Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well,” said Colville, “I’ve heard a great many people talk about Savonarola, and I’m rather glad he talked to me about American girls.”

  “American girls!” uttered Miss Graham, in a little scream. “Did Mr. Waters talk to you about girls?”

  “Yes. Why not? He was probably in love with one once.”

  “Mr. Waters?” cried the girl. “What nonsense!”

  “Well, then, with some old lady. Would you like that better?”

  Miss Graham looked at Mrs. Bowen for permission, as it seemed, and then laughed, but did not attempt any reply to Colville.

  “You find even that incredible of such pyramidal antiquity,” he resumed. “Well, it is hard to believe. I told him what that German said, and we agreed beautifully about another type of American girl which we said we preferred.”

  “Oh! What could it be?” demanded Miss Graham.

  “Ah, it wouldn’t be so easy to say right off-hand,” answered Colville indolently.

  Mrs. Bowen put her hand under the elbow of the arm holding her screen. “I don’t believe I should agree with you so well,” she said, apparently with a sort of didactic intention.

  They entered into a discussion which is always fruitful with Americans — the discussion of American girlhood, and Colville contended for the old national ideal of girlish liberty as wide as the continent, as fast as the Mississippi. Mrs. Bowen withstood him with delicate firmness. “Oh,” he said, “you’re Europeanised.”

  “I certainly prefer the European plan of bringing up girls,” she replied steadfastly. “I shouldn’t think of letting a daughter of mine have the freedom I had.”

  “Well, perhaps it will come right in the next generation, then; she will let her daughter have the freedom she hadn’t.”

  “Not if I’m alive to prevent it,” cried Mrs. Bowen.

  Colville laughed. “Which plan do you prefer, Miss Graham?”

  “I don’t think it’s quite the same now as it used to be,” answered the girl evasively.

  “Well, then, all I can say is that if I had died before this chance, I had lived a blessed time. I perceive more and more that I’m obsolete. I’m in my dotage; I prattle of the good old times, and the new spirit of the age flouts me. Miss Effie, do you prefer the Amer — —”

  “No, thank you,” said her mother quickly.

  “Effie is out of the question. It’s time you were in bed, Effie.”

  The child came with instant submissiveness and kissed her mother good-night; she kissed Miss Graham, and gave her hand to Colville. He held it a moment, letting her pull shyly away from him, while he lolled back in his chair, and laughed at her with his sad eyes. “It’s past the time I should be in bed, my dear, and I’m sitting up merely because there’s nobody to send me. It’s not that I’m really such a very bad boy. Good night. Don’t put me into a disagreeable dream; put me into a nice one.” The child bridled at the mild pleasantry, and when Colville released her hand she suddenly stooped forward and kissed him.

  “You’re so funny!” she cried, and ran and escaped beyond the portière.

  Mrs. Bowen stared in the same direction, but not with severity. “Really, Effie has been carried a little beyond herself.”

  “Well,” said Colville, “that’s one conquest since I came to Florence. And merely by being funny! When I was in Florence before, Mrs. used to go about quite freely with either of them. They were both very pretty, and we were all very young. Don’t you think it was charming?” Mrs. Bowen coloured a lovely red, and smiled, but made no other response. “Florence has changed very much for the worse since that time. There used to be a pretty flower-girl, with a wide-flapping straw hat, who flung a heavy bough full of roses into my lap when she met me driving across the Carraja bridge. I spent an hour looking for that girl to-day, and couldn’t find her. The only flower-girl I could find was a fat one of fifty, who kept me fifteen minutes in Via Tornabuoni while she was fumbling away at my button-hole, trying to poke three second-hand violets and a sickly daisy into it. Ah, youth! youth! I suppose a young fellow could have found that other flower-girl at a glance; but my old eyes! No, we belong, each of us, to our own generation. Mrs. Bowen,” he said, with a touch of tragedy — whether real or affected, he did not well know himself — in his hardiness, “what has become of Mrs. Pilsbury?”

