Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And I insist upon it; I must. It is Nature that I accuse; not the divine nature, or even human nature, but brute nature, that commits a million blunders, and destroys myriads of types, in order to arrive at such an imperfect creature as man still physically is, after untold ages of her blind empiricism. If the human intelligence could be put in possession of the human body, we should have altruism at once. We should not get hungry three times a day; instead of the crude digestive apparatus which we have inherited with apparently no change whatever from the cave-dweller, we should have an organ delicately adjusted to the exigencies of modern life, and responsive to all the emotions of philanthropy. But no! The stomach of the nineteenth century remains helplessly in the keeping of primeval nature, who is a mere Bourbon; who learns nothing and forgets nothing. She obliges us to struggle on with a rude arrangement developed from the mollusk, and adapted at best to the conditions of the savage; imperative and imperfect; liable to get out of order with the carefulest management, and to give way altogether with the use of half a lifetime. No, David! You will have to wait until man has come into control of his stomach, and is able to bring his ingenuity to bear upon its deficiencies. Then, and not till then, you will have the Altruistic Man. Until then the egoistic man will continue to eat his brother, and more or less indigest him — if there is such a verb.”

  Bay listened with one ear to them. The other was filled with the soft murmur of women’s voices from the further end of the little apartment; they broke now and then from a steady flow of talk, and rippled into laughter, and then smoothed themselves to talk again. He longed to know what they were talking about, laughing about.

  “No, David,” Kane went on, “when you take man out of the clutches of Nature, and put Nature in the keeping of man, we shall have the millennium. I have nothing to say against the millennium, per se, except that it never seems to have been on time. I am willing to excuse its want of punctuality; there may have always been unavoidable delays; but you can’t expect me to have as much faith in it as if it had never disappointed people. Now with you I admit it’s different. You’ve seen it come a great many times, and go even oftener.”

  “Young man!” the other called so abruptly to Ray that it made him start in his chair, “I wish you would step out into the room yonder, and ask one of my daughters to bring me my whiskey and milk. It’s time for it,” and he put down a watch which he had taken from the table beside him.

  He nodded toward a sort of curtained corridor at one side of the room, and after a glance of question at Kane, who answered with a reassuring smile, Ray went out through this passage. The voices had suddenly fallen silent, but he found their owners in the little room beyond; they were standing before their chairs as if they had jumped to their feet in a feminine dismay which they had quelled. In one he made out the young Mrs. Denton, whose silhouette had received him and Kane; the other looked like her, but younger, and in the two Ray recognized the heroines of the pocket-book affair on the train.

  He trembled a little inwardly, but he said, with a bow for both: “I beg your pardon. Your father wished me to ask you for his” —

  He faltered at the queerness of it all, but the younger said, simply and gravely: “Oh, yes, I’ll take it in. I’ve got it ready here,” and she took up a tumbler from the hearth of the cooking-stove keeping itself comfortable at one side of a little kitchen beyond the room where they were, and went out with it.

  Ray did not know exactly what to do, or rather how he should do what he wished. He hesitated, and looked at Mrs. Denton, who said, “Won’t you sit down — if it isn’t too hot here?”

  XV.

  “OH, it isn’t at all hot,” said Ray, and in fact the air was blowing freely in through the plants at the open window. Then he sat down, as if to prove that it was not too hot; there was no other reason that he could have given for staying, instead of going back to Kane and her father.

  “We can keep the windows open on this side,” said Mrs. Denton, “but the elevated makes too much noise in front. When we came here first, it was warm weather; it was stifling when we shut the windows, and when we opened them, it seemed as if the trains would drive us wild. It was like having them in the same room with us. But now it’s a little cooler, and we don’t need the front windows open; so it’s very pleasant.”

  Ray said it was delightful, and he asked, “Then you haven’t been in New York long?”

  “No; only since the beginning of September. We thought we would settle in New Jersey first, and we did take a house there, in the country; but it was too far from my husband’s work, and so we moved in. Father wants to meet people; he’s more in the current here.”

  As she talked, Mrs. Denton had a way of looking down at her apron, and smoothing it across her knees with one hand, and now and then glancing at Ray out of the corner of her eye, as if she were smiling on the further side of her face.

  “We went out there a little while ago to sell off the things we didn’t want to keep. The neighbors took them.” She began to laugh, and Ray laughed, too, when she said, “We found they had taken some of them before we got there. They might as well have taken all, they paid us so little for the rest I didn’t suppose there would be such a difference between firsthand and second-hand things. But it was the first time we had ever set up housekeeping for ourselves, and we had to make mistakes. We had always lived in a community.”

  She looked at him for the impression of this fact, and Ray merely said, “Yep; Mr. Kane told me something of the kind.”

