Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She lost her voice. “Oh, come now, mother,” Dan protested huskily.

  Alice did not say anything; she bent over, without repugnance, and gathered the shadowy shape into her strong young arms, and kissed the wasted face whose unearthly coolness was like the leaf of a flower against her lips. “He never gave me a moment’s trouble,” said the mother, “and I’m sure he’ll make you happy. How kind of you not to be afraid of me—”

  “Afraid!” cried the girl, with passionate solemnity. “I shall never feel safe away from you!”

  The door opened upon the sound of voices, and the others came in.

  Mrs. Pasmer did not wait for an introduction, but with an affectation of impulse which she felt Mrs. Mavering would penetrate and respect, she went up to the bed and presented herself. Dan’s mother smiled hospitably upon her, and they had some playful words about their children. Mrs. Pasmer neatly conveyed the regrets of her husband, who had hoped up to the last moment that the heavy cold he had taken would let him come with her; and the invalid made her guest sit down on the right hand of her bed, which seemed to be the place of honour, while her husband took Dan’s place on the left, and admired his wife’s skill in fence. At the end of her encounter with Mrs. Pasmer she called out with her strong voice, “Why don’t you get your banjo, Molly, and play something?”

  “A banjo? Oh, do!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “It’s so picturesque and interesting! I heard that young ladies had taken it up, and I should so like to hear it!” She had turned to Mrs. Mavering again, and she now beamed winningly upon her.

  Alice regarded the girl with a puzzled frown as she brought her banjo in from another room and sat down with it. She relaxed the severity of her stare a little as Molly played one wild air after another, singing some of them with an evidence of training in her naive effectiveness. There were some Mexican songs which she had learned in a late visit to their country, and some Creole melodies caught up in a winter’s sojourn to Louisiana. The elder sister accompanied her on the piano, not with the hard, resolute proficiency which one might have expected of Eunice Mavering, but with a sympathy which was perhaps the expression of her share of the family kindliness.

  “Your children seem to have been everywhere,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of flattering envy. “Oh, you’re not going to stop!” she pleaded, turning from Mrs. Mavering to Molly.

  “I think Dan had better do the rheumatic uncle now,” said Eunice, from the piano.

  “Oh yes! the rheumatic uncle — do,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “We know the rheumatic uncle,” she added, with a glance at Alice. Dan looked at her too, as if doubtful of her approval; and then he told in character a Yankee story which he had worked up from the talk of his friend the foreman. It made them all laugh.

  Mrs. Pasmer was the gayest; she let herself go, and throughout the evening she flattered right and left, and said, in her good-night to Mrs. Mavering, that she had never imagined so delightful a time. “O Mrs. Mavering, I don’t wonder your children love their home. It’s a revelation.”

  XXXIV.

  “She’s a cat, Dan,” said his mother quietly, and not without liking, when he looked in for his goodnight kiss after the rest were gone; “a perfect tabby. But your Alice is sublime.”

  “O mother—”

  “She’s a little too sublime for me. But you’re young, and you can stand it.”

  Dan laughed with delight. “Yes, I think I can, mother. All I ask is the chance.”

  “Oh, you’re very much in love, both of you; there’s no doubt about that. What I mean is that she’s very high strung, very intense. She has ideals — any one can see that.”

  Dan took it all for praise. “Yes,” he said eagerly, “that’s what I told you. And that will be the best thing about it for me. I have no ideals.”

  “Well, you must find out what hers are, and live up to them.”

  “Oh, there won’t be any trouble about that,” said Dan buoyantly.

  “You must help her to find them out too.” He looked puzzled. “You mustn’t expect the child to be too definite at first, nor to be always right, even when she’s full of ideals. You must be very patient with her, Dan.”

  “Oh, I will, mother! You know that. How could I ever be impatient with Alice?”

  “Very forbearing, and very kind, and indefatigably forgiving. Ask your father how to behave.”

