Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, I meant having an affection for the chickens; you’d have to let other people eat them.” She joined in Helen’s laugh at the futility of her suggestions; but she added: “Well, we must think out the answer to you. There’s no hurry.”

  “O no.”

  That afternoon Margaret came with a heart full of proud contrition to blame herself for having been in Ireland for the past three months, and for having just learned of Helen’s sickness and whereabouts. She wept over Helen’s sorrows, and over her wasted looks and hollow eyes; and the girl was freer to talk with her of what had happened than she had yet felt with any one else.

  She told her about the shipwreck, of which Margaret had not heard before, and she showed her a scrap of paper, the cover of an official despatch.

  “Here are his last words. He wrote them to me while he was standing on that rock in the middle of the sea, and they came from Washington after I was taken sick.”

  “Oh, Miss Helen, Miss Helen, how did you ever live to tell the tale?”

  Helen did not answer. “We were engaged, and he was coming home,” she said, with a sort of crazy satisfaction in the poignancy of Margaret’s sympathy. She threw the burden of suffering upon her for the time, and talked with an unsparing hardness for herself. “But I deserved it — I deserved it all.” Her thin hands trembled in her lap, and her head shook. “Where are you living now, Margaret?” she broke off abruptly.

  “Why, Miss Helen,” answered Margaret, with a blush, “I’m living in the Port, in a house of my own.”

  “In a house of your own?”

  “Yes, Miss Helen.” Margaret hesitated. “You see, there was an old fellow on the ship coming back, that had been out to Ireland too, and he kept talking so much about it all the way, and never leaving me a moment’s peace, that I thought maybe I’d better. And so, I did — three weeks ago.”

  “Did what?”

  “Married him, Miss Helen.” Margaret seemed doubtful of the effect of the intelligence upon Helen; she hastened to add in excuse, “He’s a very quiet body, and he works at the glass-works in East Cambridge. We have a nice little house, and I should be much pleased to have you come out some day and see it, Miss Helen. The worst of it is, that there isn’t enough to keep a person busy, and I’m thinking that maybe I’ll take a boarder. There’s a spare room. He’d like to see you, Miss Helen. I’ve told him a good deal about you.”

  “Thank you, Margaret, I will come out some day. I should like to see your husband.”

  “Oh, he’s no great things. But he’s a very quiet body.”

  Helen was looking at the bonnet on Margaret’s head, and she answered rather absently, “Yes.” The bonnet was a combination of purple fruits and magenta flowers, caught in a net of lace, as if to protect them from the depredations of birds and insects. “Where did you get your bonnet, Margaret?”

  “In Hanover Street, Miss Helen,” said Margaret. “I don’t think it’s very good; do you? I paid enough for it; but money won’t buy the like of the bonnets that you used to make me, Miss Helen.”

  “You’d better let me see what I can do with this. The shape isn’t bad,” said Helen critically.

  “Oh, I couldn’t, Miss Helen. After what I’ve said to you! I should feel as if I’d hinted.”

  “You needn’t ‘be under a compliment’ for it, Margaret,” said Helen, with a sudden inspiration; “You may pay me for making over the bonnet!”

  “Oh, Miss Helen!”

  “Yes. I need the money. I must work for my living now.”

  “How good of you!” said Clara, when she found Helen with the bonnet in her hands the next day, and learned whose it was.

  “It’s good for me,” returned Helen. “Margaret pays me for doing it. Perhaps this is the solution.” Clara permitted herself a silence in which her imagination kindled with the idea. “Helen,” she cried, “it is splendid! Why shouldn’t you do something of the sort? There’s nothing disgraceful about it, and with your taste, your genius, you could make every bonnet a work of art — as they do those picture-dresses in London.”

