Читать книгу Their Pilgrimage - Charles Dudley Warner - Страница 14

And a city it is. If many houses, endless avenues, sand, paint, make a city, the artist confessed that this was one. Everything is on a large scale. It covers a large territory, the streets run at right angles, the avenues to the ocean take the names of the states. If the town had been made to order and sawed out by one man, it could not be more beautifully regular and more satisfactorily monotonous. There is nothing about it to give the most commonplace mind in the world a throb of disturbance. The hotels, the cheap shops, the cottages, are all of wood, and, with three or four exceptions in the thousands, they are all practically alike, all ornamented with scroll-work, as if cut out by the jig-saw, all vividly painted, all appealing to a primitive taste just awakening to the appreciation of the gaudy chromo and the illuminated and consoling household motto. Most of the hotels are in the town, at considerable distance from the ocean, and the majestic old sea, which can be monotonous but never vulgar, is barricaded from the town by five or six miles of stark-naked plank walk, rows on rows of bath closets, leagues of flimsy carpentry-work, in the way of cheap-John shops, tin-type booths, peep-shows, go-rounds, shooting-galleries, pop-beer and cigar shops, restaurants, barber shops, photograph galleries, summer theatres. Sometimes the plank walk runs for a mile or two, on its piles, between rows of these shops and booths, and again it drops off down by the waves. Here and there is a gayly-painted wooden canopy by the shore, with chairs where idlers can sit and watch the frolicking in the water, or a space railed off, where the select of the hotels lie or lounge in the sand under red umbrellas. The calculating mind wonders how many million feet of lumber there are in this unpicturesque barricade, and what gigantic forests have fallen to make this timber front to the sea. But there is one thing man cannot do. He has made this show to suit himself, he has pushed out several iron piers into the sea, and erected, of course, a skating rink on the end of one of them. But the sea itself, untamed, restless, shining, dancing, raging, rolls in from the southward, tossing the white sails on its vast expanse, green, blue, leaden, white-capped, many-colored, never two minutes the same, sounding with its eternal voice I knew not what rebuke to man.

When Mr. King wrote his and his friend's name in the book at the Mansion House, he had the curiosity to turn over the leaves, and it was not with much surprise that he read there the names of A. J. Benson, wife, and daughter, Cyrusville, Ohio.

“Oh, I see!” said the artist; “you came down here to see Mr. Benson!”

That gentleman was presently discovered tilted back in a chair on the piazza, gazing vacantly into the vacant street with that air of endurance that fathers of families put on at such resorts. But he brightened up when Mr. King made himself known.

“I'm right glad to see you, sir. And my wife and daughter will be. I was saying to my wife yesterday that I couldn't stand this sort of thing much longer.”

“You don't find it lively?”

“Well, the livelier it is the less I shall like it, I reckon. The town is well enough. It's one of the smartest places on the coast. I should like to have owned the ground and sold out and retired. This sand is all gold. They say they sell the lots by the bushel and count every sand. You can see what it is, boards and paint and sand. Fine houses, too; miles of them.”

“And what do you do?”

“Oh, they say there's plenty to do. You can ride around in the sand; you can wade in it if you want to, and go down to the beach and walk up and down the plank walk—walk up and down—walk up and down. They like it. You can't bathe yet without getting pneumonia. They have gone there now. Irene goes because she says she can't stand the gayety of the parlor.”

From the parlor came the sound of music. A young girl who had the air of not being afraid of a public parlor was drumming out waltzes on the piano, more for the entertainment of herself than of the half-dozen ladies who yawned over their worsted-work. As she brought her piece to an end with a bang, a pretty, sentimental miss with a novel in her hand, who may not have seen Mr. King looking in at the door, ran over to the player and gave her a hug. “That's beautiful! that's perfectly lovely, Mamie!”—“This,” said the player, taking up another sheet, “has not been played much in New York.” Probably not, in that style, thought Mr. King, as the girl clattered through it.