Volume I Part 7 (1/2)
There is considerable monotony in seaside life, but it is monotony of a different kind from the everyday existence of the rest of the year; and in this complete change its princ.i.p.al charm and benefit consist.
The home-life of a number of households is laid aside for the time, and the heterogeneous elements are thrown for the moment into a larger whole, forming an unstable compound--a salad of humanity where the sweets, the sours, and the bitters find themselves in new combinations with one another, and united for the time in a _sauce piquante_ of fresh air and idleness. There can be no great variety in the occupations; picnics, excursions, drives, rides, walks, form an ever-recurring ditto, to which the unaccustomedness alone gives flavour.
There is rest for the workers, and society for the home-keeping, but genuine delight only for the very young, whose gregarious instincts are still unblunted, and who find in the presence of one another the exhilaration of spreading their callow wings in early flights.
For the mother-birds, however, there is anxiety. In this larger poultry-yard their chicks grow wilder than they have ever known them before. The broods get mixed, and wander into undreamt-of mischief, pullets consorting with c.o.c.kerels of another breed, chickens with ducklings venturing into the water, while Dame Partlet clucks and flutters about, pecking and distracted.
Mrs Naylor sat fidgeting and restless among the matrons who presided over and superintended the enjoyments of their youthful charges. Lucy was causing her anxiety. ”Who was that tall man she was dancing with?--dancing not for the first time or the second, but the third time without a break. And how unnecessarily intimate they appeared!
Could she not fan herself if she felt warm, when they stopped for breath?--instead of letting an awkward stranger raise tempests which were blowing her hair into unsightly confusion, and making her so needlessly conspicuous.” If a gentleman was warranted ”nice,” she did not object to his paying attention to her girls, but she wanted a.s.surance of the niceness. She leant over to the nearest neighbour who seemed at leisure to answer her inquiries, and with whom, being a stranger, she would not compromise herself, whatever might be said.
The neighbour was Miss Maida Springer, a damsel scarcely any longer young, seeing her thirtieth birthday would be her next, who hovered on the confines of the dance, and looked hungrily after young men leading other maidens out, and wondering why no one came for her. She sat under the wing of an elder as lonely as herself--the widow Denwiddie, who varied the sober tenor of her life by spending a fortnight each summer among the gaieties and dissipations by the sea. She was bidding the widow observe things curious in the whirling crowd of dancers as they pa.s.sed.
”See that great thing in pink,” she had said last. ”Positively stout.
And what a colour for a large woman to wear! If it had been black, now, or blue, or even white----” and she glanced down approvingly at her own blue and white washed muslin. ”Just watch the slow revolving heap. Ain't she like an iceberg out at sea, growing pink in the setting sun? And her poor little bit of a partner, racing to get round her on time! My! mustn't he feel warm! He reminds me of an ant trying to carry home a seed of wheat. Why don't he choose a slim one like himself?” and she ran her eye down her own spare form, which was certainly as slim as the absence of superfluous tissue could make it, with spider-like arms and wrists which would not be kept out of sight,--thinking how much freer the gentleman would have felt in the clasp of these slender tendrils.
”Look at that one's feet. Well, I never! What a size! I wonder how she can venture to stand up and dance. Ain't it good for the beetles they ain't none of them here?” and then, by a strange coincidence, a pair of number-one shoes stole out in front to show themselves--things small and narrow, on which it seemed wonderful that a human being could stand. But then a few bones can be packed away in very little room.
”Will you kindly tell me,” asked Mrs Naylor, ”who is that gentleman by the wall, with a lady's fan in his hand?--the one with the limp hair, brushed up so strangely above his forehead.”
”The tall fine man with drab hair? That's Mr Aurelius Sefton of Pugwash--one of the most rising pork-packers in the whole West, they do say.”
”Pugwash? What a name! And pork! That accounts for the sleekness of his hair. Lard--depend upon it.”
”You think the lard has got in his hair? Well, now, ain't you droll!
Perhaps it has. But if lard has got in the hair, they do tell there has money got in the pocket. Do you lumber folks in Canady, now, have chips in your hair--chips and sawdust?”
Mrs Naylor looked dignified, and turned away. The magnates of her country deal in lumber. It is quite a high-cla.s.s pursuit, and not to be spoken of in the same breath with pork--a horrid butcherly business, in which no person of refinement would condescend to make his fortune.
Maida raised her eyebrows, and turned to her friend.
”Ain't we high-strung, just! we aristocrats from Canady? What difference can it make whether it's hogs or logs a man makes his pile by, so long as he makes it? And I guess, if there's been less money made in pork, there's been a sight more lost in lumber. I had a friend once----” and she coloured faintly, looking down, and heaving a sigh so demonstrative that her friend turned and looked at her.
”Yes, my dear?” said the widow, with a droop in her voice in token of sympathy. ”You _had_ a friend? That sounds sad. Whaar did he go to?”
”He went away; and that's why it always seems as if something was catching my breath and making me feel low, whenever lumber is spoken of. _He_ went to Canady in the lumbering interest, because prospects were better there than in old Vermont. He promised to come back when he had made his pile, and I promised to wait. It's nothing so mighty unusual for young folks to do; and it's real feelin' of you to shake your head and look at me like that, Mrs Denwiddie. But don't let folks see you a-doing it; they might wonder.”
”Ah yes!” heaved the widow, in deep sympathy; ”I can understand. It's the tender way us trustin' women always has. We never tell our love, but just let folks think it's a big caterpillar has got in the heart of the cabbage, so to speak; or rather, I should say, liver and dispepsy that's eatin' our young looks away. It's disappinted love, now--is it, my dear--that's wearin' you to a shaddy? I know the feelin' well,” and another sigh undulated her portly figure. ”It's twenty years, come Fall, since I was left a lone woman, and hope has been tellin' me flatterin' tales ever since; but the men are that backward--they just look foolish when I shake their hands friendly-like and invite them to sit a bit, after seein' me home from evenin' meetin'; and away they go, sayin' never a word, and leavin' me with no more appet.i.te for supper than if I'd eaten it a'ready.”
”Do you mean that you would marry again?”
”I would then--and don't you forget it--if ever I get the chance.”
Maida glanced sidewise, and shrank the least bit possible away.
”You think me light-minded now, maybe, my dear? I don't wonder at it.
Them as hain't been married don't know how lonesome it feels to see just the one cup and saucer laid out beside the teapot at mealtimes.”
”There must be memories. It would be sweet, I should have thought, to dwell on the idea that one had gone before, and was waiting across the river to be joined by the old companion.”