Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I am ashamed,” he said, not without a remote resentment of the unworthiness of the republican voters of Des Vaches, “when I hear of such things, to think of what we are at home, with all our resources and opportunities.”

  The Italian would have politely excused us to him, but Colville would have no palliation of our political and moral nakedness; and he framed a continuation of the letter he began on the Ponte Vecchio to the Post-Democrat-Republican, in which he made a bitterly ironical comparison of the achievements of Italy and America in the last ten years.

  He forgot about Miss Graham, and had only a vague sense of her splendour as he caught sight of her in the long mirror which she stood before. She was talking to a very handsome young clergyman, and smiling upon him. The company seemed to be mostly Americans, but there were a good many evident English also, and Colville was dimly aware of a question in his mind whether this clergyman was English or American. There were three or four Italians and there were some Germans, who spoke English.

  Colville moved about from group to group as his enlarging acquaintance led, and found himself more interested in society than he could ever have dreamed of being again. It was certainly a defect of the life at Des Vaches that people, after the dancing and love-making period, went out rarely or never. He began to see that the time he had spent so busily in that enterprising city had certainly been in some sense wasted.

  At a certain moment in the evening, which perhaps marked its advancement, the tea-urn was replaced by a jug of the rum punch, mild or strong according to the custom of the house, which is served at most Florentine receptions. Some of the people went immediately after, but the young clergyman remained talking with Miss Graham.

  Colville, with his smoking glass in his hand, found himself at the side of a friendly old gentleman who had refused the punch. They joined in talk by a common impulse, and the old gentleman said, directly, “You are an American, I presume?”

  His accent had already established the fact of his own nationality, but he seemed to think it the part of candour to say, when Colville had acknowledged his origin, “I’m an American myself.”

  “I’ve met several of our countrymen since I arrived,” suggested Colville.

  The old gentleman seemed to like this way of putting it. “Well, yes, we’re not unfairly represented here in numbers, I must confess. But I’m bound to say that I don’t find our countrymen so aggressive, so loud, as our international novelists would make out. I haven’t met any of their peculiar heroines as yet, sir.”

  Colville could not help laughing. “I wish I had. But perhaps they avoid people of our years and discretion, or else take such a filial attitude toward us that we can’t recognise them.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” cried the old gentleman, with cheerful assent.

  “I was talking with one of our German friends here just now, and he complained that the American girls — especially the rich ones — seem very calculating and worldly and conventional. I told him I didn’t know how to account for that. I tried to give him some notion of the ennobling influences of society in Newport, as I’ve had glimpses of it.”

  The old gentleman caressed his elbows, which he was holding in the palms of his hands, in high enjoyment of Colville’s sarcasm. “Ah! very good! very good!” he said. “I quite agree with you, and I think the other sort are altogether preferable.”

  “I think,” continued Colville, dropping his ironical tone, “that we’ve much less to regret in their unsuspecting, unsophisticated freedom than in the type of hard materialism which we produce in young girls, perfectly wide awake, disenchanted, unromantic, who prefer the worldly vanities and advantages deliberately and on principle, recognising something better merely to despise it. I’ve sometimes seen them — —”

  Mrs. Bowen came up in her gentle, inquiring way. “I’m glad that you and Mr. Colville have made acquaintance,” she said to the old gentleman.

  “Oh, but we haven’t,” said Colville. “We’re entire strangers.”

  “Then I’ll introduce you to Rev. Mr. Waters. And take you away,” she added, putting her hand through Colville’s arm with a delicate touch that flattered his whole being, “for your time’s come at last, and I’m going to present you to Miss Graham.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Of course, as there is a Miss Graham, I can’t help being presented to her, but I had almost worked myself up to the point of wishing there were none. I believe I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that at all. A simple schoolgirl like that!” Mrs. Bowen’s sense of humour had not the national acuteness. She liked joking in men, but she did not know how to say funny things back “You’ll see, as you come up to her.”

  IV

  Miss Graham did, indeed, somehow diminish in the nearer perspective. She ceased to be overwhelming. When Colville lifted his eyes from bowing before her he perceived that she — was neither so very tall nor so very large, but possessed merely a generous amplitude of womanhood. But she was even more beautiful, with a sweet and youthful radiance of look that was very winning. If she had ceased to be the goddess she looked across the length of the salon, she had gained much by becoming an extremely lovely young girl; and her teeth, when she spoke, showed a fascinating little irregularity that gave her the last charm.

  Mrs. Bowen glided away with the young clergyman, but Effie remained at Miss Graham’s side, and seemed to have hold of the left hand which the girl let hang carelessly behind her in the volume of her robe. The child’s face expressed an adoration of Miss Graham far beyond her allegiance to her mother.

  “I began to doubt whether Mrs. Bowen was going to bring you at all,” she said frankly, with an innocent, nervous laugh, which made favour for her with Colville. “She promised it early in the evening.”

