, and with little baggage
beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his
faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow
money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year.  A colour
merchant has next to be attracted.  A certain vogue must be given to the
place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should find himself
alone.  And no sooner are these first difficulties overcome, than fresh
perils spring up upon the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist
are knocking at the gate.  This is the crucial moment for the colony.  If
these intruders gain a footing, they not only banish freedom and amenity;
pretty soon, by means of their long purses, they will have undone the
education of the innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the
poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet.  “Not here, O
Apollo!” will become his song.  Thus Trouville and, the other day, St.
Raphael were lost to the arts.  Curious and not always edifying are the
shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; like the
cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool; but
at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him
licence.  Where his own purse and credit are not threatened, he will do
the honours of his village generously.  Any artist is made welcome,
through whatever medium he may seek expression; science is respected;
even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon
begin to find himself at home.  And when that essentially modern
creature, the English or American girl-student, began to walk calmly into
his favourite inns as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter
owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he fled.  His French
respectability, quite as precise as ours, though covering different
provinces of life, recoiled aghast before the innovation.  But the girls
were painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader.  Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he hounded
from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist.  The lads
are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they
are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much
occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and
this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent.  To work grossly at the
trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else,
is, for awhile at least, the king’s highway of progress.  Here, in
England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among
the intelligent bourgeois.  These, when they are not merely indifferent,
prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art.  And this
is the lad’s ruin.  For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade.
The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love
of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation
of the writer and the painter.  The arabesque, properly speaking, and
even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with
his material as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a
second stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of
representation.  In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; that is
his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really grow beyond
it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business of real art—to
give life to abstractions and significance and charm to facts.  In the
meanwhile, let him dwell much among his fellow-craftsmen.  They alone can
take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of
these years.  They alone can behold with equanimity this fingering of the
dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal
painting of dull and insignificant subjects.  Outsiders will spur him on.
They will say, “Why do you not write a great book? paint a great
picture?”  If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to
the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style
falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning.  The life of the apprentice to any art
is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the
midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the heaviest scholar
is conscious of a certain progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer
to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.
But the time comes when a man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up,
put a violence upon his will, and, for better or worse, begin the
business of creation.  This evil day there is a tendency continually to
postpone: above all with painters.  They have made so many studies that
it has become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush
with them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their
horn-book.  This class of man finds a congenial home in artist villages;
in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to call them
“Snoozers.”  Continual returns to the city, the society of men farther
advanced, the study of great works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing
is to be had, a little religion or philosophy, are the means of
treatment.  It will be time enough to think of curing the malady after it
has been caught; for to catch it is the very thing for which you seek
that dream-land of the painters’ village.  “Snoozing” is a part of the
artistic education; and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else
being forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the very
air of France that communicates the love of style.  Precision, clarity,
the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling,
apart from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere
residence; or if not acquired, become at least the more appreciated.  The
air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration.  And to leave that
airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but to
change externals.  The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from
the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are
still pretty in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be
decorative in its emptiness.



II


In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of Fontainebleau
is hardly anywhere tedious.  I know the whole western side of it with
what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at least to testify
that there is no square mile without some special character and charm.
Such quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Bréau, and the
Reine Blanche, might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point
in common beyond the silence of the birds.  The two last are really
conterminous; and in both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a
thousand political vicissitudes.  But in the one the great oaks prosper
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and
the light are very free below their stretching boughs.  In the other the
trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbled one upon
another, the foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in
the crevice; and above it all the great beech goes spiring and casting
forth her arms, and, with a grace beyond church architecture, canopies
this rugged chaos.  Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white
causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue: a road conceived for
pageantry and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days
of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and
only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away
and faintly audible along its ample sweep.  A little upon one side, and
you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the
other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close
beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees.  So artfully are the
ingredients mingled.  Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part,
you come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold the plain,
northward and westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long
the shadows keep changing; and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night
succeeds, and with the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and
fragrance.  There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the
lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the glittering
streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive.  It is a
changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in.  As fast as your
foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously painted
in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of
forests on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient
refuge of his race.

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout.  The most savage
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in the
most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if with
conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, has
countersigned the picture.  After your farthest wandering, you are never
surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the
centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing,
thousand-footed, through the brush.  It is not a wilderness; it is rather
a preserve.  And, fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a hermit’s
cavern.  In the midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with
the business of pleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction and
peopled by historic names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug
who called himself the hermit.  In a great tree, close by the highroad,
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family
Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope
ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was savage as a
Sioux.  I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly
stupid, not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small
change; for that he had a great avidity.  In the course of time he proved
to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from
the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only
stock-in-trade to beg withal.  The choice of his position would seem to
indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places still to be
discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie
unvisited.  There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct
you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock.  But
your security from interruption is complete; you might camp for weeks, if
there were only water, and not a soul suspect your presence; and if I may
suppose the reader to have committed some great crime and come to me for
aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a
hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed.  A
confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for
water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest
pond; and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and
offers some of the repose of natural forests.  And the solitary, although
he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with
his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees.  The demands
of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon
by windows; others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that
meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter’s camp in an
adjacent county.  To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem but
an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day.  But to the plain man
it offers solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for
company.



