Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else that March did not know many people in it. But she was not a girl to care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions; she rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March’s own age. In the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best, and tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing with a little seriousness on one side. He made her laugh; and he flattered her by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by enjoying what he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good husband always does when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was Mrs. March there; and would he introduce her?

  She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she said she would come to see her, if she would let her. Mrs. March could not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her amiability. Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who must have been so much spoiled. They tried to analyze her charm, and they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual fashionableness and worldly innocence. “I think,” said Mrs. March, “that city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most innocent of all. They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and if they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children. Everything combines to keep them so; the very hollowness of society shields them. They are the loveliest of the human race. But perhaps the rest have to pay too much for them.”

  “For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance,” said March, “we couldn’t pay too much.”

  A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in front of them. A girl’s voice called out: “Run, run, Jen! The copper is after you.” A woman’s figure rushed stumbling across the way and into the shadow of the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.

  “Ah, but if that’s part of the price?”

  They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence which he broke with a sigh. “Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we left yonder really belong to the same system of things? How impossible each makes the other seem!”

  VI.

  Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece’s benevolent activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these things, however oddly, were tolerated — even encouraged — by society; and they gave Margaret a charm. They made her originality interesting. Mrs. Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her aunt’s that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the Dryfooses. She explained as well as she could the social destitution of these opulent people, and she had of course to name Beaton as the source of her knowledge concerning them.

  “Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?”

  “No; he rather discouraged it.”

  “And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance? New

  York is full of people who don’t know anybody.”

  Margaret laughed. “I suppose it’s like any other charity: you reach the cases you know of. The others you say you can’t help, and you try to ignore them.”

  “It’s very romantic,” said Mrs. Horn. “I hope you’ve counted the cost; all the possible consequences.”

  Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common experience with the Leightons, whom, to give their common conscience peace, she had called upon with her aunt’s cards and excuses, and an invitation for her Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit seem a welcome to New York. She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her niece’s guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the Leightons till she went to call upon them. She never complained: the strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now she said, with this in mind: “Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if you don’t want them. You merely have to let them alone.”

  “It isn’t so pleasant, letting them alone,” said Mrs. Horn.

  “Or having them let you alone,” said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn’s Thursdays.

  “Yes, or having them let you alone,” Mrs. Horn courageously consented. “And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to know these people.”

  “I don’t,” said the girl, seriously, “in the usual way.”

  “Then the question is whether you do in the unusual way. They will build a great deal upon you,” said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the Leightons must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her desert they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her mind from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any reasonable claim they had upon her.

  “It seems very odd, very sad,” Margaret returned, “that you never could act unselfishly in society affairs. If I wished to go and see those girls just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they’re strange and lonely, I might do them good, even — it would be impossible.”

  “Quite,” said her aunt. “Such a thing would be quixotic. Society doesn’t rest upon any such basis. It can’t; it would go to pieces, if people acted from unselfish motives.”

  “Then it’s a painted savage!” said the girl. “All its favors are really bargains. It’s gifts are for gifts back again.”

  “Yes, that is true,” said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit. “You get what you pay for. It’s a matter of business.” She satisfied herself with this formula, which she did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not dislike her niece’s revolt against it. That was part of Margaret’s originality, which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own conventionality; she was really a timid person, and she liked the show of courage which Margaret’s magnanimity often reflected upon her. She had through her a repute, with people who did not know her well, for intellectual and moral qualities; she was supposed to be literary and charitable; she almost had opinions and ideals, but really fell short of their possession. She thought that she set bounds to the girl’s originality because she recognized them. Margaret understood this better than her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her about going to see the Dryfooses out of deference, and with no expectation of luminous instruction. She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew what she might and might not do, so that she was rather a by-law. She was the kind of girl that might have fancies for artists and poets, but might end by marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump of moneyed and fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and good-will. The intellectual interests were first with her, but she might be equal to sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know how to harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined; comets themselves traverse space on fixed lines. She was like every one else, a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to the general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not finally be. Provisionally, she was very much what she liked to be.

  VII

  Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind thing. This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient a
s she examined it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in her motive, without being very well satisfied with it. She tried to add a slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive at all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible strangers she saw fit to call upon. She perceived that she must be very careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest and sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part. This was easy, compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them the fact that she was not playing a part. When the hesitating Irish serving-man had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken her card to them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room. Her study of its appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestion how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had really decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she was going to play a part for want of some chosen means of not doing so. She found herself, before she knew it, making her banjo a property in the little comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos was taking it up; she had herself been so much interested by it. Anything, she said, was a relief from the piano; and then, between the guitar and the banjo, one must really choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote one’s whole natural life to the violin. Of course, there was the mandolin; but Margaret asked if they did not feel that the bit of shell you struck it with interposed a distance between you and the real soul of the instrument; and then it did have such a faint, mosquitoy little tone! She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh.

  “Well, that’s just what it does sound like,” she explained defiantly to her sister. “I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite. I don’t see what ever brought such a thing into fashion.”

  Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded, and she asked, after gathering herself together, “And you are both learning the banjo?” “My, no!” said Mela, “I’ve gone through enough with the piano. Christine is learnun’ it.”

  “I’m so glad you are making my banjo useful at the outset, Miss Dryfoos.” Both girls stared at her, but found it hard to cope with the fact that this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them. “Mr. Beaton mentioned that he had left it here. I hope you’ll keep it as long as you find it useful.”

  At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her. “Of course,” she said, “I expect to get another, right off. Mr. Beaton is going to choose it for me.”

  “You are very fortunate. If you haven’t a teacher yet I should so like to recommend mine.”

  Mela broke out in her laugh again. “Oh, I guess Christine’s pretty well suited with the one she’s got,” she said, with insinuation. Her sister gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.

  “Then that’s much better,” she said. “I have a kind of superstition in such matters; I don’t like to make a second choice. In a shop I like to take the first thing of the kind I’m looking for, and even if I choose further I come back to the original.”

  “How funny!” said Mela. “Well, now, I’m just the other way. I always take the last thing, after I’ve picked over all the rest. My luck always seems to be at the bottom of the heap. Now, Christine, she’s more like you. I believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on the thing she wants every time.”

  “I’m like father,” said Christine, softened a little by the celebration of her peculiarity. “He says the reason so many people don’t get what they want is that they don’t want it bad enough. Now, when I want a thing, it seems to me that I want it all through.”

  “Well, that’s just like father, too,” said Mela. “That’s the way he done when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he sold the farm, and that’s got some of the best gas-wells on it now that there is anywhere.” She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation. Mela rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, “You’ve never been in the natural-gas country, have you?”

  “Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!” said Margaret, with a fervor that was partly, voluntary.

  “Would you? Well, we’re kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would strike a stranger.”

  “I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,” said Christine. “It seems as if the world was on fire.”

  “Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun’ down in the woods, like it used to by our spring-house — so still, and never spreadun’ any, just like a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece off.”

  They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father’s property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they compared to its advantage with that of New York. They became excited by Margaret’s interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and envious.

  She said, as she rose, “Oh, how much I should like to see it all!” Then she made a little pause, and added:

  “I’m so sorry my aunt’s Thursdays are over; she never has them after Lent, but we’re to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists. There won’t be any banjos, I’m afraid, but there’ll be some very good singing, and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother.”

  She put down her aunt’s card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled, as if it were the best joke: “Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; you couldn’t get her out for love or money.” But she was herself overwhelmed with a simple joy at Margaret’s politeness, and showed it in a sensuous way, like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came closer to Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.

  “Ain’t she just as lovely as she can live?” she demanded of her sister when Margaret was gone.

  “I don’t know,” said Christine. “I guess she wanted to know who Mr.

  Beaton had been lending her banjo to.”

  “Pshaw! Do you suppose she’s in love with him?” asked Mela, and then she broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. “Well, don’t eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway? I’m goun’ to git it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls. I guess she’s somebody. Mrs. Mandel can tell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and git well — or something. But I guess we appeared about as well as she did. I could see she was afraid of you, Christine. I reckon it’s gittun’ around a little about father; and when it does I don’t believe we shall want for callers. Say, are you goun’? To that concert of theirs?”

  “I don’t know. Not till I know who they are first.”

  “Well, we’ve got to hump ourselves if we’re goun’ to find out before

  Tuesday.”

  As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience. She felt kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the poison of flattery. She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such an attempt to do good. If she had escaped this effect she was willing to leave the rest with Providence.

  VIII.

  The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance’s traditions would naturally form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful humility. Howev
er they received it, she had made it upon principle, from a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she had been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was in arguing their attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of argument, with her perspective. They had not the means, intellectual or moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had remained at home on the farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres, and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest. As it was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor of their father’s success in making money had blinded them forever to any possible difference against them. They had no question of themselves in the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York. They had been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must be some mistake.

  They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as the fact of their father’s wealth had got around. They had been steadfast in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they were not only better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good as any; and they took Margaret’s visit, so far as they, investigated its motive, for a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of course, a thing could not get around in New York so quick as it could in a small place. They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of Mrs. Mandel when she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted her about going to Mrs. Horn’s musicale. If she had felt any doubt at the name for there were Horns and Horns — the address on the card put the matter beyond question; and she tried to make her charges understand what a precious chance had befallen them. She did not succeed; they had not the premises, the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid her work in part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn’s standing was independent of money; that though she was positively rich, she was comparatively poor. Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called because she wished to be the first to get in with them since it had begun to get around. This view commended itself to Mela, too, but without warping her from her opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet for anything. She had not so vivid a consciousness of her father’s money as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon its power. She was far from thinking meanly of any one who thought highly of her for it; that seemed so natural a result as to be amiable, even admirable; she was willing that any such person should get all the good there was in such an attitude toward her.