Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook, tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood, with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting over its bridge, and turning out distinctly ‘retrousse’. This gave her profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that nose to be either irresolute or commonplace, and for good or for ill Miss Anderson was decided and original. She carried her figure, which was no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness; she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies and tangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with tones like a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of the perfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous, feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.

  She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice at an early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had a patronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herself less fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping with actualities.

  “I think she’s moybid, Alice is,” she said. “She isn’t moybid in the usual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of the woyld generally than anybody’s going to get out of it. She thinks she’s going to get as much as she gives, and that’s a great mistake, Mrs. Pasmer,” she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letter which the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would be tiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.

  “Oh yes, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat, and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss Anderson’s.

  “Now, even at church — she carries the same spirit into the church. She doesn’t make allowance for human nature, and the church does.”

  “Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Pasmer agreed.

  “She isn’t like a person that’s been brought up in the church. It’s more like the old Puritan spirit. — Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!”

  “Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!” said Mrs. Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care for them.

  “I always forget that you’re a Bostonian,” Miss Anderson apologized.

  “Oh, thank you!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

  “I’m going to try to make her like other girls,” continued Miss Anderson.

  “Do,” said Alice’s mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the undertaking.

  “If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and a little under fifty, it would be easier,” said Miss Anderson thoughtfully. “But how are you going to make a girl like other girls when there are no young men?”

  “That’s very true,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of course did her best to make impersonal. “Do you think there will be more, later on?”

  “They will have to Huey up if they are comin’,” said Miss Anderson. “It’s the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in September.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.

  She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of the broad hotel steps.

  “What is it, Alice?”

  “Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat.”

  “Mr. Munt?”

  “Yes.” She would not stay for further question.

  Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on the balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with her daughter’s being, after all, like other girls, when it came to essentials.

  XII.

  Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave her hand to both the gentlemen without the affectation of surprise at seeing either.

  “I saw Mr. Munt coning up from the boat,” she said in answer to Mavering’s demand for some sort of astonishment from her. “I wasn’t certain that it was you.”

  Mrs. Pasmer, whose pretences had been all given away by this simple confession, did not resent it, she was so much pleased with her daughter’s evident excitement at the young man’s having come. Without being conscious of it, perhaps, Alice prettily assumed the part of hostess from the moment of their meeting, and did the honours of the hotel with a tacit implication of knowing that he had come to see her there. They had only met twice, but now, the third time, meeting after a little separation, their manner toward each other was as if their acquaintance had been making progress in the interval. She took him about quite as if he had joined their family party, and introduced him to Miss Anderson and to all her particular friends, for each of whom, within five minutes after his presentation, he contrived to do some winning service. She introduced him to her father, whom he treated with deep respect and said “Sir” to. She showed him the bowling alley, and began to play tennis with him.

  Her mother, sitting with John Munt on the piazza, followed these polite attentions to Mavering with humorous satisfaction, which was qualified as they went on.

  “Alice,” she said to her, at a chance which offered itself during the evening, and then she hesitated for the right word.

  “Well; mamma?” said the girl impatiently, stopping on her way to walk up and down the piazza with Mavering; she had run in to get a wrap and a Tam-o’-Shanter cap.

  “Don’t — overdo — the honours.”

  “What do you mean, mamma?” asked the girl; dropping her arms before her, and letting the shawl trail on the floor.

  “Don’t you think he was very kind to us on Class Day?”

  Her mother laughed. “But every one mayn’t know it’s gratitude.”

  Alice went out, but she came back in a little while, and went up to her room without speaking to any one.

  The fits of elation and depression with which this first day passed for her succeeded one another during Mavering’s stay. He did not need Alice’s chaperonage long. By the next morning he seemed to know and to like everybody in the hotel, where he enjoyed a general favour which at that moment had no exceptions. In the afternoon he began to organise excursions and amusements with the help of Miss Anderson.

  The plans all referred to Alice, who accepted and approved with an authority which every one tacitly admitted, just as every one recognised that Mavering had come to Campobello because she was there. Such a phase is perhaps the prettiest in the history of a love affair. All is yet in solution; nothing has been precipitated in word or fact. The parties to it even reserve a final construction of what they themselves say or do; they will not own to their hearts that they mean exactly this or that. It is this phase which in its perfect freedom is the most American of all; under other conditions it is an instant, perceptible or imperceptible; under ours it is a distinct stage, unhurried by any outside influences.

