Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, they’re the nicest kind of people,” said Dan, in optimistic generalisation. “You’d like Mrs. Pasmer. She’s awfully nice.”

  “Do you say that because you think I wouldn’t?” asked his mother. “Isn’t she rather sly and hum-bugging?”

  “Well, yes, she is, to a certain extent,” Dan admitted, with a laugh. “But she doesn’t mean any harm by it. She’s extremely kind-hearted.”

  “To you? I dare say. And Mr. Pasmer is rather under her thumb?”

  “Well, yes, you might say thumb,” Dan consented, feeling it useless to defend the Pasmers against this analysis.

  “We won’t say heel,” returned his mother; “we’re too polite. And your father says he had the reputation in college of being one of the most selfish fellows in the world. He’s never done anything since but lose most of his money. He’s been absolutely idle and useless all his days.” She turned her vivid blue eyes suddenly upon her son’s.

  Dan winced. “You know how hard father is upon people who haven’t done anything. It’s a mania of his. Of course Mr. Pasmer doesn’t show to advantage where there’s no — no leisure class.”

  “Poor man!”

  Dan was going to say, “He’s very amiable, though,” but he was afraid of his mother’s retorting, “To you?” and he held his peace, looking chapfallen.

  Whether his mother took pity on him or not, her next sally was consoling. “But your Alice may not take after either of them. Her father is the worst of his breed, it seems; the rest are useful people, from what your father knows, and there’s a great deal to be hoped for collaterally. She had an uncle in college at the same time who was everything that her father was not.”

  “One of her aunts is in one of those Protestant religious houses in England,” repeated Dan.

  “Oh!” said his mother shortly, “I don’t know that I like that particularly. But probably she isn’t useless there. Is Alice very religious?”

  “Well, I suppose,” said Dan, with a smile for the devotions that came into his thought, “she’s what would be called ‘Piscopal pious.”

  Mrs. Mavering referred to the photograph, which she still held in her hand. “Well, she’s pure and good, at any rate. I suppose you look forward to a long engagement?”

  Dan was somewhat taken aback at a supposition so very contrary to what was in his mind. “Well, I don’t know. Why?”

  “It might be said that you are very young. How old is Agnes — Alice, I mean?”

  “Twenty-one. But now, look here, mother! It’s no use considering such a thing in the abstract, is it?”

  “No,” said his mother, with a smile for what might be coming.

  “This is the way I’ve been viewing it; I may say it’s the way Alice has been viewing it — or Mrs. Pasmer, rather.”

  “Decidedly Mrs. Pasmer, rather. Better be honest, Dan.”

  “I’ll do my best. I was thinking, hoping, that is, that as I’m going right into the business — have gone into it already, in fact — and could begin life at once, that perhaps there wouldn’t be much sense in waiting a great while.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s all. That is, if you and father are agreed.” He reflected upon this provision, and added, with a laugh of confusion and pleasure: “It seems to be so very much more of a family affair than I used to think it was.”

  “You thought it concerned just you and her?” said his mother, with arch sympathy.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Poor fellow! She knew better than that, you may be sure. At any rate, her mother did.”

  “What Mrs. Pasmer doesn’t know isn’t probably worth knowing,” said Dan, with an amused sense of her omniscience.

  “I thought so,” sighed his mother, smiling too. “And now you begin to find out that it concerns the families in all their branches on both sides.”

  “Oh, if it stopped at the families and their ramifications! But it seems to take in society and the general public.”

  “So it does — more than you can realise. You can’t get married to yourself alone, as young people think; and if you don’t marry happily, you sin against the peace and comfort of the whole community.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m chiefly looking out for now. I don’t want any of those people in Central Africa to suffer. That’s the reason I want to marry Alice at the earliest opportunity. But I suppose there’ll have to be a Mavering embassy to the high contracting powers of the other part now?”

  “Your father and one of the girls had better go down.”

  “Yes?”