  They talked the scheme over, and as soon as Helen was strong enough to attempt it, they put it in practice. Clara wanted her to set up a shop in her drawing-room, but they devolved upon something more modest in the end, and Helen took Mrs. Hewitt’s parlour floor. Clara advanced the capital; a tasteful and récherché stock of frames and feathers and ribbons was chosen, and Helen embarked in the enterprise under the favouring smiles of a world at once fashionable and sympathetic and high-minded. It would not be easy to say just how the scheme came to final ruin. But when once a lively lady had said Miss Harkness’s bonnets had so much touch, and another had answered, “O yes, they were all touch,” and both had then tittered in tacit recognition of a certain amateurish lack in them, it was well on the way to failure. By the time that a visiting New York lady had said Miss Harkness seemed to be quite a Boston fashion, and had been answered, “O no; a Boston passion,” she was no longer so. Clara Kingsbury wore her Harkness bonnet to the bitter end (as some one phrased it), but she was notoriously interested, and her heroic devotion counted for nothing. All Helen’s gains went to pay the assistant whom she had taken from a well-known milliner’s shop, with a just conviction of her own unfitness for practical details; and when her stock was exhausted, and the ladies had given away her bonnets to their second-girls, she had nothing but her debt to Clara for her pains. They cried over the failure together when they had to face it at last, and Clara inveighed against the hollowness and ingratitude of the world. But Helen took the blame upon herself. “It was arrogant in me to suppose that I could succeed in any business without serving an apprenticeship to it — without beginning at the bottom. It was like those silly women who go on the stage, and expect to begin at the very top, over the heads of people who have faithfully worked all their lives learning to be actors. It’s just!”

  “That doesn’t make it any the easier to bear,” Clara repined.

  “It does for me,” said Helen. “If the things that have happened to me were not just, I couldn’t endure them.”

  Clara took her in her arms, vowing that she was the best and bravest creature in the world, and that she had never done anything except suffer unmerited wrong. She would not hear any talk of the money she had advanced; she professed that if their undertaking had succeeded, she had always intended to take her share of the profits, and that she was more than willing to take her share of the loss. How little it was, compared to Helen’s, who had lost time and labour, and everything but courage! She did not understand how Helen kept up.

  “Because I must” Helen explained. “You can bear things that you must bear. I suppose that’s what makes death endurable to those that have to live on.” Clara was silent in awe of her sad wisdom, and she went on more lightly: “Besides, this hasn’t been altogether a loss to me, this experience. I’ve learnt a good many things. I’ve really learnt how to make bonnets, for one thing, and I believe I can be of some little use to others as well as myself. I’ve got a new idea, and I’m going out to talk with Margaret about it.”

  “With Margaret! Oh, Helen, dear, what is it?

  I’m afraid—”

  “That it’s something foolish? It isn’t. It’s only something distasteful — something very humble. It’s something Miss Root suggested.”

  Clara was only partly comforted. “Miss Root is terribly severe. She doesn’t know how to spare people’s sensibilities.”

  “She’s had to do with people who have no business to have any sensibilities — like me. I’ve thought it all out, Clara.” A woman instinctively respects another woman who says this, and believes her; Clara listened attentively. “I’ve thought it all out, and I see that I haven’t talent enough to be first-rate in anything. I couldn’t endure to be a second-rate artist or writer; but I don’t mind being a second rate milliner; and that’s what I’m going to be, if I can. And now I won’t tell you anything more about my scheme till I see whether it’s practicable.
People will laugh, but they won’t sneer, and if they pity me, I shall be glad and grateful for their pity.”

  Clara tried to get from her some details of her plan, but she would not give them; she would not leave her any comfort but the fact that she could not say or do anything to prevent her trying to carry out her plan.

  She went out to Margaret’s in the horse-cars, and walked down the little side street to the end of the row of French-roof cottages, in the last and poorest of which Margaret was so proud of living. Helen’s sickness and convalescence, and her subsequent experiment in aesthetic millinery, had carried her through the summer and the early fall; the young elms along the side-walk had dropped their last yellow leaves, and the grass in the narrow door-yards lay limp and flat after the heavy November frosts; around, the open lots stretched brown and bare, swept by an east wind that brought the salt savour of the bay rank across them. A few slatternly goats, lank and heavy-uddered, wandered over the dismal expanse, as if to crop the battered tomato-cans and old boots in which it abounded.

