I have no doubt there were mult.i.tudes going to church that morning, but our third-cla.s.s compartment was filled with people going into the country for the day; fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for an endless time in the fields and woods, which are often free in that much-owned England, while the may was yet freshly red and white on the hawthorns in the first week in June. Among our fellow-pa.s.sengers that morning a young mother, not much older than her five children, sat with her youngest in her arms, while the other four perched at the edge of the seat, two on each side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one flare of red cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came to lifting them out of the car after her, the public had to help. One"s heart must go with these holiday-makers as they began to leave the train after the last suburban stations, where they could feel themselves fairly in the country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such motherly looking country, and yet young with springtime, and of a breath that came balmily in at the open car-windows; and the trees stood about in the meadows near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing it was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being much good for fuel or lumber they could stand for ages and ages, and shelter the sheep and cattle without danger of the axe.
At our own station we found our host"s motor waiting for us, and after waiting for some one else, who did not come by the next train, it whisked us much sooner than we could have wished over the nine miles of smooth road stretching to his house. The English are always telling you, if you are an American, how the Americans think nothing of distances, and they apparently derive their belief from the fact that it is a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we do not step casually aboard a train for either of those places, or, indeed, without much moral and material preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware attaches to you from our supposed contempt of s.p.a.ce, you could make out a very pretty case against them, in convicting them of an even greater indifference to distances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and accepting invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a run from London down to Ultima Thule for a week is thought nothing of, or much less of than a journey from New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more in the English social scheme than the other is in ours; and perhaps the distance at which a gentleman will live from his railroad-station in the country is still more impressive. The American commuter who drives night and morning two or three miles after leaving and before getting his train, thinks he is having quite drive enough; if he drives six miles the late and early guest feels himself badly used; but apparently such distances are not minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come to devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled away by a public fly, they seem not to have been regarded as evils.
For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil. Every foot, every inch of the way was delightful, and we only wished that our motor could have conceived of our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom had made it indifferent. There were some villages in the course of that swift flight where we could have willingly spent a week of such Sundays: villages with gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards and kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for millionaire money with us, and villagers in their church-going best, whom, as they lived in the precious scene, our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves are the symbol of our race"s rustic Sunday leisure everywhere; and the main difference that I could note between our own farmer-folk and these was that at home they would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, and here they were hanging over gates; you cannot very well sit on the tops of hedges.
If one part of England can be said to be more charming than another, and I suppose that there are odds in its loveliness, I think there can be no doubt but we were that day in one of the most beautiful regions within an hour"s reach of London. We were pretty constantly mounting in our motor-flight from the station; the uplands opened round us, and began to roll far away towards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were very stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency of English downs which satisfies without surfeiting, and this we had from the windows and gardened levels of our friends" house even more than from the highroad, which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way of its own.
Mountains would have been out of key with the landscape; downs were just right.
I do not know why the house was the more agreeable for being new, and for being the effect of our friends" immediate and not their ancestral fancy, quite as it would have been with most of our friends"
country-houses at home. We certainly had not come to England for newness of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the shrubberies being new; and my content was absolute when I heard from our friends that they had at one time thought of building their house of wood: the fact seemed to restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built continent which I had so willingly forsaken only a few weeks before.
But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than that it shall render us some fleeting image of the nearest and dearest things of home?
What I had reasonably or logically come to England for was nature tamed to the hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of something wild, something savage-looking, gaunt, huge, rugged, I rejoiced with an insensate pleasure in its likeness to the roughest aspect of America that a.s.sociation could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some others, and I will own that when our friends took us the walk over the downs which they had promised us, nothing could have gladdened me so much as to enter a secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart-track growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and finally forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths of shade. Then I said to my soul that it might have been a wood-road in the White Mountains, mouldering out of memory of the clearing where the young pines and birches had grown into good-sized trees since the giants of the primeval forest were slain and dragged out over its snows and mosses.
The ma.s.ses of the red may and the white may which stood here and there in the border of the yews, might have been the blossom of the wilding apple-trees which often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his ill.u.s.trations. He knew how to be true to such mediaeval moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame to bear what witness we can to the fact.
The yew-tree"s shade in Gray"s Elegy had not prepared me for a whole forest of yews, and I had never imagined them of the vastness I beheld.