  “And invite Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer and their daughter to come up here.”

  “All on probation?”

  “Oh no. If you’re pleased, Dan—”

  “I am, mother — measurably.” They both laughed at this mild way of putting it.

  “Why, then it’s to be supposed that we’re all pleased. You needn’t bring the whole Pasmer family home to live with you, if you do marry them all.”

  “No,” said Dan, and suddenly he became very distraught. It flashed through him that his mother was expecting him to come home with Alice to live, and that she would not be at all pleased with his scheme of a European sojourn, which Mrs. Pasmer had so cordially adopted. He was amazed that he had not thought of that, but he refused to see any difficulty which his happiness could not cope with.

  “No, there’s that view of it,” he said jollily; and he buried his momentary anxiety out of sight, and, as it were, danced upon its grave. Nevertheless, he had a desire to get quickly away from the spot. “I hope the Mavering embassy won’t be a great while getting ready to go,” he said. “Of course it’s all right; but I shouldn’t want an appearance of reluctance exactly, you know, mother; and if there should be much of an interval between my getting back and their coming on, don’t you know, why, the cat might let herself out of the bag.”

  “What cat?” asked his mother demurely.

  “Well, you know, you haven’t received my engagement with unmingled enthusiasm, and — and I suppose they would find it out from me — from my manner; and — and I wish they’d come along pretty soon, mother.”

  “Poor boy! I’m afraid the cat got out of the bag when Mrs. Pasmer came to the years of discretion. But you sha’n’t be left a prey to her. They shall go back with you. Ring the bell, and let’s talk it over with them now.”

  Dan joyfully obeyed. He could see that his mother was all on fire with interest in his affair, and that the idea of somehow circumventing Mrs. Pasmer by prompt action was fascinating her.

  His sisters came up at once, and his father followed a moment later. They all took their cue from the mother’s gaiety, and began talking and laughing, except the father, who sat looking on with a smile at their lively spirits and the jokes of which Dan became the victim. Each family has its own fantastic medium, in which it gets affairs to relieve them of their concrete seriousness, and the Maverings now did this with Dan’s engagement, and played with it as an airy abstraction. They debated the character of the embassy which was to be sent down to Boston on their behalf, and it was decided that Eunice had better go with her father, as representing more fully the age and respectability of the family: at first glance the Pasmers would take her for Dan’s mother, and this would be a tremendous advantage.

  “And if I like the ridiculous little chit,” said Eunice, “I think I shall let Dan marry her at once. I see no reason why he shouldn’t and I couldn’t stand a long engagement; I should break it off.”

  “I guess there are others who will have something to say about that,” retorted the younger sister. “I’ve always wanted a long engagement in this family, and as there seems to be no chance for it with the ladies, I wish to make the most of Dan’s. I always like it where the hero gets sick and the heroine nurses him. I want Dan to get sick, and have Alice come here and take care of him.”

  “No; this marriage must take place at once. What do you say, father?” asked Eunice.

  Her father sat, enjoyin
g the talk, at the foot of the bed, with a tendency to doze. “You might ask Dan,” he said, with a lazy cast of his eye toward his son.

  “Dan has nothing to do with it.”

  “Dan shall not be consulted.”

  The two girls stormed upon their father with their different reasons.

  “Now I will tell you Girls, be still!” their mother broke in. “Listen to me: I have an idea.”

  “Listen to her: she has an idea!” echoed Eunice, in recitative.

  “Will you be quiet?” demanded the mother.

  “We will be du-u-mb!”

  When they became so, at the verge of their mother’s patience, of which they knew the limits, she went on: “I think Dan had better get married at once.”

  “There, Minnie!”

  “But what does Dan say?”

  “I will — make the sacrifice,” said Dan meekly.

  “Noble boy! That’s exactly what Washington said to his mother when she asked him not to go to sea,” said Minnie.

  “And then he went into the militia, and made it all right with himself that way,” said Eunice. “Dan can’t play his filial piety on this family. Go on, mother.”

