Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He counted a good deal upon his novel in certain moods. He knew it had weak points which he was not able to strengthen because he was too ignorant of life, though he hated to own it; but he thought it had some strong ones too; and he believed it would succeed if he could get a publisher for it.

  He had read passages of it to his friend, and Sanderson had praised them. Ray knew he had not entered fully into the spirit of the thing, because he was merely and helplessly a newspaper mind, though since Ray had left the Echo, Sanderson had talked of leaving it too, and going on to devote himself to literature in New York. Ray knew he would fail, but he encouraged him because he was so fond of him; he thought now what a good, faithful fellow Sanderson was. Sanderson not only praised the novel to its author, but he celebrated it to the young ladies. They all knew that Ray had written it, and several of them spoke to him about it; they said they were just dying to see it. One of them had seen it, and when he asked her what she thought of his novel, in the pretence that he did not imagine she had looked at the manuscript, it galled him a little to have her say that it was like Thackeray; he knew he had imitated Thackeray, but he feigned that he did not know; and he hoped no one else would see it. She recognized traits that he had drawn from himself, and he did not like that, either; in the same way that he feigned not to know that he had imitated Thackeray, he feigned not to know that he had drawn his own likeness. But the sum of what she said gave him great faith in himself, and in his novel. He theorized that if its subtleties of thought and its flavors of style pleased a girl like her, and at the same time a fellow like Sanderson was taken with the plot, he had got the two essentials of success in it. He thought how delicately charming that girl was; still he knew that he was not in love with her. He thought how nice girls were, anyway; there were lots of perfectly delightful girls in Midland, and he should probably have fallen in love with some of them if it had not been for that long passion of his early youth, which seemed to have vastated him before he came there. He was rather proud of his vastation, and he found it not only fine, but upon the whole very convenient, to be going away heart-free.

  He had no embarrassing ties, no hindering obligations of any kind. He had no one but himself to look out for in seeking his fortune. His father, after long years of struggle, was very well placed in the little country town which Ray had come from to Midland; his brothers had struck out for themselves farther west; one of his sisters was going to be married; the other was at school. None of them needed his help, or was in anywise dependent upon him. He realized, in thinking of it all, that he was a very lucky fellow; and he was not afraid but he should get on if he kept trying, and if he did his best, the chances were that it would be found out. He lay in his berth, with a hopeful and flattered smile on his lips, and listened to the noises of the station: the feet on the platforms; the voices, as from some disembodied life; the clang of engine bells; the jar and clash and rumble of the trains that came and went, with a creaking and squealing of their slowing or starting wheels, while his sleeper was quietly side-tracked, waiting for the express to arrive and pick it up. He felt a sort of slight for the town he was to leave behind; a sort of contemptuous fondness; for though it was not New York, it had used him well; it had appreciated him, and Ray was not ungrateful. Upon the whole, he was glad that he had agreed to write those letters from New York which the Hanks Brothers had finally asked him to do for the Echo. He knew that they had asked him under a pressure of public sentiment, and because they had got it through them at last that other people thought he would be a loss to the paper. He liked well enough the notion of keeping the readers of the Echo in mind of him; if he failed to capture New York, Midland would always be a good point to fall back upon. He expected his novel to succeed, and then he should be independent. But till then, the five dollars a week which the Hanks Brothers proposed to pay him for his letters would be very convenient, though the sum was despicable in itself. Besides, he could give up the letters whenever he liked. He had his dreams of fame and wealth, but he knew very well that they were dreams, and he was not going to kick over his basket of glass till they had become realities.

  A keen ray from one of the electric moons depending from the black roof of the depot suddenly pierced his window at the side of his drawn curtain; and he felt the car jolted backward. He must have been drowsing, for the express had come in unknown to him, and was picking up his sleeper. With a faint thrill of homesickness for the kindly town he was leaving, he felt the train pull forward and so out of its winking lamps into the night. He held his curtain aside to see the last of these lights. Then, with a luxurious sense of helplessness against fate, he let it fall; and Midland slipped back into the irrevocable past.