III


I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; _et ego in Arcadia vixi_,
it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the
borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot in
memory.  The great Millet was just dead, the green shutters of his modest
house were closed; his daughters were in mourning.  The date of my first
visit was thus an epoch in the history of art: in a lesser way, it was an
epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter.  The _Petit Cénacle_ was dead
and buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest
from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost;
and the petrified legend of the _Vie de Bohéme_ had become a sort of
gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators.  But if the book be
written in rose-water, the imitation was still farther expurgated;
honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I have said, almost
unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest painter to depart, to take
all his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid; and if they sometimes
lost, it was by English and Americans alone.  At the same time, the great
influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious.
There had been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and
the Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry.  It
would be well if nations and races could communicate their qualities; but
in practice when they look upon each other, they have an eye to nothing
but defects.  The Anglo-Saxon is essentially dishonest; the French is
devoid by nature of the principle that we call “Fair Play.”  The
Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest, and, when that defender
of innocence retired over-seas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled
once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the
same eccentricity; a shrug expressed his judgment upon both.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts.  Palizzi bore
rule at Gretz—urbane, superior rule—his memory rich in anecdotes of the
great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and
venerable to the eye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with
Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of
his manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback.  Cernay had
Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who,
when a full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples,
bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all admired.
Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne.  Only Barbizon,
since the death of Millet, was a headless commonwealth.  Even its
secondary lights, and those who in my day made the stranger welcome, have
since deserted it.  The good Lachèvre has departed, carrying his
household gods; and long before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our
midst by an untimely death.  He died before he had deserved success; it
may be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest
countenance still haunts the memory of all who knew him.  Another—whom I
will not name—has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of his
decadence.  His days of royal favour had departed even then; but he still
retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of conscious
importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, the occupant of several
chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon
great canvases that none would buy, still waiting the return of fortune.
But these days also were too good to last; and the former favourite of
two sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night.  There was a time
when he was counted a great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the
whirligig of time brings in his revenges!  To pity Millet is a piece of
arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it is
harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may pity his
unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to opulence and
momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was suffered step by step
to sink again to nothing.  No misfortune can exceed the bitterness of
such back-foremost progress, even bravely supported as it was; but to
those also who were taken early from the easel, a regret is due.  From
all the young men of this period, one stood out by the vigour of his
promise; he was in the age of fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities.
“Il faut faire de la peinture nouvelle,” was his watchword; but if time
and experience had continued his education, if he had been granted health
to return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must
believe that the name of Hills had become famous.

Siron’s inn, that excellent artists’ barrack, was managed upon easy
principles.  At any hour of the night, when you returned from wandering
in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped yourself to
liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or wine.
The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check your
inroads; only at the week’s end a computation was made, the gross sum was
divided, and a varying share set down to every lodger’s name under the
rubric: _estrats_.  Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was
levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness
of your disposition.  At any hour of the morning, again, you could get
your coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest.  The doves had
perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold
of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest.  Close by were the
great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest
shadow.  There you were free to dream and wander.  And at noon, and again
at six o’clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron’s table.  The whole of
your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the _estrals_, cost
you five francs a day; your bill was never offered you until you asked
it; and if you were out of luck’s way, you might depart for where you
pleased and leave it pending.



