The merits of the different pensions also formed a subject of vital interest. The advantages and disadvantages of these rival establishments were, as a topic, never exhausted. Madame une telle gave five o’clock tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her rival gave one more meat course at dinner and her coffee was certainly better, while a third undoubtedly had a nicer set of people. No one here at home can realize the importance these matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles. Their slender incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain of even this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra franc a day becomes a serious consideration.
Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or with serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or a son to put into business), would break away from its somnolent surroundings and re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope and fear. It is here that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van Winkles. They find their native cities changed beyond recognition. (For we move fast in these days.) The mother gets out her visiting list of ten years before and is thunderstruck to find that it contains chiefly names of the “dead, the divorced, and defaulted.” The waves of a decade have washed over her place and the world she once belonged to knows her no more. The leaders of her day on whose aid she counted have retired from the fray. Younger, and alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner tables where before she had found only friends. After a feeble little struggle to get again into the “swim,” the family drifts back across the ocean into the quiet back water of a continental town, and goes circling around with the other twigs and dry leaves, moral flotsam and jetsam, thrown aside by the great rush of the outside world.
For the parents the life is not too sad. They have had their day, and are, perhaps, a little glad in their hearts of a quiet old age, away from the heat and sweat of the battle; but for the younger generation it is annihilation. Each year their circle grows smaller. Death takes away one member after another of the family, until one is left alone in a foreign land with no ties around her, or with her far-away “home,” the latter more a name now than a reality.
A year or two ago I was taking luncheon with our consul at his primitive villa, an hour’s ride from the city of Tangier, a ride made on donkey-back, as no roads exist in that sunny land. After our coffee and cigars, he took me a half-hour’s walk into the wilderness around him to call on his nearest neighbors, whose mode of existence seemed a source of anxiety to him. I found myself in the presence of two American ladies, the younger being certainly not less than seventy-five. To my astonishment I found they had been living there some thirty years, since the death of their parents, in an isolation and remoteness impossible to describe, in an Arab house, with native servants, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” Yet these ladies had names well known in New York fifty years ago.
The glimpse I had of their existence made me thoughtful as I rode home in the twilight, across a suburb none too safe for strangers. What had the future in store for those two? Or, worse still, for the survivor of those two? In contrast, I saw a certain humble “home” far away in America, where two old ladies were ending their lives surrounded by loving friends and relations, honored and cherished and guarded tenderly from the rude world.
In big cities like Paris and Rome there is another class of the expatriated, the wealthy who have left their homes in a moment of pique after the failure of some social or political ambition; and who find in these centres the recognition refused them at home and for which their souls thirsted.
It is not to these I refer, although it is curious to see a group of people living for years in a country of which they, half the time, do not speak the language (beyond the necessities of housekeeping and shopping), knowing but few of its inhabitants, and seeing none of the society of the place, their acquaintance rarely going beyond that equivocal, hybrid class that surrounds rich “strangers” and hangs on to the outer edge of the grand monde. One feels for this latter class merely contempt, but one’s pity is reserved for the former. What object lessons some lives on the Continent would be to impatient souls at home, who feel discontented with their surroundings, and anxious to break away and wander abroad! Let them think twice before they cut the thousand ties it has taken a lifetime to form. Better monotony at your own fireside, my friends, where at the worst, you are known and have your place, no matter how small, than an old age among strangers.
No. 12—“Seven Ages” of Furniture
The progress through life of active-minded Americans is apt to be a series of transformations. At each succeeding phase of mental development, an old skin drops from their growing intelligence, and they assimilate the ideas and tastes of their new condition, with a facility and completeness unknown to other nations.
One series of metamorphoses particularly amusing to watch is, that of an observant, receptive daughter of Uncle Sam who, aided and followed (at a distance) by an adoring husband, gradually develops her excellent brain, and rises through fathoms of self-culture and purblind experiment, to the surface of dilettantism and connoisseurship. One can generally detect the exact stage of evolution such a lady has reached by the bent of her conversation, the books she is reading, and, last but not least, by her material surroundings; no outward and visible signs reflecting inward and spiritual grace so clearly as the objects people collect around them for the adornment of their rooms, or the way in which those rooms are decorated.