Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She went to her room, hardening her heart, and she burst in with a flood of voluble exasperation that threatened all the neighbouring rooms with overflow.

  “Well,” she cried, “they have shown their hands completely. They have come here to hound Dan Mavering down, and get him into their toils again. Why, the woman actually said as much! But I fancy I have given her a fit of insomnia that will enable her to share her daughter’s vigils. Really such impudence I never heard of!”

  “Do you want everybody in the corridor to hear of it?” asked Brinkley, from behind a newspaper.

  “I know one thing,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, dropping her voice a couple of octaves. “They will never get him here if I can help it. He won’t come, anyway, now Miss Anderson is gone; but I’ll make assurance doubly sure by writing him not to come; I’ll tell him they’ve gone; and than we are going too.”

  “You had better remember the man in Chicago,” said her husband.

  “Well, this is my business — or I’ll make it my business!” cried Mrs. Brinkley. She went on talking rapidly, rising with great excitement in her voice at times, and then remembering to speak lower; and her husband apparently read on through most of her talk, though now and then he made some comment that seemed of almost inspired aptness.

  “The way they both made up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is just a tool in her mother’s hands. Her mother seemed actually passive in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was simply a masterpiece.”

  “How do you know she put her at you?” asked Brinkley.

  “How? By the way she seemed not to do it! And because from what I know of that stupid Pasmer pride it would be perfectly impossible for any one who was a Pasmer to take her deprecatory manner toward me of herself. You ought to have seen it! It was simply perfect.”

  “Perhaps,” said Brinkley, with a remote dreaminess, “she was truly sorry.”

  “Truly stuff! No, indeed; she hates me as much as ever — more!”

  “Well, then, may be she’s doing it because she hates you — doing it for her soul’s good — sort of penance, sort of atonement to Mavering.”

  Mrs. Brinkley turned round from her dressing-table to see what her husband meant, but the newspaper hid him. We all know that our own natures are mixed and contradictory, but we each attribute to others a logical consistency which we never find in any one out of the novels. Alice Pasmer was cold and reticent, and Mrs. Brinkley, who had lived half a century in a world full of paradoxes, could not imagine her subject to gusts of passionate frankness; she knew the girl to be proud and distant, and she could not conceive of an abject humility and longing for sympathy in her heart. If Alice felt, when she saw Mrs. Brinkley, that she had a providential opportunity to punish herself for her injustice to Dan, the fact could not be established upon Mrs. Brinkley’s theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs. Brinkley might not have been mistaken in suspecting her of an ignoble motive, though it might have had for the girl the last sublimity of self-sacrifice. The woman who disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced she held all the more strenuously to her own theory that Alice was practising her mother’s arts. This was inevitable, partly from the sense of Mrs. Pasmer’s artfulness which everybody had, and partly from the allegiance which we pay — and women especially like to pay — to the tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the part of other women — such other women as Mrs. Pasmer.

  Mrs. Brinkley continued to talk, but the god spoke no more from behind the newspaper; and afterward Mrs. Brinkley lay a long time awake; hardening her heart. But she was haunted to the verge of her dreams by that girl’s sick look, by her languid walk, and by the effect which she had seen her own words take upon Mrs. Pasmer — an effect so admirably disowned, so perfectly obvious. Before she could get to sleep she was obliged to make a compromise with her heart, in pursuance of which, when she found Mrs. Pasmer at breakfast alone in the morning, she went up to her, and said, holding her hand a moment, “I hope your daughter slept well last night.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Pasmer, slipping her hand away, “I can’t say that she did.” There was probably no resentment expressed in the way she withdrew her hand, but the other thought there was.

  “I wish I could do something for her,” she cried.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “It’s very good of you.” And Mrs. Brinkley fancied she smiled rather bitterly.