The place had its peculiar gloom through the church-yard a.s.sociations of the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish flavor in the lawless fact that in times when it was less protected than now, or when its wood was more employed in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London used to come out to the forest by night and lop away great limbs of the yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of timber-merchants. From time to time my host put his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry decay without that endeavor some other trees make to cover the stump with a new growth. The down, he told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his horse or his cow or his goose on its gra.s.s, and I do not know whose forest rights, if any one"s, were especially violated in these cruel midnight outrages on the yews; but some one must have had the interest to stop it.
I would not try to say how far the common extended, or how far its privileges; but the land about is mostly held in great estates, like most of the land in England, and no doubt there are signorial rights which overlie the popular privileges. I fancied a symbol of these in the game keeper--whom we met coming out of the wood, brown-clad, with a scarcely touched hat, silently sweeping through the gorse, furtive as one of the pheasants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met in England, and, as it happened, the last, but he now seems to me to have been so perfect in his way that I would not for the sake of the books where I have known so many of his sort, have him the least different from what he was.
The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is usually cool and pleasant, but you must not take liberties. By the time we got back to lunch we could have believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after the talk filling the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, which we were to take at a famous house in the neighborhood, the temperature was all right again; it was more than all right in the cold current of air which the motor created.
In the course of that post-luncheon talk our host brought out a small porcelain bust of Washington, in very Continental blue, which he said was one of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the time of our Revolution to express the feeling of our English sympathizers in the struggle which gave English liberty a new lease. One reads of this sympathy, how wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not realized it.
The miniature father-of-his-country smiled at our ignorance with his accustomed blandness, and I hope he will never regret being given to one of us as a testimony of the amity which had largely endured for our nation from and through the most difficult times. The gift lent our day a unique grace, and I could only hope that it might be without a surprise too painful that our English Washington would look upon the American Republic of his creation when we got home with him; I doubted if he would find it altogether his ideal.
The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down to the house where we were going, I do not know how many miles, for our afternoon tea. The house was famous, for being the most perfect Tudor house in existence; but I am not going to transfer the burden of my slight knowledge of its past to the mind of the reader. I will only say that it came into the hands of the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of its owners" heads, a means of acquisition not so distasteful to him as to them, and after its rest.i.tution to the much decapitated family it continued in their possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind, rising upon a gentle level of fields and meadows, with nothing dramatically picturesque in the view from its straight-browed windows. The present owner, who showed me through its rooms and gardens hurriedly in consideration of our early train, has the generous pa.s.sion of leaving the old place as nearly as he can in the keeping of its past; and I was glad to have him to agree with me that the Tudor period was that in which English domestic comfort had been most effectually studied. But my satisfaction in this was much heightened by my approval of what he was simultaneously saying about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not publishing serial fiction: in his own newspaper, he said, he had a story running all the time.
The old and the new kiss each other constantly in England, and I perceived that this vividly modern possessor of the most perfect Tudor house existing was, with the intense actuality of his interests and ambitions, as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom. When we came out of the house and walked towards the group we had left under a spreading oak (or it might have been an elm; the two are much of the same habit in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have fancied one"s self in any most picturesque period of the past, if it had not been for the informality of the men"s dress. Women are always of the past in the beauty of their attire, and those whom the low sun, striking across the velvet of the gra.s.s, now lighted up in their pretty gowns of our day, could easily have stepped out of an old picture, or continued in it as they sat in their wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table.
XV
FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT
An incident of the great midsummer heat, was an excursion down the Thames which took us far from the society atmosphere so relaxing to the moral fibre of the mere witness of the London season. The change was not to the cooler air which had been imagined, but it immersed us for the s.p.a.ce of the boat"s voyage to and from Greenwich among those social inferiors who are probably the moral betters of their superiors, but whose company does not always seem the spiritual baptism it doubtless is. Our fellow-pa.s.sengers were distinctly of the cla.s.ses which are lower as well as middle, and the sole worldly advantage they had of us was that they were going where they wished, and we were going where we must. We had started for Richmond, but as there proved to be no boat for Richmond, we decided to take the boat which was for Greenwich, and consoled ourselves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor of many parliamentary and literary feasts which that fish has furnished. A whitebait dinner, what would not one suffer of human contiguity for it, even though it could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early hour?
It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the Greenwich boat puffed up to her landing at Westminster Bridge, and the lower middle cla.s.ses streamed aboard.
She looked very lower middle cla.s.s herself, poor boat, and she was of a failing line which the London County Council is about to replace by a line of munic.i.p.al boats, without apparently alarming, in the English, the sensibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there is any talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets might have been training himself for a position on the munic.i.p.al line, he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased rea.s.suring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which pa.s.ses for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the tide towards Greenwich.
Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark and the grandeur of the Westminster sh.o.r.e, which is probably the n.o.blest water-front in the world. Near and far the great imperial and munic.i.p.al and palatial ma.s.ses of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we pa.s.sed, varied their grouping with one another, and with the leafy domes and spires which everywhere enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great succession ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it does to the mind"s eye, but to the body"s eye, the Tower is rather histrionic than historic. It is like a scenic reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage; and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the County Council should think of selling it to Chicago, to be set up somewhere between the Illinois Central and the Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her the purchase: New York could easily build a London Tower that would look worthier of its memories than the real one, without even making it a sky-sc.r.a.per.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER.]
So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it is so true as it is that after pa.s.sing the Tower the one sh.o.r.e of the Thames begins to lose its dignity and beauty, and to be of like effect with the other, which is the Southwark side, and like all the American river-sides that I remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, and frowsy wharves and docks grieve the eye, which the shipping in the stream does little to console. That is mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch liners, clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between low sh.o.r.es where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom.
Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bathing from the slimy shoals, running down to the water on planks laid over them, and splashing joyously into the filthy solution with the inextinguishable gladness of their years. They looked like boys out of the purlieus of d.i.c.kens"s poverty-world, and all London waterside apparitions are more or less from his pages. The elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated hotel to which we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as much of his invention as if he had created him from the dust of the place, and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul into him. He had a queer pseudo-respectful shuffle and a sidelong approach, with a dawning baldness at the back of his head, which seemed of one quality with these characteristics: his dress-coat was l.u.s.trous with the greasiness of long serving. Asked for whitebait, he destroyed the illusion in which we had come at a blow. He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any call for it now, and they did not keep it. Then he smiled down upon us out of an apparently humorous face in which there was no real fun, and added that we could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon mayonnaise was therefore what we had, and except that it was not whitebait, it was not very disappointing; we had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it, we were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a fly which we wished to take for a drive, in the absence of whitebait. But a fly required, in Greenwich, an interview with a stableman and a negotiation which, though we were a.s.sured it would be fairly conducted, we decided to forego, and contented ourselves with exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was called Nelson"s, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate foreground--it was as much earth as water that lapped the sh.o.r.e--a small boy wading out to a small boat and providing himself a sorrowful evening at home with his mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves and trousers in the solution. Some young men in rowing costume were vigorously pulling in a heavy row-boat by way of filling in their outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaintance we had made in coming, was hurrying to get out of the river into the freshness of the sea, and this was all of Greenwich as a watering-place which we cared to see.
But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of b.a.l.l.s and parties, which, though not imaginably of the first social quality, must have given his middle-aging hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in summer. He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the gallery of the old naval college on the way back to our boat, and saw us to the door, and fairly out into the blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat, and we utilized every sc.r.a.p of shade as one does in Italy, running from tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every available portico and colonnade. But once inside the great hall where England honors her naval heroes and their battles, it was deliriously cool. It could not have been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid air, for they all represented the heat of battle, with fire and smoke, and the work of coming to close quarters, with
"hot gun-lip kissing gun."
The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals and other sea-dogs of England whose portraits relieved the intolerable spread of the battle scenes; and it was best of all in the many pictures and effigies and relics of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of his great time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon; everywhere his face showed the impa.s.sioned dreamer, the poet; and once more gave the lie to the silly notion that there is a type of this or that kind of great men.
When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we perceived that the whole place we were in was a temple to Nelson, and that whatever minor marine deities had their shrines there, it was in strict subordination to him. England had done what she could for them, who had done so much for her; but they seem consecrated in rather an out-of-the-way place, now that there is no longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their worship; and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before choosing just their apotheosis.
By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, it was time to grill forth to our boat, and we escaped from shade to shade, as before, until we reached the first-cla.s.s shelter of the awning at her stern.
Even there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the small breeze that was crisping the surface of the solution; and fifteen or twenty babies developed themselves to testify of the English abhorrence of race-suicide among the lower middle cla.s.ses. They were mostly good, poor things, and evoked no sentiment harsher than pity even when they were not good. Still it was not just the sort of day when one could have wished them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich. Perhaps they were only incidentally given it, but it must have been from a specific generosity that several children in arms were fed by their indulgent mothers with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had probably had no whitebait.