IV


Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it was a
kind of club.  The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they
protected Siron.  Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was
the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the
society; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished.
A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he
desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free
Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies.  I have
seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in
words what they had done, but they deserved their fate.  They had shown
themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had pushed
themselves; they had “made their head”; they wanted tact to appreciate
the “fine shades” of Barbizonian etiquette.  And once they were
condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty; after
one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of our commonwealth,
the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose exceeding early the next
day, and the first coach conveyed him from the scene of his discomfiture.
These sentences of banishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered
against an artist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd
and pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed.  Painters,
sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and
some were sulky, and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at
once into the spirit of the association.  This singular society is purely
French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects.  It
cannot be imitated by the English.  The roughness, the impatience, the
more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent friendships of the
Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth.  But this random
gathering of young French painters, with neither apparatus nor parade of
government, yet kept the life of the place upon a certain footing,
insensibly imposed their etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech
enforced their edicts against the unwelcome.  To think of it is to wonder
the more at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre.
This inbred civility—to use the word in its completest meaning—this
natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all that is
required to make a governable nation and a just and prosperous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of
laughter, and of the initiative of youth.  The few elder men who joined
us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions.  We
returned from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by
the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; the
Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the
natural man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent
pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and
laughter sounded far into the night.  It was a good place and a good life
for any naturally-minded youth; better yet for the student of painting,
and perhaps best of all for the student of letters.  He, too, was
saturated in this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the
disturbing currents of the world, he might forget that there existed
other and more pressing interests than that of art.  But, in such a
place, it was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience,
like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw himself
idle among many who were apparently, and some who were really, employed;
and what with the impulse of increasing health and the continual
provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to
work.  He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals,
long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and still floating like
music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might
be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas,
and words that were alive with import.  So in youth, like Moses from the
mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we shall
never enter.  They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style that
repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-throbs of that
excited amateur who has to die in all of us before the artist can be
born.  But they come to us in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent
achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison.  We were all artists;
almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and
walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if
we were happy!  But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and
though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others
succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable
malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the House Beautiful
shines upon its hill-top.



V


Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river.  It boasts a
mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many sterlings.  And
the bridge is a piece of public property; anonymously famous; beaming on
the incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions.  I have
seen it in the Salon; I have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in
the last French Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a
black-and-white by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages
of the _Magazine of Art_.  Long-suffering bridge!  And if you visit Gretz
to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom of
Chevillon’s garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly painting it
again.

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than
Barbizon.  I give it the palm over Cernay.  There is something ghastly in
the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn tables standing in
one corner, as though the stage were set for rustic opera, and in the
early morning all the painters breaking their fast upon white wine under
the windows of the villagers.  It is vastly different to awake in Gretz,
to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the
bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level.  The meals
are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves.  The splash of oars
and bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the
jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure.  There is
“something to do” at Gretz.  Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall
no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the
solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon.  This “something to do”
is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high
spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them gone!  But Gretz
is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit.  The
course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle
attractions for the navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the
red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies,
and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs.  And of all noble sweeps of
roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours
between its lines of talking poplar.

But even Gretz is changed.  The old inn, long shored and trussed and
buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and the place
as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests.  They,
indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening,
the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the company that
gathered round the pillar in the kitchen.  But the material fabric is now
dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall
follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in
name and lineament, vanish from the world of men.  “For remembrance of
the old house’ sake,” as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one
story.  When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters
were left stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was
over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them.  It was difficult to
obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best, sat
down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals were
supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ.  Madame
Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them.  But they stood firm;
eat they must, but having no money they would soil no napkins.



VI


Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been little
visited by painters.  They are, indeed, too populous; they have manners
of their own, and might resist the drastic process of colonisation.
Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I never knew it inhabited
but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there with a barrel of
_piquette_, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis above the
weir, in sight of the green country and to the music of the falling
water.  It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just
too rustic to be stagey; and from my memories of the place in general,
and that garden trellis in particular—at morning, visited by birds, or at
night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party—I am inclined to
think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny.  Chailly-en-Bière
has outlived all things, and lies dustily slumbering in the plain—the
cemetery of itself.  The great road remains to testify of its former
bustle of postilions and carriage bells; and, like memorial tablets,
there still hang in the inn room the paintings of a former generation,
dead or decorated long ago.  In my time, one man only, greatly daring,
dwelt there.  From time to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a
shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and after some communication
with flesh and blood return to his austere hermitage.  But even he, when
I last revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed
the roll of Chaillyites.  It may revive—but I much doubt it.  Achères and
Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question, being
merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or the beauty;
and of all the possible places on the western side, Marlotte alone
remains to be discussed.  I scarcely know Marlotte, and, very likely for
that reason, am not much in love with it.  It seems a glaring and
unsightly hamlet.  The inn of Mother Antonie is unattractive; and its
more reputable rival, though comfortable enough, is commonplace.
Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I were the young painter I would
leave it alone in its glory.



VII


These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good
conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day.  Many of us
have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a portion of
our souls behind us buried in the woods.  I would not dig for these
reliquiæ; they are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich the
finder; and yet there may lie, interred below great oaks or scattered
along forest paths, stores of youth’s dynamite and dear remembrances.
And as one generation passes on and renovates the field of tillage for
the next, I entertain a fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth
into the forest they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of
their predecessors, and, like those “unheard melodies” that are the
sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field
of trees.  Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer farther,
those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves, surely in
Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions?  We are not
content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would
leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this memorable
forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when
the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer also.
The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is
theirs indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at night in the
fondest of their dreams, and use it for ever in their books and pictures.
Yet when they made their packets, and put up their notes and sketches,
something, it should seem, had been forgotten.  A projection of
themselves shall appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a
natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares.  Over the whole
field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like
indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all beloved
spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously unwilling to forget
their orphanage.  If anywhere about that wood you meet my airy bantling,
greet him with tenderness.  He was a pleasant lad, though now abandoned.
And when it comes to your own turn to quit the forest, may you leave
behind you such another; no Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful
whipster, but, as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in
which we figure, the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has
not been mirthfully conceived.

