II.
On the following Monday and Tuesday the company appeared for two nights at Detroit,[48] the chief city of Michigan, to large and most friendly audiences. I was in New York at this time, and had arranged to meet Irving, Miss Terry, and a few friends, at Niagara, on Wednesday. “If Abbey is agreeable, I shall give the company a holiday, so that they can go to Niagara,[49] spend the day, and sleep in Toronto at night. It will do us all good.” Abbey was agreeable, and Wednesday, February 20, was one of the most memorable days of the tour.
I travelled from New York by the West Shore road, an admirably equipped railway (and having at Syracuse the most picturesque and one of the finest stations in America), to meet my friends at the Falls. At two o’clock, on Tuesday, I arrived on the Canadian side of the river. The country was covered with snow, but a thaw had set in during the morning. Driving from the railway station the scene was wild, weird, and impressive. The steep banks of the Niagara river were seamed and furrowed with ice and snow. The American side of the ravine was ploughed by the weather into ridges. One might say the river banks were corrugated, cracked, grooved into strange lines, every channel ribbed with ice. Here and there tiny falls, that had mimicked the colossal ones beyond, were frozen into columns. Others had been converted into pillars that seemed to be supporting white, ghost-like figures. Further on there was a cluster of fountains gushing out of the rocks beneath a number of mills, the wheels of which they had turned on their way to the river. These waters leaped down some fifty or sixty feet into great ice-bowls. You would think they had found an outlet other than the river but for its discoloration at the base of the great natural urns, or bowls, into which they fell. There were ponderous heaps of ice at the bed of the American falls. A section of them was literally frozen into a curious mass of icicles. The ice was not bright, but had a dull, woolly appearance. Coming upon the two great falls at a slight bend of the river you see them both at once. On this day they were almost enveloped in spray. Our horses splashed through thawing snow, and picked their way over a road broken up with scoriated ice and flooded with water. A strong, but not a cold, wind blew in our faces, and covered us with spray. The water was pouring down the abyss in greater masses it seemed to me than usual; and this was my third visit to Niagara. I had seen the falls in summer and autumn. Their winter aspect had not the fascinating charm of the softer periods of the year, when the banks are green, and the leaves are rustling on the trees of the islands. The Clifton House was closed. The balconies, upon which merry parties are sitting and chatting in summer evenings, were empty. Even the Prospect House looked chilly. The flood fell into its awful gulf with a dull, thudding boom, and the rapids above were white and angry.
I wondered what Irving would think of the scene. Some people profess that they are disappointed with the first sight of Niagara. There are also people who look upon the ocean without surprise; and some who see the curtain go up on a great play, or a grand opera, for the first time in their lives, without experiencing one throb of the sensation which Bulwer, in one of his novels, describes with pathetic eloquence. The Rev. Dr. Thomas, a popular preacher in the Prairie city, went to his first play while Irving was at Chicago, and was greatly impressed; although he half confessed that, on the whole, he liked a good lecture quite as well. A colored man and his wife, at Philadelphia, told me they had always considered the play wicked, and would never have thought to go to a theatre had not one of their clergymen done so. “But,” said the husband, “I see noffin’ wicked nor wrong, and it did my heart good to see all dem white folk bowing to de colored gentleman and making much of him.” It was the casket scene in “The Merchant” that had most delighted these people.
Almost the first thing I did on arriving at Niagara was to send Irving a telegram, asking if he had settled where to stay, advising him that for a brief visit the Prospect House was most conveniently placed for seeing the falls. My response was a request for rooms. This was followed by an inquiry if the house could provide a dinner for seventy; and from that moment I found myself actively engaged, not in reviving my former recollections of Niagara, but in preparing to receive the Irving Company. The landlord of the Prospect House is a land-owner in Manitoba. He was looking after his interests in those distant regions. The landlady, a bright, clever woman of business, however, undertook to “run the dinner.”
“The house is partially closed, as you know,” she said, “and it is small. We have only a few servants during the winter, and it is difficult to get provisions at short notice. But we have the Western Union telegraph in the house, and a telephone. We will do our best.”
The intelligent colored waiter found it impossible to seat seventy persons in the dining-room.
“They must dine at twice,” he said; “that’s the only chance; no help for it.”
It was night before the order for dinner was really closed and settled, many telegrams passing between Detroit and Niagara; and, as I found to my consternation, between Niagara and many adjacent towns.
“Not a turkey nor a chicken to be got for love or money,” said the landlady. “I have telegraphed and telephoned the whole neighborhood,—just going to try Buffalo, as a last resort. You see the hotels here are closed, and it is very quiet in the winter.”
“As good a dinner as can be provided,” was one of Stoker’s latest telegrams, “and it must be ready at half-past three to the minute.”
The excitement at the Prospect House was tremendous. The falls were quite discounted. They were of no moment for the time being, compared with the question of turkeys and the seating of the coming guests.
“You have beef, mutton, ham, you say?”
“Yes, and we can make some excellent soup,—a nice lot of fish has come in from Toronto, lake fish,—but turkeys, no; chickens, no; though I have telegraphed everywhere and offered any price for them. Ah, if we had only known two days ago!” said the landlady.
“Never mind, let it be a plain English dinner, horseradish sauce with the beef,—can you manage that?”
“Yes! Oh, yes!”
“And boiled legs of mutton, eh?”
“Yes, with caper-sauce.”
“Capital. And what do you say to plum-pudding?”
“I fear there will not be time to stone the raisins; but I’ll telephone into the town at once and see.”
While she was gone I surveyed the dining-room once more. “If you moved the stove, and placed forms against the walls, instead of chairs, how would that be?” I asked.
It was a great problem, this. My colored ally and his two assistants set to measuring with a foot-rule. They had their woolly heads together when I looked in upon them an hour later.
“Yes, I believe it can be done,” said the chief waiter; and before midnight the tables were arranged, the stove cleared out, and the room almost ready for the feasters. As he was leaving for the night he said, “The people of my race honor Mr. Irving. He knew our great actor, Ira Aldridge. There was a letter from Mr. Irving about him, and a Dramatic Club started by our folk in the New York papers. Rely on me, sir, to have this dinner a success.”[50]