Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  While he eagerly pressed these arguments his mother listened stonily, without apparent interest or sympathy. But at the end she asked, “How are you going to support a wife? Your practice here won’t do it. Has she got anything?”

  “She has property, I believe,” replied her son. “She seems to have been brought up in that way.”

  “She won’t want to come and live here, then. She’ll have notions of her own. If she’s like the rest of them, she’ll never have you.”

  “If she were like the rest of them, I’d never have her. But she is n’t. As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing against her that she’s studied medicine. She did n’t do it from vanity, or ambition, or any abnormal love of it. She did it, so far so I can find out, because she wished to do good that way. She’s been a little notional, she’s had her head addled by women’s talk, and she’s in a queer freak; but it’s only a girl’s freak after all: you can’t say anything worse of her. She’s a splendid woman, and her property’s neither here nor there. I could support her.”

  “I presume,” replied his mother, “that she’s been used to ways that ain’t like our ways. I’ve always stuck up for you, Rufus, stiff enough, I guess; but I ain’t agoin’ to deny that you’re country born and bred. I can see that, and she can see it, too. It makes a great difference with girls. I don’t know as she’d call you what they call a gentleman.”

  Dr. Mulbridge flushed angrily. Every American, of whatever standing or breeding, thinks of himself as a gentleman, and nothing can gall him more than the insinuation that he is less. “What do you mean, mother?”

  “You hain’t ever been in such ladies’ society as hers in the same way. I know that they all think the world of you, and flatter you up, and they’re as biddable as you please when you’re doctorin’ ‘em; but I guess it would be different if you was to set up for one of their own kind amongst ‘em.”

  “There is n’t one of them,” he retorted, “that I don’t believe I could have for the turn of my hand, especially if it was doubled into a fist. They like force.”

  “Oh, you’ve only seen the sick married ones. I guess you’ll find a well girl is another thing.”

  “They’re all alike. And I think I should be something of a relief if I was n’t like what she’s been used to hearing called a gentleman; she’d prefer me on that account. But if you come to blood, I guess the Mulbridges and Gardiner, can hold up their heads with the best, anywhere.”

  “Yes, like the Camfers and Rafllins.” These were people of ancestral consequence and local history, who had gone up to Boston from Corbitant, and had succeeded severally as green-grocers and retail dry-goods men, with the naturally attendant social distinction.

  “Pshaw!” cried her son. “If she cares for me at all, she won’t care for the cut of my clothes, or my table manners.”

  “Yes, that’s so. ‘T ain’t on my account that I want you should make sure she doos care.”

  He looked hard at her immovable face, with its fallen eyes, and then went out of the room. He never quarrelled with his mother, because his anger, like her own, was dumb, and silenced him as it mounted. Her misgivings had stung him deeply, and at the bottom of his indolence and indifference was a fiery pride, not easily kindled, but unquenchable. He flung the harness upon his old unkempt horse, and tackled him to the mud-encrusted buggy, for whose shabbiness he had never cared before. He was tempted to go back into the house, and change his uncouth Canada homespun coat for the broadcloth frock which he wore when he went to Boston; but he scornfully resisted it, and drove off in his accustomed figure.

  His mother’s last words repeated themselves to him, and in that dialogue, in which he continued to dramatize their different feelings, he kept replying, “Well, the way to find out whether she cares is to ask her.”

  X.

  During her convalescence Mrs. Maynard had the time and inclination to give Grace some good advice. She said that she had thought a great deal about it throughout her sickness, and she had come to the conclusion that Grace was throwing away her life.

  “You’re not fit to be a doctor, Grace,” she said. “You’re too nervous, and you’re too conscientious. It is n’t merely your want of experience. No matter how much experience you had, if you saw a case going wrong in your hands, you’d want to call in some one else to set it right. Do you suppose Dr. Mulbridge would have given me up to another doctor because he was afraid he couldn’t cure me? No, indeed! He’d have let me die first, and I should n’t have blamed him. Of course I know what pressure I brought to bear upon you, but you had no business to mind me. You oughtn’t to have minded my talk any more than the buzzing of a mosquito, and no real doctor would. If he wants to be a success, he must be hard-hearted; as hard-hearted as” — she paused for a comparison, and failing any other added— “as all possessed.” To the like large-minded and impartial effect, she, ran on at great length. “No, Grace,” she concluded, “what you want to do is to get married. You would be a good wife, and you would be a good mother. The only trouble is that I don’t know any man worthy of you, or half worthy. No, I don’t!”

  Now that her recovery was assured, Mrs. Maynard was very forgiving and sweet and kind with every one. The ladies who came in to talk with her said that she was a changed creature; she gave them all the best advice, and she had absolutely no shame whatever for the inconsistency involved by her reconciliation with her husband. She rather flaunted the happiness of her reunion in the face of the public, and she vouchsafed an explanation to no one. There had never been anything definite in her charges against him, even to Grace, and her tacit withdrawal of them succeeded perfectly well. The ladies, after some cynical tittering, forgot them, and rejoiced in the spectacle of conjugal harmony afforded them: women are generous creatures, and there is hardly any offence which they are not willing another woman should forgive her husband, when once they have said that they do not see how she could ever forgive him.

