C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
A Midsummer-Day’s Dream
By William Dean Howells (1837–1920)
T
They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in the train on the thither side of the water.
“Don’t tell me, Basil,” said Isabel, “that Leonard travels fifty miles every day by rail going to and from his work!”
“I must, dearest, if I would be truthful.”
“Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at the South End, aren’t there?” And in agreement upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as well as all acquirable merits, with after-talk that need not be recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country station near which the Leonards dwelt.
I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and they had not met since Isabel’s return from Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease all that she had said in blame of Basil’s conduct during the rupture, and exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit after their marriage. And now that they had come together, their only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which husbands could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend’s joy the sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as their great-grandmothers could have been in the same circumstances, and as I say, shamefully encouraged each other in their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. “Do you really suppose, Basil,” Isabel would say to her oppressor, after having given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon husbands, “that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better and better, just because they’ve got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet”—she put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement little push—“there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the proceedings.”
“Isabel,” said her husband with severity, “this is bridal!”
“No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to the general public. But the application of it is that you must be careful not to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we can be like the Leonards very much sooner than they became so. The great object is not to have any hitchiness; and you know you are provoking—at times.”
They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil happiness by the example and precept of their friends; and the time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperous New-Yorkers who love both the excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction; and everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard’s, inhabited by men like himself, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spend all their working hours in the city and all their smoking and sleeping hours in the country.
The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it come to an end; yet they all resigned themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other result than to detain the travelers into the very heart of the hot weather. In that weather it was easy to do anything that did not require an active effort, and resignation was so natural with the mercury at ninety, that I am not sure but there was something sinful in it.
They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany by the day boat, which was represented to them in every impossible phase. It would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it stopped the heat would be insupportable. Besides, it would bring them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the night there, or push on to Niagara by the night train. “You had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till you reach West Point, and you’ll see all the best scenery. Then you can get a good night’s rest, and start fresh in the morning.” So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have done if they had been advised: “You had better go by the morning boat. It’s deliciously cool, traveling; you see the whole of the river; you reach Albany for supper, and you push through to Niagara that night and are done with it.”
They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat of the country into the heat of the city, where some affairs and pleasures were to employ them till the evening boat should start.
Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat brooded upon them. All abroad burned the fierce white light of the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another; after every station the desperate conductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket, which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the clatter of rails struck through and through the car like a demoniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so close and dead and mixed with the carbonic breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower, and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer, before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the mercury was above ninety; and, exulting with the pride that savages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently they drew near that strange irregular row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York side; and before the boat’s motion ceased the air grew thick and warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the buildings front. Upon this the boat’s passengers issued, passing up through the gangway, on one side of which a throng of return passengers was pent by a gate of iron bars, like a herd of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and according to their different temperaments had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor.
“Now the question is, my dear,” said Basil, when free of the press they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, “whether we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here and be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route we shall have sights and smells which the other can’t offer us, but whichever we take we shall be sorry.”
“Then I say take this,” decided Isabel. “I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms, this weather.”
They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with regard to the whole day’s business, or if she could have given up her plans for it with the same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty; and dutiolatry, as one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Columbus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as ever I came into sight of their granite perch should have turned back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors; and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which had wiselier been left unaccomplished. Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling and calming by the way, until they reached the ticket office on Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed; but it was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,—the spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements and prospering on, with every form of labor and at a terrible cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls, that rankly grow and grow as from his life’s blood, will only lay down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk; the trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on: in all those vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase, packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and unsparing weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.
Their afternoon’s experience was something that Basil and Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vision, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimage through that squalid street by the river-side; where presently they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings (rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories) on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust that the hot breaths of wind caught up and sent swirling into the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of granite bowlders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious, and whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from the car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue quenched themselves in the shade of the cross street. A little strip of shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow. With great bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these spaces, as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before, moved on. They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to be told that people were out, and again that they were in; and they had a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water, and then they came forth again; and evermore
At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a purpose to go down-town again, and of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brown-stone flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets there was seldom a soul to be seen; so that when their ringing at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwards they had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream. They had spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been so little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder might even at that moment be somewhere taking place, and that no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper circumstance; they morbidly wondered what that day’s murder would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the assassin streets by the river-sides,—if indeed it did not befall in some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the master, and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the world.
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size: there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and incidents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was four o’clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about his legs and summoned him to halt. Most of the foot passengers kept to the shady side; and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though there were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul, they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there they showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side, “I can’t stand this much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—” But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied,—though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed; and at last, their own errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it was a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the soda fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary’s hung a thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out, with a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, “Ninety-seven degrees!” Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at the shrine of heat before he tossed off the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their coming they issued through another door upon the side street; each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The group was of a very patient, half frightened, half puzzled looking gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other when the first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as “The Sunstroke” would sell enormously in the hot season. “Better take a little more of that,” the apothecary said, looking up from his prescription, and at the organized sympathy of the seemingly indifferent crowd smiling very kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted something in the glass he held. “Do you still feel like fainting?” asked the humane authority. “Slightly, now and then,” answered the other; “but I’m hanging on hard to the bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel that I’m all right as long as I can see that. The people get rather hazy occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But I don’t know that I look very impressive myself,” he added, in the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Americans in the face of all embarrassments.
“Oh, you’ll do!” the apothecary answered with a laugh; but he said, in answer to an anxious question from the lady, “He mustn’t be moved for an hour yet,” and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband’s skull. Isabel offered her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet; and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door. “What a shocking thing!” she whispered. “Did you see how all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant? It was dreadful. I shouldn’t like to have you sunstruck in New York.”
“That’s very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the crudest place. Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be sure to be. As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give me the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothecary’s was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd may be a little ennuyé of sunstrokes, and to that degree indifferent; but they most likely know that they can only do harm by an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as they have delegated their helpfulness, to the proper authority, and go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn’t know what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so that no breath of air could reach the victim.”
“Maybe so, dear,” said the wife pensively; “but if anything did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spectators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps I’m a little exacting.”
“I think you are. Nothing is so hard as to understand that there are human beings in this world besides one’s self and one’s set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn’t you and I there in the apothecary’s shop, as it might very well be; and let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible midsummer-day’s dream. We must have a carriage,” he added with a tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, “as we ought to have had all day; though I’m not sorry, now the worst’s over, to have seen the worst.”