  Mrs. Brinkley went out upon the seaward verandah of the hotel with this bitterness of Mrs. Pasmer’s smile in her thoughts; and it disposed her to feel more keenly the quality of Miss Pasmer’s smile. She found the girl standing there at a remote point of that long stretch of planking, and looking out over the water; she held with both hands across her breast the soft chuddah shawl which the wind caught and fluttered away from her waist. She was alone, said as Mrs. Brinkley’s compunctions goaded her nearer, she fancied that the saw Alice master a primary dislike in her face, and put on a look of pathetic propitiation. She did not come forward to meet Mrs. Brinkley, who liked better her waiting to be approached; but she smiled gratefully when Mrs. Brinkley put out her hand, and she took it with a very cold one.

  “You must find it chilly here,” said the elder woman.

  “I had better be out in the air all I could, the doctor said,” answered Alice.

  “Well, then, come with me round the corner; there’s a sort of recess there, and you won’t be blown to pierces,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with authority. They sat down together in the recess, and she added: “I used to sit here with Miss Van Hook; she could hear better in the noise the waves made. I hope it isn’t too much for you.”

  “Oh no,” said Alice. “Mamma said you told her they were here.” Mrs. Brinkley reassured herself from this; Miss Van Hook’s name had rather slipped out; but of course Mrs. Pasmer had not repeated what she had said about Dan in this connection. “I wish I could have seen Julia,” Alice went on. “It would have been quite like Campobello again.”

  “Oh, quite,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a short breath, and not knowing whither this tended. Alice did not leave her in doubt.

  “I should like to have seen her, and begged her for the way I treated her the last part of the time there. I feel as if I could make my whole life a reparation,” she added passionately.

  Mrs. Brinkley believed that this was the mere frenzy of sentimentality, the exaltation of a selfish asceticism; but at the break in the girl’s voice and the aversion of her face she could not help a thrill of motherly tenderness for her. She wanted to tell her she was an unconscious humbug, bent now as always on her own advantage, and really indifferent to others she also wanted to comfort her, and tell her that she exaggerated, and was not to blame. She did neither, but when Alice turned her face back she seemed encouraged by Mrs. Brinkley’s look to go on: “I didn’t appreciate her then; she was very generous and high-minded — too high-minded for me to understand, even. But we don’t seem to know how good others are till we wrong them.”

  “Yes, that is very true,” said Mrs. Brinkley. She knew that Alice was obviously referring to the breach between herself and Miss Anderson following the night of the Trevor theatricals, and the dislike for her that she had shown with a frankness some of the ladies had thought brutal. Mrs. Brinkley also believed that her words had a tacit meaning, and she would have liked to have the hardness to say she had seen an unnamed victim of Alice doing his best to console the other she had specified. But she merely said drily, “Yes, perhaps that’s the reason why we’re allowed to injure people.”

  “It must be,” said Alice simply. “Did Miss Anderson ever speak of me?”

  “No; I can’t remem
ber that she ever did.” Mrs. Brinkley did not feel bound to say that she and Miss Van Hook had discussed her at large, and agreed perfectly about her.

  “I should like to see her; I should like to write to her.”

  Mrs. Brinkley felt that she ought not to suffer this intimate tendency in the talk:

  “You must find a great many other acquaintances in the hotel, Miss Pasmer.”

  “Some of the Frankland girds are here, and the two Bellinghams. I have hardly spoken to them yet. Do you think that where you have even been in the right, if you have been harsh, if you have been hasty, if you haven’t made allowances, you ought to offer some atonement?”

  “Really, I can’t say,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a smile of distaste. “I’m afraid your question isn’t quite in my line of thinking; it’s more in Miss Cotton’s way. You’d better ask her some time.”

  “No,” said Alice sadly; “she would flatter me.”

  “Ah! I always supposed she was very conscientious.”

  “She’s conscientious, but she likes me too well.”

  “Oh!” commented Mrs. Brinkley to herself, “then you know I don’t like you, and you’ll use me in one way, if you can’t in another. Very well!” But she found the girl’s trust touching somehow, though the sentimentality of her appeal seemed as tawdry as ever.

