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_ Arriving in town (where my bachelor-rooms, long before this time, had
received some other occupant), I established myself, for a day or two,
in a certain, respectable hotel. It was situated somewhat aloof
from my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid
most of my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other
interests, and who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves
at the expense of the amateur workingman. The hotel-keeper put me
into a back room of the third story of his spacious establishment.
The day was lowering, with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly
tempered east wind, which seemed to come right off the chill and
melancholy sea, hardly mitigated by sweeping over the roofs, and
amalgamating itself with the dusky element of city smoke. All the
effeminacy of past days had returned upon me at once. Summer as it
still was, I ordered a coal fire in the rusty grate, and was glad to
find myself growing a little too warm with an artificial temperature.
My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote
regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.
There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into
one impression. It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of
mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life. True, if you look
at it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country. But,
considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a
different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its
aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into
the current history which time was writing off. At one moment, the
very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy
room in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next
instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in
time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised
whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of
a speculative man. I had never before experienced a mood that so
robbed the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a
charm, on which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to
pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.
Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the
thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many
men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took
quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could
never be enough of it. Each characteristic sound was too suggestive
to be passed over unnoticed. Beneath and around me, I heard the stir
of the hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper;
steps echoing on the staircase; the ringing of a bell, announcing
arrivals or departures; the porter lumbering past my door with
baggage, which he thumped down upon the floors of neighboring
chambers; the lighter feet of chambermaids scudding along the
passages;--it is ridiculous to think what an interest they had for me!
From the street came the tumult of the pavements, pervading the
whole house with a continual uproar, so broad and deep that only an
unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it. A company of the city soldiery,
with a full military band, marched in front of the hotel, invisible
to me, but stirringly audible both by its foot-tramp and the clangor
of its instruments. Once or twice all the city bells jangled
together, announcing a fire, which brought out the engine-men and
their machines, like an army with its artillery rushing to battle.
Hour by hour the clocks in many steeples responded one to another.
In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an
exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day
occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the
rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion.
Then ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and
thump of sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels. All this
was just as valuable, in its way, as the sighing of the breeze among
the birch-trees that overshadowed Eliot's pulpit.
Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human
activity and pastime. It suited me better, for the present, to
linger on the brink, or hover in the air above it. So I spent the
first day, and the greater part of the second, in the laziest manner
possible, in a rocking-chair, inhaling the fragrance of a series of
cigars, with my legs and slippered feet horizontally disposed, and in
my hand a novel purchased of a railroad bibliopolist. The gradual
waste of my cigar accomplished itself with an easy and gentle
expenditure of breath. My book was of the dullest, yet had a sort of
sluggish flow, like that of a stream in which your boat is as often
aground as afloat. Had there been a more impetuous rush, a more
absorbing passion of the narrative, I should the sooner have
struggled out of its uneasy current, and have given myself up to the
swell and subsidence of my thoughts. But, as it was, the torpid life
of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment to the life within
me and about me. At intervals, however, when its effect grew a
little too soporific,--not for my patience, but for the possibility
of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from the
rocking-chair, and looked out of the window.
A gray sky; the weathercock of a steeple that rose beyond the
opposite range of buildings, pointing from the eastward; a sprinkle
of small, spiteful-looking raindrops on the window-pane. In that
ebb-tide of my energies, had I thought of venturing abroad, these
tokens would have checked the abortive purpose.
After several such visits to the window, I found myself getting
pretty well acquainted with that little portion of the backside of
the universe which it presented to my view. Over against the hotel
and its adjacent houses, at the distance of forty or fifty yards, was
the rear of a range of buildings which appeared to be spacious,
modern, and calculated for fashionable residences. The interval
between was apportioned into grass-plots, and here and there an
apology for a garden, pertaining severally to these dwellings. There
were apple-trees, and pear and peach trees, too, the fruit on which
looked singularly large, luxuriant, and abundant, as well it might,
in a situation so warm and sheltered, and where the soil had
doubtless been enriched to a more than natural fertility. In two or
three places grapevines clambered upon trellises, and bore clusters
already purple, and promising the richness of Malta or Madeira in
their ripened juice. The blighting winds of our rigid climate could
not molest these trees and vines; the sunshine, though descending
late into this area, and too early intercepted by the height of the
surrounding houses, yet lay tropically there, even when less than
temperate in every other region. Dreary as was the day, the scene
was illuminated by not a few sparrows and other birds, which spread
their wings, and flitted and fluttered, and alighted now here, now
there, and busily scratched their food out of the wormy earth. Most
of these winged people seemed to have their domicile in a robust and
healthy buttonwood-tree. It aspired upward, high above the roofs of
the houses, and spread a dense head of foliage half across the area.
There was a cat--as there invariably is in such places--who evidently
thought herself entitled to the privileges of forest life in this
close heart of city conventionalisms. I watched her creeping along
the low, flat roofs of the offices, descending a flight of wooden
steps, gliding among the grass, and besieging the buttonwood-tree,
with murderous purpose against its feathered citizens. But, after
all, they were birds of city breeding, and doubtless knew how to
guard themselves against the peculiar perils of their position.
