Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862», sayfa 11

CHAPTER V.
SKATING AS A FINE ART

Of all the plays that are played by this playful world on its play-days, there is no play like Skating.

To prepare a board for the moves of this game of games, a panel for the drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the entrechats and pirouettes of its graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last two nights, sliding at full speed up and down the North River.

We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin under whose feet sprang roses; but Zero’s heels and toes were armed with more precious influences. They left a diamond way, where they slid,—a hundred and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.

Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it. Zero’s product, finer even than diamond, was filled—at the rate of a million to the square foot—with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet every one big enough to comprise the entire sun in small, but without alteration or abridgment. When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to catch the tip of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.

Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though polished with all the wax in Christendom.

On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.

Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure. The sloops and schooners were frozen in along shore, the tugs and barges were laid up in basins, the floating palaces were down at New York, deodorizing their bar-rooms, regilding their bridal chambers, and enlarging their spittoon accommodations alow and aloft, for next summer. All the population was out on the ice, skating, sliding, sledding, slipping, tumbling, to its heart’s content.

One person out of every Dunderbunk family was of course at home, roasting Christmas turkey. The rest were already at high jinks on Zero’s Christmas present, when Wade and the men came down, from the meeting.

Wade buckled on his new skates in a jiffy. He stamped to settle himself, and then flung off half a dozen circles on the right leg, half a dozen with the left, and the same with either leg backwards.

The ice, traced with these white peripheries, showed like a blackboard where a school has been chalking diagrams of Euclid, to point at with the “slow unyielding finger” of demonstration.

“Hurrah!” cries Wade, halting in front of the men, who, some on the Foundry wharf, some on the deck of our first acquaintance at Dunderbunk, the tug “L Ambuster,” were putting on their skates or watching him, “Hurrah! the skates are perfection! Are you ready, Bill?”

“Yes,” says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact as Giotto’s autograph.

“Now, then,” Wade said, “we’ll give Dunderbunk a laugh, as we practised last night.”

They got under full headway, Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands. When they were near enough to the merry throng out in the stream, both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the other man’s leg. In this queer figure they rushed through the laughing crowd.

Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a grand show of

SKATING AS A FINE ART

The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects them to do their duty.

It is hard to treat of this Fine Art by the Art of Fine Writing. Its eloquent motions must be seen.

To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a Soul, each of the First Order; otherwise you will never get out of coarse art and skating in one syllable. So much for yourself, the motive power. And your machinery,—your smooth-bottomed rockers, the same shape stem and stern,—this must be as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it.

Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics will say, “See! this athlete docs his work as Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer chisels, as Wittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as Seward, as keen as Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher; be is Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he is as complete as the steamboat Metropolis, as Steers’s yacht, as Singer’s sewing-machine, as Colt’s revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization.” You wish to be so ranked among the people and things that lead the age;—consider the qualities you must have, and while you consider, keep your eye on Richard Wade, for he has them all in perfection.

First,—of your physical qualities. You must have lungs, not bellows; and an active heart, not an assortment of sluggish auricles and ventricles. You must have legs, not shanks. Their shape is unimportant, except that they must not interfere at the knee. You must have muscles, not flabbiness; sinews like wire; nerves like sunbeams; and a thin layer of flesh to cushion the gable-ends, where you will strike, if you tumble,—which, once for all be it said, you must never do. You must be all momentum, and no inertia. You must be one part grace, one force, one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manila hemp, and watch-spring. Your machine, your body, must be thoroughly obedient. It must go just so far and no farther. You have got to be as unerring as a planet holding its own, emphatically, between forces centripetal and centrifugal. Your aplomb must be as absolute as the pounce of a falcon.

So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary to be a Great Artist in Skating. See Wade, how be shows them!

Now for the moral and intellectual. Pluck is the first;—it always is the first quality. Then enthusiasm. Then patience. Then pertinacity. Then a fine aesthetic faculty,—in short, good taste. Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent to act in accordance with the laws of Art. Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable. That well-known skeptic, the King of tropical Bantam, could not skate, because he had never seen ice and doubted even the existence of solid water. Widdrington, after the Battle of Chevy Chace, could not have skated, because he had no legs,—poor fellow!

