Suburban Sketches

by William Dean Howells

The Madonna is neighbored by several paintings, if the kind called Grecian for a reason never revealed by the inventor of an art as old as potichomanie itself. It was an art by which ordinary lithographs were given a ghastly transparency, and a tone as disagreeable as chromos; and I doubt if it could have been known to the Greeks in their best age. But I remember very well when it passed over whole neighborhoods in some parts of this country, wasting the time of many young women, and disfiguring parlor walls with the fruit of their accomplishment. It was always taught by Professors, a class of learned young men who acquired their title by abandoning the plough and anvil, and, in a suit of ready-made clothing, travelling about the country with portfolios under their arms. It was an experience to make loafers for life of them: and I fancy the girls who learnt their art never afterwards made so good butter and cheese.

“Non-ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.”

Besides the Grecian paintings there are some mezzotints; full length pictures of presidents and statesmen, chiefly General Jackson, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, which have hung their day in the offices or parlors of country politicians. They are all statesmanlike and presidential in attitude; and I know that if the mighty Webster's lips had language, he would take his hand out of his waistcoat front, and say to his fellow mezzotints: “Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation, bringing your household furniture and miscellaneous trumpery of all kinds with you.”

Some old-fashioned entry lanterns divide my interest with certain old willow chairs of an hour-glass pattern, which never stood upright, probably, and have now all a confirmed droop to one side, as from having been fallen heavily asleep in, upon breezy porches, of hot summer afternoons. In the windows are small vases of alabaster, fly-specked Parian and plaster figures, and dolls with stiff wooden limbs and papier-maché heads, a sort of dolls no longer to be bought in these days of modish, blue-eyed blondes of biscuit and sturdy india-rubber brunettes. The show-case is full of an incredible variety, as photograph albums, fishing-hooks, socks, suspenders, steel pens, cutlery of all sorts, and curious old colored prints of Adelaide, and Kate, and Ellen. A rocking-horse is stabled near amid pendent lengths of second-hand carpeting, hat-racks, and mirrors; and standing cheek-by-jowl with painted washstands and bureaus are some plaster statues, aptly colored and varnished to represent bronze.

There is nothing here but has a marked character of its own, some distinct yet intangible trait acquired from former circumstances; and doubtless all these things have that lurking likeness to former owners which clothes and furniture are apt to take on from long association, and which we should instantly recognize could they be confronted with their late proprietors. It seems, in very imaginative moments, as if the strange assemblage of incongruities must have a consciousness of these latent resemblances, which the individual pieces betray when their present keeper turns the key upon them, and abandons them to themselves at night; and I have sometimes fancied such an effect in the late twilight, when I have wandered into their resting-place, and have beheld them in the unnatural glare of a kerosene lamp burning before a brightly polished reflector, and casting every manner of grotesque shadow upon the floor and walls. But this may have been an illusion; at any rate I am satisfied that the bargain-driving capacity of the storekeeper is not in the least affected by a weird quality in his wares; though they have not failed to impart to him something of their own desultory character. He sometimes leaves a neighbor in charge when he goes to meals, and then, if I enter, I am watchfully followed about from corner to corner, and from room to room, lest I pocket a mattress or slip a book-case under my coat. The storekeeper himself never watches me; perhaps he knows that it is a purely professional interest I take in the collection; that I am in the trade and have a secondhand shop of my own, full of poetical rubbish, and every sort of literary odds and ends, picked up at random, and all cast higgledy-piggledy into the same chaotic receptacle. His customers are as little like ordinary shoppers as he is like common tradesmen. They are in part the Canadians who work in the brickyards, and it is surprising to find how much business can be transacted, and how many sharp bargains struck without the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and they equally wary and equally silent, unswayed by the glib allurements of a salesman, judge of price and quality for themselves, make their solitary offer, and stand or fall by it.

I am seldom able to conclude a pedestrian tour without a glance at the wonderful interior of this cheap store, and I know all its contents familiarly. I recognize wares that have now been on sale there for years; I miss at first glance such accustomed objects as have been parted with between my frequent visits, and hail with pleasure the additions to that extraordinary variety. I can hardly, I suppose, expect the reader to sympathize with the joy I felt the other night, in discovering among the latter an adventurous and universally applicable sign-board advertising This House and Lot for Sale, and, intertwined with the cast-off suspenders which long garlanded a coffee-mill pendent from the roof, a newly added second-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here and there, however, I hope a finer soul will relish, as I do, the poetry of thus buying and offering for sale the very most recondite, as well as the commonest articles of commerce, in the faith that one day the predestined purchaser will appear and carry off the article appointed him from the beginning of time. This faith is all the more touching, because the collector cannot expect to live until the whole stock is disposed of, and because, in the order of nature, much must at last fall to rein unbought, unless the reporter's Devouring Element appears and gives a sudden tragical turn to the poem.

