Chapter IX

Want and fine lines come together to supply! In less than a week we heard from Aunt Kate. It had been a fairly prosperous year at Flowerfield. Major Dallas, Aunt Kate, John, and Miriam were going to the Centennial--and they wanted me to go with them. Uncle John would give me the trip. We were going in two weeks. We might be away a month, even longer. We would stop in Washington on the way to Philadelphia. There was a possibility of New York beyond Philadelphia. There was--there was--just a possibility of Niagara Falls.

How slowly went by those two weeks!

They passed. I went to Flowerfield; we started from there. I see us now, at the railroad station, in the county town. Look at 1876 pictures to see the type of clothes we wore, we who would not be too far behind Fashion, but who certainly walked in her rear. But Major Dallas would have rested, no matter what he wore, a big, magnetic man, able, and very kind. Aunt Kate had a slight, small body, but a big--oh! a big--nature. John and Miriam and I stood in a brown study waiting for the train to come. I remember how the day was sunny, but not heated. John was fifteen. Miriam a little under, I a little over, fourteen.

The train came--we were aboard with our ancient satchels, our unfashionable umbrellas and baskets. Began our wonder-trip to the Centennial Exhibition.

Virginia scenery was good, was desirable, but the love of our life, for Miriam, John, and me, was getting out of Virginia. We had never been out of Virginia. The long miles, the quite a number of hours that must be overpassed before we entered the District of Columbia, rather appalled us. But then the journey, even through Virginia, grew interesting. John and I sat together, Miriam had the seat across the aisle. The train that day was not filled; we could move about, exchange. Uncle John and Aunt Kate were lovely persons with whom to travel. When the boy came through with fruit we had fruit. When he brought magazines Uncle John bought our choice for each of us. We were traveling finely, _comme il faut_, with the bloom on the event.

Miriam wore a blue-green poplin, with an embroidered tie at the throat. She had a small round hat of straw, colored like the dress, with a wreath of cornflowers. She was dark and slight and straight, with strange, deep eyes, and a smile that was like a different dawn each time it came.

In the late afternoon we approached the confines of Virginia. At Alexandria we began to thrill. Now the Potomac River, great and wide, with some little boats upon it. Now the Virginia shore behind us. Now before us Washington.... "Look, children! There's the dome of the Capitol!"

Ours was an old hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where we had three rooms, and outside the long windows a narrow, ironwork balcony. Standing here we saw, we felt, a sycamore-tree, a languorous, summer air, warmer than in our part of Virginia where we lived well above the sea, a pearly twilight, and out of it the gas street-lights springing--then, with a white flash, an arc-light. That was an amazement to more than us that summer! Electric light! I remember first reading this year a phrase that was beginning to come in like a star in bright twilight, seen and not seen and then again seen, "The Age of Electricity." ... We young folk leaned upon the balcony rail. How wide was Pennsylvania Avenue--much wider than Richmond streets--and how long and how straight! We might also have said, in 1876, what strange, shabby buildings line much of it!

But we are in glamour. The All of it was all right. All right is, presently, the hotel dinner instead of the supper familiar to us. All right is the walk before bedtime that we take with Uncle John and Aunt Kate. We walk to the Capitol. By the happiest circumstance there hangs in the sky a full, a golden moon. With that and with the street-lights we might see the faces of the pedestrians whom we passed or overtook or accompanied. We liked the sound of the many feet upon the pavement. Some seemed to say, "We live in this happy place." Some said, "We are travelers like you; we are going to the Centennial!"

Now we saw the Capitol. We were in its grounds. We stood still, we travelers from Virginia, and gazed and gazed upon the moonlighted, white mountain with the rounded crest. It swam upon us in a beauty that was pain. Oh, all ye symbols, belting us like a Zodiac, three dimensional mother-language, thick with visions....

We found a bench and sat down. Major Dallas spoke. "I don't suppose that there have been many periods more politically corrupt than the one we're in. Financially corrupt, too. There's rottenness. The sign of hope is that we smell it, we see it, and are beginning to be ashamed of it. I think we'll have a house-cleaning. But it's going to be hard to get the especial stain off these years.... Well! And still, Kate, there's the White Capitol!"

It seemed lambent there before us. It grew more and more beautiful. I heard Miriam sigh with delight.

We went back to the hotel. Oh, the compounded taste, the long, twisted romance and adventure of the hostel, inn, tavern, hotel! Miriam, John, and I, I know, _contacted_ many an inn beside this one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

We slept and woke to strong enchantment still. We stayed in Washington four days. And here we went and there we went, and we returned thrice to the Capitol. We went, upon a river boat, down to Mount Vernon. "Now I feel at home!" said Aunt Kate, and laughed. "That is, I feel more at home."

But Miriam and John and I were where the novel was to us home.... We loved the Capitol, and we loved the balcony before our rooms at that hotel.... Four days, and we went to the great Centennial Exhibition.

I have seen world's fairs since, but beside them always comes up 1876 in Philadelphia, so small in comparison, but to the child-country so full of taste, so vivid, so sonorous, so remarkable! We from Virginia had a new pleasant tavern to dwell in and a new city to see. We stood in Independence Hall before the cracked bell. "Shut your eyes!" said Miriam. "Close the crack---lift the bell. Now it's up in the steeple! It's whole--it's ringing--ringing!"

