Читать книгу The Wild North Land - William Francis Sir Butler - Страница 7

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Powder versus Primroses.—The American Lounger.—“Home, Sweet Home.”

It was just time to leave London. The elm-trees in the parks were beginning to put forth their earliest and greenest leaves; innumerable people were flocking into town because custom ordained that the country must be quitted when the spring is at its finest; as though the odour of primroses had something pestilential about it, and anything in the shape of violets except violet powder was terribly injurious to feminine beauty.

Youthful cosmopolites with waxed moustaches had apparently decided to compromise with the spring, and to atone for their abandonment of the country by making a miniature flower-garden of their button-holes. It was the last day of April, and ere the summer leaves had yellowed along the edge of the great sub-Arctic forest, my winter hut had to be hewn and built from the pine-logs of the far-distant Saskatchewan.

In the saloon or on the after-deck of a Cunard steamship steering west, one sees perhaps more of America’s lounging class than can be met with on any other spot in the world; the class is a limited one, in fact it may be a matter of dispute, whether the pure and simple lounger, as we know him in Piccadilly or Pall Mall, is to be found in the New World; but a three, or six, or twelve months’ visit to Europe has sufficiently developed the dormant instincts of the class in the New York or Boston man of business, to give colour to the assumption that Columbia possesses a lounger.

It is possible that he is a lounger only for the moment. That one glimpse of Bunker, one echo of Wall Street, will utterly banish for ever the semblance of lounging; but for the present the Great Pyramid minus Bunker’s Hill, the Corso minus Wall Street, have done something towards stamping him with the air and manner of the idler. For the moment he sips his coffee, or throws his cigar-end overboard, with a half-thoughtful, half-blasé air; for the moment he has discovered that the sun does not rise and set exclusively in the United States, and that there were just a few shreds and patches of history in the world prior to the declaration of American independence: still, when the big ship has steamed on into the shallow waters which narrow into Sandy Hook or Plymouth Sound, and the broad panorama twixt Long Island and Staten, or Plymouth and Nahant opens on the view, the old feeling comes back with the old scenes again.

“Sir, the Bay of New York closely resembles the Bay of Naples.” There is not the slightest use in telling him that it is quite as like the Bey of Tunis, or the Hospodar of Bulgaria—so we let it be.

“There, sir, is Bunker’s Hill.”

“Ah, indeed!” drawled a genuine British lounger, with that superb ignorance only to be attained after generations of study, as he quietly scanned the ridge through his lazily-arranged eye-glass. “Bunker—who was Bunker? and what did he do on his hill?”

Yet, ere we hasten away to the North, another word anent our cousin. These things are, after all, the exception; the temptation to tell a good story, or what we may deem such, must not blind us to the truth; the other side of the question must not be forgotten. An English traveller in America will have so much to thank American travel for that he can well afford to smile at such things.

It was an American who painted for us the last scenes of Moorish history, with a colouring as brilliant as that which the Hall of the Lions could boast of in the old days of Grenada’s glory. To-day an American dwelling in Rome recalls for us in marble the fierce voluptuous beauty of the Egyptian Queen. Another catches the colouring of Claude, in his “Twilight in the Wilderness.” And if, as I have somewhere heard, it is to the writer of the ballad-song that true poetic fame belongs, that song which is heard at lonely camp-fires, which is sung by sailors at the wheel as the canvas-clouded ship reels on under the midnight gloom through the tumbling seas,—the song which has reached the heart of a nation, and lives for ever in the memory of a people,—then let us remember, when we listen to those wondrous notes on whose wings float the simple words, “Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home;” let us remember the land whose memory called them forth from the heart of an American exile.

And now we must away.