  “I want him to bring his wife home, and live with us,” continued his mother.

  “In the L part!” cried Minnie, clasping her hands in rapture. “I’ve always said what a perfect little apartment it was by itself.”

  “Well, don’t say it again, then,” returned her sister. “Always is often enough. Well, in the L part Go on, mother! Don’t ask where you were, when it’s so exciting.”

  “I don’t care whether it’s in the L part or not. There’s plenty of room in the great barn of a place everywhere.”

  “But what about his taking care of the business in Boston?” suggested Eunice, looking at her father.

  “There’s no hurry about that.”

  “And about the excursion to aesthetic centres abroad?” Minnie added.

  “That could be managed,” said her father, with the same ironical smile.

  The mother and the girls went on wildly planning Dan’s future for him. It was all in a strain of extravagant burlesque. But he could not take his part in it with his usual zest. He laughed and joked too, but at the bottom of his heart was an uneasy remembrance of the different future he had talked over with Mrs. Pasmer so confidently. But he said to himself buoyantly at last that it would come out all right. His mother would give in, or else Alice could reconcile her mother to whatever seemed really best.

  He parted from his mother with fond gaiety. His sisters came out of the room with him.

  “I’m perfectly sore with laughing,” said Minnie. “It seems like old times — doesn’t it, Dan? — such a gale with mother.”

  XXXI.

  An engagement must always be a little incredible at first to the families of the betrothed, and especially to the family of the young man; in the girl’s, the mother, at least, will have a more realising sense of the situation. If there are elder sisters who have been accustomed to regard their brother as very young, he will seem all the younger because in such a matter he has treated himself as if he were a man; and Eunice Mavering said, after seeing the Pasmers, “Well, Dan, it’s all well enough, I suppose, but it seems too ridiculous.”

  “What’s ridiculous about it, I should like to know?” he demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Who’ll look after you when you’re married? Oh, I forgot Ma’am Pasmer!”

  “I guess we shall be able to look after ourselves,” said Dan; a little sulkily.

  “Yes, if you’ll be allowed to,” insinuated his sister.

  They spoke at the end of a talk in which he had fretted at the reticence of both his sister and his father concerning the Pasmers, whom they had just been to see. He was vexed with his father, because he felt that he had been influenced by Eunice, and had somehow gone back on him. He was vexed and he was grieved because his father had left them at the door of the hotel without saying anything in praise of Alice, beyond the generalities that would not carry favour with Eunice; and he was depressed with a certain sense of Alice’s father and mother, which seemed to have imparted itself to him from the others, and to be the Mavering opinion of them. He could no longer see Mrs. Pasmer harmless if trivial, and good-hearted if inveterately scheming; he could not see the dignity and refinement which he had believed in Mr. Pasmer; they had both suffered a sort of shrinkage or collapse, from which he could not rehabilitate them. But this would have been nothing if his sister’s and his father’s eyes, through which he seemed to have been looking, had not shown him Alice in a light in which she appeared strange and queer almost to eccentricity. He was hurt at this effect from their want of sympathy, his pride was touched, and he said to himself that he should not fish for Eunice’s praise; but he found himself saying, without surprise, “I suppose you will do what you can to prejudice mother and Min.”

  “Isn’t that a little previous?” asked Eunice. “Have I said anything against Miss Pasmer?”

  “You haven’t because you couldn’t,” said Dan, with foolish bitterness.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. She’s a human being, I suppose — at least that was the impression I got from her parentage.”

  “What have you got to say against her parents?” demanded Dan savagely.

  “Oh, nothing. I didn’t come down to Boston to denounce the Pasmer family.”

  “I suppose you didn’t like their being in a flat; you’d have liked to find them in a house on Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street.”

  “I’ll own I’m a snob,” said Eunice, with maddening meekness. “So’s father.”

