An Open-Eyed Conspiracy. William Dean Howells
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might give them a turn on the circular railway or the switchback; or we could take them to the Punch and Judy drama, or get their fortunes told in the seeress’s tent, or let them fire in the shooting-gallery, or buy some sweet-grass baskets of the Indians; and there is the pop-corn and the lemonade.”
“I will tell you what,” said Mrs. March, who had not been listening to a word I said; for if she had heard me she would not have had patience with my ironical suggestions.
“Well, what?”
“Or, no; that wouldn’t do, either.”
“I’m glad you don’t approve of the notion, on second thoughts. I didn’t like it from the beginning, and I didn’t even know what it was.”
“We could have them up to the house this evening, and introduce them to some of our friends,—only there isn’t a young man in the whole place,—and have them stay to the charades.”
“What do you think,” I said, “of their having come up this morning and tried to get rooms at our house?”
“Yes; they told me.”
“And don’t you call that rather forth-putting? It seems to me that it was taking a mean advantage of my brags.”
“It was perfectly innocent in them. But now, dearest, don’t be tiresome. I know that you like them as well as I do, and I will take all your little teasing affectations for granted. The question is, what can we do for them?”
“And the answer is, I don’t in the least know. There isn’t any society life at Saratoga that I can see; and if there is, we are not in it. How could we get any one else in? I see that’s what you’re aiming at. Those public socialities at the big hotels they could get into as well as we could; but they wouldn’t be anywhere when they got there, and they wouldn’t know what to do. You know what hollow mockeries those things are. Don’t you remember that hop we went to with the young Braceys the first summer? If those girls hadn’t waltzed with each other they wouldn’t have danced a step the whole evening.”
“I know, I know,” sighed my wife; “it was terrible. But these people are so very unworldly that don’t you think they could be deluded into the belief that they were seeing society if we took a little trouble? You used to be so inventive! You could think up something now if you tried.”
“My dear, a girl knows beyond all the arts of hoodwinking whether she’s having a good time, and your little scheme of passing off one of those hotel hops for a festivity would never work in the world.”
“Well, I think it is too bad! What has become of all the easy gaiety there used to be in the world?”
“It has been starched and ironed out of it, apparently. Saratoga is still trying to do the good old American act, with its big hotels and its heterogeneous hops, and I don’t suppose there’s ever such a thing as a society person at any of them. That wouldn’t be so bad. But the unsociety people seem to be afraid of one another. They feel that there is something in the air—something they don’t and can’t understand; something alien, that judges their old-fashioned American impulse to be sociable, and contemns it. No; we can’t do anything for our hapless friends—I can hardly call them our acquaintances. We must avoid them, and keep them merely as a pensive colour in our own vivid memories of Saratoga. If we made them have a good time, and sent them on their way rejoicing, I confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it is, they’re a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer registers eighty-nine. Don’t you see the advantage of that? I believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can think of a fitting fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in Every Other Week. He’ll get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and strike the hotels and springs for ad’s.”
“Well,” said Mrs. March, “I wish I had never seen them; and it’s all your fault, Basil. Of course, when you played upon my sympathies so about them, I couldn’t help feeling interested in them. We are a couple of romantic old geese, my dear.”
“Not at all, or at least I’m not. I simply used these people conjecturally to give myself an agreeable pang. I didn’t want to know anything more about them than I imagined, and I certainly didn’t dream of doing anything for them. You’ll spoil everything if you turn them from fiction into fact, and try to manipulate their destiny. Let them alone; they will work it out for themselves.”
“You know I can’t let them alone now,” she lamented. “I am not one of those who can give themselves an agreeable pang with the unhappiness of their fellow-creatures. I’m not satisfied to study them; I want to relieve them.”
She went on to praise herself to my disadvantage, as I notice wives will with their husbands, and I did not attempt to deny her this source of consolation. But when she ended by saying, “I believe I shall send you alone,” and explained that she had promised Mrs. Deering we would come to their hotel for them after tea, and go with them to hear the music at the United States and the Grand Union, I protested. I said that I always felt too sneaking when I was prowling round those hotels listening to their proprietary concerts, and I was aware of looking so sneaking that I expected every moment to be ordered off their piazzas. As for convoying a party of three strangers about alone, I should certainly not do it.
“Not if I’ve a headache?”
“Not if you’ve a headache.”
“Oh, very well, then.”
“What are you two quarrelling about?” cried a gay voice behind us, and we looked round into the laughing eyes of Miss Dale. She was the one cottager we knew in Saratoga, but when we were with her we felt that we knew everybody, so hospitable was the sense of world which her kindness exhaled.
“It was Mrs. March who was quarrelling,” I said. “I was only trying to convince her that she was wrong, and of course one has to lift one’s voice. I hope I hadn’t the effect of halloaing.”
“Well, I merely heard you above the steam harmonicon at the switchback,” said Miss Dale. “I don’t know whether you call that holloaing.”
“Oh, Miss Dale,” said my wife, “we are in such a fatal—”
“Pickle,” I suggested, and she instantly adopted the word in her extremity.
“—pickle with some people that Providence has thrown in our way, and that we want to do something for”; and in a labyrinth of parentheses that no man could have found his way into or out of, she possessed Miss Dale of the whole romantic fact. “It was Mr. March, of course, who first discovered them,” she concluded, in plaintive accusation.
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