April Hopes

  XI.

  After first going to the Owen, at Campobello, the Pasmers took roomsat the Ty'n-y-Coed, which is so much gayer, even if it is not socharacteristic of the old Welsh Admiral's baronial possession ofthe island. It is characteristic enough, and perched on its bluffoverlooking the bay, or whatever the body of water is, it sees a scoreof pretty isles and long reaches of mainland coast, with a white marbleeffect of white-painted wooden Eastport, nestled in the wide lap of theshore, in apparent luxury and apparent innocence of smuggling and themanufacture of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the island inmorning and evening fog temper the air of the latitude to a Newportsoftness in summer, with a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarlydelicious, lulling the day with long calms and light breezes, and afternightfall commonly sending a stiff gale to try the stops of the hotel'sgables and casements, and to make the cheerful blaze on its publichearths acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat arrives,with passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks orswims half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but allnight long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. Thepretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sortof feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and itsfisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for theaesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him andhis language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all thesojourners on the island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such ofthe guests as prefer to let others make their excursions into the heartof the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night,when the falling mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouseto lighthouse the fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzascede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life doesnot greatly differ from other seaside hotel life on the surface, andif one were to make distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying thathotel society there has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere,with a little more accessibility. As the reader doubtless knows, thegreat mass of Boston society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk,transports itself down the North Shore scarcely further than Manchesterat the furthest; but there are more courageous or more detachablespirits who venture into more distant regions. These contributesomewhat toward peopling Bar Harbour in the summer, but they scarcelycharacterise it in any degree; while at Campobello they settle in littledaring colonies, whose self-reliance will enlist the admiration of thesympathetic observer. They do not refuse the knowledge of other coloniesof other stirps and origins, and they even combine in temporary alliancewith them. But, after all, Boston speaks one language, and New Yorkanother, and Washington a third, and though the several dialects haveonly slight differences of inflection, their moral accents render eacha little difficult for the others. In fact every society is repellantof strangers in the degree that it is sufficient to itself, and isincurious concerning the rest of the world. If it has not the elementsof self-satisfaction in it, if it is uninformed and new and restless,it is more hospitable than an older society which has a sense of meritfounded upon historical documents, and need no longer go out of itselffor comparisons of any sort, knowing that if it seeks anything betterit will probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, isas indifferent to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse thecoldness of the Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviourtoward unknown people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.

  That love of independence which is notable in us even in our mostacquiescent phases at home is perhaps what brings these cultivated andagreeable people so far away, where they can achieve a sort of sylvanurbanity without responsibility, and without that measuring of purseswhich attends the summer display elsewhere. At Campobello one might bepoor with almost as little shame as in Cambridge if one were cultivated.Mrs. Pasmer, who seldom failed of doing just the right thing forherself, had promptly divined the advantages of Campobello for herfamily. She knew, by dint of a little inquiry, and from the volunteerinformation of enthusiasts who had been there the summer before, justwho was likely to be there during the summer with which she now foundherself confronted. Campobello being yet a new thing, it was not open tothe objection that you were sure to meet such and such people, moreor less common or disagreeable, there; whatever happened, it could belightly handled in the retrospect as the adventure of a partial andfragmentary summer when really she hardly cared where they went.

  They did not get away from Boston before the middle of July, and afterthe solitude they left behind them there, the Owen at first seemed verygay. But when they had once or twice compared it with the Ty'n-y-Coed,riding to and fro in the barge which formed the connecting link withthe Saturday evening hops of the latter hotel, Mrs. Pasmer decided that,from Alice's point of view, they had made a mistake, and she repaired itwithout delay. The young people were, in fact, all at the Ty'n-y-Coed,and though she found the Owen perfectly satisfying for herself and Mr.Pasmer, she was willing to make the sacrifice of going to a new place:it was not a great sacrifice for one who had dwelt so long in tents.

  There were scarcely any young girls at the Owen, and no young men, ofcourse. Even at the Ty'n-y-Coed, where young girls abounded, it wouldnot be right to pretend that there were young men enough. Nowhere,perhaps, except at Bar Harbour, is the long-lost balance of thesexes trimmed in New England; and even there the observer, abstractlydelighting in the young girls and their dresses at that grandlove-exchange of Rodick's, must question whether the adjustment isperfectly accurate.

  At Campobello there were not more than half enough young men, and therewas not enough flirtation to affect the prevailing social mood of theplace: an unfevered, expectationless tranquillity, in which to-day islike yesterday, and to-morrow cannot be different. It is a quiet oflight reading, and slowly, brokenly murmured, contented gossip for theladies, of old newspapers and old stories and luxuriously meditatedcigars for the men, with occasional combinations for a steam-launchcruise among the eddies and islands of the nearer waters, or a voyagefurther off in the Bay of Fundy to the Grand Menan, and a return for thelate dinner which marks the high civilisation of Campobello, and thenan evening of more reading and gossip and cigars, while the night windwhistles outside, and the brawl and crash of the balls among the tenpinscomes softened from the distant alleys. There are pleasant walks,which people seldom take, in many directions, and there are drives andbridle-paths all through the dense, sad, Northern woods which stillsavagely clothe the greater part of the island to its furthershores, where there are shelves and plateaus of rock incomparable forpicnicking.