XVI
HENLEY DAY
Our invitation to the regatta at Henley, included luncheon in the tent of an Oxford college, and a view of the races from the college barge, which, with the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed down the Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry between the crews of the two great English universities. There may also have been Cambridge barges, spirited through the air in default of water for towing them to Henley, but I make sure only of a gay variety of houseboats stretching up and down the gra.s.sy margin of the stream, along the course the rowers were to take. As their contest was the least important fact of the occasion for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a clear notion which came off winner in any of the events, I will try not to trouble the reader with my impressions of them, except as they lent a vivid action and formed a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles under the sun. I have hitherto contended that cla.s.s-day at Harvard was the fairest flower of civilization, but, having seen the regatta at Henley, I am no longer so sure of it.
Henley is no great way from London, and the quick pulse of its excitement could be sensibly felt at the station, where we took train for it. Our train was one of many special trains leaving at quarter-hourly intervals, and there was already an anxious crowd hurrying to it, with tickets ent.i.tling them to go by that train and no other. It was by no means the youthful crowd it would have been at home, and not even the overwhelmingly feminine crowd. The chaperon, who now politely prevails with us in almost her European numbers, was here in no greater evident force; but gray-haired fathers and uncles and elderly friends much more abounded; and they looked as if they were not altogether bent upon a vicarious day"s pleasure. The male of the English race is of much more striking presence than the American; he keeps more of the native priority of his s.e.x in his costume, so that in this crowd, I should say, the outward shows were rather on his part than that of his demurely cloaked females, though the hats into which these flowered at top gave some hint of the summer loveliness of dress to be later revealed. They were, much more largely than most railway-station crowds, of the rank which goes first cla.s.s, and in these special Henley trains it was well to have booked so, if one wished to go in comfort, or arrive uncrumpled, for the second-cla.s.s and third-cla.s.s carriages were packed with people.
There seemed so many of our fellow-pa.s.sengers, that reaching Henley in the condition of greed and grudge of all travellers on errands of pleasure, we made haste to antic.i.p.ate any rush for the carriages outside the station which were to take us to the scene of the races. Oddly enough there was no great pressure for these vehicles, or for the more public brakes and char-a-bancs and omnibuses plying to the same destination; and so far from falling victims to covert extortion in the matter of fares, we found the flys conscientiously placarded with the price of the drive. This was about double the ordinary price, and so soon does human nature adjust itself to conditions that I promptly complained to an English friend for having had to pay four shillings for a drive I should have had to pay four dollars for at home. In my resentment I tried to part foes with my driver, who mildly urged that he had but a few days in the year for doubling his fares, but I succeeded so ill that when I found him waiting for me at the end of the day, I amicably took him again for the return to the station.
Of the coming and going through the town of Henley I keep the sort of impression which small English towns give the pa.s.sing stranger, of a sufficiently busy commercial life, doing business in excellent shops of the modern pattern, but often housed in dwellings of such a familiar picturesqueness that you wonder what old-fashioned annual or stage-setting or ill.u.s.trated Christmas-story they are out of. I never could pa.s.s through such a town without longing to stop in it and know all about it; and I wish I could believe that Henley reciprocated my longing, on its bright holiday morning, that we could have had each other to ourselves in the interest of an intimate acquaintance. It looked most worthy to be known, and I have no doubt that it is full of history and tradition of the sort which small towns have been growing for centuries throughout England.
But we had only that one day there, and in our haste to give it to the regatta we could only make sure of driving over a beautiful picture-postal bridge on our way to the meadows by whose brink our college barge was moored, and making believe to tug at its chain. It was really doing nothing of the kind, for it was familiar with boat-racing in the Thames where the Thames is still the Isis at Oxford, and was as wholly without the motive as without the fact of impatience. Like many other barges and house-boats set broadside to the sh.o.r.e for a mile up and down as closely as they could be lined, it was of a comfortable cabin below and of a pleasant gallery above, with an awning to keep off the sun or rain, whichever it might be the whim of the weather to send.
