The Entire March Family Trilogy

by William Dean Howells

There had been rain in the night; the air war full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twittering birds. Presently they came to a bench set in a corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vista of sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam of the foaming river beyond. As they sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their courtship, began to recite a poem. It was one which had been haunting him since his first sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart in his youth—the rhyme of some poor newspaper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clipping his name from the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil's memory, rather from the interest of the awful fact it recorded, than from any merit of its own; and now he recalled it with a distinctness that surprised him.

AVERY.
I.
All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore, Heard, or
seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar, Out of the hell of the
rapids as 'twere a lost soul's cries Heard and could not believe; and
the morning mocked their eyes, Showing where wildest and fiercest the
waters leaped up and ran Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught Fast
in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught. Was it a life,
could it be, to yon slender hope that clung Shrill, above all the tumult
the answering terror rang.
II.
Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned, Over the
rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound, And the long, fateful
hours of the morning have wasted soon, As it had been in some blessed
trance, and now it is noon. Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it
strong and stanch, And to the lines and the treacherous rocks look well
as you launch Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprent
sides, Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides, Onward
rushes the raft, with many a lurch and leap,—Lord! if it strike him
loose from the hold he scarce can keep! No! through all peril unharmed,
it reaches him harmless at least, And to its proven strength he lashes
his weakness fast. Now, for the shore! But steady, steady, my men, and
slow; Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so, let her go!
Thronging the shores around stands the pitying multitude; Wan as his
own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to brood Heavy upon them,
and heavy the silence hangs on all, Save for the rapids' plunge, and the
thunder of the fall. But on a sudden thrills from the people still
and pale, Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail Caught on a
lurking point of rock it sways and swings, Sport of the pitiless waters,
the raft to which he clings.
III.
All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways; And on the shore the
crowd lifts up its hands and prays: Lifts to heaven and wrings the hands
so helpless to save, Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock and
the ways Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife
Straggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life, Tugging
at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon. Priceless second by
second, so wastes the afternoon. And it is sunset now; and another boat
and the last Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely
passed.
IV.
Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay
Maddening against the gate that is locked athwart his way. “No! we keep
the bridge for them that can help him. You, Tell us, who are you?” “His
brother!” “God help you both! Pass through.” Wild, with wide arms of
imploring he calls aloud to him, Unto the face of his brother, scarce
seen in the distance dim; But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering
words are lost As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed.
And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope Holding him
to the raft, and rise secure in his hope; Sees all as in a dream the
terrible pageantry, Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds
flying free; Sees, then, the form—that, spent with effort and fasting
and fear, Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so
near, Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and
hurled Headlong on to the cataract's brink, and out of the world.

“O Basil!” said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking the hush that best praised the unknown poet's skill, “it isn't true, is it?”

“Every word, almost, even to the brother's coming at the last moment. It's a very well-known incident,” he added, and I am sure the reader whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly every point of interest about the place has killed its man, and there might well be a deeper stain of crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching the falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy as the lightest-hearted tourist could desire. The abominable savages, revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these squalid devil-worshippers; the French planting the fort that yet guards the mouth of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole Niagara country; the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of France and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon the American settlements in the Revolution by the savages who prepared their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of the fall; the savage forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and the blazing villages on either shore in the War of 1812,—these are the memories of the place, the links in a chain of tragical interest scarcely broken before our time since the white man first beheld the mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect as Basil, in the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories,—those precious books that make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom,—and then, lacking this light, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power; only they refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of the new temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands every year. The shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should also abound in them; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of interest and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing arms and their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the island, and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran smooth before breaking into the rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground of every famous American landscape; and when I think of the amount of public love-making in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth century is the golden age, and that we want very little of being a nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or rather of people whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges connect them now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded from exploring them. It wants no courage to do this, but merely submission to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward than the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no human being had perhaps set foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge with a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence, through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the heaving and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which at every instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil another revelation of character. Without the slightest warning she sank down at the root of a tree, and said, with serious composure, that she could never go back on those bridges; they were not safe. He stared at her cowering form in blank amaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Then it occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and he said, “Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat.”

“O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!” implored Isabel. “You see yourself the bridges are not safe. Do get a boat.”