  II.

  THE next evening, under a rich, mild October sky, the train drew in towards New York over a long stretch of trestle-work spanning a New Jersey estuary. Ray had thriftily left his sleeper at the station where he breakfasted, and saved the expense of it for the day’s journey by taking an ordinary car. He could be free with his dollars when he did not suppose he might need them; but he thought he should be a fool to throw one of them away on the mere self-indulgence of a sleeper through to New York, when he had no use for it more than half way. He experienced the reward of virtue in the satisfaction he felt at having that dollar still in his pocket; and he amused himself very well in making romances about the people who got on and off at different points throughout the day. He read a good deal in a book he had brought with him, and imagined a review of it. He talked with passengers who shared his seat with him, from time to time. He ate ravenously at the station where the train stopped twenty minutes for dinner, and he took little supernumerary naps during the course of the afternoon, and pieced out the broken and abbreviated slumbers of the night From the last of these naps he woke with a sort of formless alarm, which he identified presently as the anxiety he must naturally feel at drawing so near the great, strange city which had his future in keeping. He was not so hopeful as he was when he left Midland; but he knew he had really no more cause now than he had then for being less so.

  The train was at a station. Before it started, a brakeman came in and called out in a voice of formal warning: “This train express to Jersey City. Passengers for way stations change cars. This train does not stop between here and Jersey City.”

  He went out and shut the door behind him, and at the same time a young woman with a baby in her arms jumped from her seat and called out, “Oh, dear, what did he say?”

  Another young woman, with another baby in her arms, rose and looked round, but she did not say anything. She had the place in front of the first, and their two seats were faced, as if the two young women were travelling together. Ray noted, with the interest that he felt in all young women as the elements both of love and of literature, that they looked a good deal alike, as to complexion and feature. The distraction of the one who rose first seemed to communicate itself to her dull, golden-brown hair, and make a wisp of it come loose from the knot at the back of her head, and stick out at one side. The child in her arms was fretful, and she did not cease to move it to and fro and up and down, even in the panic which brought her to her feet. Her demand was launched at the whole carful of passengers, but one old man answered for all: “He said, this train doesn’t stop till it gets to Jersey City.”

  The young woman said, “Oh!” and she and the other sat down again, and she stretched across the fretful child which clung to her, and tried to open her window. She could not raise it, and the old man who had answered her question lifted it for her. Then she sank back in her seat, and her sister, if it was her sister, leaned forward, and seemed to whisper to her. She put up her hand and thrust the loosened wisp of her hair back into the knot. To do this she gave the child the pocket-book which she seemed to have been holding, and she did not take it away again. The child stopped fretting, and began to pull at its plaything to get it open; then it made aimless dabs with it at the back of the car seat and at its mother’s face. She moved her
head, patiently from side to side to escape the blows; and the child entered with more zest into the sport, and began to laugh and strike harder. Suddenly, mid-way of the long trestle-work, the child turned towards the window and made a dab at the sail of a passing sloop. The pocket-book flew from its hand, and the mother sprang to her feet again with a wail that filled the car.

  “Oh, what shall I do! He’s thrown my pocket-book out of the window, and it’s got every cent of my money in it. Oh, couldn’t they stop the train?”

  The child began to cry. The passengers all looked out of the windows on that side of the aisle; and Ray could see the pocket-book drifting by in the water. A brakeman whom the young woman’s lamentation had called to the rescue, passed through the car with a face of sarcastic compassion, and spoke to the conductor entering from the other end. The conductor shook his head; the train kept moving slowly on. Of course it was impossible and useless to stop. The young women leaned forward and talked anxiously together, as Ray could see from his distant seat; they gave the conductor their tickets, and explained to him what had happened; he only shook his head again.

  When he came to get Ray’s ticket, the young fellow tried to find out something about them from him.

  “Yes, I guess she told the truth. She had all her money, ten dollars and some change, in that pocket-book, and of course she gave it to her baby to play with right by an open window. Just like a woman! They’re just about as fit as babies to handle money. If they had to earn it, they’d be different. Some poor fellow’s week’s work was in that pocket-book, like as not. They don’t look like the sort that would have a great deal of money to throw out of the window, if they was men.”