  Dan promised to do so, with a laugh at the joke. It had never occurred to him that his father was particularly exemplary in these things, or that his mother idolised him for what seemed to Dan simply a matter-of-course endurance of her sick whims and freaks and moods. He broke forth into a vehement protest of his good intentions, to which his mother did not seem very attentive. After a while she asked —

  “Is she always so silent, Dan?”

  “Well, not with me, mother. Of course she was a little embarrassed; she didn’t know exactly what to say, I suppose—”

  “Oh, I rather liked that. At least she isn’t a rattle-pate. And we shall get acquainted; we shall like each other. She will understand me when you bring her home here to live with us, and—”

  “Yes,” said Dan, rising rather hastily, and stooping over to his mother. “I’m not going to let you talk any more now, or we shall have to suffer for it to-morrow night.”

  He got gaily away before his mother could amplify a suggestion which spoiled a little of his pleasure in the praises — he thought they were unqualified and enthusiastic praises — she had been heaping upon Alice. He wished to go to bed with them all sweet and unalloyed in his thought, to sleep, to dream upon his perfect triumph.

  Mrs. Pasmer was a long time in undressing, and in calming down after the demands which the different events of the evening had made upon her resources.

  “It has certainly been a very mixed evening, Alice,” she said, as she took the pins out of her back hair and let it fall; and she continued to talk as she went back and forth between their rooms. “What do you think of banjo-playing for young ladies? Isn’t it rather rowdy? Decidedly rowdy, I think. And Dan’s Yankee story! I expected to see the old gentleman get up and perform some trick.”

  “I suppose they do it to amuse Mrs. Mavering,” said Alice, with cold displeasure.

  “Oh, it’s quite right,” tittered Mrs. Pasmer. “It would be as much as their lives are worth if they didn’t. You can see that she rules them with a rod of iron. What a will! I’m glad you’re not going to come under her sway; I really think you couldn’t be safe from her in the same hemisphere; it’s well you’re going abroad at once. They’re a very self-concentrated family, don’t you think — very self-satisfied? Of course that’s the danger of living off by themselves as they do: they get to thinking there’s nobody else in the world. You would simply be absorbed by them: it’s a hair-breadth escape.

  “How splendidly Dan contrasts with the others! Oh, he’s delightful; he’s a man of the world. Give me the world, after all! And he’s so considerate of their rustic conceit! What a house! It’s perfectly baronial — and ridiculous. In any other country it would mean something — society, entertainments, troops of guests; but here it doesn’t mean anything but money. Not that money isn’t a very good thing; I wish we had more of it. But now you see how very little it can do by itself. You looked very well, Alice, and behaved with great dignity; perhaps too much. You ought to enter a little more into the spirit of things, even if you don’t respect them. That oldest girl isn’t particularly pleased, I fancy, though it doesn’t matter really.”

  Alice replied to her mother from time to time with absent Yeses and Noes; she sat by the window looking out on the hillside lawn before the house; the moon had risen, and poured a flood of snowy light over it, in which the cold statues dimly shone, and the firs, in clumps and singly, blackened with an inky solidity. Beyond wandered the hills, their bare pasturage broken here and there by blotches of woodland.

  After her mother had gone to bed she turned her light down and resumed her seat by the window, pressing her hot foreh
ead against the pane, and losing all sense of the scene without in the whirl of her thoughts.

  After this, evening of gay welcome in Dan’s family, and those moments of tenderness with him, her heart was troubled. She now realised her engagement as something exterior to herself and her own family, and confronted for the first time its responsibilities, its ties, and its claims. It was not enough to be everything to Dan; she could not be that unless she were something to his family. She did not realise this vividly, but with the remoteness which all verities except those of sensation have for youth.

  Her uneasiness was full of exultation, of triumph; she knew she had been admired by Dan’s family, and she experienced the sweetness of having pleased them for his sake; his happy eyes shone before her; but she was touched in her self-love by what her mother had coarsely characterised in them. They had regarded her liking them as a matter of course; his mother had ignored her even in pretending to decry Dan to her. But again this was very remote, very momentary. It was no nearer, no more lasting on the surface of her happiness, than the flying whiff’s of thin cloud that chased across the moon and lost themselves in the vast blue around it.