Bewitching to my fancy are all those nooks and crannies where Nature,
like a stray partridge, hides her head among the long-established
haunts of men! It is likewise to be remarked, as a general rule,
that there is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and
characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness in the
back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its
front. The latter is always artificial; it is meant for the world's
eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment. Realities keep in
the rear, and put forward an advance guard of show and humbug. The
posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has
unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the
immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life
and individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him
past the premises. In a city, the distinction between what is
offered to the public and what is kept for the family is certainly
not less striking.
But, to return to my window at the back of the hotel. Together with
a due contemplation of the fruit-trees, the grapevines, the
buttonwood-tree, the cat, the birds, and many other particulars, I
failed not to study the row of fashionable dwellings to which all
these appertained. Here, it must be confessed, there was a general
sameness. From the upper story to the first floor, they were so much
alike, that I could only conceive of the inhabitants as cut out on
one identical pattern, like little wooden toy-people of German
manufacture. One long, united roof, with its thousands of slates
glittering in the rain, extended over the whole. After the
distinctness of separate characters to which I had recently been
accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me not to be able to resolve
this combination of human interests into well-defined elements. It
seemed hardly worth while for more than one of those families to be
in existence, since they all had the same glimpse of the sky, all
looked into the same area, all received just their equal share of
sunshine through the front windows, and all listened to precisely the
same noises of the street on which they boarded. Men are so much
alike in their nature, that they grow intolerable unless varied by
their circumstances.
Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was, I had
rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.
"Can you tell me," I inquired, "what families reside in any of those
houses opposite?"
"The one right opposite is a rather stylish boarding-house," said the
waiter. "Two of the gentlemen boarders keep horses at the stable of
our establishment. They do things in very good style, sir, the
people that live there."
I might have found out nearly as much for myself, on examining the
house a little more closely, in one of the upper chambers I saw a
young man in a dressing-gown, standing before the glass and brushing
his hair for a quarter of an hour together. He then spent an equal
space of time in the elaborate arrangement of his cravat, and finally
made his appearance in a dress-coat, which I suspected to be newly
come from the tailor's, and now first put on for a dinner-party. At
a window of the next story below, two children, prettily dressed,
were looking out. By and by a middle-aged gentleman came softly
behind them, kissed the little girl, and playfully pulled the little
boy's ear. It was a papa, no doubt, just come in from his
counting-room or office; and anon appeared mamma, stealing as softly
behind papa as he had stolen behind the children, and laying her hand
on his shoulder to surprise him. Then followed a kiss between papa
and mamma; but a noiseless one, for the children did not turn their
heads.
"I bless God for these good folks!" thought I to myself. "I have not
seen a prettier bit of nature, in all my summer in the country, than
they have shown me here, in a rather stylish boarding-house. I will
pay them a little more attention by and by."
On the first floor, an iron balustrade ran along in front of the tall
and spacious windows, evidently belonging to a back drawing-room; and
far into the interior, through the arch of the sliding-doors, I could
discern a gleam from the windows of the front apartment. There were
no signs of present occupancy in this suite of rooms; the curtains
being enveloped in a protective covering, which allowed but a small
portion of their crimson material to be seen. But two housemaids
were industriously at work; so that there was good prospect that the
boarding-house might not long suffer from the absence of its most
expensive and profitable guests. Meanwhile, until they should appear,
I cast my eyes downward to the lower regions. There, in the dusk
that so early settles into such places, I saw the red glow of the
kitchen range. The hot cook, or one of her subordinates, with a
ladle in her hand, came to draw a cool breath at the back door. As
soon as she disappeared, an Irish man-servant, in a white jacket,
crept slyly forth, and threw away the fragments of a china dish,
which, unquestionably, he had just broken. Soon afterwards, a lady,
showily dressed, with a curling front of what must have been false
hair, and reddish-brown, I suppose, in hue,--though my remoteness
allowed me only to guess at such particulars,--this respectable
mistress of the boarding-house made a momentary transit across the
kitchen window, and appeared no more. It was her final,
comprehensive glance, in order to make sure that soup, fish, and
flesh were in a proper state of readiness, before the serving up of
dinner.
There was nothing else worth noticing about the house, unless it be
that on the peak of one of the dormer windows which opened out of the
roof sat a dove, looking very dreary and forlorn; insomuch that I
wondered why she chose to sit there, in the chilly rain, while her
kindred were doubtless nestling in a warm and comfortable dove-cote.
All at once this dove spread her wings, and, launching herself in the
air, came flying so straight across the intervening space, that I
fully expected her to alight directly on my window-sill. In the
latter part of her course, however, she swerved aside, flew upward,
and vanished, as did, likewise, the slight, fantastic pathos with
which I had invested her. _
Read next: CHAPTER XVIII - THE BOARDING-HOUSE
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