  “Do you know where they’re going?” Ray asked. “Are they going on any further?”

  “Oh, no. They live in New York. Way up on the East Side somewhere.”

  “But how will they get there with those two babies? They can’t walk.”

  The conductor shrugged. “Guess they’ll have to try it.”

  “Look here!” said Ray. He took a dollar note out of his pocket, and gave it to the conductor. “Find out whether they’ve got any change, and if they haven’t, tell them one of the passengers wanted them to take this for car fares. Don’t tell them which one.”

  “All right,” said the conductor.

  He passed into the next car. When he came back Ray saw him stop and parley with the young women. He went through the whole train again before he stopped for a final word with Ray, who felt that he had entered into the poetry of his intentions towards the women, and had made these delays and detours of purpose. He bent over Ray with a detached and casual air, and said:

  “Every cent they had was in that pocket-book. Only wonder is they hadn’t their tickets there, too. They didn’t want to take the dollar, but I guess they had to. They live ‘way up on Third Avenue about Hundred and First Street; and the one that gave her baby her money to hold looks all played out. They couldn’t have walked it. I told ’em the dollar was from a lady passenger. Seemed as if it would make it kind of easier for ‘em.”

  “Yes, that was right,” said Ray.

  III.

  WHEN they stopped in Jersey City, Ray made haste out of the car to see what became of his beneficiaries, and he followed closely after them, and got near them on the ferry-boat. They went forward out of the cabin and stood among the people at the bow who were eager to get ashore first They each held her heavy baby, and silently watched the New York shore, and scarcely spoke.

  Ray looked at it too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges with freight trains in sections on them; the canal-boats in tow of the river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively expressed in an incredible picturesqueness.

  Ray saw nothing amiss in it. This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not afraid. He took a new grip of the travelling-bag where he had his manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it went into some publisher’s keeping. He would not trust it to the trunk which he had checked at Midland, and which he now recognized among the baggage piled on a truck near him. He fingered the outside of his bag to make sure by feeling its shape that his manuscript was all right within. All the time he was aware of those two young women, each with her baby in her arms, which they amused with various devices, telling them to look at the water, the craft going by, and the horses in the wagon-way of the ferry-boat The children fretted, and pulled the women’s hair, and clawed their hats; and the passengers now and then looked censoriously at them. From time to time the young women spoke to each other spiritlessly. The one whose child had thrown her pocket-book away never lost a look of hopeless gloom, as she swayed her body half round and back, to give some diversion to the baby. Both were pretty, but she had the paleness and thinness of young motherhood; the other, though she was thin too, had the fresh color and firm texture of a young girl; she was at once less tragic and more serious than her sister, if it was her sister.

  When she found Ray gazing fixedly at her, she turned discreetly away, after a glance that no doubt took in the facts of his neat, slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its dark eyes and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant mouth; his sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked with a few browner freckles.

