Charles Macomb Flandrau

“ It is a cloudless, burning day, the best kind of a day for coffee, and the asoleadero is covered with it. Through the house there is a slight stir of air, and the fact that the house-boy has just swept the floor with wet tea leaves left over from several breakfasts, makes the breeze for the moment seem cool—which it isn’t. On such a day one is grateful for the bareness of a room—the smooth, unadorned walls, the hard, cool chairs. From the asoleadero comes without ceasing the harsh, hollow sound of the wooden hoes as they turn the coffee over in the sun and scrape against the cement. ”

“ In another hour the sun will have begun to lose its drying powers and I shall go over to the asoleadero to watch the men pack the half-dried coffee into bags and pile them up under cover for the night. By that time the pickers will have begun to straggle back through the trees—the women and children talking in tired, quiet voices, the men silent and bent double under their loads of berries. Where we are—with a hill between us and the western sky—dusk will overtake us while the mountains opposite and the distant gulf are still tinted with sunset lights of unimagined delicacy ”

“ Once having grasped the pen and set out to do any of these things, it is only human and natural to be gratified on learning that you have succeeded, and if the people you from time to time meet don’t tell you that you have, you remain in dreadful doubt. To the ears of a writer no music on earth is sweeter than intelligent praise, and even praise that is not intelligent is sweet if it has the ring of sincerity. ”

“ Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk, and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat, boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. ”

“ To me the love affair across the way—carried on as it is with much holding of hands in the excessive broadness of Mexican daylight, by a young woman of thirty-eight behind a barred window, and a young man of forty-two on the narrow sidewalk outside—to me, this public display of an emotion, ordinarily regarded as rather private, is most exciting; but even so, I am inclined to believe that after commenting on such a courtship every afternoon and evening for three and a half years it would begin to pall. On Mexicans it never seems to. ”

“ They approach one in the Plaza, in the Alameda, at the doors of hotels and theaters and restaurants, and, with an always interesting fiction, extract twenty-five cents from one in the name of patriotism. When the spring comes and it is once more warm at home, they haunt the seaports, endeavoring to return by water. For short-handed ships at Vera Cruz in April and May there is an embarrassment of choice—a glut. Without in the least suspecting it, Hayward and Lansing had, in the eyes of the world, become tramps, seeking a return passage. ”

“ Haydock and Ellis and Wolcott and Wynne he had met at various times abroad. He had made a point of hunting them up and getting to know them, with the result that his interest had succeeded in preserving his identity; he was not unknown to the youngest member of the club. If they didn’t actually know him, they at least knew of him. Even this crust is sweet to the returned graduate whose age is just far enough removed from either end of life’s measure to make it intrinsically unimportant. ”

“ One stays in the house and, some time during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I have) , the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday. ”

“ It takes the form, most fortunately, of flowers, with often a fountain in a circular basin of blue and white tiles. A Mexican patio, in fact, is considerably more than a courtyard. It is a flower garden surrounded by a house.
In Northern climates the most delightful hour of the day has always been that in which one comes in from the frosty dusk, lights the lamps, smashes a smoldering lump of coal into a bright, sudden blaze, draws the curtain and, in an atmosphere thick with warmth and quiet, sits down to read or write or rest. In tropical countries one often longs in vain for this hour. ”

“ They streamed in brilliant procession along the walks, and swarmed over the shady lawns,—glorified groups of summer millinery, trailing after them the pale pink odour of sachet powder and blond hair. They took possession of the parapet of Matthews, the chairs and benches and doorsteps in front of Hollis and Stoughton and Holworthy, stretching the length of the Yard in a many coloured border that resembled the horticultural orgies of the Public Garden. Celestial companies of maidens in diaphanous drapery floated past Beverly, in the wake of panting but determined ladies richly upholstered. ”

“ I wanted to go to large, gay luncheons at half-past two, and larger, gayer dinners at half-past eight or nine, with golf and rides and drives, and other people and tea in between. I wanted to see lots of young girls who looked like hot-house flowers and who would decide to be charming to me because they knew that I knew it would be out of the question to try to marry them, and I wanted to talk to incredibly youthful looking old women with marvelously arranged, dyed hair, high diamond collars to conceal the wattles, and ropes of pearls, with which to run through nervous, jeweled fingers. ”

“ There are whole days when there is nothing for the man in charge of him to expound through his megaphone; whole days when there is nothing to do but contemplate a cloudless sky and a semitropical sea. Thoroughly to delight in the protracted contemplation of such spacious blueness overhead and of so much placid green water underneath, one must be either very lazy or very contemplative. Tourists, of course, are neither, and while persons of fashion are sometimes both, they are given to contemplating the beauties of nature from points of vantage favorable also to the contemplation of one another. ”

“ One afternoon at sunset, before we had even sighted land, a little French boy accurately summed up for us the vague and various sensations that, during the last few hours of the hot afternoon, had stolen over us all. He had been born in Yucatan and was returning there with his father after a first visit to France. Suddenly in his race around the deck with some other children he stopped short, glanced at the group of half-dozing, half-fanning women in steamer chairs, at the listless men against the rail, at the calm, lemon-colored sky and the floating islands of seaweed on the green water. ”

“ Wells himself is aware of what is really the lesson of his novel, but it is that sixty rarely has sympathy with and genuine understanding of twenty, and twenty in its heart of hearts looks upon sixty, not as perhaps experienced and wise, but as rather absurd. Concessions! All life is an endless succession of them. If we didn’t at every moment make them, everybody in the world would have to live in absolute solitude, and even then he would have to concede to the forces of nature, the sun and the rain, the cold and the dark, hunger, weariness and sleep. ”

“ The riotous new green of early spring had matured to an academic sombreness that made the elms, the stretches of sun-flecked grass, the tremulous ivy, and the simple brick buildings inseparable in one’s thoughts. The dignity of the great space between Grays and Holworthy had grown with the late afternoon shadows, and Haydock and his mother, who had sauntered from path to{180} path, listening to the leaves, and the robins, and the quiet confidences of the wise bricks, talked of Harvard. ”

“ I have had a fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were. The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it. If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing” to admit it. ”