We see Philadelphia. We see the great Exposition of the country and its products, of other nations and their products. All is so novel--and yet is it so? Or is it familiarity in perspective that makes it so rich, so entertaining? Old fairs, great markets, medieval, ancient, further-than-ancient, seem involved in, floating in, the present. Always nation and product have gathered to look at, value, exchange with, nation and product.... The Chinese and Japanese greatly please us; the Swiss, the Italians. Look at the glass-blowers! The iridescent shapes form, drop from the blower's pipe.

Alike the Occident and the Orient please us.

We went to see the great machinery in which the West, and especially our own country, excelled. I do not remember in what factory, nor to any nicety for what purpose the machine was devised--but I remember Leviathan before which--before whom--we stood. And again Miriam and I seemed to open like two windows upon one garden. In and out, stilly, mightily, with ease, with grace, rhythmically, incredibly swiftly, went a mighty piston. Beneath it giant wheels turned, according. There were lesser wheels and lesser, and between the wheels ran swiftly flowing bands. There were rods and cogs and what not, and all important, all upholding all. The air vibrated. Up and down, and in and out, and to and fro, and here and there, and now and then, and around and around, and--without a word coined to express it--in the atmosphere of purpose, end, performance--acted the machine. Time and space and mass were caught at work. We partook of--we were--that complex-simple motion.

Of all the shows in the Centennial Show, I most liked this Machine. It began to spin for me trains of ideas.

We saw and heard at work the newly invented telephone. There was a marvel, due to expand, like the Genie out of the Bottle in the _Arabian Nights_!

We saw much at the great exhibition. Paintings, for instance, and models of many things upon the face of the earth. And the people and the people and the people, the American people, who went in and out at gates! The clusters, the groups, the relationships within relationship, the dramas within drama! Habit, manner, clothes, gesture, voices, eyes, hands--what a variorum under summer light and warmth, what rainbow molecules astir in a guessed-at form!

We spent a week in Philadelphia, and went each day to the Great Exhibition. Then we traveled on to New York.

We stayed at a hotel, much used in those days by Southerners.... And out of New York I pick now the journeying forth from New York to see the ocean. That happened on the seventh day of our visit. We had seen the eight-story (I forget whether eight or ten-story) building, the child skyscraper. We had been to Wall Street and the Stock Exchange and old Trinity. We had seen the Bowery and Newspaper Row and the City Hall and A. T. Stewart's store. The horse-cars carried us from sight to sight. We had walked upon Fifth Avenue. We knew Union Square and Madison Square, and far, far up-town, Central Park, named Central when it seemed to us Outlying, gave us a green welcome. We went over to the banks of the Hudson and looked across to the Palisades. General Grant was in the White House, there was no pillared white mausoleum as now. We saw churches within and without, and we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Major Dallas, relatively speaking, knew New York. Affairs had brought him here three or four times in late years. He was our pilot. It was the wrong season for a number of things. Old acquaintances, Southerners now living here, were away for the heated months. And the theaters offered very light entertainment. On the other hand, it was prime out-of-door weather, and there was so much to be seen from out-of-doors! We crossed to Brooklyn by the ferry. We walked on the Battery and visited Castle Garden. We rose early one morning and went to see an ocean liner depart for England. It was the Scythia, a Cunarder.... Again, for a moment, Madam Black seemed to be with us. Floating houses, moving bridges, devices to bring into one mind Here and There....

Then, one day, we ourselves board a small boat and go to see the main ocean. We go to Coney Island.

The air is fresh and drenched with light, the salt is in our nostrils. We are going to view the sea that we think--Miriam and John and I--that we have never seen. True, the harbor is filled from the sea, but we dream of surf and thunder and land so far away that the world seems water. In the mean time there is delight in the boats in the harbor and the various shore. There is as yet no Statue of Liberty. We pass Bedloe Island, but the giant woman does not rise above it. We are in the America of years and years ago.

We saw the ocean. We landed from our boat. Coney Island was not then the flaming, clamant amusement park it was to become. But there was a beginning. We landed at a pier; we saw a hotel and tents and booths; some kind of music was playing; persons moved about in a moderate throng. But we had come to see the ocean. We went upon the beach, we walked until we were alone. Here stretched the gleaming, solitary sand, here moved and sounded the waves, here dwelt Ocean. We sat down in the shadow of a dune, the five of us.

At sunset, returning to the city, Miriam and John and I kept to the stern of the boat. Major Dallas and Aunt Kate were forward, talking with some chance-met acquaintance. We three sat, arms upon rail, keeping Ocean still with us. The boat left a wake of dark green, foam streaked and edged, but tapering at last into sunset-colored water beneath the sunset sky. There was aboard a band of four or five pieces. It played "Suwanee River."

The last note died. Said Miriam: "Rivers and ocean and cities.... I am going to travel and travel and travel! Travel--come home--love that and love travel. Travel, come home, travel--"

"You'll have to go on your own wings," said John. "Travel like that takes money."

"Well, I'll grow the wings then--or make the money then. Make the honest money--grow the honest wings." She rested her cheek upon her arms, folded upon the rail. Her eyes looked to where met sea and air. She began to sing under her breath.

"Hear--taste--see.
Taste--see--hear.--
Power behind you--
Go!"

The band was playing airs from "Norma." Uncle John summoned us to look at the light upon the approaching city.

A day or two after this we said farewell to New York. We went to Niagara. We stayed at the Cataract House. We saw the young moon above the earth-shaking, long plunge of the waters.

Then, after two days, we turned back to Virginia, to Restwell and Flowerfield.