  He was one of those men who have no vanity concerning their persons; he knew he was rather handsome, but he did not care; his mind was on other things. When he found those soft woman-eyes lingering a moment on him he had the wish to please their owner, of course, but he did not think of his looks, or the effect they might have with her. He fancied knowing her well enough to repeat poetry to her, or of reading some favorite author aloud with her, and making her sympathize in his admiration of the book. He permitted his fancy this liberty because, although he supposed her married, his fancy safely operated their intellectual intimacy in a region as remote from experience as the dreamland of sleep. She and her sister had both a sort of refinement; they were ladies, he felt, although they were poorly dressed, and they somehow did not seem as if they had ever been richly dressed. They had not the New Yorkeress air; they had nothing of the stylishness which Ray saw in the other women about him, shabby or splendid; their hats looked as if they had been trimmed at home, and their simple gowns as if their wearers had invented and made them up themselves, after no decided fashion, but after a taste of their own, which he thought good. He began to make phrases about them to himself, and he said there was something pathetically idyllic about them. The phrase was indefinite, but it was sufficiently clear for his purpose. The baby which had thrown away the pocket-book began to express its final dissatisfaction with the prospect, and its mother turned distractedly about for some new diversion, when there came from the ladies’ cabin a soft whistle, like the warbling of a bird, low and rich and full, which possessed itself of the sense to the exclusion of all other sounds. Some of the people pressed into the cabin; others stood smiling in the benediction of the artless strain. Ray followed his idyllic sisters within, and saw an old negro, in the middle of the cabin floor, lounging in an easy pose, with his hat in one hand and the other hand on his hip, while his thick lips poured out those mellow notes, which might have come from the heart of some thrush-haunted wild wood. When the sylvan music ceased, and the old n
egro, with a roll of his large head, and a twist of his burly shape, began to limp round the circle, every one put something in his hat. Ray threw in a nickel, and he saw the sisters, who faced him from the other side of the circle, conferring together. The younger had the bill in her hand which Ray had sent them by the conductor to pay their car fares home. She parleyed a moment with the negro when he reached them, and he took some of the silver from his hat and changed the bill for her. She gave him a quarter back. He ducked his head, and said, “Thank yeh, miss,” and passed on.

  The transaction seemed to amuse some of the bystanders, and Ray heard one of them, who stood near him, say: “Well, that’s the coolest thing I’ve seen yet I should have about as soon thought of asking the deacon to change a bill for me when he came round with the plate in church. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world!”

  He looked like a country merchant, on a first business visit to the city; his companion, who had an air of smart ease, as of a man who had been there often, said:

  “It takes all kinds to make a town like New York. You’ll see queerer things than that before you get home. If that old darkey makes much on that transaction, I’m no judge of human nature.”

  “Pshaw! You don’t mean it wasn’t a good bill?” The two men lost themselves in the crowd now pressing out of the cabin door. The boat was pushing into her slip. She bumped from one elastic side to the other, and settled with her nose at the wharf. The snarl of the heavy chains that held her fast was heard; the people poured off and the hollow thunder of the hoofs and wheels of the disembarking teams began. Ray looked about for a last glimpse of the two young women and their babies; but he could not see them.

  IV.

  RAY carried his bag himself when he left the elevated road, and resisted the offer of the small Italian dodging about his elbow, and proposing to take it, after he had failed to get Ray to let him black his boots. The young man rather prided himself on his thrift in denying the boy, whose naked foot came half through one of his shoes; he saw his tatters and nakedness with the indifference of inexperience, and with his country breeding he considered his frugality a virtue. His senses were not offended by the foulness of the streets he passed through, or hurt by their sordid uproar; his strong young nerves were equal to all the assaults that the city could make; and his heart was lifted in a dream of hope. He was going to a hotel that Sanderson had told him of, where you could get a room, on the European plan, for seventy-five cents, and then eat wherever you pleased; he had gone to an American hotel when he was in New York before, and he thought he could make a saving by trying Sanderson’s. It had a certain gayety of lamps before it, but the splendor diminished within, and Ray’s pride was further hurt by the clerk’s exacting advance payment for his room from him. The clerk said he could not give him an outside room that night, but he would try to change him in the morning; and Ray had either to take the one assigned him or go somewhere else. But he had ordered his trunk sent to this hotel by the express, and he did not know how he should manage about that if he left; so he staid, and had himself shown to his room. It seemed to be a large cupboard in the wall of the corridor; but it had a window near the bed, and the usual equipment of stand and bureau, and Ray did not see why he should not sleep very well there. Still, he was glad that his friends at Midland could none of them see him in that room, and he resolved to leave the hotel as soon as he could the next day. It did not seem the place for a person who had left Midland with the highest social honors that could be paid a young man. He hurried through the hotel office when he came out, so as not to be seen by any other Midlander that might happen to be there, and he went down to the basement, where the clerk said the restaurant was, and got his supper. When he had finished his oyster stew he started towards the street-door, but was overtaken at the threshold by a young man who seemed to have run after him, and who said, “You didn’t pay for your supper.”