Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Miss Anderson said, looking down, “I always thought she was a very conscientious giyl.” Then after a pause, in which she seemed to be overcoming an embarrassment in being obliged to speak of another in such a conviction, “I think she was very moybid. She was like ever so many New England giyls that I’ve met. They seem to want some excuse for suffering; and they must suffer even if it’s through somebody else. I don’t know; they’re romantic, New England giyls are; they have too many ideals.”

  Dan felt a balm in this; he too had noticed a superfluity of ideals in Alice, he had borne the burden of realising some of them; they all seemed to relate in objectionable degree to his perfectionation. So he said gloomily, “She was very good. And I was to blame.”

  “Oh yes!” said Miss Anderson, catching her breath in a queer way; “she seyved you right.”

  She rose abruptly, as if she heard her aunt speak, and Dan perceived that he had been making a long call.

  He went away dazed and dissatisfied; he knew now that he ought not to have told Miss Anderson about his affair, unless he meant more by his confidence than he really did — unless he meant to follow it up.

  He took leave of her, and asked her to make his adieux to her aunt; but the next day he came down to the boat to see them off. It seemed to him that their interview had ended too hastily; he felt sore and restless over it; he hoped that something more conclusive might happen. But at the boat Miss Anderson and her aunt were inseparable. Miss Van Hook said she hoped they should soon see him at the Hygeia, and he replied that he was not sure that he should be able to come after all.

  Miss Anderson called something after him as he turned from them to go ashore. He ran back eagerly to know what it was. “Better lookout for that Mr. Lafflin of yours,” she repeated.

  “Oh! oh yes,” he said, indefinitely disappointed. “I shall keep a sharp eye on him.” He was disappointed, but he could not have said what he had hoped or expected her to say. He was humbled before himself for having told Miss Anderson about his affair with Alice, and had wished she would say something that he might scramble back to his self-esteem upon. He had told her all that partly from mere weakness, from his longing for the sympathy which he was always so ready to give, and partly from the willingness to pose before her as a broken heart, to dazzle her by the irony and persiflage with which he could treat such a tragical matter; but he could not feel that he had succeeded. The sum of her comment had been that Alice had served him right. He did not know whether she really believed that or merely said it to punish him for some reason; but he could never let it be the last word. He tingled as he turned to wave his handkerchief to her on the boat, with the suspicion that she was laughing at him; and he could not console himself with any hero of a novel who had got himself into just such a box. There were always circumstances, incidents, mitigations, that kept the hero still a hero, and ennobled the box into an unjust prison cell.

  L.

  On the long sunny piazza of the Hygeia Mrs. Brinkley and Miss Van Hook sat and talked in a community of interest which they had not discovered during the summer before at Campobello, and with an equality of hearing which the sound of the waves washing almost at their feet established between them. In this pleasant noise Miss Van Hook heard as well as any one, and Mrs. Brinkley gradually realised that it was the trouble of having to lift her voice that had kept her from cultivating a very agreeable acquaintance before. The ladies sat in a secluded corner, wearing light wraps that they had often found comfortable at Campobello in August, and from time to time attested to each other their astonishment that they needed no more at Old Point in early April.

  They did this not only as a just tribute to the amiable climate, but as a relief from the topic which had been absorbing them, and to which they constantly returned.

  “No,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a sort of finality, “I think it is the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. He is bearing it in a very manly way, but I fancy he has felt it deeply, poor fellow. He’s never been in Boston since, and I don’t believe he’d come here if he’d any idea how many Boston people there were in the hotel — we swarm! It would be very painful to him.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Van Hook, “young people seem to feel those things.”

  “Of course he’s going to get over it. That’s what young people do too. At his age he can’t help being caught with every pretty face and every pretty figure, even in the midst of his woe, and it’s only a question of time till he seizes some pretty hand and gets drawn out of it altogether.”

  “I think that would be the case with my niece, too,” said Miss Van Hook, “if she wasn’t kept in it by a sense of loyalty. I don’t believe she really dares much for Lieutenant Willing any more; but he sees no society where he’s stationed, of course, and his constancy is a — a rebuke and a — a — an incentive to her. They were engaged a long time ago just after he left West Point — and we’ve always been in hopes that he would be removed to some post where he could meet other ladies and become interested in some one else. But he never has, and so the affair remains. It’s most undesirable they should marry, and in the meantime she won’t break it off, and it’s spoiling her chances in life.”

  “It is too bad,” sighed Mrs. Brinkley, “but of course you can do nothing. I see that.”

  “No, we can do nothing. We have tried everything. I used to think it was because she was so dull there at Yonkers with her family, and brooded upon the one idea all the time, that she could not get over it; and at first it did seem when she came to me that she would get over it. She is very fond of gaiety — of young men’s society, and she’s had plenty of little flirtations that didn’t mean anything, and never amounted to anything. Every now and then a letter would come from the wilds where he was stationed, and spoil it all. She seemed to feel a sort of chivalrous obligation because he was so far off and helpless and lonely.”

  “Yes, I understand,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “What a pity she couldn’t be made to feel that that didn’t deepen the obligation at all.”

