YESTERDAY the lady was in her most amiable mood, and we talked together—about Boston, it so happened.
"Do you like Boston?" she asked me.
"Yes," I replied; "I am fond of Boston. It fascinates me."
"But not fonder of it than of Butte, in Montana?"
"Oh, no," said I, hastily. "Butte in Montana is my first love. There are barren mountains there—they are with me always. Boston doesn't go to my heart in the least, but I like it much. I like to live here."
"I am fond of Boston—sometimes," Annabel Lee observed. "Here by the sea it is not quite Boston. It is everything. This sea washes down by enchanted purple islands and touches at the coast of Spain. But if one can but turn one's eyes from it for a moment, Boston is a fine and good thing, and interesting."
"I think it is—from several points of view," I agreed.
"Tell me what you find that interests you in Boston," said my friend Annabel Lee.
"There are many things," I replied. "I have found a little corner down by the East Boston wharf where often I sit on cold days. The sun shines bright and warm on a narrow wooden platform between two great barrels, and I can be hidden there, but I can watch the madding crowd as it goes. The crowd is very madding down around East Boston. And I do not lack company—sometimes brave, sharp-toothed rats venture out on the ground below me. They can not see the madding crowd, but they can enjoy the sunshine and hunt mice among the rubbish.
"The dwellers in East Boston—they are the poor we have always with us. They are not the meek, the worthy, the deserving poor. They are the devilish, the ill-conditioned—one with the wharf rats that hunt for mice. Except that the rats do occasionally try to clean their soft, gray coats by licking them with their little red tongues; whereas, the poor—But why should the poor wash? Are they not the poor?
"As I rest me between my two great barrels and watch this grewsome pageant, I think: It seems a quite desperate thing to be poor in Boston, for Boston is said to be of the best-seasoned knowledge and to carry a lump of ice in its heart. From between my two barrels in East Boston I have seen humanity, oh, so brutal, oh, so barbarous as ever it could have been in merrie England in the reign of good old Harry the Eighth.
"And so then that is very interesting."
"In truth it is so," said my friend Annabel Lee.
"Boston is fair, and very fair.—Tell me more."
"And times," I said, "I sit in one of the window-seats on the stairway of the Public Library. And I look at the walls. A Frenchman with a marvelous fancy and great skill in his finger-ends has worked on those walls. He painted there the emblems of all the world's great material things of all ages. And over them he painted a thin gray veil of those things that are not material, that come from no age, that are with us, around us, above us—as they were with the children of Israel, with the dwellers in Pompeii, with the fair cities of Greece and the inhabitants thereof.
"I have looked at the paintings and I have been dazzled and transported. What is there not upon those walls!
"I have seen, in truth, 'the vision of the world and all the wonder that shall be.'
"I have seen the struggling of the chrysalis-soul and its bursting into light; I have seen the divinity that doth sometime hedge the earth; I have looked at a conception of Poetry and I have heard the thin, rhythmic sounds of shawms and stringed instruments; and I have heard low, voluptuous music from within the temple—human voices like sweet jessamine; I have seen the fascinating idolatry of pagans—and I have seen, pale in the evening by the light of a star, the wooden figure of the Cross; I have leaned over the edge of a chasm and beheld the things of old—the army of Hannibal before Carthage—the Norsemen going down to the sea in ships—the futile, savage fighting of Goths and Vandals; I have seen science and art within the walled cities, and I have seen frail little lambs gamboling by the side of the brook; I have seen night-shades lowering over occult works, and I have seen bees flying heavy-laden to their hives on a fine summer's morning; I have heard a lute played where a tiny cataract leaps, and the pipes of Pan mingled with the bubbling notes of a robin in mint meadows; I have seen pages and pages of printed lines that reach from world's end to world's end; I have seen profound words written centuries ago in inks of many colors; I have seen and been overwhelmed by the marvels of scientific things bristling with the accurate kind of knowledge that I shall never know; withal, I have seen the complete serenity of the world's face, as shown by the brush of the Frenchman Chavannes.
"And over all, the nebulous conception of the long, ignorant silence.
"What is there not upon those wonderful walls!
"I sit in semi-consciousness in the little window-seat and these things swim before my two gray eyes. My mind is full of the vision of murmuring, throbbing life.
"But what a thing is life, truly—for marvelous as are these pictures, those that I have seen, times, down where the rats forage among the rubbish, are more marvelous still."
"Truly," said my friend Annabel Lee, "there is much, much, in Boston. Tell me more."