  Mrs. Maynard’s silence seemed insufficient to none but Mrs. Breen and her own husband. The former vigorously denounced its want of logic to Grace as all but criminal, though she had no objection to Mr. Maynard. He, in fact, treated her with a filial respect which went far to efface her preconceptions; and he did what he could to retrieve himself from the disgrace of a separation in Grace’s eyes. Perhaps he thought that the late situation was known to her alone, when he casually suggested, one day, that Mrs. Maynard was peculiar.

  “Yes,” said Grace mercifully; “but she has been out of health so long. That makes a great difference. She’s going to be better now.”

  “Oh, it’s going to come out all right in the end,” he said, with his unbuoyant hopefulness, “and I reckon I’ve got to help it along. Why, I suppose every man’s a trial at times, doctor?”

  “I dare say. I know that every woman is,” said the girl.

  “Is that so? Well, may be you’re partly right. But you don’t suppose but what a man generally begins it, do you? There was Adam, you know. He did n’t pull the apple; but he fell off into that sleep, and woke up with one of his ribs dislocated, and that’s what really commenced the trouble. If it had n’t been for Adam, there would n’t have been any woman, you know; and you could n’t blame her for what happened after she got going?” There was no gleam of insinuation in his melancholy eye, and Grace listened without quite knowing what to make of it all. “And then I suppose he was n’t punctual at meals, and stood round talking politics at night, when he ought to have been at home with his family?”

  “Who?” asked Grace.

  “Adam,” replied Mr. Maynard lifelessly. “Well, they got along pretty well outside,” he continued. “Some of the children didn’t turn out just what you might have expected; but raising children is mighty uncertain business. Yes, they got along.” He ended his parable with a sort of weary sigh, as if oppressed by experience. Grace looked at his slovenly figure, his smoky complexion, and the shaggy outline made by his untrimmed hair and beard, and she wondered how Louise could marry h
im; but she liked him, and she was willing to accept for all reason the cause of unhappiness at which he further hinted. “You see, doctor, an incompatibility is a pretty hard thing to manage. You can’t forgive it like a real grievance. You have to try other things, and find out that there are worse things, and then you come back to it and stand it. We’re talking Wyoming and cattle range, now, and Mrs. Maynard is all for the new deal; it’s going to make us healthy, wealthy, and wise. Well, I suppose the air will be good for her, out there. You doctors are sending lots of your patients our way, now.” The gravity with which he always assumed that Grace was a physician in full and regular practice would have had its edge of satire, coming from another; but from him, if it was ironical, it was also caressing, and she did not resent it. “I’ve had some talk with your colleague, here, Dr. Mulbridge, and he seems to think it will be the best thing for her. I suppose you agree with him?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Grace, “his opinion would be of great value. It wouldn’t be at all essential that I should agree with him:’

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Maynard. “I reckon he thinks a good deal of your agreeing with him. I’ve been talking with him about settling out our way. We’ve got a magnificent country, and there’s bound to be plenty of sickness there, sooner or later. Why, doctor, it would be a good opening for you! It ‘s just the place for you. You ‘re off here in a corner, in New England, and you have n’t got any sort of scope; but at Cheyenne you’d have the whole field to yourself; there is n’t another lady doctor in Cheyenne. Now, you come out with us. Bring your mother with you, and grow up with the country. Your mother would like it. There’s enough moral obliquity in Cheyenne to keep her conscience in a state of healthful activity all the time. Yes, you’d get along out there.”

  Grace laughed, and shook her head. It was part of the joke which life seemed to be with Mr. Maynard that the inhabitants of New England were all eager to escape from their native section, and that they ought to be pitied and abetted in this desire. As soon as his wife’s convalescence released him from constant attendance upon her, he began an inspection of the region from the compassionate point of view; the small, frugal husbandry appealed to his commiseration, and he professed to have found the use of canvas caps upon the haycocks intolerably pathetic. “Why, I’m told,” he said, “that they have to blanket the apple-trees while the fruit is setting; and they kill off our Colorado bugs by turning them loose, one at a time, on the potato-patches: the bug starves to death in forty-eight hours. But you’ve got plenty of schoolhouses, doctor; it does beat all, about the schoolhouses. And it’s an awful pity that there are no children to go to school in them. Why, of course the people go West as fast as they can, but they ought to be helped; the Government ought to do something. They’re good people; make first-rate citizens when you get them waked up, out there. But they ought all to be got away, and let somebody run New England’ as a summer resort. It’s pretty, and it’s cool and pleasant, and the fishing is excellent; milk, eggs, and all kinds of berries and historical associations on the premises; and it could be made very attractive three months of the year; but my goodness! you oughtn’t to ask anybody to live here. You come out with us, doctor, and see that country, and you’ll know what I mean.”