But that day the weather had no whims; it was its pleasure to be neither wet nor hot, but of a delicious average warmth, informed with a cool freshness which had the days of the years of youth in it. In fact, youth came back in all the holiday sights and scents to the elderly witness who ought to have known better than to be glad of such things as the white tents in the green meadows, the gypsy fires burning pale in the sunlight by the gypsy camps, the traps and carriages thronging up and down the road, or standing detached from the horses in the wayside shadow, where the trodden gra.s.s, not less nor more than the wandering cigar-whiff, exhaled the memories of far-off circus-days and Fourths of July. But such things lift the heart in spite of philosophy and experience, and bid it rejoice in the relish of novelty which a scene everywhere elementally the same offers in slight idiosyncrasies of time and place. Certain of these might well touch the American half-brother with a sense of difference, but there was none that perhaps more suggested it than the frank English proclamation by sign-board that these or those grounds in the meadows were this or that lady"s, who might be supposed waiting in proprietory state for her guests within the pavilion of her roped-off enclosure. Together with this a.s.sertion of private right, and the warning it implied, was the expression of yet elder privilege in the presence of the immemorial wanderers who had their shabby camps by the open wayside and offered the pa.s.ser fortune at so low a rate that the poorest pleasurer could afford to buy a prophecy of prosperity from them; I do not know why they proposed to sell with these favorable destinies small brushes and brooms of their own make.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A HOUSE-BOAT OX THE THAMES AT HENLEY.]
These swarthy aliens, whom no conditions can naturalize, are a fact of every English holiday without which it would not be so native, as the English themselves may hereafter be the more peculiarly and intensely insular through the prevalence of more and more Americans among them. Most of our fellow-guests on that Oxford barge were our fellow-countrymen, and I think now that without their difference there would have been wanting an ultimately penetrating sense of the entirely English keeping of the affair. The ardor of our fresh interest lent, I hope, a novel zest to our English hosts for the spectacle which began to offer itself so gradually to our delight, and which seemed to grow and open flower-like from the water, until it was a blossom which covered the surface with its petals.
The course for the races was marked off midway from either sh.o.r.e by long timbers fastened end to end and forming a complete barrier to the intrusion of any of the mere pleasure-craft. Our own sh.o.r.e was sacred to barges and house-boats; the thither margin, if I remember rightly, was devoted to the noisy and muscular expansion of undergraduate emotion, but, it seems to me, that farther up on the grounds which rose from it were some such tents and pavilions as whitened our own side. Still the impression of something rather more official in the arrangements of that sh.o.r.e persists with me.
There was a long waiting, of course, before the rowing began, but as this throughout was the least interest of the affair for any one but the undergraduates, and the nearest or fairest friends of the crews, I will keep my promise not to dwell on it. Each event was announced some minutes beforehand by the ringing of a rather unimpressive hand-bell.
Then a pistol-shot was fired; and then, after the start far up the course, the sh.e.l.ls came sweeping swiftly down towards us. I noticed that the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked from their waists up as our university crews do, or used to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced at New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculpturesque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for the signal to come to eager life. I think that American moment was more thrilling than any given moment at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a college barge, and more gentle seclusion for the favored spectator, I am not going to own that it equals as a view-point the observation-train, with its successive banks of shouting and glowing girls, all a flutter of handkerchiefs and parasols, which used to keep abreast of the racing crews beside the stately course of the Connecticut Thames. Otherwise I think it best to withhold comparisons, lest the impartial judge should decide in favor of Henley.
There was already a mult.i.tude of small boats within the barriers keeping the race-course open, and now and then one of these crossed from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. They were of all types: skiffs and wherries and canoes and snub-nosed punts, with a great number of short, sharply rounded craft, new to my American observance, and called c.o.c.kles, very precisely adapted to contain one girl, who had to sit with her eyes firmly fixed on the young man with the oars, lest a glance to this side or that should oversee the ticklishly balanced sh.e.l.l. She might a.s.sist her eyes in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the boat with a red or yellow parasol, or a large fan, but it appeared that her gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat, must be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink, lest any turmoil of colors in it should be too much for the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleidoscope"s vulgar variety in the respective costumes. As the numbers of the boats momentarily increased, it was more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park had taken water, and though in such a scene as that which spread its soft allure before us, it was not quite imaginable that all the loveliness one saw was of the quality of that in the consecrated paddocks near Stanhope Gate, neither was it imaginable that much of the beauty was not as well-born as it was well-dressed. Those house-boats up and down the sh.o.r.e must mainly have been peopled by persons of worldly worth, and of those who had come from the four quarters to Henley for the day, not every one could have been an actress with her friends, though each contributed to the effect of a spectacle not yet approached in any pantomime. There was a good deal of friendly visiting back and forth among the house-boat people; and I was told that it was even more than correct for a young man to ask a house-boat girl to go out with him in one of the small boats on the water, but how much this contributed to keep the scene elect I do not know.