But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin in the elastic days of youth, when cold does not sting, tumbles do not bruise, and duckings do not wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough to try everything; if you work slowly ahead and stick to it; if you have good taste and a lively invention; if you are a man, and not a lubber;—then, in fine, you may become a Great Skater, just as with equal power and equal pains you may put your grip on any kind of Greatness.

The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of the great feats, the Big Things, have admitted names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade’s achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible rhapsody. A sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice and a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams, Anatomy its corpus to carve. Skating also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains an Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.

Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate, its M.A., its F.S.D., (Doctor of Frantic Skipping,) its A.G.D., (Doctor of Airy Gliding,) its N.T.D., (Doctor of No Tumbles,) and finally its highest degree, U.P. (Unapproachable Podographer).

Wade was U.P.

There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who had passed their Little Go and could skate forward and backward easily. A half-hundred, perhaps, were through the Great Go; these could do outer edge freely. A dozen had taken the Baccalaureate, and were proudly repeating the pirouettes and spread-eagles of that degree. A few could cross their feet, on the edge, forward and backward, and shift edge on the same foot, and so were Magistri Artis.

Wade, U.P., added to these an indefinite list of combinations and fresh contrivances. He spun spirals slow, and spirals neck or nothing. He pivoted on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings, inner and outer edge, forward and back, He skated on one foot better than the M.A.s could on both. He ran on his toes; he slid on his heels; he cut up shines like a sunbeam on a bender; he swung, light as if he could fly, if he pleased, like a wing-footed Mercury; he glided as if will, not muscle, moved him; he tore about in frenzies; his pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg flapped like a graceful pinion; he turned somersets; he jumped, whirling backward as he went, over a platoon of boys laid flat on the ice;—the last boy winced, and thought he was amputated; but Wade flew over, and the boy still holds together as well as most boys. Besides this, he could write his name, with a flourish at the end, like the rubrica of a Spanish hidalgo. He could podograph any letter, and multitudes of ingenious curlicues which might pass for the alphabets of the unknown tongues. He could not tumble.

It was Fine Art.

Bill Tarbox sometimes pressed the champion hard. But Bill stopped just short of Fine Art, in High Artisanship.

How Dunderbunk cheered this wondrous display! How delighted the whole population was to believe they possessed the best skater on the North River! How they struggled to imitate! How they tumbled, some on their backs, some on their faces, some with dignity like the dying Caesar, some rebelliously like a cat thrown out of a garret, some limp as an ancient acrobate! How they laughed at themselves and at each other!

“It’s all in the new skates,” says Wade, apologizing for his unapproachable power and finish.

“It’s suthin’ in the man,” says Smith Wheelwright.

“Now chase me, everybody,” said Wade.

And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the merry crowd, until at last, breathless, he let himself be touched by pretty Belle Purtett, rosiest of all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the ice.

“He rayther beats Bosting,” says Captain Isaac Ambuster to Smith Wheelwright. “It’s so cold there that they can skate all the year round; but he beats them, all the same.”

The Captain was sitting in a queer little bowl of a skiff on the deck of his tug, and rocking it like a cradle, as he talked.

“Bosting’s always hard to beat in anything,” rejoined the ex-Chairman. “But if Bosting is to be beat, here’s the man to do it.”

And now, perhaps, gentle reader, you think I have said enough in behalf of a limited fraternity, the Skaters.

The next chapter, then, shall take up the cause of the Lovers, a more numerous body, and we will see whether True Love, which never makes “smooth running,” can help its progress by a skate-blade.

CHAPTER VI.
“GO NOT, HAPPY DAY, TILL THE MAIDEN YIELDS.”

Christmas noon at Dunderbunk. Every skater was in galloping glee,—as the electric air, and the sparkling sun, and the glinting ice had a right to expect that they all should be.

Belle Purtett, skating simply and well, had never looked so pretty and graceful. So thought Bill Tarbox.

He had not spoken to her, nor she to him, for more than six months. The poor fellow was ashamed of himself and penitent for his past bad courses. And so, though he longed to have his old flame recognize him again, and though he was bitterly jealous and miserably afraid he should lose her, he had kept away and consumed his heart like a true despairing lover.