  “They are connected with the best families in the city, and they are in the best society. They do what they please, and they live where they like. They have been so long in Europe that they don’t care for those silly distinctions. But what you say doesn’t harm them. It’s simply disgraceful to you; that’s all,” said Dan furiously.

  “I’m glad it’s no worse, Dan,” said his sister, with a tranquil smile. “And if you’ll stop prancing up and down the room, and take a seat, and behave yourself in a Christian manner, I’ll talk with you; and if you don’t, I won’t. Do you suppose I’m going to be bullied into liking them?”

  “You can like them or not, as you please,” said Dan sullenly; but he sat down, and waited decently for his sister to speak. “But you can’t abuse them — at least in my presence.”

  “I didn’t know men lost their heads as well as their hearts,” said Eunice. “Perhaps it’s only an exchange, though, and it’s Miss Pasmer’s head.” Dan started, but did not say anything, and Eunice smoothly continued: “No, I don’t believe it is. She looked like a sensible girl, and she talked sensibly. I should think she had a very good head. She has good manners, and she’s extremely pretty, and very graceful. I’m surprised she should be in love with such a simpleton.”

  “Oh, go on! Abuse me as much as you like,” said Dan. He was at once soothed by her praise of Alice.

  “No, it isn’t necessary to go on; the case is a little too obvious. But I think she will do very well. I hope you’re not marrying the whole family, though. I suppose that it’s always a question of which shall be scooped up. They will want to scoop you up, and we shall want to scoop her up. I dare say Ma’am Pasmer has her little plan; what is it?”

  Dan started at this touch on the quick, but he controlled himself, and said, with dignity, “I have my own plans.”

  “Well, you know what mother’s are,” returned Eunice easily. “You seem so cheerful that I suppose yours are quite the same, and you’re just keeping them for a surprise.” She laughed provokingly, and Dan burst forth again —

  “You seem to live to give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, you’re very much mistaken.”

  “Well, well, there! It sha’n’t be teased any more, so it sha’n’t! It shall have its own way, it shall, and nobo
dy shall say a word against its little girly’s mother.” Eunice rose from her chair, and patted Dan on the head as she passed to the adjoining room. He caught her hand, and flung it violently away; she shrieked with delight in his childish resentment, and left him sulking. She was gone two or three minutes, and when she came back it was in quite a different mood, as often happens with women in a little lapse of time.

  “Dan, I think Miss Pasmer is a beautiful girl, and I know we shall all like her, if you don’t set us against her by your arrogance. Of course we don’t know anything about her yet, and you don’t, really; but she seems a very lovable little thing, and if she’s rather silent and undemonstrative, why, she’ll be all the better for you: you’ve got demonstration enough for twenty. And I think the family are well enough. Mrs. Pasmer is thoroughly harmless; and Mr. Pasmer is a most dignified personage; his eyebrows alone are worth the price of admission.” Dan could not help smiling. “All that there is about it is, you mustn’t expect to drive people into raptures about them, and expect them to go grovelling round on their knees because you do.”

  “Oh, I know I’m an infernal idiot,” said Dan, yielding to the mingled sarcasm and flattery. “It’s because I’m so anxious; and you all seem so confoundedly provisional about it. Eunice, what do you suppose father really thinks?”

  Eunice seemed tempted to a relapse into her teasing, but she did not yield. “Oh, father’s all right — from your point of view. He’s been ridiculous from the first; perhaps that’s the reason he doesn’t feel obliged to expatiate and expand a great deal at present.”

  “Do you think so?” cried Dan, instantly adopting her as an ally.

  “Well, if I sad so, oughtn’t it to be enough?”

  “It depends upon what else you say. Look here, now, Eunice!” Dan said, with a laughing mixture of fun and earnest, “what are you going to say to mother? It’s no use, being disagreeable, is it? Of course, I don’t contend for ideal perfection anywhere, and I don’t expect it. But there isn’t anything experimental about this thing, and don’t you think we had better all make the best of it?”