  “Mrs. Milbury, you mean?” gasped Mrs. Bowen, in affright at his boldness.

  “Milbury, Bilbury, Pilsbury — it’s all one, so long as it isn’t — —”

  “They’re living in Chicago!” she hastened to reply, as if she were afraid he was going to say, “so long as it isn’t Colville,” and she could not have borne that.

  Colville clasped his hands at the back of his head and looked at Mrs. Bowen with eyes that let her know that he was perfectly aware she had been telling Miss Graham of his youthful romance, and that he had now touched it purposely. “And you wouldn’t,” he said, as if that were quite relevant to what they had been talking about— “you wouldn’t let Miss Graham go out walking alone with a dotard like me?”

  “Certainly not,” said Mrs. Bowen.

  Colville got to his feet by a surprising activity. “Good-bye, Miss Graham.” He offered his hand to her with burlesque despair, and then turned to Mrs. Bowen. “Thank you for such a pleasant evening! What was your day, did you say?”

  “Oh, any day!” said Mrs. Bowen cordially, giving her hand.

  “Do you know whom you look like?” he asked, holding it.

  “No.”

  “Lina Ridgely.”

  The ladies stirred softly in their draperies after he was gone. They turned and faced the hearth, where a log burned in a bed of hot ashes, softly purring and ticking to itself, and whilst they stood pressing their hands against the warm fronts of their dresses, as the fashion of women is before a fire, the clock on the mantel began to strike twelve.

  “Was that her name?” asked Miss Graham, when the clock had had its say. “Lina Ridgely?”

  “No; that was my name,” answered Mrs. Bowen.

  “Oh yes!” murmured the young girl apologetically.

  “She led him on; she certainly encouraged him. It was shocking. He was quite wild about it.”

  “She must have been a cruel girl. How could he speak of it so lightly?”

  “It was best to speak of it, and have done with it,” said Mrs. Bowen. “He knew that I must have been telling you something about it.”

  “Yes. How bold it was! A young man couldn’t have done it! Yes, he’s fascinating. But how old and sad he looked, as he lay back there in the chair!”

  “Old? I don’t think he looked old. He looked sad. Yes, it’s left its mark on him.”

  The log burned quite through to its core, and fell asunder, a bristling mass of embers. They had been looking at it with downcast heads. Now they lifted their faces, and saw the pity in each other’s eyes, and the beautiful girl impulsively kissed the pretty woman good-night.

  V

  Colville fell asleep with the flattered sense which abounds in the heart of a young man after his first successful evening in society, but which can visit maturer life only upon some such conditions of long exile and return as had been realised in his. The looks of these two charming women followed him into his dreams; he knew he must have pleased them, the dramatic homage of the child was evidence of that; and though it had been many years since he had found it sufficient cause of happiness to have pleased a woman, the desire to do so was by no means extinct in him. The eyes of the girl hovered above him like stars; he felt in their soft gaze that he was a romance to her young heart, and this made him laugh; it also made him sigh.

  He woke at dawn with a sharp twinge in his shoulder, and he rose to give himself the pleasure of making his own fire with those fagots of broom and pine twigs which he had enjoyed the night before, promising himself to get back into bed when the fire was well going, and sleep late. While he stood before the open stove, the jangling of a small bell outside called him to the win
dow, and he saw a procession which had just issued from the church going to administer the extreme unction to some dying person across the piazza. The parish priest went first, bearing the consecrated wafer in its vessel, and at his side an acolyte holding a yellow silk umbrella over the Eucharist; after them came a number of facchini in white robes and white hoods that hid their faces; their tapers burned sallow and lifeless in the new morning light; the bell jangled dismally.

