Letters Home. William Dean Howells
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make you feel yourself not merely a witness of the great procession of life, but a part of it. By that time every one's work is over, and the people are streaming to the theatres, past the shining shops on foot, and cramming the trolleys, the women in furs and diamonds, and the men in crush hats and long overcoats, with just enough top buttons open to betray the dress tie and dress shirt. (I have laid in one of those majestic overcoats already, and I have got a silk hat, and I would like to show it to you in Wottoma, where you can't buy a silk hat unless you send to Chicago for it.) At the doors of the theatres, more gorgeous women and more correct men are getting out of hansoms, and coupés, and automobiles, and trailing in over the pavements between rows of resplendent darkeys in livery; and life is worth living. But when I begin anywhere on New York, I want to leave off and begin somewhere else, for the job is always hopeless. Take the Christmas streets alone, at three o'clock in the afternoon, and if you have a soul in you it soars sky-scraper high at the sight of the pavements packed with people, and the street jammed with cars, wagons, carriages, and every vehicle you can imagine, and many you can't, you poor old provincial! I ache to get at it all in verse; I want to write the Epic of New York, and I am going to. I would like to walk you down Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and wake you up to the fact that you have got a country. Only you would think you were dreaming; and it is a dream. What impresses me most is the gratis exhibition that goes on all the time, the continuous performance of the streets that you could not get for money anywhere else, and that here is free to the poorest. In fact, is for the poor. There is one window on Fourteenth Street where the sidewalk is a solid mass of humanity from morning till night, entranced by the fairy scene inside; and most of the spectators look as if they had not been to breakfast or dinner, and were not going to supper. But they are enraptured; and that is the great secret of New York; she takes you out of yourself; she annihilates you and disperses you, and you might starve to death here without feeling hungry, for your mind wouldn't be on it. That is what convinces me that I have come to the best place for that little heart-cure.
This afternoon I was in the Park; my hotel is only a few blocks below it, and the woods called to me across the roofs, and I went. The sunset was dying over the Seventh Avenue entrance as I went in and as I tramped up past a big meadow where they pasture a flock of sheep, and crossed a bridge to a path that follows the border of a lake into what they call the Ramble, far from hoofs and wheels. The twilight was hovering in the naked tree tops, but the sunset was still reflected from the water among the trunks below, and just as I got to a little corner under the hill where there is a bust of Schiller on a plinth, between evergreens that try to curtain it, the red radiance glorified a pair of lovers tilting on the air above the path before me. He had his arm across her shoulders, and she had hers flung round his waist; I stopped, for I felt myself intruding, and that made them look round, and they started apart. Then, after they had taken a few steps, she closed upon Mm again, and with an action of angelic defiance, as if she said, " I don't care; suppose we are? " she flung her slim little arm round him, and ran him up the slope of the path past the bust, and round a rock out of sight. It was charming, Line, but it made me faint, and I dropped down on a bench beside an old fellow who might have been a fellow-sufferer, though he didn't look it. He was got up in things that reduced mine to an average value of thirty cents, and I saw that if I really meant business I must have a pair of drab gaiters inside of the next twenty-four hours. I don't know what made me think he was also literary, but I did, and I was flattered to have him speak to me after he had given me a glance over the shoulder next me, through his extremely polite pince-nez. He was clean shaven, except for the neat side whiskers, of the period of 1840-60, as you see them in the old pictures; and very rosy about the gills, with a small, sweet smile. You could see that he was his own ideal of a gentleman, and he looked as if he had been used to being one for several generations; at least, that was the way I romanced him; and perhaps that was why I felt flattered when he suggested, as if I would perfectly understand, " That was rather pretty. " I ventured to answer, " Yes, very pretty, indeed. " I was just thinking how old Schiller would have liked to wink the other eye of his bust there, and tell them he knew how it was himself. So I quoted —
" Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,
Ich habe gelebt und geliebet. "
My quotation seemed to startle the old fellow, and he said " Ah! " and faced around at me, and asked with an irony that caressed, " Made in Germany? " I made bold to answer, " The verses were. I was made in Iowa." Then I felt rather flat, for having lugged in my autobiography, but he did not mind, or if he did, he only laughed, and remarked, " A thing like that would make a nice effect on the stage, if you could get it in. " " But you couldn't, " I said, " you could only get it into a poem. It would be gross and palpable on the stage. " " Was it gross and palpable here? " " No, here it was the real thing. " " I don't see the logic of your position, " he said. " I don't know that I could show it to you. It's something you must feel! " He laughed again, with the revelation of some very well-dentistried teeth, and said, " Well, let's hope that some time I may be fine enough to feel it. If I put it on the stage will it spoil it for a poem? " " Not if I get it into a poem first. " "I shouldn't object to that; I could dramatize the poem. Or perhaps you could. " He got up, and made me a beautiful bow, with his hat off. " We may be rivals, " he said, " but I hope we part friends? " and I got back with, " Oh, yes, or the best of enemies. "
That made him smile again, and he walked away down the path I had come. He might have been a fine old actor: he had the effect of " going off " at the end of the scene. But think of this happening to me all at once, and out of a clear sky, after the chronic poverty of incident in Wottoma! I suppose I shall never see him again, but once is enough to enrich the imagination with boundless possibilities. He had an English accent, but I feel sure that he was not English; they study that accent for the stage, of course.
Well, I might as well stop first as last, if this is first; I never should get through; and I should have to dispatch this letter in sections, like a big through train, if it went on much longer. Good-by. I shall not wait for you to write. It would kill me not to write, and you may expect something every day. Yours ever,
W. Ardith.
P. S. — I shall use that lovers incident in a story. Then I can get my unknown friend in, and I can make use of myself. I see a way to relate our common fortunes to those of the lovers. I believe I can make something out of it. But now I like to let it lie a silent joy in my soul — No, I don't believe I can risk waiting. That old fellow may be going to use the material at once. I believe I shall try making a poem of it, and if I hit it off, I will send you a copy to let you see what I have done with it. If I could only get that thing out as it is in my mind! I think I will imagine some old fellow, seeing in that pair of lovers the phantom of his own love, dead forty years. That would allow me to put in some Thackeray touches, (that elderly unknown was quite a Thackeray type,) and I could use my own experience with a Certain Person. Line, that girl looked just like a Certain Person: I mean her figure, so slight and light and electrical" and the way she glanced defiantly back at us over her shoulder, when she put her arm round him again!
III.
From Abner J. Baysley to Rev. William Baysley, Timber Creek, Iowa.
New York, December 19, 1901.
Dear Brother:
Yours of the 15th received, and contents noted. Would say that we are all usually well, and getting used to our life here as well as we can. It is worse for wife and I than it is for the girls, but I guess they are a little homesick, too. Am not sure but what it is worse for them, because the girls have not much to do, and mother and me are pretty well taken up, her with her housekeeping, and me getting settled in the business here, and feeling anxious whether I can make it go or not. When the company offered me the place here, at $2,600, I thought it was a fortune, but money does not go quite so far in New York as what it would in Timber Creek; I have to pay forty dollars a month for rent alone, and we live in a six-room flat, with two of the rooms so dark that we have to bum gas in them by day, and gas costs. But the kitchen is sunny, and Ma likes that. We set there of an evening when the girls are carrying on in the parlor, with their music, and try to make ourselves believe that