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a
cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment.
Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to Fontainebleau, and
once there let him address himself to the spirit of the place; he will
learn more from exercise than from studies, although both are necessary;
and if he can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woods
he will have gone far to undo the evil of his sketches.  A spirit once
well strung up to the concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will
hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture.
The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which we
test the flatness of our art.  Here it is that Nature teaches and
condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure.  Thus it
is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid works; and the
more we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we be apt to love
the literal in our productions.  In all sciences and senses the letter
kills; and to-day, when cackling human geese express their ignorant
condemnation of all studio pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be
learnt.  Let the young painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he
stupefies himself with studies that teach him the mechanical side of his
trade, let him walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not
pick and botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature.  So he will
learn—or learn not to forget—the poetry of life and earth, which, when he
has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

                                                                   [1882.]




IV
EPILOGUE TO “AN INLAND VOYAGE” {95}


THE country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the Loing,
is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people.  The weather was
superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain fell in
sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the air
vigorous and pure.  They walked separate: the Cigarette plodding behind
with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa posting on ahead.  Thus each
enjoyed his own reflections by the way; each had perhaps time to tire of
them before he met his comrade at the designated inn; and the pleasures
of society and solitude combined to fill the day.  The Arethusa carried
in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the
hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels.  In this path, he
must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley, and all
contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons, he will be the last to
publish the result.  The Cigarette walked burthened with a volume of
Michelet.  And both these books, it will be seen, played a part in the
subsequent adventure.

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed.  He is no precisian in attire; but by
all accounts, he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; having set
forth indeed, upon a moment’s notice, from the most unfashionable spot in
Europe, Barbizon.  On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian work, the
gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished.  A flannel shirt of an
agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black; a light tweed coat
made by a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and
leathern gaiters completed his array.  In person, he is exceptionally
lean; and his face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.
For years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion;
the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked askance upon him;
and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he is actually denied
admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo.  If you will imagine him,
dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking nearly five miles
an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers fluttering about his
spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly round him as if in terror of
pursuit—the figure, when realised, is far from reassuring.  When Villon
journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at
Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of the same appearance.
Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too
must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his
successor.  And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the
same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the
stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild
bull’s-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare
inn-chamber—the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of
noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves—and above all, if he had
anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relish for what
he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the
rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates to-day with the poor
exile, and count myself a gainer.

But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for
which the Arethusa was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of
incomplete security.  It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war.
Swiftly as men forget, that country-side was still alive with tales of
uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth ’scapes from the
ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and
invaded.  A year, at the most two years later, you might have tramped all
that country over and not heard one anecdote.  And a year or two later,
you would—if you were a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript
array—have gone your rounds in greater safety; for along with more
interesting matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded from men’s
imaginations.

For all that, our voyager had got beyond Château Renard before he was
conscious of arousing wonder.  On the road between that place and
Châtillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman; they fell
together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but through one and
all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and his eyes were
faithful to the Arethusa’s knapsack.  At last, with mysterious
roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook
his head with kindly incredulity.  “_Non_,” said he, “_non_, _vous avez
des portraits_.”  And then with a languishing appeal, “_Voyons_, show me
the portraits!”  It was some little while before the Arethusa, with a
shout of laughter, recognised his drift.  By portraits he meant indecent
photographs; and in the Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he
thought to have identified a pornographic colporteur.  When countryfolk
in France have made up their minds as to a person’s calling, argument is
fruitless.  Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and fluted
meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now he would upbraid, now he
would reason—“_Voyons_, I will tell nobody”; then he tried corruption,
and insisted on paying for a glass of wine; and, at last when their ways
separated—“_Non_,” said he, “_ce n’est pas bien de votre part_.  _O non_,
_ce n’est pas bien_.”  And shaking his head with quite a sentimental
sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed.