  One need ask nothing better, in fact, than to stroll down the sylvanroad that leads to the Owen, past the little fishing-village with itssheds for curing herring; and the pale blue smoke and appetising savourescaping from them; and past the little chapel with which the oldAdmiral attested his love of the Established rite. On this road you maysometimes meet a little English bishop from the Provinces, in his apronand knee-breeches; and there is a certain bridge over a narrow estuary,where in the shallow land-locked pools of the deeply ebbing tide you maythrow stones at sculpin, and witness the admirable indifference of thosefish to human cruelty and folly. In the middle distance you will seea group of herring weirs, which with their coronals of tufted saplingsform the very most picturesque aspect of any fishing industry. You may,now and then find an artist at this point, who, crouched over his easel,or hers, seems to agree with you about the village and the weirs.

  But Alice Pasmer cared little more for such things than her mother did,and Mrs. Pasmer regarded Nature in all her aspects simply as an adjunctof society, or an occasional feature of the entourage. The girl hadno such worldly feeling about it, but she found slight sympathy in themoods of earth and sky with her peculiar temperament. This temperament,whose recondite origin had almost wholly broken up Mrs. Pasmer's faithin heredity, was like other temperaments, not always in evidence, andAlice was variously regarded as cold, of shy, or proud, or insipid
, bythe various other temperaments brought in contact with her own. Shewas apt to be liked because she was as careful of others as she was ofherself, and she never was childishly greedy about such admiration asshe won, as girls often are, perhaps because she did not care for it.Up to this time it is doubtful if her heart had been touched even by thefancies that shake the surface of the soul of youth, and perhaps it wasfor this reason that her seriousness at first fretted Mrs. Pasmer with avague anxiety for her future.

  Mrs. Pasmer herself remained inalienably Unitarian, but she was aware ofthe prodigious-growth which the Church had been making in society, andwhen Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not atall as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it didnot seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughtershould have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.

  In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several ofthe ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owenchapel--ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits longwidowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies,younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alicewas especially a favourite with the three or four who represented theirclass and condition at the Ty'n-y Coed, and who read the best books readthere, and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreementamong these ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in thetemperaments of the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did notunderstand Alice; but probably there were very few people except herselfwhom Mrs. Pasmer did not understand quite well. She understood theseladies and their compassion for Alice, and she did not in the leastresent it. She was willing that people should like Alice for any reasonthey chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter offutile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and hertrust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at thecult of Alice's friends, as she did at the girl's seriousness, whichalso she felt herself able to keep from going too far.

  While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whateverinspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew upcontemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular andpractical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one ofthose instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observancea strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through thedifference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference betweenidealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-agedBoston women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sadin the beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly ownedthat she had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there,and she knew in a minute she never got those things on this side; herobeisances and genuflections throughout the service, much more profoundand punctilious than those of any one else there, had apparently notprevented her from making a thorough study of Alice's costume and acorrect conjecture as to its authorship.

  Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook,tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given herin christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood,with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have lefther face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose insuddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after gettingover its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave herprofile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with thatnose to be either irresolute or commonplace, and for good or for illMiss Anderson was decided and original. She carried her figure, whichwas no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness;she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies andtangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with toneslike a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of theperfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous,feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.

  She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice atan early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had apatronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herselfless fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping withactualities.

  "I think she's moybid, Alice is," she said. "She isn't moybid in theusual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of thewoyld generally than anybody's going to get out of it. She thinks she'sgoing to get as much as she gives, and that's a great mistake, Mrs.Pasmer," she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letterwhich the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would betiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.

  "Oh yes, I quite agree with you," said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat,and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of MissAnderson's.

  "Now, even at church--she carries the same spirit into the church. Shedoesn't make allowance for human nature, and the church does."

  "Oh, certainly!" Mrs. Pasmer agreed.

  "She isn't like a person that's been brought up in the church. It's morelike the old Puritan spirit.--Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!"

  "Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!" said Mrs.Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to carefor them.

  "I always forget that you're a Bostonian," Miss Anderson apologized.

  "Oh, thank you!" cried Mrs. Pasmer.

  "I'm going to try to make her like other girls," continued MissAnderson.

  "Do," said Alice's mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of theundertaking.

  "If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen anda little under fifty, it would be easier," said Miss Andersonthoughtfully. "But how are you going to make a girl like other girlswhen there are no young men?"

  "That's very true," said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she ofcourse did her best to make impersonal. "Do you think there will bemore, later on?"

  "They will have to Huey up if they are comin'," said Miss Anderson."It's the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week inSeptember."

  "Yes," said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appearedover the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals anddepartures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.

  She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedlythat Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top ofthe broad hotel steps.

  "What is it, Alice?"

  "Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat."

  "Mr. Munt?"

  "Yes." She would not stay for further question.

  Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth tillshe disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat downnear the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging onthe balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of theprecipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with apolite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillfulastonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected tosee, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she waspleased with them, but because she was still more pleased withher daughter's being, after all, like other girls, when it came toessentials.