Suburban Sketches

by William Dean Howells

Perhaps when the ladies come to vote, they will abate, with other nuisances, the whole business of overloaded public conveyances. In the mean time the kindness of women to each other is a notable feature of all horse-car journeys. It is touching to see the smiling eagerness with which the poor things gather close their volumed skirts and make room for a weary sister, the tender looks of compassion which they bend upon the sufferers obliged to stand, the sweetness with which they rise, if they are young and strong, to offer their place to any infirm or heavily burdened person of their sex.

But a journey to Boston is not entirely an experience of bitterness. On the contrary, there are many things besides the mutual amiability of these beautiful martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A whole car-full of people, brought into the closest contact with one another, yet in the absence of introductions never exchanging a word, each being so sufficient to himself as to need no social stimulus whatever, is certainly an impressive and stately spectacle. It is a beautiful day, say; but far be it from me to intimate as much to my neighbor, who plainly would rather die than thus commit himself with me, and who, in fact, would well-nigh strike me speechless with surprise if he did so. If there is any necessity for communication, as with the conductor, we essay first to express ourselves by gesture, and then utter our desires with a certain hollow and remote effect, which is not otherwise to be described. I have sometimes tried to speak above my breath, when, being about to leave the car, I have made a virtue of offering my place to the prettiest young woman standing, but I have found it impossible; the genius loci, whatever it was, suppressed me, and I have gasped out my sham politeness as in a courteous nightmare. The silencing influence is quite successfully resisted by none but the tipsy people who occasionally ride out with us, and call up a smile, sad as a gleam of winter sunshine, to our faces by their artless prattle. I remember one eventful afternoon that we were all but moved to laughter by the gayeties of such a one, who, even after he had ceased to talk, continued to amuse us by falling asleep, and reposing himself against the shoulder of the lady next him. Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of the agreeable variety they contribute to horse-car life, that the conductor treats his inebriate passengers with such unfailing tenderness and forbearance. I have never seen them molested, though I have noticed them in the indulgence of many eccentricities, and happened once even to see one of them sit down in a lady's lap. But that was on the night of Saint Patrick's day. Generally all avoidable indecorums are rare in the horse-cars, though during the late forenoon and early afternoon, in the period of lighter travel, I have found curious figures there:—among others, two old women, in the old-clothes business, one of whom was dressed, not very fortunately, in a gown with short sleeves, and inferentially a low neck; a mender of umbrellas, with many unwholesome whity-brown wrecks of umbrellas about him; a peddler of soap, who offered cakes of it to his fellow-passengers at a discount, apparently for friendship's sake; and a certain gentleman with a pock-marked face, and a beard dyed an unscrupulous purple, who sang himself a hymn all the way to Boston, and who gave me no sufficient reason for thinking him a sea-captain. Not far from the end of the Long Bridge, there is apt to be a number of colored ladies waiting to get into the car, or to get out of it,—usually one solemn mother in Ethiopia, and two or three mirthful daughters, who find it hard to suppress a sense of adventure, and to keep in the laughter that struggles out through their glittering teeth and eyes, and who place each other at a disadvantage by divers accidental and intentional bumps and blows. If they are to get out, the old lady is not certain of the place where, and, after making the car stop, and parleying with the conductor, returns to her seat, and is mutely held up to public scorn by one taciturn wink of the conductor's eye.

Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to note one so common and observable as that middle-aged lady who gets aboard and will not see the one vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door, blind and deaf to all the modest beckonings and benevolent gasps of her fellow-passengers. An air as of better days clings about her; she seems a person who has known sickness and sorrow; but so far from pitying her, you view her with inexpressible rancor, for it is plain that she ought to sit down, and that she will not. But for a point of honor the conductor would show her the vacant place; this forbidding, however, how can he? There she stands and sniffs drearily when you glance at her, as you must from time to time, and no wild turkey caught in a trap was ever more incapable of looking down than this middle-aged (shall I say also unmarried?) lady.

Of course every one knows the ladies and gentlemen who sit cater-cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practically sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by having your knee under him. He implies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up more space than belongs to you, and that you are justly made an example of.

I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse-car an advocate of one of the great reforms of the day. He held a green bag upon his knees, and without any notice passed from a question of crops to a discussion of suffrage for the negro, and so to womanhood suffrage. “Let the women vote,” said he,—“let 'em vote if they want to. I don't care. Fact is, I should like to see 'em do it the first time. They're excitable, you know; they're excitable;” and he enforced his analysis of female character by thrusting his elbow sharply into my side. “Now, there's my wife; I'd like to see her vote. Be fun, I tell you. And the girls,—Lord, the girls! Circus wouldn't be anywhere.” Enchanted with the picture which he appeared to have conjured up for himself, he laughed with the utmost relish, and then patting the green bag in his lap, which plainly contained a violin, “You see,” he went on, “I go out playing for dancing-parties. Work all day at my trade,—I'm a carpenter,—and play in the evening. Take my little old ten dollars a night. And I notice the women a good deal; and I tell you they're all excitable, and I sh'd like to see 'em vote. Vote right and vote often,—that's the ticket, eh?” This friend of womanhood suffrage—whose attitude of curiosity and expectation seemed to me representative of that of a great many thinkers on the subject—no doubt was otherwise a reformer, and held that the coming man would not drink wine—if he could find whiskey. At least I should have said so, guessing from the odors he breathed along with his liberal sentiments.