  “I knew you would be just,” added Alice wistfully.

  “Oh, I don’t know about atonements!” said Mrs. Brinkley, with an effect of carelessness. “It seems to me that we usually make them for our own sake.”

  “I have thought of that,” said Alice, with a look of expectation.

  “And we usually astonish other people when we offer them.”

  “Either they don’t like it, or else they don’t feel so much injured as we had supposed.”

  “Oh, but there’s no question—”

  “If Miss Anderson—”

  “Miss Anderson? Oh — oh yes!”

  “If Miss Anderson for example,” pursued Mrs. Brinkley, “felt aggrieved with you. But really I’ve no right to enter into your affairs, Miss Pasmer.”

  “Oh Yes, yes! — do! I asked you to,” the girl implored.

  “I doubt if it will help matters for her to know that you regret anything; and if she shouldn’t happen to have thought that you were unjust to her, it would make her uncomfortable for nothing.”

  “Do you think so?” asked the girl, with a disappointment that betrayed itself in her voice and eyes.

  “I never feel I myself competent to advise,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I can criticise — anybody can — and I do, pretty freely; but advice is a more serious matter. Each of us must act from herself — from what she thinks is right.”

  “Yes, I see. Thank you so much, Mrs. Brinkley.”

  “After all, we have a right to do ourselves good, even when we pretend that it’s good to others, if we don’t do them any harm.”

  “Yes, I see.” Alice looked away, and then seemed about to speak again; but one of Mrs. Brinkley’s acquaintance came up, and the girl rose with a frightened air and went away.

  “Alice’s talk with you this morning did her so much good!” said Mrs. Pasmer, later. “She has always felt so badly about Miss Anderson!”

  Mrs. Brinkley saw that Mrs. Pasmer wished to confine the meaning of their talk to Miss Anderson, and she assented, with a penetration of which she saw that Mrs. Pasmer was gratefully aware.

  She grew more tolerant of both the Pasmers as the danger of greater intimacy from them, which seemed to threaten at first seemed to pass away. She had not responded to their advances, but there was no reason why she should not be civil to them; there had never been any open quarrel with them. She often found herself in talk with them, and was amused to note that she was the only Bostonian whom they did not keep aloof from.

  It could not be said that she came to like either of them better. She still suspected Mrs. Pasmer of design, though she developed none beyond manoeuvring Alice out of the way of people whom she wished to avoid; and she still found the girl, as she always thought her, as egotist, whose best impulses toward others had a final aim in herself. She thought her very crude in her ideas — cruder than she had seemed at Campobello, where she had perhaps been softened by her affinition with the gentler and kindlier nature of Dan Mavering. Mrs. Brinkley was never tired of saying that he had made the most fortunate escape in the world, and though Brinkley owned he was tired of hearing it, she continued to say it with a great variety of speculation. She recognised that in most girls of Alice’s age many traits are in solution, waiting their precipitation into character by the chemical contact which time and chances must bring, and that it was not fair to judge her by the present ferment of hereditary tendencies; but she rejoiced all the same that it was not Dan Mavering’s character which was to give fixity to hers. The more she saw of the girl the more she was convinced that two such people could only make each other unhappy; from day to day, almost from hour to hour, she resolved to write to Mavering and tell him not to come.

  She was sure that the Pasmers wished to have the affair on again, and part of her fascination with a girl whom she neither liked nor approved was her belief that Alice’s health had broken under the strain of her regrets and her despair. She did not get better from the change of air; she grew more listless and languid, and more dependent upon Mrs. Brinkley’s chary sympathy. The older woman asked herself again and again what made the girl cling to her? Was she going to ask her finally to intercede with Dan? or was it really a despairing atonement to him, the most disagreeable sacrifice she could offer, as Mr. Brinkley had stupidly suggested? She believed that Alice’s selfishness and morbid sentiment were equal to either.