  Margaret’s house had never had more than one coat of pinkish-brown paint, and it looked rather thinly clad for the season; but within, a pungent heat from the furnace, which did more than anything else to make Margaret feel that she was an American householder, struck into the parlour where she received Helen. It was curious and amusing to see how little Margaret had profited by her life in Beacon Steps, in arranging and decorating her best room. There were no evidences of the better taste to which she had been accustomed half her days; she had simply tried to make her parlour as like all the other parlours in that row as she could, with a wood-coloured ingrain carpet, tan terry furniture, and a marble-topped centre-table; if she had been a Protestant, she would have had a large gilt-edged Bible on this; as it was, she had an infant Jesus in wax under a glass bell.

  Helen stopped her in her ceremonious preparations for making company of her. “Margaret,” she said abruptly, “I want to come and live with you, — if you think you can trust me for my board a while.”

  “Indeed, Miss Helen,” said Margaret with a splendour that was worth more than money to her, “I don’t know what you mean, exactly; but if you do mean to come and live with me, there’ll be no talk of board.”

  “Well, well,” returned Helen, “we’ll talk of that later; we’re both pretty headstrong.” Margaret deprecated this, as far as Helen was concerned, with a flattered simper. “But now I’ll tell you what I want to do. You know I’ve been trying to set up for a fashionable milliner in Boston.”

  “Yes, Miss Helen,” sighed Margaret.

  “And I’ve made a failure of it. The fashionable people don’t want my bonnets.”

  “They ‘re a set of hateful things, Miss Helen,” cried Margaret, “and the best of them isn’t fit to scrub your floors for you.”

  Helen laughed at the unmeasured zeal of Margaret’s loyalty, expressed in terms so little fit for the polite ears of those they devoted to condemnation. “No, no, Margaret; they were quite right, and I was all wrong. I didn’t know how to make bonnets when I began.”

  “Miss Helen, if there’s been one person spoke to me on this very street about that last bonnet you done over for me, there’s been a hundred! Everybody says it’s the becomingest bonnet, with more real Beacon Street style to it than any they ever saw me have on!”

  “Well, I’m very glad,” answered Helen patiently; “and that brings me to what I wanted to say. “If I didn’t know how to make bonnets before I began, I did know when I got through — perhaps by spoiling so many.” Margaret sniffed a disdainful denial of the premises, and remained with inflated nostrils, while Helen went on. “And what I think is this: that if I could come out here, and take your spare room, you might tell your friends — those poor girls that sometimes waste so much on bonnets — that I could do their work for them just as well, and a great deal cheaper—”

  “You work for them good-for-nothing hussies, Miss Helen! No, indeed! It’s bad enough having you work for ladies — if they choose to call themselves such after they throw your bonnets back on your hands — but as for them trollops of general housework and second-girls, let them fling their money away; they ‘re soon enough parted from it; but you shan’t take a stitch for them.”

  “Margaret, Margaret!” cried Helen. “I’m not strong enough to talk to you, if you go on in that silly way. I haven’t a cent of my own in the world, and I must work, or I must beg. The question is whether you will let me have your spare room to live and work in, or whether you will turn me out of doors.”

  “Oh, Miss Helen, how can you say such a thing?”

  “Well, then, don’t talk so!”

  “You can have the whole house, and all that we can do for you, and you shall not pay a penny for it.”

  Helen rose. “Very well, then, I shall not take it. You don’t want me to have the room, and that’s your way of putting me off. I understand you, Margaret. But I did suppose that after all these years you’d lived with us, you wouldn’t turn me into the streets.”

  She sank weakly into her chair again, and Margaret called to all the saints to witness if she did not wish to do in every particular exactly what Helen desired.

  “Well, then,” demanded Helen tragically, “will you let me pay you five dollars a week, and make all your bonnets for you?”

  “Yes, yes! Indeed I will, Miss Helen!”

