Seven English Cities

by William Dean Howells

VI

Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but, when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end of it was a famous city gate—Bootham Bar, namely—with a practicable portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into “the chamber over the gate,” where it was once worked, and whence its lower beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and Bootham Bar is never closed.

The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair, and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys, with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque, into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down, perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise, I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.

There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores, newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and there was one united florist’s and fruiterer’s which I particularly liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence, as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, “Ah, the Americans are clever people.” Then he added, “I hope you won’t mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are rather harder than our English ladies, sir.”

“Yes,” I eagerly assented. “How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?”

“Well, not just that, sir.”

“More practical? More business-like?” I pursued.

“Well, I shouldn’t like to say that, sir. But—they seem rather harder, sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather harder, sir.”

We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty, and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their advantage with the summer hardness of our women.