On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at
Châtillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Châtillon, of
grislier memory, looms too near at hand.  But the next day, in a certain
hamlet called La Jussiére, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a very
poor, bare drinking shop.  The hostess, a comely woman, suckling a child,
examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes.  “You are not of
this department?” she asked.  The Arethusa told her he was English.
“Ah!” she said, surprised.  “We have no English.  We have many Italians,
however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of
hereabouts.  An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something
new.”  Here was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa pondered as he
drank his grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the
light came upon him in a flash.  “_O_, _pour vous_,” replied the
landlady, “a halfpenny!”  _Pour vous_?  By heaven, she took him for a
beggar!  He paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to
correct her.  But when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed
in spirit.  The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow;
and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the
river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short stage
through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Châtillon-sur-Loire.  It
was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of
firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen.  Overhead the birds were in
consternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and re-arising.  And yet with
all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary.  The
Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down
very exactly all he was to do at Châtillon: how he was to enjoy a cold
plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette’s arrival, in
sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire.  Fired by these ideas, he
pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon and in
a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town.  Childe
Roland to the dark tower came.

A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.

“_Monsieur est voyageur_?” he asked.

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile attire,
replied—I had almost said with gaiety: “So it would appear.”

“His papers are in order?” said the gendarme.  And when the Arethusa,
with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he was informed
(politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.

The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and
trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the
prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph’s) “all
whelks and bubuckles,” the dullest might have been prepared for grief.
Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the
interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument could reach.

THE COMMISSARY.  You have no papers?

THE ARETHUSA.  Not here.

THE COMMISSARY.  Why?

THE ARETHUSA.  I have left them behind in my valise.

THE COMMISSARY.  You know, however, that it is forbidden to circulate
without papers?

THE ARETHUSA.  Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary.  I am here on
my rights as an English subject by international treaty.

THE COMMISSARY (_with scorn_).  You call yourself an Englishman?

THE ARETHUSA.  I do.

THE COMMISSARY.  Humph.—What is your trade?

THE ARETHUSA.  I am a Scotch advocate.

THE COMMISSARY (_with singular annoyance_).  A Scotch advocate!  Do you
then pretend to support yourself by that in this department?

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension.  The Commissary had
scored a point.

THE COMMISSARY.  Why, then, do you travel?

THE ARETHUSA.  I travel for pleasure.

THE COMMISSARY (_pointing to the knapsack_, _and with sublime
incredulity_).  _Avec ça_?  _Voyez-vous_, _je suis un homme intelligent_!
(With that?  Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)

The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary
relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the postman,
but with what different expectations!) to see the contents of the
knapsack.  And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake to his
position, fell into a grave mistake.  There was little or no furniture in
the room except the Commissary’s chair and table; and to facilitate
matters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on earth) leant the
knapsack on a corner of the bed.  The Commissary fairly bounded from his
seat; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he
screamed to lay the desecrating object on the floor.

The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks,
and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of soap in one of
the shoes, two volumes of the _Collection Jannet_ lettered _Poésies de
Charles d’Orléans_, a map, and a version book containing divers notes in
prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this
day unpublished: the Commissary of Châtillon is the only living man who
has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles.  He turned the assortment
over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he
regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of
infection.  Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing
really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of Orleans, to the
ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as a certificate; and it
was supposed the farce was nearly over.

The inquisitor resumed his seat.

THE COMMISSARY (_after a pause_).  _Eh bien_, _je vais vous dire ce que
vous êtes_.  _Vous êtes allemand et vous venez chanter à la foire_.
(Well, then, I will tell you what you are.  You are a German and have
come to sing at the fair.)

THE ARETHUSA.  Would you like to hear me sing?  I believe I could
convince you of the contrary.

THE COMMISSARY.  _Pas de plaisanterie_, _monsieur_!

THE ARETHUSA.  Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this book.
Here, I open it with my eyes shut.  Read one of these songs—read this
one—and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be
possible to sing it at a fair?

THE COMMISSARY (_critically_).  _Mais oui_.  _Très bien_.

THE ARETHUSA.  _Comment_, _monsieur_!  What!  But do you not observe it
is antique.  It is difficult to understand, even for you and me; but for
the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

THE COMMISSARY (_taking a pen_).  _Enfin_, _il faui en finir_.  What is
your name?

THE ARETHUSA (_speaking with the swallowing vivacity of the English_).
Robert-Louis-Stev’ns’n.

THE COMMISSARY (_aghast_).  _Hé_!  _Quoi_?

THE ARETHUSA (_perceiving and improving his advantage_).
Rob’rt-Lou’s-Stev’ns’n.

THE COMMISSARY (_after several conflicts with his pen_).  _Eh bien_, _il
faut se passer du nom_.  _Ca ne s’écrit pas_.  (Well, we must do without
the name: it is unspellable.)