  “She has used me much worse, Miss Graham,” said Colville. “She has kept me waiting from the beginning of time. So that I have grown grey on my way up to you,” he added, by an inspiration. “I was a comparatively young man when Mrs. Bowen first told me she was going to introduce me.”

  “Oh, how good!” said Miss Graham joyously. And her companion, after a moment’s hesitation, permitted herself a polite little titter. She had made a discovery; she had discovered that Mr. Colville was droll.

  “I’m very glad you like it,” he said, with a gravity that did not deceive them.

  “Oh yes,” sighed Miss Graham, with generous ardour. “Who but an American could say just such things? There’s the loveliest old lady here in Florence, who’s lived here thirty years, and she’s always going back and never getting back, and she’s so homesick she doesn’t know what to do, and she always says that Americans may not be better than other people, but they are different.”

  “That’s very pretty. They’re different in everything but thinking themselves better. Their native modesty prevents that.”

  “I don’t exactly know what you mean,” said Miss Graham, after a little hesitation.

  “Well,” returned Colville, “I haven’t thought it out very clearly myself yet. I may mean that the Americans differ from other people in not thinking well of themselves, or they may differ from them in not thinking well enough. But what I said had a very epigrammatic sound, and I prefer not to investigate it too closely.”

  This made Miss Graham and Miss Effie both cry out “Oh!” in delighted doubt of his intention. They both insensibly drifted a little nearer to him.

  “There was a French lady said to me at the table-d’hote this evening that she knew I was an American, because the Americans always strike the key of personality.” He practised these economies of material in conversation quite recklessly, and often made the same incident or suggestion do duty round a whole company.

  “Ah, I don’t believe that,” said Miss Graham.

  “Believe what?”

  “That the Americans always talk about themselves.”

  “I’m not sure she meant that. You never can tell what a person means by what he says — or she.” />
  “How shocking!”.

  “Perhaps the French lady meant that we always talk about other people. That’s in the key of personality too.”

  “But I don’t believe we do,” said Miss Graham. “At any rate, she was talking about us, then.”

  “Oh, she accounted for that by saying there was a large American colony in Paris, who had corrupted the French, and taught them our pernicious habit of introspection.”

  “Do you think we’re very introspective?”

  “Do you?”

  “I know I’m not. I hardly ever think about myself at all. At any rate, not till it’s too late. That’s the great trouble. I wish I could. But I’m always studying other people. They’re so much more interesting.”

  “Perhaps if you knew yourself better you wouldn’t think so,” suggested Colville.

  “Yes, I know they are. I don’t think any young person can be interesting.”

  “Then what becomes of all the novels? They’re full of young persons.”

  “They’re ridiculous. If I were going to write a novel, I should take an old person for a hero — thirty-five or forty.” She looked at Colville, and blushing a little, hastened to add, “I don’t believe that they begin to be interesting much before that time. Such flat things as young men are always saying! Don’t you remember that passage somewhere in Heine’s Pictures of Travel, where he sees the hand of a lady coming out from under her mantle, when she’s confessing in a church, and he knows that it’s the hand of a young person who has enjoyed nothing and suffered nothing, it’s so smooth and flower-like? After I read that I hated the look of my hands — I was only sixteen, and it seemed as if I had had no more experience than a child. Oh, I like people to go through something. Don’t you?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I do. Other people.”

  “No; but don’t you like it for yourself?”

  “I can’t tell; I haven’t been through anything worth speaking of yet.”

  Miss Graham looked at him dubiously, but pursued with ardour: “Why, just getting back to Florence, after not having been here for so long — I should think it would be so romantic. Oh dear! I wish I were here for the second time.”

  “I’m afraid you wouldn’t like it so well,” said Colville. “I wish I were here for the first time. There’s nothing like the first time in everything.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Well, there’s nothing like the first time in Florence.”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine it. I should think that recalling the old emotions would be perfectly fascinating.”

  “Yes, if they’d come when you do call them. But they’re as contrary-minded as spirits from the vasty deep. I’ve been shouting around here for my old emotions all day, and I haven’t had a responsive squeak.”

  “Oh!” cried Miss Graham, staring full-eyed at him. “How delightful!” Effie Bowen turned away her pretty little head and laughed, as if it might not be quite kind to laugh at a person’s joke to his face.

  Stimulated by their appreciation, Colville went on with more nonsense. “No; the only way to get at your old emotions in regard to Florence is to borrow them from somebody who’s having them fresh. What do you think about Florence, Miss Graham?”

  “I? I’ve been here two months.”

  “Then it’s too late?”

  “No, I don’t know that it is. I keep feeling the strangeness all the time. But I can’t tell you. It’s very different from Buffalo, I can assure you.”

  “Buffalo? I can imagine the difference. And it’s not altogether to the disadvantage of Buffalo.”

  “Oh, have you been there?” asked Miss Graham, with a touching little eagerness. “Do you know anybody in Buffalo?”

  “Some of the newspaper men; and I pass through there once a year on my way to New York — or used to. It’s a lively place.”