  “They even die dramatically in this country,” thought Colville, in whom the artist was taken with the effectiveness of the spectacle before his human pity was stirred for the poor soul who was passing. He reproached himself for that, and instead of getting back to bed, he dressed and waited for the mature hour which he had ordered his breakfast for. When it came at last, picturesquely borne on the open hand of Giovanni, steaming coffee, hot milk, sweet butter in delicate disks, and two white eggs coyly tucked in the fold of a napkin, and all grouped upon the wide salver, it brought him a measure of the consolation which good cheer imparts to the ridiculous human heart even in the house where death is. But the sad incident tempered his mind with a sort of pensiveness that lasted throughout the morning, and quite till lunch. He spent the time in going about the churches; but the sunshine which the day began with was overcast, as it was the day before, and the churches were rather too dark and cold in the afternoon. He went to Viesseux’s reading-room and looked over the English papers, which he did not care for much; and he also made a diligent search of the catalogue for some book about Florence for little Effie Bowen: he thought he would like to surprise her mother with his interest in the matter. As the day waned toward dark, he felt more and more tempted to take her at her word, when she had said that any day was her day to him, and go to see her. If he had been a younger man he would have anxiously considered this indulgence and denied himself, but after forty a man denies himself no reasonable and harmless indulgence; he has learned by that time that it is a pity and a folly to do so.

  Colville found Mrs. Bowen’s room half full of arriving and departing visitors, and then he remembered that it was this day she had named to him on the Ponte Vecchio, and when Miss Graham thanked him for coming his first Thursday, he made a merit of not having forgotten it, and said he was going to come every Thursday during the winter. Miss Graham drew him a cup of tea from the Russian samovar which replaces in some Florentine houses the tea-pot of Occidental civilisation, and Colville smiled upon it and upon her, bending over the brazen urn with a flower-like tilt of her beautiful head. She wore an aesthetic dress of creamy camel’s-hair, whose colour pleased the eye as its softness would have flattered the touch.

  “What a very Tourguéneffish effect the samovar gives!” he said, taking a biscuit from the basket Effie Bowen brought him, shrinking with redoubled shyness from the eyebrows which he arched at her. “I wonder you can keep from calling me Fedor Colvillitch. Where is your mother, Effie Bowenovna?” he asked of the child, with a temptation to say Imogene Grahamovna.

  They both looked mystified, but Miss Graham said, “I’m sorry to say you won’t see Mrs. Bowen today. She has a very bad headache, and has left Effie and me to receive. We feel very incompetent, but she says it will do us good.”

  There were some people there of the night before, and Colville had to talk to them. One of the ladies asked him if he had met the Inglehart boys as he came in.

  “The Inglehart boys? No. What are the Inglehart boys?”

  “They were here all last winter, and they’ve just got back. It’s rather exciting for Florence.” She gave him a rapid sketch of that interesting exodus of a score of young painters from the art school at Munich, under the head of the singular and fascinating genius by whose name they became known. “They had their own school for a while in Munich, and then they all came down into Italy in a body. They had their studio things with them, and they travelled third class, and they made the greatest excitement everywhere, and had the greatest fun. They were a great sensation in Florence. They went everywhere, and were such favourites. I hope they are going to stay.”

  “I hope so too,” said Colville. “I should like to see them.”

  “Dear me!” said the lady, with a glance at the clock. “It’s five! I must be going.”

  The other ladies went, and Colville approached to take leave, but Miss Graham detained him.

  “What is Tourguéneffish?” she demanded.

  “The quality of the great Russian novelist, Tourguéneff,” said Colville, perceiving that she had not heard of him.

  “Oh!”

  “You ought to read him. The samovar sends up its agreeable odour all through his books. Read Lisa if you want your heart really broken.

  “I’m glad you approve of heart-breaks in books. So many people won’t read anything but cheerful books. It’s the only quarrel I have with Mrs. Bowen. She says there are so many sad things in life that they ought to be kept out of books.”

  “Ah, there I perceive a divided duty,” said Colville. “I should like to agree with both of you. But if Mrs. Bowen were here I should remind her that if there are so many sad things in life that is a very good reason for putting them in books too.”

  “Of course I shall tell her what you said.”

  “Why, I don’t object to a certain degree of cheerfulness in books; only don’t carry it too far — that’s all.”