The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I
have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary; but
the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger, has left
but little definite in the memory of the Arethusa.  The Commissary was
not, I think, a practised literary man; no sooner, at least, had he taken
pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the _procès-verbal_, than
he became distinctly more uncivil and began to show a predilection for
that simplest of all forms of repartee: “You lie!”  Several times the
Arethusa let it pass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more
insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do his
worst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly repent it.
Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first, instead of
beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going on to argue, the
thing might have turned otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the
Commissary was visibly staggered.  But it was too late; he had been
challenged the _procès-verbal_ was begun; and he again squared his elbows
over his writing, and the Arethusa was led forth a prisoner.

A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie.  Thither was our
unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the
contents of his pockets.  A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and
tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all.  Not a
file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to
condemn.  The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution.

“I regret,” he said, “that I arrested you, for I see that you are no
_voyou_.”  And he promised him every indulgence.

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe.  That he was told was
impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco.  He did not
chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief.

“_Non_,” said the gendarme.  “_Nous avons eu des histoires de gens qui se
sont pendus_.”  (No, we have had histories of people who hanged
themselves.)

“What,” cried the Arethusa.  “And is it for that you refuse me my
handkerchief?  But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my
trousers!”

The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck to his
colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.

“At least,” said the Arethusa, “be sure that you arrest my comrade; he
will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him by the
sack upon his shoulders.”

This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the
building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and
bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.

The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose
itself prepared for any mortal accident.  Prison, among other ills, was
one that had been often faced by the undaunted Arethusa.  Even as he went
down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous occasion
for a roundel, and that like the committed linnets of the tuneful
cavalier, he too would make his prison musical.  I will tell the truth at
once: the roundel was never written, or it should be printed in this
place, to raise a smile.  Two reasons interfered: the first moral, the
second physical.

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men are
liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves.  To get
and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic; and the
Arethusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing inwardly
with a white heat of smothered wrath.  But the physical had also its
part.  The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground, and
it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the wall
and smothered in the leaves of a green vine.  The walls were of naked
masonry, the floor of bare earth; by way of furniture there was an
earthenware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray
cloak for bedding.  To be taken from the hot air of a summer’s afternoon,
the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and plunged
into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck an
instant chill upon the Arethusa’s blood.  Now see in how small a matter a
hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven underfoot, with
the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the foundations
of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight and the irregular
surface, walking was impossible.  The caged author resisted for a good
while; but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper; and at
length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to climb
upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering.  There, then, he
lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a
garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far
removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just
received.  These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining
and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the
Cigarette was drawing near at his more philosophic pace.  In those days
of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the Arethusa, and
had ample opportunity to share in that gentleman’s disfavour with the
police.  Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous
comrade.  He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his
face and manner artfully recommending him to all.  There was but one
suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his
companion.  He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is
ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main; nor the
Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fère; last, but not least, he
is pretty certain to remember Châtillon-sur-Loire.

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a
moment later, two persons, in a high state of surprise, were confronted
in the Commissary’s office.  For if the Cigarette was surprised to be
arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and
appointments of his captive.  Here was a man about whom there could be no
mistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in apple-pie
order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready with his
passport, at a word, and well supplied with money: a man the Commissary
would have doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and this _beau
cavalier_ unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade!  The
conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours, I remember only
one.  “Baronet?” demanded the magistrate, glancing up from the passport.
“_Alors_, _monsieur_, _vous êtes le firs d’un baron_?”  And when the
Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the interview) denied the soft
impeachment, “_Alors_,” from the Commissary, “_ce n’est pas votre
passeport_!”  But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of
laying hands upon the Cigarette; presently he fell into a mood of
unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack,
commanding our friend’s tailor.  Ah, what an honoured guest was the
Commissary entertaining! what suitable clothes he wore for the warm
weather! what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he
carried in his knapsack!  You are to understand there was now but one
point of difference between them: what was to be done with the Arethusa?
the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming him as
the dungeon’s own.  Now it chanced that the Cigarette had passed some
years of his life in Egypt, where he had made acquaintance with two very
bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; and in the eye of the Commissary,
as he fingered the volume of Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there
was something Turkish.  I pass over this lightly; it is highly possible
there was some misunderstanding, highly possible that the Commissary
(charmed with his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took
for an act of growing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a
bribe.  And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more singular than an odd
volume of Michelet’s history?  The work was promised him for the morrow,
before our departure; and presently after, either because he had his
price, or to show that he was not the man to be behind in friendly
offices—“_Eh bien_,” he said, “_je suppose qu’il faut lâher voire
camarade_.”  And he tore up that feast of humour, the unfinished
_procès-verbal_.  Ah, if he had only torn up instead the Arethusa’s
roundels!  There were many works burnt at Alexandria, there are many
treasured in the British Museum, that I could better spare than the
_procès-verbal_ of Châtillon.  Poor bubuckled Commissary!  I begin to be
sorry that he never had his Michelet: perceiving in him fine human
traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a
taste for letters, a ready admiration for the admirable.  And if he did
not admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that.