Something of the character of a college-town is observable nearly always in the presence of the students, who confound certain traditional ideas of students by their quietude of costume and manner, and whom Padua or Heidelberg would hardly know, but who nevertheless betray that they are banded to—

“Scorn delights and live laborious days,”

by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a clannishness of cane or scarf, or a talk of boats and base-ball held among themselves. One cannot see them without pleasure and kindness; and it is no wonder that their young-lady acquaintances brighten so to recognize them on the horse-cars. There is much good fortune in the world, but none better than being an undergraduate twenty years old, hale, handsome, fashionably dressed, with the whole promise of life before: it's a state of things to disarm even envy. With so much youth forever in her heart, it must be hard for our Charlesbridge to grow old: the generations arise and pass away but in her veins is still this tide of warm blood, century in and century out, so much the same from one age to another that it would be hardy to say it was not still one youthfulness. There is a print of the village as it was a cycle since, showing the oldest of the college buildings and upon the street in front a scholar in his scholar's-cap and gown, giving his arm to a very stylish girl of that period, who is dressed wonderfully like the girl of ours, so that but for the student's antique formality of costume, one might believe that he was handing her out to take the horse-car. There is no horse-car in the picture,—that is the only real difference between then and now in our Charlesbridge, perennially young and gay. Have there not ever been here the same grand ambitions, the same high hopes,—and is not the unbroken succession of youth in these?

As for other life on the horse-car, it shows to little or no effect, as I have said. You can, of course, detect certain classes; as, in the morning the business-men going in, to their counters or their desks, and in the afternoon the shoppers coming out, laden with paper parcels. But I think no one can truly claim to know the regular from the occasional passengers by any greater cheerfulness in the faces of the latter. The horse-car will suffer no such inequality as this, but reduces us all to the same level of melancholy. It would be but a very unworthy kind of art which should seek to describe people by such merely external traits as a habit of carrying baskets or large travelling-bags in the car; and the present muse scorns it, but is not above speaking of the frequent presence of those lovely young girls in which Boston and the suburban towns abound, and who, whether they appear with rolls of music in their hands, or books from the circulating-libraries, or pretty parcels or hand-bags, would brighten even the horse-car if fresh young looks and gay and brilliant costumes could do so much. But they only add perplexity to the anomaly, which was already sufficiently trying with its contrasts of splendor and shabbiness, and such intimate association of velvets and patches as you see in the churches of Catholic countries, but nowhere else in the world except in our “coaches of the sovereign people.”

In winter, the journey to or from Boston cannot appear otherwise than very dreary to the fondest imagination. Coming out, nothing can look more arctic and forlorn than the river, double-shrouded in ice and snow, or sadder than the contrast offered to the same prospect in summer. Then all is laughing, and it is a joy in every nerve to ride out over the Long Bridge at high tide, and, looking southward, to see the wide crinkle and glitter of that beautiful expanse of water, which laps on one hand the granite quays of the city, and on the other washes among the reeds and wild grasses of the salt-meadows. A ship coming slowly up the channel, or a dingy tug violently darting athwart it, gives an additional pleasure to the eye, and adds something dreamy or vivid to the beauty of the scene. It is hard to say at what hour of the summer's-day the prospect is loveliest; and I am certainly not going to speak of the sunset as the least of its delights. When this exquisite spectacle is presented, the horse-car passenger, happy to cling with one foot to the rear platform-steps, looks out over the shoulder next him into fairy-land. Crimson and purple the bay stretches westward till its waves darken into the grassy levels, where, here and there, a hay-rick shows perfectly black against the light. Afar off, southeastward and westward, the uplands wear a tinge of tenderest blue; and in the nearer distance, on the low shores of the river, hover the white plumes of arriving and departing trains. The windows of the stately houses that overlook the water take the sunset from it evanescently, and begin to chill and darken before the crimson burns out of the sky. The windows are, in fact, best after nightfall, when they are brilliantly lighted from within; and when, if it is a dark, warm night, and the briny fragrance comes up strong from the falling tide, the lights reflected far down in the still water, bring a dream, as I have heard travelled Bostonians say, of Venice and her magical effects in the same kind. But for me the beauty of the scene needs the help of no such association; I am content with it for what it is. I enjoy also the hints of spring which one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide in the first open days. Then there is not only a vernal beating of carpets on the piers of the drawbridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the receding water show green patches of sea-weeds and mosses, and flatter the willing eye with a dim hint of summer. This reeking and saturated herbage—which always seems to me, in contrast with dry land growths, what the water-logged life of seafaring folk is to that which we happier men lead on shore,—taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and brightness of the sun, has then a charm which it loses when summer really comes; nor does one, later, have so keen an interest in the men wading about in the shallows below the bridge, who, as in the distance they stoop over to gather whatever shell-fish they seek, make a very fair show of being some ungainlier sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come to the spring-prophesying storks of song and story. A sentiment of the drowsiness that goes before the awakening of the year, and is so different from the drowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber, is in the air, but is gone when we leave the river behind, and strike into the straggling village beyond.