He fetched a long sigh of relief when he sank into his chair and felt himself safe from error if he kept a sharp lookout and did only what the others did. Bellingham had certain habits which he permitted himself, and one of these was tucking the corner of his napkin into his collar; he confessed himself an uncertain shot with a spoon, and defended his practice on the ground of neatness and common-sense. Lapham put his napkin into his collar too, and then, seeing that no one but Bellingham did it, became alarmed and took it out again slyly. He never had wine on his table at home, and on principle he was a prohibitionist; but now he did not know just what to do about the glasses at the right of his plate. He had a notion to turn them all down, as he had read of a well-known politician’s doing at a public dinner, to show that he did not take wine; but, after twiddling with one of them a moment, he let them be, for it seemed to him that would be a little too conspicuous, and he felt that every one was looking. He let the servant fill them all, and he drank out of each, not to appear odd. Later, he observed that the young ladies were not taking wine, and he was glad to see that Irene had refused it, and that Mrs. Lapham was letting it stand untasted. He did not know but he ought to decline some of the dishes, or at least leave most of some on his plate, but he was not able to decide; he took everything and ate everything.
He noticed that Mrs. Corey seemed to take no more trouble about the dinner than anybody, and Mr. Corey rather less; he was talking busily to Mrs. Lapham, and Lapham caught a word here and there that convinced him she was holding her own. He was getting on famously himself with Mrs. Corey, who had begun with him about his new house; he was telling her all about it, and giving her his ideas. Their conversation naturally included his architect across the table; Lapham had been delighted and secretly surprised to find the fellow there; and at something Seymour said the talk spread suddenly, and the pretty house he was building for Colonel Lapham became the general theme. Young Corey testified to its loveliness, and the architect said laughingly that if he had been able to make a nice thing of it, he owed it to the practical sympathy of his client.
“Practical sympathy is good,” said Bromfield Corey; and, slanting his head confidentially to Mrs. Lapham, he added, “Does he bleed your husband, Mrs. Lapham? He’s a terrible fellow for appropriations!”
Mrs. Lapham laughed, reddening consciously, and said she guessed the Colonel knew how to take care of himself. This struck Lapham, then draining his glass of sauterne, as wonderfully discreet in his wife. Bromfield Corey leaned back in his chair a moment. “Well, after all, you can’t say, with all your modern fuss about it, that you do much better now than the old fellows who built such houses as this.”
“Ah,” said the architect, “nobody can do better than well. Your house is in perfect taste; you know I’ve always admired it; and I don’t think it’s at all the worse for being old-fashioned. What we’ve done is largely to go back of the hideous style that raged after they forgot how to make this sort of house. But I think we may claim a better feeling for structure. We use better material, and more wisely; and by and by we shall work out something more characteristic and original.”
“With your chocolates and olives, and your clutter of bric-a-brac?”
“All that’s bad, of course, but I don’t mean that. I don’t wish to make you envious of Colonel Lapham, and modesty prevents my saying, that his house is prettier, — though I may have my convictions, — but it’s better built. All the new houses are better built. Now, your house — —”
“Mrs. Corey’s house,” interrupted the host, with a burlesque haste in disclaiming responsibility for it that made them all laugh. “My ancestral halls are in Salem, and I’m told you couldn’t drive a nail into their timbers; in fact, I don’t know that you would want to do it.”
“I should consider it a species of sacrilege,” answered Seymour, “and I shall be far from pressing the point I was going to make against a house of Mrs. Corey’s.”
This won Seymour the easy laugh, and Lapham silently wondered that the fellow never got off any of those things to him.
“Well,” said Corey, “you architects and the musicians are the true and only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors, painters, novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before us; we try to imitate, we try to represent. But you two sorts of artists create form. If you represent, you fail. Somehow or other you do evolve the camel out of your inner consciousness.”
“I will not deny the soft impeachment,” said the architect, with a modest air.
“I dare say. And you’ll own that it’s very handsome of me to say this, after your unjustifiable attack on Mrs. Corey’s property.”
Bromfield Corey addressed himself again to Mrs. Lapham, and the talk subdivided itself as before. It lapsed so entirely away from the subject just in hand, that Lapham was left with rather a good idea, as he thought it, to perish in his mind, for want of a chance to express it. The only thing like a recurrence to what they had been saying was Bromfield Corey’s warning Mrs. Lapham, in some connection that Lapham lost, against Miss Kingsbury. “She’s worse,” he was saying, “when it comes to appropriations than Seymour himself. Depend upon it, Mrs. Lapham, she will give you no peace of your mind, now she’s met you, from this out. Her tender mercies are cruel; and I leave you to supply the content from your own scriptural knowledge. Beware of her, and all her works. She calls them works of charity; but heaven knows whether they are. It don’t stand to reason that she gives the poor ALL the money she gets out of people. I have my own belief” — he gave it in a whisper for the whole table to hear— “that she spends it for champagne and cigars.”
Lapham did not know about that kind of talking; but Miss Kingsbury seemed to enjoy the fun as much as anybody, and he laughed with the rest.