But to-day Bill was a lion, only second to Wade, the unapproachable lion-in-chief. Bill was reinstated in public esteem, and had won back his standing in the Foundry. He had to-day made a speech which Perry Purtett gave everybody to understand “none of Senator Bill Seward’s could hold the tallow to.” Getting up the meeting and presenting Wade with the skates was Bill’s own scheme, and it had turned out an eminent success. Everything began to look bright to him. His past life drifted out of his mind like the rowdy tales he used to read in the Sunday newspapers.

He had watched Belle Purtett all the morning, and saw that she distinguished nobody with her smiles, not even that coq du village, Ringdove. He also observed that she was furtively watching him.

By-and-by she sailed out of the crowd, and went off a little way to practise.

“Now,” said he to himself, “sail in, Bill Tarbox!”

Belle heard the sharp strokes of a powerful skater coming after her. Her heart divined who this might be. She sped away like the swift Camilla, and her modest drapery showed just enough and “ne quid nimis” of her ankles.

Bill admired the grace and the ankles immensely. But his hopes sank a little at the flight,—for he thought she perceived his chase and meant to drop him. Bill had not bad a classical education, and knew nothing of Galatea in the Eclogue,—how she did not hide, until she saw her swain was looking fondly after.

“She wants to get away,” he thought “But she sha’n’t,—no, not if I have to follow her to Albany.”

He struck out mightily. Presently the swift Camilla let herself be overtaken.

“Good morning, Miss Purtett.” (Dogged air.)

“Good morning, Mr. Tarbox.” (Taken-by-surprise air.)

“I’ve been admiring your skating,” says Bill, trying to be cool.

“Have you?” rejoins Belle, very cool and distant.

“Have you been long on the ice?” he inquired, hypocritically.

“I came on two hours ago with Mr. Ringdove and the girls,” returned she, with a twinkle which said, “Take that, Sir, for pretending you did not see me.”

“You’ve seen Mr. Wade skate, then,” Bill said, ignoring Ringdove.

“Yes; isn’t it splendid?” Belle replied, kindling.

“Tip-top!”

“But then he does everything better than anybody.”

“So he does!” Bill said,—true to his friend, and yet beginning to be jealous of this enthusiasm. It was not the first time he had been jealous of Wade; but he had quelled his fears, like a good fellow.

Belle perceived Bill’s jealousy, and could have cried for joy. She had known as little of her once lover’s heart as he of hers. She only knew that he stopped coming to see her when he fell, and had not renewed his visits now that he was risen again. If she had not been charmingly ruddy with the brisk air and exercise, she would have betrayed her pleasure at Bill’s jealousy with a fine blush.

The sense of recovered power made her wish to use it again. She must tease him a little. So she continued, as they skated on in good rhythm,—

“Mother and I wouldn’t know what to do without Mr. Wade. We like him so much,”—said ardently.

What Bill feared was true, then, he thought. Wade, noble fellow, worthy to win any woman’s heart, had fascinated his landlady’s daughter.

“I don’t wonder you like him,” said he. “He deserves it.”

Belle was touched by her old lover’s forlorn tone.

“He does indeed,” she said. “He has helped and taught us all so much. He has taken such good care of Perry. And then”—here she gave her companion a little look and a little smile—“he speaks so kindly of you, Mr. Tarbox.”

Smile, look, and words electrified Bill. He gave such a spring on his skates that he shot far ahead of the lady. He brought himself back with a sharp turn.

“He has done kinder than he can speak,” says Bill. “He has made a man of me again, Miss Belle.”

“I know it. It makes me very happy to hear you able to say so of yourself.” She spoke gravely.

“Very happy”—about anything that concerned him? Bill had to work off his overjoy at this by an exuberant flourish. He whisked about Belle,—outer edge backward. She stopped to admire. He finished by describing on the virgin ice, before her, the letters B.P., in his neatest style of podography,—easy letters to make, luckily.

“Beautiful!” exclaimed Belle. “What are those letters? Oh! B.P.! What do they stand for?”

“Guess!”

“I’m so dull,” said she, looking bright as a diamond. “Let me think! B.P.? British Poets, perhaps.”

“Try nearer home!”

“What are you likely to be thinking of that begins with B.P.?—Oh, I know! Boiler Plates!”

