Certain Delightful English Towns. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.

      The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident, many and marvelous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March weather which was everything that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.

      I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the truth rather than bound in a slavish fidelity to the fact. The fact is that in the succession of days that were all and more than here suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird -song and bee -murmur, with the color of bloom in one's eyes and the odor of flowers in one's nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought property right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always. The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I repeat that I heard people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the social reciprocity so necessary in England, and must take humbler dwellings instead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price, and in the article of butcher's meat of a far more glaring and offensive abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in unwholesome-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way entirely with the digestion which the Bath waters were doing so little to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England complexions, the wonder what became of that bilious superfluity of pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.

      But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided, and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that self-respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which concern their comfort that it is said the consensus of feminine feeling has had force with the imperial government to prevent the placing of a garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic situation.

      The glimpse of the Bath world, which a happy and most unimagined chance afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be slower to attempt saying than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a center of fashion and infirmity, of pleasure and pain, without evolving in the finest sort the supremacy of woman, who is first in either. The lingering tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which spreads a soft afterglow over the literary decline of Boston, is of the same effect in the gentle city where the mere spectacle of life became penetrated with the quality of so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of their humor, the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness of their intelligence have remained to this time, when the spectacle of life has so dwindled that the observed are less than the observers, it would not be wonderful, for the essential part of what has been anywhere seems always to haunt the scene, and to become the immortal genius of the place. In a more literal sense Bath is haunted by the past, for it is the favorite resort of numbers of interesting ghosts, whose characters are well ascertained and whose stories are recounted to you, if you have so much merit, by people who have known the specters almost from childhood. Some of them have the habit of preferably appearing to strangers; but perhaps they drew the line at Americans.