  “It’s all very different in the world. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a community?”

  “No,” said Ray.

  “Well,” she went on, “we’ve had to get used to all sorts of things since we came out into the world. The very day we left the community, I heard some people in the seat just in front of me, in the car, planning how they should do something to get a living; it seemed ridiculous and dreadful. It fairly frightened me.

  Ray was struck with the literary value of the fact. He said: “I suppose it would be startling if we could any of us realize it for the first time. But for most of us there never is any first time.”

  Mrs. Denton said: “No, but in the community we never had to think how we should get things to eat and wear, any more than how we should get air to breathe. You know father believes that the world can be made like the Family, in that, and everybody be sure of a living, if he is willing to work.”

  She glanced at Ray with another of her demure looks, which seemed inquiries both as to his knowledge of the facts and his opinion of them.

  “I didn’t know just what your father’s ideas were,” he said; and she went on:

  “Yes; he thinks all you’ve got to do is to have patience. But it seems to me you’ve got to have money too,” or you’ll starve to death before your patience gives out.”

  Mrs. Denton laughed, and Ray sat looking at her with a curious mixture of liking and misgiving: he would have liked to laugh with her from the poet in him, but his civic man could not approve of her irresponsibility. In her quality of married woman, she was more reprehensible than she would have been as a girl; as a girl, she might well have been merely funny. Still, she was a woman, and her voice, if it expressed an irresponsible nature, was sweet to hear. She seemed not to dislike hearing it herself, and she let it run lightly on. “The hardest thing for us, though, has been getting used to money, and the care of it. It seems to be just as bad with a little as a great deal —— the care does; and you have to be thinking about it all the time; we never had to think of it at all in the Family. Most of us never saw it, or touched it; only the few that went out and sold and bought things.”

  “That’s very odd,” said Ray, trying the notion if it would not work somewhere into literature; at the same time he felt the charm of this pretty young woman, and wondered why her sister did not come back. He heard her talking with Kane in the other room; now and then her voice, gentle and clear and somewhat high, was lost in Kane’s laugh, o
r the hoarse plunge of her father’s bass.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think I feel it more than my husband or my sister does; they just have to earn the money, but I have to take care of it, and see how far I can make it go. It’s perfectly distracting; and sometimes when I forget, and do something careless!” She let an impressive silence follow, and Ray laughed.

  “Yes, that’s an anxious time for us, even if we’re brought up with the advantages of worldly experience.”

  “Anxious!” Mrs. Denton repeated; and her tongue ran on. “Why, the day I went out to New Jersey with my sister to settle up our ‘estate’ out there, we each of us had a baby to carry — my children are twins, and we couldn’t leave them here with father; it was bad enough to leave him! and my husband was at work; and on the train coming home I forgot and gave the twins my pocket-book to play with; and just then a kind old gentleman put up the car window for me, and the first thing I knew they threw it out into the water — we were crossing that piece of water before you get to Jersey City. It had every cent of my money in it; and I was so scared when they threw my pocket-book away — we always say they, because they’re so much alike we never can remember which did a thing — I was so scared that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just screamed out all about it.” Ray listened restively; he felt as if he were eavesdropping; but he did not know quite how, or when, or whether, after all, to tell her that he had witnessed the whole affair; he decided that he had better not; and she went on: “My sister said it was just as if I had begged of the whole carful; and I suppose it was. I don’t suppose that a person who was more used to money would have given it to a baby to play with.” She stopped, and Ray suddenly changed his mind; he thought he ought not to let her go on as if he knew nothing about it; that was hardly fair.

  “The conductor,” he said, “appeared to think any woman would have done it.”

  Mrs. Denton laughed out her delight. “It was you, then. My sister was sure it was, as soon as she saw you at Mr. Chapley’s.”

  “At Mr. Chapley’s?”

  “Yes; his store. That is where she works. You didn’t see her, but she saw you,” said Mrs. Denton; and then Ray recalled that Mr. Brandreth had sent to a Miss Hughes for the list of announcements she had given him.

  “We saw you noticing us in the car, and we saw you talking with the conductor. Did he say anything else about us?” she asked, significantly.

  “I don’t know exactly what you mean,” Ray answered, a little consciously, and coloring slightly.