“You shall be asked to the very next debauch of the committee, Mr. Corey; then you won’t dare expose us,” said Miss Kingsbury.
“I wonder you haven’t been down upon Corey to go to the Chardon Street home and talk with your indigent Italians in their native tongue,” said Charles Bellingham. “I saw in the Transcript the other night that you wanted some one for the work.”
“We did think of Mr. Corey,” replied Miss Kingsbury; “but we reflected that he probably wouldn’t talk with them at all; he would make them keep still to be sketched, and forget all about their wants.”
Upon the theory that this was a fair return for Corey’s pleasantry, the others laughed again.
“There is one charity,” said Corey, pretending superiority to Miss Kingsbury’s point, “that is so difficult, I wonder it hasn’t occurred to a lady of your courageous invention.”
“Yes?” said Miss Kingsbury. “What is that?”
“The occupation, by deserving poor of neat habits, of all the beautiful, airy, wholesome houses that stand empty the whole summer long, while their owners are away in their lowly cots beside the sea.”
“Yes, that is terrible,” replied Miss Kingsbury, with quick earnestness, while her eyes grew moist. “I have often thought of our great, cool houses standing useless here, and the thousands of poor creatures stifling in their holes and dens, and the little children dying for wholesome shelter. How cruelly selfish we are!”
“That is a very comfortable sentiment, Miss Kingsbury,” said Corey, “and must make you feel almost as if you had thrown open No. 31 to the whole North End. But I am serious about this matter. I spend my summers in town, and I occupy my own house, so that I can speak impartially and intelligently; and I tell you that in some of my walks on the Hill and down on the Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of the local policeman prevents my offering personal violence to those long rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses. If I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar at the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp out on the grand piano.”
“Surely, Bromfield,” said his wife, “you don’t consider what havoc such people would make with the furniture of a nice ho
use!”
“That is true,” answered Corey, with meek conviction. “I never thought of that.”
“And if you were a poor man with a sick child, I doubt if you’d have so much heart for burglary as you have now,” said James Bellingham.
“It’s wonderful how patient they are,” said the minister. “The spectacle of the hopeless comfort the hard-working poor man sees must be hard to bear.”
Lapham wanted to speak up and say that he had been there himself, and knew how such a man felt. He wanted to tell them that generally a poor man was satisfied if he could make both ends meet; that he didn’t envy any one his good luck, if he had earned it, so long as he wasn’t running under himself. But before he could get the courage to address the whole table, Sewell added, “I suppose he don’t always think of it.”
“But some day he WILL think about it,” said Corey. “In fact, we rather invite him to think about it, in this country.”
“My brother-in-law,” said Charles Bellingham, with the pride a man feels in a mentionably remarkable brother-in-law, “has no end of fellows at work under him out there at Omaha, and he says it’s the fellows from countries where they’ve been kept from thinking about it that are discontented. The Americans never make any trouble. They seem to understand that so long as we give unlimited opportunity, nobody has a right to complain.”
“What do you hear from Leslie?” asked Mrs. Corey, turning from these profitless abstractions to Mrs. Bellingham.
“You know,” said that lady in a lower tone, “that there is another baby?”
“No! I hadn’t heard of it!”
“Yes; a boy. They have named him after his uncle.”
“Yes,” said Charles Bellingham, joining in. “He is said to be a noble boy, and to resemble me.”
“All boys of that tender age are noble,” said Corey, “and look like anybody you wish them to resemble. Is Leslie still home-sick for the bean-pots of her native Boston?”
“She is getting over it, I fancy,” replied Mrs. Bellingham. “She’s very much taken up with Mr. Blake’s enterprises, and leads a very exciting life. She says she’s like people who have been home from Europe three years; she’s past the most poignant stage of regret, and hasn’t reached the second, when they feel that they must go again.”
Lapham leaned a little toward Mrs. Corey, and said of a picture which he saw on the wall opposite, “Picture of your daughter, I presume?”
“No; my daughter’s grandmother. It’s a Stewart Newton; he painted a great many Salem beauties. She was a Miss Polly Burroughs. My daughter IS like her, don’t you think?” They both looked at Nanny Corey and then at the portrait. “Those pretty old-fashioned dresses are coming in again. I’m not surprised you took it for her. The others” — she referred to the other portraits more or less darkling on the walls— “are my people; mostly Copleys.”
These names, unknown to Lapham, went to his head like the wine he was drinking; they seemed to carry light for the moment, but a film of deeper darkness followed. He heard Charles Bellingham telling funny stories to Irene and trying to amuse the girl; she was laughing, and seemed very happy. From time to time Bellingham took part in the general talk between the host and James Bellingham and Miss Kingsbury and that minister, Mr. Sewell. They talked of people mostly; it astonished Lapham to hear with what freedom they talked. They discussed these persons unsparingly; James Bellingham spoke of a man known to Lapham for his business success and great wealth as not a gentleman; his cousin Charles said he was surprised that the fellow had kept from being governor so long.