She looked at him,—innocent as a lamb. Bill looked at her, delighted with her little coquetry. A woman without coquetry is insipid as a rose without scent, as Champagne without bubbles, or as corned beef without mustard.

“It’s something I’m thinking of most of the time,” says he; “but I hope it’s softer than Boiler Plates. B.P. stands for Miss Isabella Purtett.”

“Oh!” says Belle, and she skated on in silence.

“You came down with Alonzo Ringdove?” Bill asked, suddenly, aware of another pang after a moment of peace.

“He came with me and his sisters,” she replied.

Yes; poor Ringdove had dressed himself in his shiniest black, put on his brightest patent-leather boots, with his new swan-necked skates newly strapped over them, and wore his new dove-colored overcoat with the long skirts, on purpose to be lovely in the eyes of Belle on this occasion. Alas, in vain!

“Mr. Ringdove is a great friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“If you ever came to see me now, you would know who my friends are, Mr. Tarbox.”

“Would you be my friend again, if I came, Miss Belle?”

“Again? I have always been so,—always, Bill.”

“Well, then, something more than my friend,—now that I am trying to be worthy of more, Belle?”

“What more can I be?” she said, softly.

“My wife.”

She curved to the right. He followed. To the left. He was not to be shaken off.

“Will you promise me not to say walves instead of valves, Bill?” she said, looking pretty and saucy as could be. “I know, to say W for V is fashionable in the iron business; but I don’t like it.”

“What a thing a woman is to dodge!” says Bill. “Suppose I told you that men brought up inside of boilers, hammering on the inside against twenty hammering like Wulcans on the outside, get their ears so dumfounded that they can’t tell whether they are saying valves or walves, wice or virtue,—suppose I told you that,—what would you say, Belle?”

“Perhaps I’d say that you pronounce virtue so well, and act it so sincerely, that I can’t make any objection to your other words. If you’d asked me to be your vife, Bill, I might have said I didn’t understand; but wife I do understand, and I say”—

She nodded, and tried to skate off. Bill stuck close to her side.

“Is this true, Belle?” he said, almost doubtfully.

“True as truth!”

She put out her hand. He took it, and they skated on together,—hearts beating to the rhythm of their movements. The uproar and merriment of the village came only faintly to them. It seemed as if all Nature was hushed to listen to their plighted troth, their words of love renewed, more earnest for long suppression. The beautiful ice spread before them, like their life to come, a pathway untouched by any sorrowful or weary footstep. The blue sky was cloudless. The keen air stirred the pulses like the vapor of frozen wine. The benignant mountains westward kindly surveyed the happy pair, and the sun seemed created to warm and cheer them.

“And you forgive me, Belle?” said the lover. “I feel as if I had only gone bad to make me know how much better going right is.”

“I always knew you would find it out. I never stopped hoping and praying for it.”

“That must have been what brought Mr. Wade here.”

“Oh, I did hate him so, Bill, when I heard of something that happened between you and him! I thought him a brute and a tyrant. I never could get over it, until he told mother that you were the best machinist he ever knew, and would some time grow to be a great inventor.”

“I’m glad you hated him. I suffered rattlesnakes and collapsed flues for fear you’d go and love him.”

“My affections were engaged,” she said, with simple seriousness.

“Oh, if I’d only thought so long ago! How lovely you are!” exclaims Bill, in an ecstasy. “And how refined! And how good! God bless you!”

He made up such a wishful mouth,—so wishful for one of the pleasurable duties of mouths, that Belle blushed, laughed, and looked down, and as she did so saw that one of her straps was trailing.

“Please fix it, Bill,” she said, stopping and kneeling.

Bill also knelt, and his wishful mouth immediately took its chance.

A manly smack and sweet little feminine chirp sounded as their lips met.

Boom! twanging gay as the first tap of a marriage-bell, a loud crack in the ice rang musically for leagues up and down the river. “Bravo!” it seemed to say. “Well done, Bill Tarbox! Try again!” Which the happy fellow did, and the happy maiden permitted.

“Now,” said Bill, “let us go and hug Mr. Wade!”

“What! Both of us?” Belle protested. “Mr. Tarbox, I am ashamed of you!”