Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The invitations, upon these conditions, might have gone on indefinitely, but they did not imply a future for the young girl in whom the interests of her parents centred. After being so long a little girl, she had become a great girl, and then all at once she had become a young lady. They had to ask themselves, the mother definitely and the father formlessly, whether they wished their daughter to marry an Englishman, and their hearts answered them, like true Republican hearts, Not an untitled Englishman, while they saw no prospect of her getting any other. Mrs. Pasmer philosophised the case with a clearness and a courage which gave her husband a series of twinges analogous to the toothache, for a man naturally shrinks from such bold realisations. She said Alice had the beauty of a beauty, and she had the distinction of a beauty, but she had not the principles of a beauty; there was no use pretending that she had. For this reason the Prince of Wales’s set, so accessible to American loveliness with the courage of its convictions, was beyond her; and the question was whether there was money enough for a younger son, or whether, if there was, a younger son was worth it.

  However this might be, there was no question but there was now less money than there had been, and a great deal less. The investments had not turned out as they promised; not only had dividends been passed, but there had been permanent shrinkages. What was once an amiable competency from the pooling of their joint resources had dwindled to a sum that needed a careful eye both to the income and the outgo. Alice’s becoming a young lady had increased their expenses by the suddenly mounting cost of her dresses, and of the dresses which her mother must now buy for the different role she had to sustain in society. They began to ask themselves what it was for, and to question whether, if she could not marry a noble Englishman, Alice had not better marry a good American.

  Even with Mrs. Pasmer this question was tacit, and it need not be explained to any one who knows our life that in her most worldly dreams she intended at the bottom of her heart that her daughter should marry for love. It is the rule that Americans marry for love, and the very rare exception that they marry for anything else; and if our divorce courts are so busy in spite of this fact, it is perhaps because the Americans also unmarry for love, or perhaps because love is not so sufficient in matters of the heart as has been represented in the literature of people who have not been able to give it so fair a trial. But whether it is all in all in marriage, or only a very marked essential, it is certain that Mrs. Pasmer expected her daughter’s marriage to involve it. She would have shrunk from intimating anything else to her as from a gross indecency; and she could not possibly, by any finest insinuation, have made her a partner in her design for her happiness. That, so far as Alice was concerned, was a thing which was to fall to her as from heaven; for this also is part of the American plan. We are the children of the poets, the devotees of the romancers, so far as that goes; and however material and practical we are in other things, in this we are a republic of shepherds and shepherdesses, and we live in a golden age; which if it sometimes seems an age of inconvertible paper, is certainly so through no want of faith in us.

  Though the Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice’s sake, they both understood that they were going home experimentally, and not with the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unless they liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had no illusions in regard to it. She had learned from her former visits home that it was frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years which they had spent chiefly abroad, she had observed the decay of that distinction which formerly attended returning sojourners from Europe. She had seen them cease gradually from the romantic reverence which once clothed them, and decline through a gathering indifference into something like slight and compassion, as people who have not been able to make their place or hold their own at home; and she had taught herself so well how to pocket the superiority natural to the Europeanised American before arriving at consciousness of this disesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people who had always stayed at home.

  In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for her that she flattered adroitly always. But adroitness in flattery is not necessary for its successful use. There is no morsel of it too gross for the condor gullet and the ostrich stomach of human vanity; there is no society in which it does not give the utterer instant honour and acceptance in greater or less degree. Mrs. Pasmer, who was very good-natured, employed it because she liked it herself, and knowing how absolutely worthless it was from her own tongue, prized it from others. She could have rested perfectly safe without it in her social position, which she found unchanged by years of absence. She had not been a Hibbins for nothing, and she was not a Pasmer for nothing, though why she should have been either for something it would not be easy to say.

  But while confessing the foibles of Mrs. Pasmer, it would not be fair to omit from the tale of her many virtues the final conscientiousness of her openly involuted character. Not to mention other things, she instituted and practised economies as alien to her nature as to her husband’s, and in their narrowing affairs she kept him out of debt. She was prudent; she was alert; and while presenting to the world all the outward effect of a butterfly, she possessed some of the best qualities of the bee.