It is the whistle of a train drawing up at the neighboring station that calls me away from the second-hand store; for I never find myself able to resist the hackneyed prodigy of such an arrival. It cannot cease to be impressive. I stand beside the track while the familiar monster writhes up to the station and disgorges its passengers,—suburbanly packaged, and bundled, and bagged, and even when empty-handed somehow proclaiming the jaded character of men that hurry their work all day to catch the evening train out, and their dreams all night to catch the morning train in,—and then I climb the station-stairs, and “hang with grooms and porters on the bridge,” that I may not lose my ever-repeated sensation of having the train pass under my feet, and of seeing it rush away westward to the pretty blue hills beyond,—hills not too big for a man born in a plain-country to love. Twisting and trembling along the track, it dwindles rapidly in the perspective, and is presently out of sight. It has left the city and the suburbs behind, and has sought the woods and meadows; but Nature never in the least accepts it, and rarely makes its path a part of her landscape's loveliness. The train passes alien through all her moods and aspects; the wounds made in her face by the road's sharp cuts and excavations are slowest of all wounds to heal, and the iron rails remain to the last as shackles upon her. Yet when the rails are removed, as has happened with a non-paying track in Charlesbridge, the road inspires a real tenderness in her. Then she bids it take or the grace that belongs to all ruin; the grass creeps stealthily over the scarified sides of the embankments; the golden-rod, and the purple-topped iron-weed, and the lady's-slipper, spring up in the hollows on either side, and—I am still thinking of that deserted railroad which runs through Charlesbridge—hide with their leafage the empty tomato-cans and broken bottles and old boots on the ash-heaps dumped there; Nature sets her velvety willows a waving near, and lower than their airy tops plans a vista of trees arching above the track, which is as wild and pretty and illusive a vista as the sunset ever cared to look through and gild a board fence beyond.

Most of our people come from Boston on the horse-cars, and it is only the dwellers on the Avenue and the neighboring streets whom hurrying homeward I follow away from the steam-car station. The Avenue is our handsomest street; and if it were in the cosmopolitan citizen of Charlesbridge to feel any local interest, I should be proud of it. As matters are, I perceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a pardonable satisfaction, that it is not only handsome, but probably the very dullest street in the world. It is magnificently long and broad, and is flanked nearly the whole way from the station to the colleges by pine palaces rising from spacious lawns, or from the green of trees or the brightness of gardens. The splendor is all very new, but newness is not a fault that much affects architectural beauty, while it is the only one that time is certain to repair: and I find an honest and unceasing pleasure in the graceful lines of those palaces, which is not surpassed even by my appreciation of the vast quiet and monotony of the street itself. Commonly, when I emerge upon it from the grassy-bordered, succory-blossomed walks of Benicia Street, I behold, looking northward, a monumental horse-car standing—it appears for ages, if I wish to take it for Boston—at the head of Pliny Street; and looking southward I see that other emblem of suburban life, an express-wagon, fading rapidly in the distance. Haply the top of a buggy nods round the bend under the elms near the station; and, if fortune is so lavish, a lady appears from a side street, and, while tarrying for the car, thrusts the point of her sun-umbrella into the sandy sidewalk. This is the mid-afternoon effect of the Avenue; but later in the day, and well into the dusk, it remembers its former gayety as a trotting-course,—with here and there a spider-wagon, a twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. On market-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks of bleating sheep, and a pastoral tone is thus given to its tranquillity; anon a herd of beef-cattle appears under the elms; or a drove of pigs, many pausing, inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they were the heirs of prosperity instead of doom, is slowly urged on toward the shambles. In the spring or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enlivened by the progress of a brace or so of students who, in training for one of the University Courses of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestly along the sidewalk, fists up, elbows down, mouths shut, and a sense of immense responsibility visible in their faces.

The summer is waning with the day as I turn from the Avenue into Benicia Street. This is the hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the Tuscan poet says, and, as one may add, the frying grasshopper yields to the shrilly cricket in noisiness. The embrowning air rings with the sad music made by these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the gardens round, and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the spirits not to be accounted for upon the theory that the street is duller than the Avenue, for it really is not so.

Quick now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene!—without their light, the cry of those crickets, dominated for an instant, but not stilled, by the bellowing of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a distant dog, were too much. If it were the last autumn that ever was to be, it could not be heralded with notes of dismaller effect. This is in fact the hour of supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but a newly-accepted lover can be happy at twilight. In the city, even, it is oppressive; in the country it is desolate; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is ever lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet to stir the languid foliage of the sidewalk maples; the lamps are not yet lighted, to take away the gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses near; it is too late for letters, too early for a book. In town your fancy would turn to the theatres; in the country you would occupy yourself with cares of poultry or of stock: in the suburbs you can but sit upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mosquito.