"Well, and there is the South Station," I went on. "Oh, not until one has ambled and idled away a thousand hours in that place of trains and varied peoples can one know all of what is really to be found within its waiting-rooms.
"I have found Massachusetts there—not any Massachusetts that I had ever read about, but the Massachusetts that comes in from Braintree and Plymouth and Middleboro carrying a Boston shopping-bag; the Massachusetts that is intellectual and thrusts its forefinger through the handle of its tea-cup; the Massachusetts that eats soup from the end of its spoon; the Massachusetts that is good-hearted but walks funny; the Massachusetts that takes all the children and goes down to Providence for a day—each of the children with a thick, yellow banana in its hand; the Massachusetts that has its being because the world wears shoes—for it is intellectual and can make shoes.
"And in the South Station, furthermore, there are people from the wide world around. Actors and authors and artists are to be seen coming in and going out and sitting waiting in the waiting-rooms. Some mightily fine and curious persons have sat waiting in those waiting-rooms, as well as dingy Italians with strings of beads around their necks.
"And in the South Station there are so many, many people, that, once in a long while, one can meet with some of those tiny things that one has waited for for centuries. In among a multitude of faces there may be a young face with lines of worn and vivid life in it, and with alert and much-used eyes, and with soft dull hair above it. In a flash one recognizes it, and in a flash it is gone. It is a face that means beautiful things and one has known it and its divineness a long, long time. And here in the South Station in Boston came the one gold glimpse of it.
"And I have seen in the South Station a strange scene: that of a mild Jew man bearing the brunt of caring for his large family of small children, while their child-weary mother was allowed for once in her life to rest completely, sitting with her eyes closed and her hands folded. She might well rest tranquil in the thought that in giving birth to that small Hebraic army she had done her share of this dubious world's penance.
"And in the South Station, as much as anywhere, one feels the air of Boston.
"The air of Boston, too, is wonderful—and 'tis not free for all to breathe. 'Tis for the anointed—the others must content them with the untinted, unscented air that blows wild from mountain-tops and north seas. But for me, I have eyes wherewith to see—and since the air of Boston has color, I can see it. And I have ears wherewith to hear—and since the air of Boston has musical vibrations, I can hear it. And I have sensibility—wherefore all that is pungent in the air of Boston, and all that is fine, and all that is art, and all that is beautiful, and all that is true, and all that is benign, and particularly all that is very cool and all that is bitterly contemptuous—are not wholly lost upon me.
"If all the persons who go to and fro at the South Station were heroes and breathed the air there and left their dim shadows behind them—as they do—I presume the South Station would be hallowed ground. They all are not heroes, but they breathe the air and leave their dim shadows, whatever they may be, and ever after the air of the South Station is tinctured. And since more than a half of these people are of Boston, the air is tinctured therewith.
"If you are civilized and conventional you may know and breathe this air. If you are not—well, at least you may stand and contemplate it. And always one can bide one's time.
"My contemplation of it has interested me.
"The air of Boston is a mingling of very ancient and very modern things and ways of thinking that are picturesque and at times lead to something. The ancient things date back to Confucius and others of his ilk—and the modern ones are tinted with Lilian Whiting and newspapers and the theater.
"One is half-conscious of this as one contemplates, and one's thought is, 'Woe is me that I have my habitation among the tents of Kedar!' One exclaims this not so much that one considers oneself benighted, but that one is very sure that the air of Boston considers one so. To be sure, it ought to know, but, somehow, as yet one is content to bide one's time.
"But yes. There is a beatified quality in the air of Boston. It is tinted with rose and blue. It sounds, remotely, of chimes and flutes. You feel it, perchance, when you sit within the subdued, brilliant stillness of Trinity church—when you walk among the green and gold fields about Brookline and Cambridge, where orchids are lifting up their pale, soft lips—when you are in the Museum of Fine Arts and see, hanging on the wall, a small dull-toned picture that is old—so old!
"Music is in the air of Boston. It pours into the heart like fire and flood—it awakens the soul from its dreaming—it sends the human being out into the many-colored pathways to see, to suffer, it may be—yes, surely to suffer—but to live, oh, to live!
"One can see in the mists the slender, gray figure of one's own soul rising and going to mingle with all these. In spite of the clouds about it, one knows its going and that it is well. It was long since said: 'My beloved has gone down into her garden to the bed of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.' And now again is the beloved in the garden, and in those moments, oh, life is fair"
My friend Annabel Lee opened her lips—her lips like damp, red quince-blooms in the spring-time—and told me that there were times when I interested her, times when I amused her mightily, and times when in me she made some rare discoveries.
But which of the three this time was, she has not told.