  With his senatorial presence, his distinction of person and manner, Mr. Pasmer was inveterately selfish in that province of small personal things where his wife left him unmolested. In what related to his own comfort and convenience he was undisputed lord of himself. It was she who ordered their comings and goings, and decided in which hemisphere they should sojourn from time to time, and in what city, street, and house, but always with the understanding that the kitchen and all the domestic appointments were to her husband’s mind. He was sensitive to degrees of heat and cold, and luxurious in the matter of lighting, and he had a fine nose for plumbing. If he had not occupied himself so much with these details, he was the sort of man to have thought Mrs. Pasmer, with her buzz of activities and pretences, rather a tedious little woman. He had some delicate tastes, if not refined interests, and was expensively fond of certain sorts of bric-a-brac: he spent a great deal of time in packing and unpacking it, and he had cases stored in Rome and London and Paris; it had been one of his motives in consenting to come home that he might get them out, and set up the various objects of bronze and porcelain in cabinets. He had no vices, unless absolute idleness ensuing uninterruptedly upon a remotely demonstrated unfitness for business can be called a vice. Like other people who have always been idle, he did not consider his idleness a vice. He rather plumed himself upon it, for the man who has done nothing all his life naturally looks down upon people who have done or are doing something. In Europe he had not all the advantage of this superiority which such a man has here; he was often thrown with other idle people, who had been useless for so many generations that they had almost ceased to have any consciousness of it. In their presence Pasmer felt that his uselessness had not that passive elegance which only ancestral uselessness can give; that it was positive, and to that degree vulgar.

  A life like this was not one which would probably involve great passions or affections, and it would be hard to describe exactly the feeling with which he regarded his daughter. He liked her, of course, and he had naturally expected certain things of her, as a ladylike intelligence, behaviour, and appearance; but he had never shown any great tenderness for her, or even pride in her. She had never given him any displeasure, however, and he had not shared his wife’s question of mind at a temporary phase of Alice’s development when she showed a decided inclination for a religious life. He had apparently not observed that the girl had a pensive temperament in spite of the effect of worldly splendour which her mother contrived for her, and that this pensiveness occasionally deepened to gloom. He had certainly never seen that in a way of her own she was very romantic. Mrs. Pasmer had seen it, with amusement sometimes, and sometimes with anxiety, but always with the courage to believe that she could cope with it when it was necessary.<
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  Whenever it was necessary she had all the moral courage she wanted; it seemed as if she could have it or not as she liked; and in coming home she had taken a flat instead of a house, though she had not talked with her friends three minutes without perceiving that the moment when flats had promised to assert their social equality with houses in Boston was past for ever. There were, of course, cases in which there could be no question of them; but for the most part they were plainly regarded as makeshifts, the resorts of people of small means, or the defiances or errors of people who had lived too much abroad. They stamped their occupants as of transitory and fluctuant character; good people might live in them, and did, as good people sometimes boarded; but they could not be regarded as forming a social base, except in rare instances. They presented peculiar difficulties in calling, and for any sort of entertainment they were too — not public, perhaps, but — evident.

  In spite of these objections Mrs. Pasmer took a flat in the Cavendish, and she took it furnished from people who were going abroad for a year.

  X.

  Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was looking out of the other window, started significantly back.

  “What is it, Alice?”

  “Nothing! Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his — —”

  “Which friend? But where? Don’t look! They will think we were watching them. I can’t see them at all. Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly betraying this anxiety to her daughter.

  Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room. “They are coming this way,” she said indifferently.

  Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home. “Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend. “Were you going, Alice? Better stay. It would be awkward sending out for you. You look well enough.”

  “Well!”

  The young men came in, Mavering with his nervous laugh first, and then Boardman with his twinkling black eyes, and his main-force self-possession.

  “We couldn’t go away as far as New London without coming to see whether you had really survived Class Day,” said the former, addressing his solicitude to Mrs. Pasmer. “I tried to find out from, Mrs. Saintsbury, but she was very noncommittal.” He laughed again, and shook hands with Alice, whom he now included in his inquiry.

  “I’m glad she was,” said Mrs. Pasmer — inwardly wondering what he meant by going to New London— “if it sent you to ask in person.” She made them sit down; and she made as little as possible of the young ceremony they threw into the transaction. To be cosy, to be at ease instantly, was Mrs. Pasmer’s way. “We’ve not only survived, we’ve taken a new lease of life from Class Day. I’d for gotten how charming it always was. Or perhaps it didn’t use to be so charming? I don’t believe they have anything like it in Europe. Is it always so brilliant?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mavering. “I really believe it was rather a nice one.”

  “Oh, we were both enraptured,” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

  Alice added a quiet “Yes, indeed,” and her mother went on —

  “And we thought the Beck Hall spread was the crowning glory of the whole affair. We owe ever so much to your kindness.”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Mavering.

  “But we were talking afterward, Alice and I, about the sudden transformation of all that disheveled crew around the Tree into the imposing swells — may I say howling swells?—”

  “Yes, do say ‘howling,’ Mrs. Pasmer!” implored the young man.

  “ — whom we met afterward at the spread,” she concluded. “How did you manage it all? Mr. Irving in the ‘Lyons Mail’ was nothing to it. We thought we had walked directly over from the Tree; and there you were, all ready to receive us, in immaculate evening dress.”