  “Yes, it is,” sighed Miss Graham fondly.

  “Do the girls of Buffalo still come out at night and dance by the light of the moon?”

  “What!”

  “Ah, I see,” said Colville, peering at her under his thoughtfully knitted brows, “you do belong to another era. You don’t remember the old negro minstrel song.”

  “No,” said Miss Graham. “I can only remember the end of the war.”

  “How divinely young!” said Colville. “Well,” he added, “I wish that French lady could have overheard us, Miss Graham. I think she would have changed her mind about Americans striking the note of personality in their talk.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed the girl reproachfully, after a moment of swift reflection and recognition, “I don’t see how you could let me do it! You don’t suppose that I should have talked so with every one? It was because you were another American, and such an old friend of Mrs. Bowen’s.”

  “That is what I shall certainly tell the French lady if she attacks me about it,” said Colville. He glanced carelessly toward the end of the room, and saw the young clergyman taking leave of Mrs. Bowen; all the rest of the company were gone. “Bless me!” he said, “I must be going.”

  Mrs. Bowen had so swiftly advanced upon him that she caught the last words. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because it’s to-morrow, I suspect, and the invitation was for one day only.”

  “It was a season ticket,” said Mrs. Bowen, with gay hospitality, “and it isn’t to-morrow for half an hour yet. I can’t think of letting you go. Come up to the fire, all, and let’s sit down by it. It’s at its very best.”

  Effie looked a pretty surprise and a pleasure in this girlish burst from her mother, whose habitual serenity made it more striking in contrast, and she forsook Miss Graham’s hand and ran forward and disposed the easy-chairs comfortably about the hearth.

  Colville and Mrs. Bowen suddenly found themselves upon those terms which often succeed a long separation with people who have felt kindly toward each other at a former meeting and have parted friends: they were much more intimate than they had supposed themselves to be, or had really any reason for being.

  “Which one of your guests do you wish me to offer up, Mrs. Bowen?” he asked, from the hollow of the arm-chair, not too low, which he had sunk into. With Mrs. Bowen in a higher chair at his right hand, and Miss Graham intent upon him from the sofa on his left, a sense of delicious satisfaction filled him from head to foot. “There isn’t one I would spare if you said the word.”

  “And there isn’t one I want destroyed, I’m sorry to say,” answered Mrs. Bowen. “Don’t you think they were all very agreeable?”

  “Yes, yes; agreeable enough — agreeable enough, I suppose. But they stayed too long. When I think we might have been sitting here for the last half-hour, if they’d only gone sooner, I find it pretty hard to forgive them.”

  Mrs. Bowen and Miss Graham exchanged glances above his head — a glance which demanded, “Didn’t I tell you?” for a glance that answered, “Oh, he is!” Effie Bowen’s eyes widened; she kept them fastened upon Colville in silent worship.

  He asked who were certain of the company that he had noticed, and Mrs. Bowen let him make a little fun of them: the fun was very good-natured. He repeated what the German had said about the worldly ambition of American girls; but she would not allow him so great latitude in this. She said they were no worldlier than other girls. Of course, they were fond of society, and some of them got a little spoiled. But they were in no danger of becoming too conventional.

  Colville did not insist. “I missed the military to-night, Mrs. Bowen,” he said. “I thought one couldn’t get through an evening in Florence without officers?”

  “We have them when there is dancing,” returned Mrs. Bowen.

  “Yes, but they don’t know anything but dancing,” Miss Graham broke in. “I like some one who can talk something besides compliments.”

  “You are very peculiar, you know, Imogene,” urged Mrs. Bowen gently. “I don’t think our young men at home do much better in conversation, if you come to that, though.”

  “Oh,
young men, yes! They’re the same everywhere. But here, even when they’re away along in the thirties, they think that girls can only enjoy flattery. I should like a gentleman to talk to me without a single word or look to show that he thought I was good-looking.”

  “Ah, how could he be?” Colville insinuated, and the young girl coloured.

  “I mean, if I were pretty. This everlasting adulation is insulting.”

  “Mr. Morton doesn’t flatter,” said Mrs. Bowen thoughtfully, turning the feather screen she held at her face, now edgewise, now flatwise, toward Colville.

  “Oh no,” owned Miss Graham. “He’s a clergyman.”

  Mrs Bowen addressed herself to Colville. “You must go to hear him some day. He’s very interesting, if you don’t mind his being rather Low Church.”

  Colville was going to pretend to an advanced degree of ritualism; but it occurred to him that it might be a serious matter to Mrs. Bowen, and he asked instead who was the Rev. Mr. Waters.

  “Oh, isn’t he lovely?” cried Miss Graham. “There, Mrs. Bowen! Mr. Waters’s manner is what I call truly complimentary. He always talks to you as if he expected you to be interested in serious matters, and as if you were his intellectual equal. And he’s so happy here in Florence! He gives you the impression of feeling every breath he breathes here a privilege. You ought to hear him talk about Savonarola, Mr. Colville.”