If one looked steadily at the pretty sight, it lost reality as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one"s feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one"s college barge. Out of that "giddy pleasure of the eyes" business lifted a practical front from time to time, and extended a kind of b.u.t.terfly net at the end of a pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos. For, it must be explained, there were many in that aquatic crowd who were there to be heard as well as seen, and this gave the affair its pathos. Not that negro minstrelsy as the English have interpreted the sole American contribution to histrionic art, is in itself pathetic, except as it is so lamentably far from the original; but that any obvious labor which adds to our gayety is sorrowful; and there were many different artists there who were working hard. Sometimes it was the man who sang and the woman who played; but it was always the woman who took up the collection: she seemed to have the greater enterprise and perseverance. Of course in the case of the blackened minstrels, some man appealed to the love of humor rather than the love of beauty for the bounty of the spectators. In the case of an old-time plantation darkey who sang the familiar melodies with the slurring vowels and wandering aspirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective than the other could have been. A company of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager because they were, as our English friends believed, undergraduates on a lark.
They were no better-natured than the rest of the constantly increasing mult.i.tude. The boats thickened upon the water as if they had risen softly from the bottom to which any panic might have sent them; but the people in them took every chance with the amiability which seems to be finally the thing that holds England together. The English have got a bad name abroad which certainly they do not deserve at home; but perhaps they do not think foreigners worthy the consideration they show one another on any occasion that ma.s.ses them. One lady, from her vantage in the stern of her boat, was seen to hit the gentleman in the bow a tremendous whack with her paddle; but he merely looked round and smiled, as if it had been a caress, which it probably was, in disguise. But they were all kind and patient with one another whether in the same boat or not. Some had clearly not the faintest notion how a boat should be managed; they b.u.mped and punched one another wildly; but the occupants of the boat a.s.sailed simply pushed off the attacking party with a smiling acceptance of its apology, and pa.s.sed on the incident to another boat before or beside them. From the whole mult.i.tude there came not one loud or angry note, and, for any appearance of authority on the scene it was altogether unpoliced, and kept safe solely by the universal good-humor. The women were there to show themselves in and at their prettiest, and to see one another as they lounged on the cushions or lay in the bottoms of the boats, or sat up and displayed their hats and parasols; the men were there to make the women have a good time. Neither the one nor the other seemed in the least concerned in the races, which duly followed one another with the ringing of bells and firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure-craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, softly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the water, so that you could have walked from the barrier to the sh.o.r.e without dipping foot in the flood. I have suggested that the situation might have had its perils. Any panic must have caused a commotion that would have overturned hundreds of the crazy craft, and plunged their freight to helpless death. But the spectacle smiled securely to the sun, which smiled back upon it from a cloud-islanded blue with a rather more than English ardor; and we left it without anxiety, to take our luncheon in the pavilion pitched beside our barge on the gra.s.sy sh.o.r.e.
To this honest meal we sat comfortably down at long tables, and served one another from the dishes put before us. There was not the ambitious variety of salads and sweets and fruits and ices, which I have seen at Harvard Cla.s.s-Day spreads, but there were the things that stay one more wholesomely and substantially, and one was not obliged to eat standing and hold one"s plate. Everything in England that can be is adjusted to the private and personal scale; everything with us is generalized and fitted to the convenience of the greatest number. Later, we all sat down together at afternoon tea, a rite of as inviolable observance as breakfast itself in that island of fixed habits.
I believe some races were rowed while we were eating and drinking, but we did not mind. We were not there for the races, but for the people who were there for the races; or who were apparently so. In the mean time, the mult.i.tude of them seemed to have increased, and where I had fancied that not one boat more could have been pressed in, half a dozen had found room. The feat must have been accomplished by main strength and awkwardness, as the old phrase is. It was no place indeed for skill to evince itself; but people pushed about in the most incredible way when they tried to move, though mostly they did not try; they let their boats lie still, and sway with the common movement when the water rose and sank, or fluctuated unseen beneath them. There were more and more people of the sort that there can never be enough of, such as young girls beautifully dressed in airy muslins and light silks, sheltered but not hidden by gay parasols floating above their summer hats. It was the fairy mult.i.tude of Harvard Cla.s.s-Day in English terms, and though Henley never came at any moment to that prodigiously picturesque expression which Cla.s.s-Day used to reach when all its youthful loveliness banked itself on the pine-plank gradines enclosing the Cla.s.s-Day elm, and waited the struggle for its garlands, yet you felt at Henley somehow in the presence of inexhaustible numbers, drawing themselves from a society ultimately, if not immediately, vaster. It was rather dreadful perhaps to reflect that if all that brilliant expanse of fashion and beauty had been engulfed in the hidden Thames it could have been instantly replaced by as much more, not once but a score of times.