The American Scene | Page 3

in a house of genial but discriminating
hospitality that opened its doors just where the fiddle-string of
association could most intensely vibrate, just where the sense of "old
New York," of the earlier stages of the picture now so violently
overpainted, found most of its occasions--found them, to extravagance,
within and without. The good easy Square, known in childhood, and as

if the light were yellower there from that small accident, bristled with
reminders as vague as they were sweet; within, especially, the place
was a cool backwater, for time as well as for space; out of the slightly
dim depths of which, at the turn of staircases and from the walls of
communicating rooms, portraits and relics and records, faintly, quaintly
¾sthetic, in intention at least, and discreetly--yet bravely, too, and all
so archaically and pathetically--Bohemian, laid traps, of a pleasantly
primitive order, for memory, for sentiment, for relenting irony; gross
little devices, on the part of the circumscribed past, which appealed
with scarce more emphasis than so many tail-pieces of closed chapters.
The whole impression had fairly a rococo tone; and it was in this
perceptibly golden air, the air of old empty New York afternoons of the
waning summer-time, when the long, the perpendicular rattle, as of
buckets, forever thirsty, in the bottomless well of fortune, almost dies
out in the merciful cross-streets, that the ample rearward loggia of the
Club seemed serenely to hang; the glazed, disglazed, gallery dedicated
to the array of small spread tables for which blank "backs," right and
left and opposite, made a privacy; backs blank with the bold crimson of
the New York house-painter, and playing upon the chord of
remembrance, all so absurdly, with the scarcely less simplified green of
their great cascades of Virginia creeper, as yet unturned: an admonition,
this, for piety, as well as a reminder--since one had somehow failed to
treasure it up--that the rather pettifogging plan of the city, the fruit, on
the spot, of an artless age, happened to leave even so much margin as
that for consoling chances. There were plenty of these--which I perhaps
seem unduly to patronize in speaking of them as only "consoling"--for
many hours to come and while the easy wave that I have mentioned
continued to float me: so abysmal are the resources of the foredoomed
student of manners, or so helpless, at least, his case when once adrift in
that tide.
If in Gramercy Park already, three hours after his arrival, he had felt
himself, this victim, up to his neck in what I have called his "subject,"
the matter was quite beyond calculation by the time he had tumbled, in
such a glorified "four-wheeler," and with such an odd consciousness of
roughness superimposed upon smoothness, far down-town again, and,
on the deck of a shining steamer bound for the Jersey shore, was taking

all the breeze of the Bay. The note of manners, the note that begins to
sound, everywhere, for the spirit newly disembarked, with the first
word exchanged, seemed, on the great clean deck, fairly to vociferate in
the breeze--and not at all, so far, as was pleasant to remark, to the
harshening of that element. Nothing could have been more to the
spectator's purpose, moreover, than the fact he was ready to hail as the
most characteristic in the world, the fact that what surrounded him was
a rare collection of young men of business returning, as the phrase is,
and in the pride of their youth and their might, to their "homes," and
that, if treasures of "type" were not here to be disengaged, the fault
would be all his own.It was perhaps this simple sense of treasure to be
gathered in, it was doubtless this very confidence in the objective
reality of impressions, so that they could deliciously be left to ripen,
like golden apples, on the tree--it was all this that gave a charm to one's
sitting in the orchard, gave a strange and inordinate charm both to the
prospect of the Jersey shore and to every inch of the entertainment, so
divinely inexpensive, by the way. The immense liberality of the Bay,
the noble amplitude of the boat, the great unlocked and tumbled-out
city on one hand, and the low, accessible mystery of the opposite State
on the other, watching any approach, to all appearance, with so gentle
and patient an eye; the gaiety of the light, the gladness of the air, and,
above all (for it most came back to that), the unconscious affluence, the
variety in identity, of the young men of business: these things somehow
left speculation, left curiosity exciting, yet kept it beguilingly safe. And
what shall I say more of all that presently followed than that it
sharpened to the last pleasantness--quite draining it of fears