  The nearest approach to a definition of the situation was in a walk between Mavering and Mrs. Pasmer, and this talk, too, light and brief, might have had no such intention as her fancy assigned his part of it.

  She recurred to something that had been said on Class Day about h
is taking up the law immediately, or going abroad first for a year.

  “Oh, I’ve abandoned Europe altogether for the present,” he said laughing. “And I don’t know but I may go back on the law too.”

  “Indeed! Then you are going to be an artist?”

  “Oh no; not so bad as that. It isn’t settled yet, and I’m off here to think it over a while before the law school opens in September. My father wants me to go into his business and turn my powers to account in designing wall-papers.”

  “Oh, how very interesting!” At the same time Mrs. Pasmer ran over the whole field of her acquaintance without finding another wall-paper maker in it. But she remembered what Mrs. Saintsbury had said: it was manufacturing. This reminded her to ask if he had seen the Saintsburys lately, and he said, No; he believed they were still in Cambridge, though.

  “And we shall actually see a young man,” she said finally, “in the act of deciding his own destiny!”

  He laughed for pleasure in her persiflage. “Yes; only don’t give me away. Nobody else knows it.”

  “Oh no, indeed. Too much flattered, Mr. Mavering. Shall you let me know when you’ve decided? I shall be dying to know, and I shall be too high-minded to ask.”

  It was not then too late to adapt ‘Pinafore’ to any exigency of life, and Mavering said, “You will learn from the expression of my eyes.”

  XIII.

  The witnesses of Mavering’s successful efforts to make everybody like him were interested in his differentiation of the attentions he offered every age and sex from those he paid Alice. But while they all agreed that there never was a sweeter fellow, they would have been puzzled to say in just what this difference consisted, and much as they liked him, the ladies of her cult were not quite satisfied with him till they decided that it was marked by an anxiety, a timidity, which was perfectly fascinating in a man so far from bashfulness as he. That is, he did nice things for others without asking; but with her there was always an explicit pause, and an implicit prayer and permission, first. Upon this condition they consented to the glamour which he had for her, and which was evident to every one probably but him.

  Once agreeing that no one was good enough for Alice Pasmer, whose qualities they felt that only women could really appreciate, they were interested to see how near Mavering could come to being good enough; and as the drama played itself before their eyes, they pleased themselves in analysing its hero.

  “He is not bashful, certainly,” said one of a little group who sat midway of the piazza while Alice and Mavering walked up and down together. “But don’t you think he’s modest? There’s that difference, you know.”

  The lady addressed waited so long before answering that the young couple came abreast of the group, and then she had to wait till they were out of hearing. “Yes,” she said then, with a tender, sighing thoughtfulness, “I’ve felt that in him. And really think he is a very loveable nature. The only question would be whether he wasn’t too loveable.”

  “Yes,” said the first lady, with the same kind of suspiration, “I know what you mean. And I suppose they ought to be something more alike in disposition.”

  “Or sympathies?” suggested the other.

  “Yes, or sympathies.”

  A third lady laughed a little. “Mr. Mavering has so many sympathies that he ought to be like her in some of them.”

  “Do you mean that he’s too sympathetic — that he isn’t sincere?” asked the first — a single lady of forty-nine, a Miss Cotton, who had a little knot of conscience between her pretty eyebrows, tied there by the unremitting effort of half a century to do and say exactly the truth, and to find it out.

  Mrs. Brinkley, whom she addressed, was of that obesity which seems often to incline people to sarcasm. “No, I don’t think he’s insincere. I think he always means what he says and does — Well, do you think a little more concentration of good-will would hurt him for Miss Pasmer’s purpose — if she has it?”

  “Yes, I see,” said Miss Cotton. She waited, with her kind eyes fixed wistfully upon Alice, for the young people to approach and get by. “I wonder what the men think of him?”

  “You might ask Miss Anderson,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

  “Oh, do you think they tell her?”

  “Not that exactly,” said Mrs. Brinkley, shaking with good-humoured pleasure in her joke.

  “Her voice — oh yes. She and Alice are great friends, of course.”

