I
So it was Uncle George Bulmer who presently left the Green Chalybeate, to pursue Mrs. Chaytor with his lawless arts. I stayed out the season.
Now I cannot conscientiously recommend the Green Chalybeate against your next vacation. Once very long ago, it was frequented equally for the sake of gaiety and of health. In the summer that was Marian’s the resort was a beautiful and tumbledown place where invalids congregated for the sake of the nauseous waters—which infallibly demolish a solid column of strange maladies I never read quite through, although it bordered every page of the writing-paper you got there from the desk-clerk—and a scanty leaven of persons who came thither, apparently, in order to spend a week or two in lamenting “how very dull the season is this year, and how abominable the fare is.”
But for one I praise the place, and I believe that Marian Winwood also bears it no ill-will. For we two were very happy there. We took part in the “subscription euchres” whenever we could not in time devise an excuse which would pass muster with the haggard “entertainer.” We danced conscientiously beneath the pink and green icing of the ballroom’s ceiling, with all three of the band playing “Hearts and Flowers”; and with a dozen “chaperones”—whom I always suspected of taking in washing during the winter months—lined up as closely as was possible to the door, as if in preparation for the hotel’s catching fire any moment, to give us pessimistic observal. And having thus discharged our duty to society at large, we enjoyed ourselves tremendously.
For instance, we would talk over the book I was going to write in the autumn. That was the main thing. Then one could golf, or drive, or—I blush to write it even now—croquet. Croquet, though, is a much maligned game, as you will immediately discover if you ever play it on the rambling lawn of the Chalybeate, about six in the afternoon, say, when the grass is greener than it is by ordinary, and the shadows are long, and the sun is well beneath the treetops of the Iron Bank, and your opponent makes a face at you occasionally, and on each side the old, one-storied cottages are builded of unusually red bricks and are quite ineffably asleep.
Or again there is always the creek to divert yourself in. Once I caught five crawfishes there, while Marian waited on the bank; and afterward we found an old tomato-can and boiled them in it, and they came out a really gorgeous crimson. This was the afternoon that we were Spanish Inquisitors. … Oh, believe me, you can have quite a good time at the Chalybeate, if you set about it in the proper way.