  XXXV.

  People came to the first of Mrs. James Bellingham’s receptions with the expectation of pleasure which the earlier receptions of the season awaken even in the oldest and wisest. But they tried to dissemble their eagerness in a fashionable tardiness. “We get later and later,” said Mrs. Brinkley to John Munt, as she sat watching the slow gathering of the crowd. By half-past eleven it had not yet hidden Mrs. Bellingham, where she stood near the middle of the room, from the pleasant corner they had found after accidentally arriving together. Mr. Brinkley had not come; he said he might not be too old for receptions, but he was too good; in either case he preferred to stay at home. “We used to come at nine o’clock, and now we come at I’m getting into a quotation from Mother Goose, I think.”

  “I thought it was Browning,” said Munt, with his witticism manner. Neither he nor Mrs. Brinkley was particularly glad to be together, but at Mrs. James Bellingham’s it was well not to fling any companionship away till you were sure of something else. Besides, Mrs. Brinkley was indolent and good-natured, and Munt was active and good-natured, and they were well fitted to get on for ten or fifteen minutes. While they talked she kept an eye out for other acquaintance, and he stood alert to escape at the first chance. “How is it we are here so early — or rather you are?” she pursued irrelevantly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Munt, accepting the implication of his superior fashion with pleasure. “I never mind being among the first. It’s rather interesting to see people come in — don’t you think?”

  “That depends a good deal on the people. I don’t find a great variety in their smirks and smiles to Mrs. Bellingham; I seem to be doing them all myself. And there’s a monotony about their apprehension and helplessness when they’re turned adrift that’s altogether too much like my own. No, Mr. Munt, I can’t agree with you that it’s interesting to see people come in. It’s altogether too autobiographical. What else have you to suggest?”

  “I’m afraid I’m at the end of my string,” said Munt. “I suppose we shall see the Pasmers and young Mavering here to-night.”

  Mrs. Brinkley turned and looked sharply at him.

  “You’ve heard of the engagement?” he asked.

  “No, decidedly, I haven’t. And after his flight from Campobello it’s the last thing I expected to hear of. When did it come out?”

  “Only within a few days. They’ve been keeping it rather quiet. Mrs. Pasmer told me herself.”

  Mrs. Brinkley gave herself a moment for reflection. “Well, if he can stand it, I suppose I can.”

  “That isn’t exactly what people are saying to Mrs. Pasmer, Mrs. Brinkley,” suggested Munt, with his humorous manner.

  “I dare say they’re trying to make her believe that her daughter is sacrificed. That’s the way. But she knows better.”

  “There’s no doubt but she’s informed herself. She put me through my catechism about the Maverings the day of the picnic down there.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Bridge Mavering and I were at Harvard together.”

  “Tell me about them.” Mrs. Brinkley listened to Munt’s praises of his old friend with an attention superficially divided with the people to whom she bowed and smiled. The room was filling up. “Well,” she said at the end, “he’s a sweet young fellow. I hope he likes his Pasmers.”

  “I guess there’s no doubt about his liking one of them — the principal one.”

  “Yes, if she is the principal one.” There was an implication in everything she said that Dan Mavering had been hoodwinked by Mrs. Pasmer. Mature ladies always like to imply something of the sort in these cases. They like to ignore the prime agency of youth and love, and pretend that marriage is a game that parents play at with us, as if we were in an old comedy; it is a tradition. “Will he take her home to live?”

  “No. I heard that they’re all going abroad — for a year, or two at least.”

  “Ah! I thought so,” cried Mrs. Brinkley. She looked up with whimsical pleasure in the uncertainty of an old gentleman who is staring hard at her through his glasses. “Well,” she said with a pleasant sharpness, “do you make me out?”