  “It was pretty quick work,” modestly admitted the young man. “Could you recognise any one in that hurly-burly round the Tree?”

  “We didn’t till you rose, like a statue of Victory, and began grabbing for the spoils from the heads and shoulders of your friends. Who was your pedestal?”

  Mavering put his hand on his friend’s broad shoulder, and gave him a playful push.

  Boardman turned up his little black eyes at him, with a funny gleam in them.

  “Poor Mr. Boardman!” said Mrs. Pasmer.

  “It didn’t hurt him a bit,” said Mavering, pushing him. “He liked it.”

  “Of course he did,” said Mrs. Pasmer, implying, in flattery of Mavering, that Boardman might be glad of the distinction; and now Boardman looked as if he were not. She began to get away in adding, “But I wonder you don’t kill each other.”

  “Oh, we’re not so easily killed,” said Mavering.

  “And what a fairy scene it was at the spread!” said Mrs. Pasmer, turning to Boardman. She had already talked its splendours over with Mavering the same evening. “I thought we should never get out of the Hall; but when we did get out of the window upon that tapestried platform, and down on the tennis-ground, with Turkey rugs to hide the bare spots in it—” She stopped as people do when it is better to leave the effect to the listener’s imagination.

  “Yes, I think it was rather nice,” said Boardman.

  “Nice?” repeated Mrs. Pasmer; and she looked at Mavering. “Is that the famous Harvard Indifferentism?”

  “No, no, Mrs. Pasmer! It’s just his personal envy. He wasn’t in the spread, and of course he doesn’t like to hear any one praise it. Go on!” They all laughed.

  “Well, even Mr. Boardman will admit,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “that nothing could have been prettier than that pavilion at the bottom of the lawn, and the little tables scattered about over it, and all those charming young creatures under that lovely evening sky.”

  “Ah! Even Boardman can’t deny that. We did have the nicest crowd; didn’t we?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Pasmer, playfully checking herself in a ready adhesion, “that depends a good deal upon where Mr. Boardman’s spread was.”

  “Thank you,” said Boardman.

  “He wasn’t spreading anywhere,” cried his friend. “Except himself — he was spreading himself everywhere.”

  “Then I think I should prefer to remain neutral,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a mock prudence which pleased the young men. In the midst of the pleasure the was giving and feeling she was all the time aware that her daughter had contributed but one remark to the conversation, and that she must be seeming very stiff and cold. She wondered what that meant, and whether she disliked this little Mr. Boardman, or whether she was again trying to punish Mr. Mavering for something, and, if so, what it was. Had he offended her in some way the other day? At any rate, she had no right to show it. She longed for some chance to scold the girl, and tell her that it would not do, and make her talk. Mr. Mavering was merely a friendly acquaintance, and there could be no question of anything personal. She forgot that between young people the social affair is always trembling to the personal affair.

  In the little pause which these reflections gave her mother, the girl struck in, with the coolness that always astonished Mrs. Pasmer, and as if she had been merely waiting till some phase of the talk interested her.

  “Are many of the students going to the race?” she asked Boardman.

  “Yes; nearly everybody. That is—”

  “The race?” queried Mrs. Pasmer.

  “Yes, at New London,” Mavering broke in. “Don’t you know? The University race — Harva
rd and Yale.”

  “Oh — oh yes,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, wondering how her daughter should know about the race, and she not. “Had they talked it over together on Class Day?” she asked herself. She felt herself, in spite of her efforts to keep even with them; left behind and left out, as later age must be distanced and excluded by youth. “Are you gentlemen going to row?” she asked Mavering.

  “No; they’ve ruled the tubs out this time; and we should send anything else to the bottom.”

  Mrs. Pasmer perceived that he was joking, but also that they were not of the crew; and she said that if that was the case the should not go.

  “Oh, don’t let that keep you away! Aren’t you going? I hoped you were going,” continued the young man, speaking with his eyes on Mrs. Pasmer, but with his mind, as she could see by his eyes, on her daughter.

  “No, no.”

  “Oh, do go, Mrs. Pasmer!” he urged: “I wish you’d go along to chaperon us.”

  Mrs. Pasmer accepted the notion with amusement. “I should think you might look after each other. At any rate, I think I must trust you to Mr. Boardman this time.”

  “Yes; but he’s going on business,” persisted Mavering, as if for the pleasure he found in fencing with the air, “and he can’t look after me.”

  “On business?” said Mrs. Pasmer, dropping her outspread fan on her lap, incredulously.

  “Yes; he’s going into journalism — he’s gone into it,” laughed Mavering; “and he’s going down to report the race for the ‘Events’.”