When the latter turned from Irene to make one of these excursions into the general talk, young Corey talked to her; and Lapham caught some words from which it seemed that they were speaking of Penelope. It vexed him to think she had not come; she could have talked as well as any of them; she was just as bright; and Lapham was aware that Irene was not as bright, though when he looked at her face, triumphant in its young beauty and fondness, he said to himself that it did not make any difference. He felt that he was not holding up his end of the line, however. When some one spoke to him he could only summon a few words of reply, that seemed to lead to nothing; things often came into his mind appropriate to what they were saying, but before he could get them out they were off on something else; they jumped about so, he could not keep up; but he felt, all the same, that he was not doing himself justice.
At one time the talk ran off upon a subject that Lapham had never heard talked of before; but again he was vexed that Penelope was not there, to have her say; he believed that her say would have been worth hearing.
Miss Kingsbury leaned forward and asked Charles Bellingham if he had read Tears, Idle Tears, the novel that was making such a sensation; and when he said no, she said she wondered at him. “It’s perfectly heart-breaking, as you’ll imagine from the name; but there’s such a dear old-fashioned hero and heroine in it, who keep dying for each other all the way through, and making the most wildly satisfactory and unnecessary sacrifices for each other. You feel as if you’d done them yourself.”
“Ah, that’s the secret of its success,” said Bromfield Corey. “It flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but with his limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their supernatural proportions. You’ve read it, Nanny?”
“Yes,” said his daughter. “It ought to have been called Slop, Silly Slop.”
“Oh, not quite SLOP, Nanny,” pleaded Miss Kingsbury.
“It’s astonishing,” said Charles Bellingham, “how we do like the books that go for our heart-strings. And I really suppose that you can’t put a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into a novel. We do like to see people suffering sublimely.”
“There was talk some years ago,” said James Bellingham, “about novels going out.”
“They’re just coming in!” cried Miss Kingsbury.
“Yes,” said Mr. Sewell, the minister. “And I don’t think there ever was a time when they formed the whole intellectual experience of more people. They do greater mischief than ever.”
“Don’t be envious, parson,” said the host.
“No,” answered Sewell. “I should be glad of their help. But those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them — excuse me, Miss Kingsbury — are ruinous!”
“Don’t you feel like a moral wreck, Miss Kingsbury?” asked the host.
But Sewell went on: “The novelists might be the greatest possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.”
This seemed sense to Lapham; but Bromfield Corey asked: “But what if life as it is isn’t amusing? Aren’t we to be amused?”
“Not to our hurt,” sturdily answered the minister. “And the self-sacrifice painted in most novels like this — —”
“Slop, Silly Slop?” suggested the proud father of the inventor of the phrase.
“Yes — is nothing but psychical suicide, and is as wholly immoral as the spectacle of a man falling upon his sword.”
“Well, I don’t know but you’re right, parson,” said the host; and the minister, who had apparently got upon a battle-horse of his, careered onward in spite of some tacit attempts of his wife to seize the bridle.
“Right? To be sure I am right. The whole business of love, and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Love is very sweet, very pretty — —”
“Oh, THANK you, Mr. Sewell,” said Nanny Corey, in a way that set them all laughing.
“But it’s the affair, commonly, of very young people, who have not yet character and experience enough to make them interesting. In novels it’s treated, not only as if it were the chief interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that the glow of a true passion lasts for ever; and that it is sacrilege to think or act otherwise.”
“Well, but isn’t that true, Mr. Sewell?” pleaded Miss Kingsbury.
“I have known some most estimable people who had married a second time,” said the minister, and then he had the applause with him. Lapham wanted to make some open recognition of his good sense, but could not.
“I suppose the passion itself has been a good deal changed,” said Bromfield Corey, “since the poets began to idealise it in the days of chivalry.”
“Yes; and it ought to be changed again,” said Mr. Sewell.
“What! Back?”
“I don’t say that. But it ought to be recognised as something natural and mortal, and divine honours, which belong to righteousness alone, ought not to be paid it.”
“Oh, you ask too much, parson,” laughed his host, and the talk wandered away to something else.
It was not an elaborate dinner; but Lapham was used to having everything on the table at once, and this succession of dishes bewildered him; he was afraid perhaps he was eating too much. He now no longer made any pretence of not drinking his wine, for he was thirsty, and there was no more water, and he hated to ask for any. The ice-cream came, and then the fruit. Suddenly Mrs. Corey rose, and said across the table to her husband, “I suppose you will want your coffee here.” And he replied, “Yes; we’ll join you at tea.”
The ladies all rose, and the gentlemen got up with them. Lapham started to follow Mrs. Corey, but the other men merely stood in their places, except young Corey, who ran and opened the door for his mother. Lapham thought with shame that it was he who ought to have done that; but no one seemed to notice, and he sat down again gladly, after kicking out one of his legs which had gone to sleep.
They brought in cigars with coffee, and Bromfield Corey advised Lapham to take one that he chose for him. Lapham confessed that he liked a good cigar about as well as anybody, and Corey said: “These are new. I had an Englishman here the other day who was smoking old cigars in the superstition that tobacco improved with age, like wine.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 242