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came
suddenly a noise of bolts and chains.  He sprang to his feet, ready to
welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the door was flung
wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and
with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the drama)—“_Vous
êtes libre_!” he said.  None too soon for the Arethusa.  I doubt if he
had been half-an-hour imprisoned; but by the watch in a man’s brain
(which was the only watch he carried) he should have been eight times
longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the
healing warmth of the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth came as
sweet as a cow’s into his nostril; and he heard again (and could have
laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum
of life.

And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, this was
an act-drop and not the curtain.  Upon what followed in front of the
barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate.  The
wife of the Maréchal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the Arethusa
was not sorry to be gone from her society.  Something of her image, cool
as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his memory: yet more
of her conversation.  “You have there a very fine parlour,” said the poor
gentleman.—“Ah,” said Madame la Maréchale (des-logis), “you are very well
acquainted with such parlours!”  And you should have seen with what a
hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before her!  I do not
think he ever hated the Commissary; but before that interview was at an
end, he hated Madame la Maréchale.  His passion (as I am led to
understand by one who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye, a
pale cheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame meanwhile tasting the joys
of the matador, goading him with barbed words and staring him coldly
down.

It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit
down to an excellent dinner in the inn.  Here, too, the despised
travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman of
these parts, returned from the day’s sport, who had the good taste to
find pleasure in their society.  The dinner at an end, the gentleman
proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the café.

The café was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each other
and the world the smallness of their bags.  About the centre of the room,
the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat with their new acquaintance; a trio
very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late experience) were
greedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced in a pair of
patient listeners.  Suddenly the glass door flew open with a crash; the
Maréchal-des-logis appeared in the interval, gorgeously belted and
befrogged, entered without salutation, strode up the room with a clang of
spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a door at the far end.  Close
at his heels followed the Arethusa’s gendarme of the afternoon,
imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearing of his
chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the
shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic utterance
of which he had the secret—“_Suivez_!” said he.

The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of
the declaration of independence, Mark Antony’s oration, all the brave
scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in
the café at Châtillon.  Terror breathed upon the assembly.  A moment
later, when the Arethusa had followed his recaptors into the farther part
of the house, the Cigarette found himself alone with his coffee in a ring
of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners,
all their clamorous voices hushed in whispering, all their eyes shooting
at him furtively as at a leper.

And the Arethusa?  Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview in
the back kitchen.  The Maréchal-des-logis, who was a very handsome man,
and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on the
case.  He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not wish to
get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and the
other, to all of which the Arethusa (with a growing sense of his
position) demurred.

“In short,” suggested the Arethusa, “you want to wash your hands of
further responsibility?  Well, then, let me go to Paris.”

The Maréchal-des-logis looked at his watch.

“You may leave,” said he, “by the ten o’clock train for Paris.”

And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure
in the dining-room at Siron’s.