  His boasts were always uttered with a wan, lack-lustre irony, as if he were burlesquing the conventional Western brag and enjoying the mystifications of his listener, whose feeble sense of humor often failed to seize his intention, and to whom any depreciation of New England was naturally unintelligible. She had not come to her final liking for him without a season of serious misgiving, but after that she rested in peace upon what every one knowing him felt to be his essential neighborliness. Her wonder had then come to be how he could marry Louise, when they sat together on the seaward piazza, and he poured out his easy talk, unwearied and unwearying, while, with one long, lank leg crossed upon the other, he swung his unblacked, thin-soled boot to and fro.

  “Well, he was this kind of a fellow: When we were in Switzerland, he was always climbing some mountain or other. They could n’t have hired me to climb one of their mountains if they’d given me all their scenery, and thrown their goitres in. I used to tell him that the side of a house was good enough for me. But nothing but the tallest mountains would do him; and one day when he was up there on the comb of the roof somewhere, tied with a rope round his waist to the guide and a Frenchman, the guide’s foot slipped, and he commenced going down. The Frenchman was just going to cut the rope and let the guide play it alone; but he knocked the knife out of his hand with his long-handled axe, and when the jerk came he was on the other side of the comb, where he could brace himself, and brought them both up standing. Well, he’s got muscles like bunches of steel wire. Did n’t he ever tell you about it?”

  “No,” said Grace sadly.

  “Well, somebody ought to expose Libby. I don’t suppose I should ever have known about it myself, if I hadn’t happened to see the guide’s friends and relations crying over him next day as if he was the guide’s funeral. Hello! There’s the doctor.” He unlimbered his lank legs, and rose with an effect of opening his person like a pocket-knife. “As I understand it, this is an unprofessional visit, and the doctor is here among us as a guest. I don’t know exactly what to do under the circumstances, whether we ought to talk about Mrs. Maynard’s health or the opera; but I reckon if we show our good intentions it will come out all right in the end.”

  He went forward to meet the doctor, who came up to shake hands with Grace, and then followed him in-doors to see Mrs. Maynard. Grace remained in her place, and she was still sitting there when Dr. Mulbridge returned without him. He came directly to her, and said, “I want to speak with you, Miss Breen. Can I see you alone?”

  “Is — is Mrs. Maynard worse?” she asked, rising in a little trepidation.

  “No; it has nothing to do with her. She’s practically well now; I can remand the case to you. I wish to see you — about yourself.” She hesitated at this peculiar summons, but some pressure was upon her to obey Dr. Mulbridge, as there was upon most people where he wished to obey him. “I want to talk with you,” he added, “about what you are going to do, — about your future. Will you come?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered; and she suffered him to lead the way down from the piazza, and out upon one of the sandy avenues toward the woods, in which it presently lost itself. “But there will be very little to talk about,” she continued, as they moved away, “if you confine yourself to my future. I have none.”

  “I don’t see how you’ve got rid of it,” he rejoined. “You’ve got a future as much as you have a past, and there’s this advantage, — that you can do something with your future.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked, with a little bitterness. “That has n’t been my experience.”

  “It’s been mine,” he said, “and you can make it yours. Come, I want to talk with you about your future, because I have been thinking very seriously about my own. I want to ask your advice and to give you mine. I’ll commence by asking yours. What do you think of me as a physician? I know you are able to judge.”

  She was flattered, in spite of herself. There were long arrears of cool indifference to her own claims in that direction, which she might very well have resented; but she did not. There was that flattery in his question which the junior in any vocation feels in the appeal of his senior; and there was the flattery which any woman feels in a man’s recourse to her judgment. Still, she contrived to parry it with a little thrust. “I don’t suppose the opinion of a mere homoeopathist can be of any value to a regular practitioner.”

  He laughed. “You have been a regular practitioner yourself for the last three weeks. What do you think of my management of the case?”

  “I have never abandoned my principles,” she began.

  “Oh, I know all about that? What do you think of me as a doctor?” he persisted.

  “Of course I admire you. Why do you ask me that?”

 
“Because I wished to know. And because I wished to ask you something else. You have been brought up in a city, and I have always lived here in the country, except the two years I was out with the army. Do you think I should succeed if I pulled up here, and settled in Boston?”

  “I have not lived in Boston,” she answered. “My opinion wouldn’t be worth much on that point.”

  “Yes, it would. You know city people, and what they are. I have seen a good deal of them in my practice at the hotels about here, and some of the ladies — when they happened to feel more comfortable — have advised me to come to Boston.” His derision seemed to throw contempt on all her sex; but he turned to her, and asked again earnestly, “What do you think? Some of the profession know me there. When I left the school, some of the faculty urged me to try my chance in the city.”

  She waited a moment before she answered. “You know that I must respect your skill, and I believe that you could succeed anywhere. I judge your fitness by my own deficiency. The first time I saw you with Mrs. Maynard, I saw that you had everything that I hadn’t. I saw that I was a failure, and why, and that it would be foolish for me to keep up the struggle.”

  “Do you mean that you have given it up?” he demanded, with a triumph in which there was no sympathy.

  “It has given me up. I never liked it, — I told you that before, — and I never took it up from any ambitious motive. It seemed a shame for me to be of no use in the world; and I hoped that I might do something in a way that seemed natural for women. And I don’t give up because I’m unfit as a woman. I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not.”