  “As nearly as my belief in your wisdom will allow,” said the old gentleman, as distinctly as his long white moustache and an apparent absence of teeth behind it would let him. John Munt had eagerly abandoned the seat he was keeping at Mrs. Brinkley’s side, and had launched himself into the thickening crowd. The old gentleman, who was lank and tall, folded himself down into it, He continued as tranquilly as if seated quite alone with Mrs. Brinkley, and not minding that his voice, with the senile crow in it, made itself heard by others. “I’m always surprised to find sensible people at these things of Jane’s. They’re most extraordinary things. Jane’s idea of society is to turn a herd of human beings loose in her house, and see what will come of it. She has no more sense of hospitality or responsibility than the Elements or Divine Providence. You may come here and have a good time — if you can get it; she won’t object; or you may die of solitude and inanition; she’d never know it. I don’t know but it’s rather sublime in her. It’s like the indifference of fate; but it’s rather rough on those who don’t understand it. She likes to see her rooms filled with pretty dresses, but she has no social instincts and no social inspiration whatever. She lights and heats and feeds her guests, and then she leaves them to themselves. She’s a kind woman — Jane is a very good-natured woman, and I really think she’d be grieved if she thought any one went away unhappy, but she does nothing to make them at home in her house — absolutely nothing.”

  “Perhaps she does all they deserve for them. I don’t know that any one acquires merit by coming to an evening party; and it’s impossible to be personally hospitable to everybody in such a crowd.”

  “Yes, I’ve sometimes taken that view of it. And yet if you ask a stranger to your house, you establish a tacit understanding with him that you won’t forget him after you have him there. I like to go about and note the mystification of strangers who’ve come here with some notion of a little attention. It’s delightfully poignant; I suffer with them; it’s a cheap luxury of woe; I follow them through all the turns and windings of their experience. Of course the theory is that, being turned loose here with the rest, they may speak to anybody; but the fact is, they can’t. Sometimes I should like to hail some of these unfriended spirits, but I haven’t the courage. I’m not individually bashful, but I have a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon civilisation behind me. There ought to be policemen, to show strangers about and be kind to them. I’ve just seen two pretty women cast away in a corner, and clinging to a small water-colour on the wall with a show of interest that would melt a heart of stone. Why do you come, Mrs. Brinkley? I should like to know. You’re not obliged to.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Brinkley, lowering her voice instinctively, as
if to bring his down. “I suppose I come from force of habit I’ve been coming a long time, you know. Why do you come?”

  “Because I can’t sleep. If I could sleep, I should be at home in bed.” A weariness came into his thin face and dim eyes that was pathetic, and passed into a whimsical sarcasm. “I’m not one of the great leisure class, you know, that voluntarily turns night into day. Do you know what I go about saying now?”

  “Something amusing, I suppose.”

  “You’d better not be so sure of that. I’ve discovered a fact, or rather I’ve formulated an old one. I’ve always been troubled how to classify people here, there are so many exceptions; and I’ve ended by broadly generalising them as women and men.”

  Mrs. Brinkley was certainly amused at this. “It seems to me that there you’ve been anticipated by nature — not to mention art.”

  “Oh, not in my particular view. The women in America represent the aristocracy which exists everywhere else in both sexes. You are born to the patrician leisure; you have the accomplishments and the clothes and manners and ideals; and we men are a natural commonalty, born to business, to newspapers, to cigars, and horses. This natural female aristocracy of ours establishes the forms, usages, places, and times of society. The epicene aristocracies of other countries turn night into day in their social pleasures, and our noblesse sympathetically follows their example. You ladies, who can lie till noon next day, come to Jane’s reception at eleven o’clock, and you drag along with you a herd of us brokers, bankers, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, who must be at our offices and counting-rooms before nine in the morning. The hours of us work-people are regulated by the wholesome industries of the great democracy which we’re a part of; and the hours of our wives and daughters by the deleterious pleasures of the Old World aristocracy. That’s the reason we’re not all at home in bed.”