  “I’ve tried to make her,” said Miss Van Hook, “and I’ve been everywhere with her. One winter we were up the Nile, and another in Nice, and last winter we were in Rome. She met young men everywhere, and had offers upon offers; but it was of no use. She remained just the same, and till she met Mr. Mavering in Washington I don’t believe—”

  Miss Van Hook stopped, and Mrs. Brinkley said, “And yet she always seemed to me particularly practical and level-headed — as the men say.”

  “So she is. But she is really very romantic about some things; and when it comes to a matter of that kind, girls are about all alike, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley hopelessly, and both ladies looked out over the water, where the waves came rolling in one after another to waste themselves on the shore as futilely as if they had been lives.

  In the evening Miss Anderson got two letters from the clerk, at the hour when the ladies all flocked to his desk with the eagerness for letters which is so engaging in them. One she pulled open and glanced at with a sort of impassioned indifference; the other she read in one intense moment, and then ran it into her pocket, and with her hand still on it hurried vividly flushing to her room, and read and read it again with constantly mounting emotion.

  “WORMLEY’s HOTEL, Washington, April 7, 188-.

  “DEAR MISS ANDERSON, — I have been acting on your parting advice to look out for that Mr. Lafflin of mine, and I have discovered that he is an unmitigated scamp. Consequently there is nothing more to keep me in Washington, and I should now like your advice about coming to Fortress Monroe. Do you find it malarial? On the boat your aunt asked me to come, but you said nothing about it, and I was left to suppose that you did not think it would agree with me. Do you still think so? or what do you think? I know you think it was uncalled for and in extremely bad taste for me to tell you what I did the other day; and I have thought so too. There is only one thing that could justify it — that is, I think
it might justify it — if you thought so. But I do not feel sure that you would like to know it, or, if you knew it, would like it. I’ve been rather slow coming to the conclusion myself, and perhaps it’s only the beginning of the end; and not the conclusion — if there is such a difference. But the question now is whether I may come and tell you what I think it is — justify myself, or make things worse than they are now. I don’t know that they can be worse, but I think I should like to try. I think your presence would inspire me.

  “Washington is a wilderness since Miss — Van Hook left. It is not a howling wilderness simply because it has not enough left in it to howl; but it has all the other merits of a wilderness.

  “Yours sincerely,

  “D. F. MAVERING.”

  After a second perusal of this note, Miss Anderson recurred to the other letter which she had neglected for it, and read it with eyes from which the tears slowly fell upon it. Then she sat a long time at her table with both letters before her, and did not move, except to take her handkerchief out of her pocket and dry her eyes, from which the tears began at once to drip again. At last she started forward, and caught pen and paper toward her, biting her lip and frowning as if to keep herself firm, and she said to the central figure in the photograph case which stood at the back of the table, “I will, I will! You are a man, anyway.”

  She sat down, and by a series of impulses she wrote a letter, with which she gave herself no pause till she put it in the clerk’s hands, to whom she ran downstairs with it, kicking her skirt into wild whirls as she ran, and catching her foot in it and stumbling.

  “Will it go — go to-night?” she demanded tragically.

  “Just in time,” said the clerk, without looking up, and apparently not thinking that her tone betrayed any unusual amount of emotion in a lady posting a letter; he was used to intensity on such occasions.

  The letter ran —

  “DEAR MR. MAVERING, — We shall now be here so short a time that I do not think it advisable for you to come.

  “Your letter was rather enigmatical, and I do not know whether I understood it exactly. I suppose you told me what you did for good reasons of your own, and I did not think much about it. I believe the question of taste did not come up in my mind.

  “My aunt joins me in kindest regards.

  “Yours very sincerely,

  “JULIA V. H. ANDERSON.

  “P.S. — I think that I ought to return your letter. I know that you would not object to my keeping it, but it does not seem right. I wish to ask your congratulations. I have been engaged for several years to Lieutenant Willing, of the Army. He has been transferred from his post in Montana to Fort Hamilton at New York, and we are to be married in June.”

  The next morning Mrs. Brinkley came up from breakfast in a sort of duplex excitement, which she tried to impart to her husband; he stood with his back toward the door, bending forward to the glass for a more accurate view of his face, from which he had scraped half the lather in shaving.

  She had two cards in her hand: “Miss Van Hook and Miss Anderson have gone. They went this morning. I found their P. P. C.’s by my plate.”

  Mr. Brinkley made an inarticulate noise for comment, and assumed the contemptuous sneer which some men find convenient for shaving the lower lip.

  “And guess who’s come, of all people in the world?”

  “I don’t know,” said Brinkley, seizing his chance to speak.

  “The Pasmers! — Alice and her mother! Isn’t it awful?”

  Mr. Brinkley had entered upon a very difficult spot at the corner of his left jaw. He finished it before he said, “I don’t see anything awful about it, so long as Pasmer hasn’t come too.”

  “But Dan Mavering! He’s in Washington, and he may come down here any day. Just think how shocking that would be!”

  “Isn’t that rather a theory?” asked Mr. Brinkley, finding such opportunities for conversation as he could. “I dare say Mrs. Pasmer would be very glad to see him.”