  Brinkley generally took the girl’s part against his wife, and in a heavy jocose way tried to cheer her up. He did little things for her; fetched and carried chairs and cushions and rugs, and gave his attentions the air of pleasantries. One of his offices was to get the ladies’ letters for them in the evening, and one night he came in beaming with a letter for each of them where they sat together in the parlour. He distributed them into their laps.

  “Hello! I’ve made a mistake,” he said, putting down his head to take back the letter he had dropped in Miss Pasmer’s lap. “I’ve given you my wife’s letter.”

  The girl glanced at it, gave a moaning kind of cry, and fell beak in her chair, hiding her face in her hands.

  Mrs. Brinkley, possessed herself of the other letter, and, though past the age when ladies wish to kill their husbands for their stupidity, she gave Brinkley a look of massacre which mystified even more than it murdered his innocence. He had to learn later from his wife’s more elicit fury what the women had all known instantly.

  He showed his usefulness in gathering Alice up and getting her to her mother’s room.

  “Oh, Mrs. Brinkley,” implored Mrs. Pasmer, following her to the door, “is Mr. Mavering coming here?”

  “I don’t know — I can’t say — I haven’t read the letter yet.”

  “Oh, do let me know when you’ve read it, won’t you? I don’t know what we shall do.”

  Mrs. Brinkley read the letter in her own room. “You go down,” she said to her husband, with unabated ferocity; “and telegraph Dan Mavering at Wormley’s not to came. Say we’re going away at once.”

  Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, “Not coming.”

  It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his own. This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part, we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we cannot break.

  Mrs. Brinkley lay awake and raged impotently against her complicity with the unhappiness of that distasteful girl and her more than distasteful mother. In her revolt against it she renounced the int
erest she had felt in that silly boy, and his ridiculous love business, so really unimportant to her whatever turn it took. She asked herself what it mattered to her whether those children marred their lives one way or another way. There was a lurid moment before she slept when she wished Brinkley to go down and recall her telegram; but he refused to be a fool at so much inconvenience to himself.

  Mrs. Brinkley came to breakfast feeling so much more haggard than she found either of the Pasmers looking, that she was able to throw off her lingering remorse for having told Mavering not to come. She had the advantage also of doubt as to her precise motive in having done so; she had either done so because she had judged it best for him not to see Miss Pasmer again, or else she had done so to relieve the girl from the pain of an encounter which her mother evidently dreaded for her. If one motive seemed at moments outrageously meddling and presumptuous, the other was so nobly good and kind that it more than counterbalanced it in Mrs. Brinkley’s mind, who knew very well in spite of her doubt that she had, acted from a mixture of both. With this conviction, it was both a comfort and a pang to find by the register of the hotel, which she furtively consulted, that Dan had not arrived by the morning boat, as she groundlessly feared and hoped he might have done.

  In any case, however, and at the end of all the ends, she had that girl on her hands more than ever; and believing as she did that Dan and Alice had only to meet in order to be reconciled, she felt that the girl whom she had balked of her prey was her innocent victim. What right had she to interfere? Was he not her natural prey? If he liked being a prey, who was lawfully to forbid him? He was not perfect; he would know how to take care of himself probably; in marriage things equalised themselves. She looked at the girl’s thin cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, and pitied and hated her with that strange mixture of feeling which our victims aspire in us.

  She walked out on the verandah with the Pasmers after breakfast, and chatted a while about indifferent things; and Alice made an effort to ignore the event of the night before with a pathos which wrung Mrs. Brinkley’s heart, and with a gay resolution which ought to have been a great pleasure to such a veteran dissembler as her mother. She said she had never found the air so delicious; she really believed it would begin to do her good now; but it was a little fresh just there, and with her eyes she invited her mother to come with her round the corner into that sheltered recess, and invited Mrs. Brinkley not to come.