V
RANDOM MEMORIES


I.—THE COAST OF FIFE


MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the
first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are
more often agreeably exciting.  Misery—or at least misery unrelieved—is
confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the “dreadful
looking-for” of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun: and to the pain of
an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious
pre-existence.  The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of
semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the
thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field—what a
sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar
circumstance!  The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems
to him, but from without.  I was proud and glad to go to school; had I
been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was around
me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: “Poor little boy,
he is going away—unkind little boy, he is going to leave us”; so the
unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach.  And
at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place
where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and
generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw—the long
empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the
woody hillside garden—a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart
died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of miserable
sympathy.  A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations—we
two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs
who had each tasted sorrow—and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled
for his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her!  I confessed at home the story of
my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the
reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road.  It was
judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of
scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was
visiting the harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided he should
take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first
professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man,
without the help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious
on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and
Tay.  It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the
rest, from the windows of my father’s house) dying away into the distance
and the easterly _haar_ with one smoky seaside town beyond another, or in
winter printing on the gray heaven some glittering hill-tops.  It has no
beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory;
trees very rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of
rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to the
eye.  It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden of Eden.
History broods over that part of the world like the easterly _haar_.
Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an
old and settled race.  Of these little towns, posted along the shore as
close as sedges, each with its bit of harbour, its old weather-beaten
church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying
fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose
royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the
blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith;
Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle
where the “bonny face was spoiled”; Burntisland where, when Paul Jones
was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between
tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his
voice and his broad lowland dialect; Kinghorn, where Alexander “brak’s
neckbane” and left Scotland to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the
witches once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners
in the North Sea; Dysart, famous—well famous at least to me for the Dutch
ships that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one particular
Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop,
smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted
caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed
a night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place,
sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall
figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.
Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers
from Meerut clattered and cried “Deen Deen” along the streets of the
imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps
already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven,
Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town
of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe.  So
on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader
will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and
Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where
Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to the
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted elders
and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach
or the quiescence of the deep—the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front,
and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the
one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off
yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb’s.  And but a
little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea,
stands the gem of the province and the light of mediæval Scotland, St.
Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,
and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox’s
jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this
day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not
hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak
easterly morning.  There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I
recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes
raise their voices to be audible.  Perhaps it is from this circumstance,
that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an ineffectual seat of learning,
and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its
drowsy classrooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until
teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull
beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages
of the open lecture.  But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews
in general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who has
written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his
incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his best poems, with grace,
and local truth, and a note of unaffected pathos.  Mr. Lang knows all
about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if
he had turned his attention to the harbour lights; and it may be news
even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable.  Hanging
about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no
doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy
of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more
important stage.  Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: “It is
the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of
this kind with any of the keepers, and when I come to the Light House,
instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation and
welcome their Family, it is distressing when one-is obliged to put on a
most angry countenance and demeanour.”  This painful obligation has been
hereditary in my race.  I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and
unauthorised inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper
on the question of storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach,
when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin for his
infant child; and then regained my equanimity with the thought that I had
done the man a service, and when the proper inspector came, he would be
readier with his panes.  The human race is perhaps credited with more
duplicity than it deserves.  The visitation of a lighthouse at least is a
business of the most transparent nature.  As soon as the boat grates on
the shore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the
very slouch of the fellows’ shoulders tells their story, and the engineer
may begin at once to assume his “angry countenance.”  Certainly the brass
of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate,
certainly all will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp
unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse.  If a light is not rather
more than middling good, it will be radically bad.  Mediocrity (except in
literature) appears to be unattainable by man.  But of course the
unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the
Service, he had no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his
trade and stood (in the mediæval phrase) quite out of the danger of my
father; but he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired
extremely.

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir.  My father had announced we
were “to post,” and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of
top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson’s _Dance of Death_; but it was
only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a
thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of
Edinburgh.  Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive.
It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do
I remember any single trait.  The fact has not been suffered to encroach
on the truth of the imagination.  I still see Magus Muir two hundred
years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate’s
carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit,
Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first.  No scene of history has
ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of
the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the
live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe’s ’bacco-box, thus clearly
indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was after
all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and
afforded a grateful relief from _Ministering Children_ or the _Memoirs of
Mrs. Kathatine Winslowe_.  The figure that always fixed my attention is
that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about
his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly,
revolving privately a case of conscience.  He would take no hand in the
deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and “that
action” must be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive; on the
other hand, “that action,” in itself, was highly justified, he had cast
in his lot with “the actors,” and he must stay there, inactive but
publicly sharing the responsibility.  “You are a gentleman—you will
protect me!” cried the wounded old man, crawling towards him.  “I will
never lay a hand on you,” said Hackston, and put his cloak about his
mouth.  It is an old temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see
the face—to open that bosom and to read the heart.  With incomplete
romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered.  I read
him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on.  I even dug
among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room where
my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly conscious of
my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted
students.  All was vain: that he had passed a riotous nonage, that he was
a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared with his grotesque
companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and even of military
common sense, and that he figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir,
so much and no more could I make out.  But whenever I cast my eyes
backward, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains of history,
sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable.  How small a thing
creates an immortality!  I do not think he can have been a man entirely
commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had the
witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus have haunted
the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would scarce delay me for a
paragraph.  An incident, at once romantic and dramatic, which at once
awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the eye, how little do we
realise its perdurable power!  Perhaps no one does so but the author,
just as none but he appreciates the influence of jingling words; so that
he looks on upon life, with something of a covert smile, seeing people
led by what they fancy to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed
artifices of his own trade, or roused by what they take to be principles
and are really picturesque effects.  In a pleasant book about a
school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote.
A “Philosophical Society” was formed by some Academy boys—among them,
Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew Wilson, the
Christian Buddhist and author of _The Abode of Snow_.  Before these
learned pundits, one member laid the following ingenious problem: “What
would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter?”
“I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products,” said
a smatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and
stands as a type of much that is most human.  For this inquirer who
conceived himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really
immersed in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his
own recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature.
Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t—that was his
idea, poor little boy!  So with politics and that which excites men in
the present, so with history and that which rouses them in the past:
there lie at the root of what appears, most serious unsuspected elements.

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke,
all three Royal Burghs—or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished
suburb, I forget whic

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