  “I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, the second speaker, “that Mr. Mavering would be jealous sometimes — till he looked twice.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Cotton, obliged to admit the force of the remark, but feeling that Mr. Mavering had been carried out of the field of her vision by the turn of the talk. “I suppose,” she continued, “that he wouldn’t be so well liked by other young men as she is by other girls, do you think?”

  “I don’t think, as a rule,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “that men are half so appreciative of one another as women are. It’s most amusing to see the open scorn with which two young fellows treat each other if a pretty girl introduces them.”

  All the ladies joined in the laugh with which Mrs. Brinkley herself led off. But Miss Cotton stopped laughing first.

  “Do you mean,”, she asked, “that if a gentleman were generally popular with gentlemen it would be—”

  “Because he wasn’t generally so with women? Something like that — if you’ll leave Mr. Mavering out of the question. Oh, how very good of them!” she broke off, and all the ladies glanced at Mavering and Alice where they had stopped at the further end of the piazza, and were looking off. “Now I can probably finish before they get back here again. What I do mean, Miss Cotton, is that neither sex willingly accepts the favourites of the other.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Cotton admissively.

  “And all that saves Miss Pasmer is that she has not only the qualities that women like in women, but some of the qualities that men, like in them. She’s thoroughly human.”

  A little sensation, almost a murmur, not wholly of assent, went round that circle which had so nearly voted Alice a saint.

  “In the first place, she likes to please men.”

  “Oh!” came from the group.

  “And that makes them like her — if it doesn’t go too far, as her mother says.”

  The ladies all laughed, recognising a common turn of phrase in Mrs. Pasmer.

  “I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, “that she would believe a little in heredity if she noticed that in her daughter;” and the ladies laughed again.

  “Then,” Mrs. Brinkley resumed concerning Alice, “she has a very pretty face — an extremely pretty face; she has a tender voice, and she’s very, very graceful — in rather an odd way; perhaps it’s only a fascinating awkwardness. Then she dresses — or her mother dresses her — exquisitely.” The ladies, with another sensation, admitted the perfect accuracy with which these points had been touched.

  “That’s what men like, what they fall in love with, what Mr. Mavering’s in love with this instant. It’s no use women’s flattering themselves that they don’t, for they do. The rest of the virtues and graces and charms are for women. If that serious girl could only know the silly things that that amiable simpleton is taken with in her, she’d—”

  “Never speak to him again?” suggested Miss Cotton.

  “No, I don’t say that. But she would think twice before marrying him.”

  “And then do it,” said Mrs. Stamwell pensively, with eyes that seemed looking far into the past.

  “Yes, and quite right to do it,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I don’t know that we should be very proud ourselves if we confessed just what caught our fancy in our husbands. For my part I shouldn’t like to say how much a light hat that Mr. Brinkley happened to be wearing had to do with the matter.”

  The ladies broke into another laugh, and then checked themselves, so that Mrs. Pasmer, coming out of the corridor upon them, naturally thought they were laughing at her. She reflected that
if she had been in their place she would have shown greater tact by not stopping just at that instant.

  But she did not mind. She knew that they talked her over, but having a very good conscience, she simply talked them over in return. “Have you seen my daughter within a few minutes?” she asked.

  “She was with Mr. Mavering at the end of the piazza a moment ago,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They must leave just gone round the corner of the building.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She had a novel, with her finger between its leaves, pressed against her heart, after the manner of ladies coming out on hotel piazzas. She sat down and rested it on her knee, with her hand over the top.

  Miss Cotton bent forward, and Mrs. Pasmer lifted her fingers to let her see the name of the book.

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Cotton. “But he’s so terribly pessimistic, don’t you think?”

  “What is it?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.

  “Fumee,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laying the book title upward on her lap for every one to see.

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, fanning herself. “Tourguenief. That man gave me the worst quarter of an hour with his ‘Lisa’ that I ever had.”

  “That’s the same as the ‘Nichee des Gentilshommes’, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with the involuntary superiority of a woman who reads her Tourguenief in French.

  “I don’t know. I had it in English. I don’t build my ships to cross the sea in, as Emerson says; I take those I find built.”

  “Ah! I was already on the other side,” said Mrs. Pasmer softly. She added: “I must get Lisa. I like a good heart-break; don’t you? If that’s what gave you the bad moment.”