  “I’ve no doubt she would,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But it’s the worst thing that could happen — for him. And I feel like writing him not to come — telegraphing him.”

  “You know how the man made a fortune in Chicago,” said her husband, drying his razor tenderly on a towel before beginning to strop it. “I advise you to let the whole thing alone. It doesn’t concern us in any way whatever.”

  “Then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “there ought to be a committee to take it in hand and warn him.”

  “I dare say you could make one up among the ladies. But don’t be the first to move in the matter.”

  “I really believe,” said his wife, with her mind taken off the point by the attractiveness of a surmise which had just occurred to her, “that Mrs. Pasmer would be capable of following him down if she knew he was in Washington.”

  “Yes, if she know. But she probably doesn’t.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley disappointedly. “I think the sudden departure of the Van Hooks must have had something to do with Dan Mavering.”

  “Seems a very influential young man,” said her husband. “He attracts and repels people right and left. Did you speak to the Pasmers?”

  “No; you’d better, when you go down. They’ve just come into the dining-room. The girl looks like death.”

  “Well, I’ll talk to her about Mavering. That’ll cheer her up.”

  Mrs. Brinkley looked at him for an instant as if she really thought him capable of it. Then she joined him in his laugh.

  Mrs. Brinkley had theorised Alice Pasmer as simply and primitively selfish, like the rest of the Pasmers in whom the family traits prevailed.

  When Mavering stopped coming to her house after his engagement she justly suspected that it was because Alice had forbidden him, and she had rejoiced at the broken engagement as an escape for Dan; she had frankly said so, and she had received him back into full favour at the first moment in Washington. She liked Miss Anderson, and she had hoped, with the interest which women feel in every such affair, that her flirtation with him might become serious. But now this had apparently not happened. Julia Anderson was gone with mystifying precipitation, and Alice Pasmer had come with an unexpectedness which had the aspect of fatality.

  Mrs. Brinkley felt bound, of course, since there was no open enmity between them, to meet the Pasmers on the neutral ground of the Hygeia with conventional amiability. She was really touched by the absent wanness of the girls look, and by the later-coming recognition which shaped her mouth into a pathetic snide. Alice did not look like death quite, as Mrs. Brinkley had told her husband, with the necessity her sex has for putting its superlatives before its positives; but she was pale and thin, and she moved with a languid step when they all met at night after Mrs. Brinkley had kept out of the Pasmers’ way during the day.

  “She has been ill all the latter part of the winter,” said Mrs. Pasmer to Mrs. Brinkley that night in the corner of the spreading hotel parlours, where they found themselves. Mrs. Pasmer did not look well herself; she spoke with her eyes fixed anxiously on the door Alice had just passed out of. “She is going to bed, but I know I shall find her awake whenever I go.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Brinkley, “this soft, heavy sea air will put her to sleep.” She tried to speak drily and indifferently, but she could not; she was, in fact, very much interested by the situation, and she was touched, in spite of her distaste for them both, by the evident unhappiness of mother and daughter. She knew what it came from, and she said to herself that they deserved it; but this did not altogether fortify her against their pathos. “I can hardly keep awake myself,” she added gruffly.

  “I hope it may help her,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “the doctor strongly urged our coming.”

  “Mr. Pasmer isn’t with you,” said Mrs. Brinkley, feeling that it was decent to say something about him.

  “No; he was detained.” Mrs. Pasmer did not explain the cause of his detention, and the two ladies slowly waved their fans a moment in silence. “
Are there many Boston People in the house?” Mrs. Pasmer asked.

  “It’s full of them,” cried Mrs. Brinkley.

  “I had scarcely noticed,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer; and Mrs. Brinkley knew that this was not true. “Alice takes up all my thoughts,” she added; and this might be true enough. She leaned a little forward and asked, in a low, entreating voice over her fan, “Mrs. Brinkley, have you seen Mr. Mavering lately?”

  Mrs. Brinkley considered this a little too bold, a little too brazen. Had they actually come South in pursuit of him? It was shameless, and she let Mrs. Pasmer know something of her feeling in the shortness with which she answered, “I saw him in Washington the other day — for a moment.” She shortened the time she had spent in Dan’s company so as to cut Mrs. Pasmer off from as much comfort as possible, and she stared at her in open astonishment.

  Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity; she wanted to shake her. “I knew,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, “that you had always been such a friend of his.”

  It is the last straw which breaks the camel’s back; Mrs. Brinkley felt her moral vertebrae give way; she almost heard them crack; but if there was really a detonation, the drowned the noise with a harsh laugh. “Oh, he had other friends in Washington. I met him everywhere with Miss Anderson.” This statement conflicted with the theory of her single instant with Dan, but she felt that in such a cause, in the cause of giving pain to a woman like Mrs. Pasmer, the deflection from exact truth was justifiable. She hurried on: “I rather expected he might run down here, but now that they’re gone, I don’t suppose he’ll come. You remember Miss Anderson’s aunt, Miss Van Hook?”

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

  “She was here with her.”

  “Miss Van Hook was such a New York type — of a certain kind,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She rose, with a smile at once so conventional, so heroic, and so pitiful that Mrs. Brinkley felt the remorse of a generous victor.