  “And never let your horrid, wicked, foolish old pride interfere with your taking the money — if I ever get it to pay you?” —

  Margaret solemnly promised, and Helen said, “Let me go to the room at once, then. I’m so tired!” and suffered herself to be helped up-stairs to the little chamber which Margaret had adorned in the worst taste of Limekiln Avenue, with chromos over the chimneypiece, and a set of painted furniture, grained to match the oak-paper on the wall. It was like the inside of an ugly box; but Helen fell upon the clean bed, and slept a sleep which carried her well through the afternoon, and left her refreshed and encouraged to begin the long fight, in which she forced Margaret from one stand after another in her determination to treat her as a lady guests But she understood Margaret well enough to know where to hold her hand, and when Margaret sent him to eat his supper in the kitchen, and sat stiffly down in fresh linen cuffs and collar to pour the tea for her in the dining-room, and would not touch anything on the table herself, Helen knew better than to interfere.

  When work began to come to her, she resolutely set her face against the indignant majesty with which Margaret would have treated the poor girls her customers. It was clearly Margaret’s intention to make them feel that it was an honour and a privilege to have their bonnets made by her Miss Helen; at first she remained present at their interviews, brow beating them by her haughty silence into acquiescence with every suggestion of Miss Helen’s, and reducing them to a submission so abject that Helen was sure some of them ordered just the ribbons and flowers they did not want, and others bought bonnets when they had merely come to talk them over. Margaret followed to the door one hapless creature who had failed, in her confusion, to give any order, with allusions to people who wasted other people’s time for nothing so cuttingly sarcastic, that Helen revolted, and positively forbade her to interfere; after that she was obliged to content herself with a haughty reception and dismissal of the customers.

  Helen did her best to serve the simple, stupid things cheaply and well. She knew that she saved them money, and she made their mistaken tastes her own, and in that way sometimes corrected them, without their knowing it, and launched them upon the world a little less formidable in shape and crude in colour than they had intended. But she instinctively studied to obey one of the first laws of business, and that was to supply an existing demand till she had created another. She did not attempt to make her shop — for finally it was nothing more nor less — a school of aesthetics, as she had in first attempting millinery; she advised and suggested, but she decided nothing. She put both her pride and her preferences into the pocket where she
bestowed her customers’ money, and kept only a conscience about giving them the material worth of it. They were a great variety of poor girls and women, beginning with the cooks and second-girls of Margaret’s acquaintance, whose patronage founded Helen’s prosperity, and rising through economical mothers of families to the upper ranks of seamstresses and “sales-ladies.” One day there came a young coloured girl, when luckily Helen was alone; Margaret would never have “demeaned” herself by receiving her, but Helen received her, and in due time sent her forth resplendent in a white hat trimmed in orange and purple.

  This incident of her new career seemed to give it an ultimate stamp of authenticity, and it afforded her such saddened satisfaction as could come to her through a sense of recognised usefulness. She spoke of it to Miss Kingsbury and Cornelia Root, who equally approved; the former because she admired everything Helen did, and the latter because she found it, as Helen herself did, a final testimony to her practicality.

  “It’s all very well in that way,” said Mr. Evans, whom Cornelia had not been able to refrain from triumphing over with a fact that refuted all his predictions of renewed failure for Helen. “So is any one who caters to a depraved popular taste of any sort, practical. But what I want you to consider is whether there is not something immoral in allowing a savage preference for purple and orange to indulge itself. If I read my Ruskin aright, I understand that there is some sort of occult connection between a feeling for colour and righteousness. Now you say that Miss Harkness allows her customers to array themselves in whatever hue of the rainbow they like best; that she daily and hourly violates her own sense of right in colour for the sake of money. Don’t you call that immoral?”

  “What do you have anything to do for with a paper that publishes all those personals and society gossip?” demanded Cornelia in her turn.

  “Oh, I’m a poor, weak, erring male man! But I’ve frequently been taught that when Woman entered the arena of business, it would be in some way that would elevate and ennoble affairs. I shudder to think what will become of us when women go into politics, if they show themselves so ready in business at all the tricks of trade. But I’ve noticed that when Ladies — I’m not speaking of women now — determine to be practical, they let no consideration stand in their way: they aim to succeed. Look at the unprincipled way they conduct their fairs for benevolent objects! What prices! What swindling lotteries of all sorts! No, your Miss Harkness is like the rest; and it appears to me that at the present moment she is pandering to a very depraved taste in ribbonry, and I see nothing to admire in the mere fact that she is making a living by it. Lots of people make a living by selling crooked whisky.”