  This made the young girl laugh, and Colville was encouraged to go on. He told her of the sight he had seen from his window at daybreak, and he depicted it all very graphically, and made her feel its pathos perhaps more keenly than he had felt it. “Now, that little incident kept with me all day, tempering my boisterous joy in the Giottos, and reducing me to a decent composure in the presence of the Cimabues; and it’s pretty hard to keep from laughing at some of them, don’t you think?”

  The young people perceived that he was making fun again; but he continued with an air of greater seriousness. “Don’t you see what a very good thing that was to begin one’s day with? Why, even in Santa Croce, with the thermometer ten degrees below zero in the shade of Alfieri’s monument, I was no gayer than I should have been in a church at home. I suppose Mrs. Bowen would object to having that procession go by under one’s window in a book; but I can’t really see how it would hurt the reader, or damp his spirits permanently. A wholesome reaction would ensue, such as you see now in me, whom the thing happened to in real life.”

  He stirred his tea, and shook with an inward laugh as he carried it to his lips.

  “Yes,” said Miss Graham thoughtfully, and she looked at him searchingly in the interval of silence that ensued. But she only added, “I wish it would get warmer in the churches. I’ve seen hardly anything of them yet.”

  “From the way I felt in them to-day,” sighed Colville, “I should think the churches would begin to thaw out about the middle of May. But if one goes well wrapped up in furs, and has a friend along to rouse him and keep him walking when he is about to fall into that lethargy which precedes death by freezing, I think they may be visited even now with safety. Have you been in Santa Maria Novella yet?”

  “No,” said Miss Graham, with a shake of the head that expressed her resolution to speak the whole truth if she died for it, “not even in Santa Maria Novella.”

  “What a wonderful old place it is! That curious façade, with the dials and its layers of black and white marble soaked golden-red in a hundred thousand sunsets! That exquisite grand portal!” He gesticulated with the hand that the tea-cup left free, to suggest form and measurement as artists do. “Then the inside! The great Cimabue, with all that famous history on its back — the first divine Madonna by the first divine master, carried through the streets in a triumph of art and religion! Those frescoes of Ghirlandajo’s with real Florentine faces and figures in them, and all lavished upon the eternal twilight of that choir — but I suppose that if the full day were let in on them, once, they would vanish like ghosts at cock-crow! You must be sure to see the Spanish chapel; and the old cloister it
self is such a pathetic place. There’s a boys’ school, as well as a military college, in the suppressed convent now, and the colonnades were full of boys running and screaming and laughing and making a joyful racket; it was so much more sorrowful than silence would have been there. One of the little scamps came up to me, and the young monk that was showing me round, and bobbed us a mocking bow and bobbed his hat off; then they all burst out laughing again and raced away, and the monk looked after them and said, so sweetly and wearily, ‘They’re at their diversions: we must have patience.’ There are only twelve monks left there; all the rest are scattered and gone.” He gave his cup to Miss Graham for more tea.

  “Don’t you think,” she asked, drawing it from the samovar, “that it is very sad having the convents suppressed?”

  “It was very sad having slavery abolished — for some people,” suggested Colville; he felt the unfairness of the point he had made.

  “Yes,” sighed Miss Graham.

  Colville stood stirring his second cup of tea, when the portière parted, and showed Mrs. Bowen wistfully pausing on the threshold. Her face was pale, but she looked extremely pretty there.

  “Ah, come in, Mrs. Bowen!” he called gaily to her. “I won’t give you away to the other people. A cup of tea will do you good.”

  “Oh, I’m a great deal better,” said Mrs. Bowen, coming forward to give him her hand. “I heard your voice, and I couldn’t resist looking in.”

  “That was very kind of you,” said Colville gratefully: and her eyes met his in a glance that flushed her face a deep red. “You find me here — I don’t know why! — in my character of old family friend, doing my best to make life a burden to the young ladies.”

  “I wish you would stay to a family dinner with us,” said Mrs. Bowen, and Miss Graham brightened in cordial support of the hospitality. “Why can’t you?”

  “I don’t know, unless it’s because I’m a humane person, and have some consideration for your headache.”