  “Why,” Mrs. Denton began; but she stopped at sight of her sister, who came in with the empty tumbler in her hand, and set it down in the room beyond. “Peace!” she called to her, and the girl came back reluctantly, Ray fancied. He had remained standing since her reappearance, and Mrs. Denton said, introducing them, “This is my sister, Mr. Ray;” and then she cried out joyfully, “It was Mr. Ray!” while he bowed ceremoniously to the girl, who showed an embarrassment that Mrs. Denton did not share. “The conductor told him that any woman would have given her baby her pocket-book to play with; and so you see I wasn’t so very bad, after all. But when one of these things happens to me, it seems as if the world had come to an end; I can’t get over it. Then we had another experience! One of the passengers that heard me say all our money was in that pocket-book, gave the conductor a dollar for us, to pay our car-fares home. We had to take it; we couldn’t have carried the children from the ferry all the way up here; but I never knew before that charity hurt so... It was dreadful!”

  A certain note made itself evident in her voice which Ray felt as an appeal. “Why, I don’t think you need have considered it as charity. It was what might have happened to any lady who had lost her purse.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Miss Hughes broke in. “It would have been offered then so that it could be returned. We were to blame for not making the conductor say who gave it. But we were so confused!”

  “I think the giver was to blame for not sending his address with it. But perhaps he was confused too,” said Ray.

  “The conductor told us it was a lady,” said Mrs. Denton, with a sudden glance upward at Ray.

  They all broke into a laugh together, and the girl sprang up and went into another room. She came back with a bank-note in her hand, which she held out toward Ray.

  He did not offer to take it. “I haven’t pleaded guilty yet.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Denton; “but we know you did it. Peace always thought you did; and now we’ve got you in our power, and you must take it back.”

  “But you didn’t use it all. You gave a quarter to the old darkey who whistled. You’re as bad as I am. You do charity, too.”

  “No; he earned his quarter. You paid him something yourself,” said the girl.

  “He did whistle divinely,” Ray admitted. “How came you to think of asking him to change your bill? I should have thought you’d have given it all to him.” They had a childlike joy in his railery, which they laughed simply out. “We did want to,” Mrs. Denton said; “but we didn’t know how we could get home.”

  “I don’t see but that convicts me.” Ray put out his hand as if to take the note, and then withdrew it. “I suppose I ought to take it,” he began. “But if I did, I should just spend it on myself. And the fact is, I had saved it on myself, or else, perhaps, I shouldn’t have given it to the conductor for you.” He told them how he had economized on his journey, and they laughed together at the picture he gave of his satisfaction in his self-denial.

  “Oh, I know that good feeling!” said Mrs. Denton. “Yes, but you can’t imagine how superior I felt when I handed my dollar over to the conductor. Good is no name for it; and I’ve simply gloated over my own merit ever since. Miss Hughes, you must keep that dollar, and give it to somebody who needs it!” This was not so novel as it seemed to Ray; but the sisters glanced at each other as if struck with its originality.

  Then the girl looked at him steadily out of her serene eyes a moment, as if thinking what she had better do, while Mrs. Denton cooed her pleasure in the situation.

  “I knew just as well, when the conductor said it was a lady passenger sent it! He said it like a sort of after-thought, you know; he turned back to say it just after he left us.”

  “Well, I will do that,” said the girl to Ray; and she carried the money back to her room.

  “Do sit down!” said Mrs. Denton to Ray when she came back. The community of experience, and the wonder of the whole adventure, launched them indefinitely forward towards intimacy in their acquaintance. “We were awfully excited when my sister came home and said she had seen you at Mr. Chapley’s.” Her sister did not deny it; but when Mrs. Denton added the question, “Are you an author?” she protested—” Jenny!”

  “I wish I were,” said Ray; “but I can’t say I am, yet. That depends upon whether Mr. Chapley takes my book,”

  He ventured to be so frank because he thought Miss Hughes probably knew already that he had offered a manuscript; but if she knew, she made no sign of knowing, and Mrs. Denton said:

  “Mr. Chapley gives my sister all the books he publishes. Isn’t it splendid? And he lets her bring home any of the books she wants to, out of the store. Are you acquainted in his family?”

  “No; I only know Mr. Brandreth, his son-in-law.”

  “My sister says he’s very nice. Everybody likes Mr. Brandreth. Mr. Chapley is an old friend of father’s. I should think his family would come to see us, some of them. But they haven’t. Mr. Chapley comes ever so much.”

  Ray did not know what to say of a fact which Mrs. Denton did not suffer to remain last in his mind. She went on, as if it immediately followed.

  “We are reading Browning now. But my husband likes Shelley the best of all. Which is your favorite poet?”

  Ray smiled. “I suppose Shelley ought to be. I was named after him.” When he had said this he thought it rather silly, and certainly superfluous. So he added, “My father was a great reader of him when he was a young ma
n, and I got the benefit of his taste, if it’s a benefit.”

  “Why, do you hate to be named Shelley?” Mrs. Denton asked.

  “Oh, no; except as I should hate to be named Shakespeare; it suggests comparisons.”

  “Yes; but it’s a very pretty name.” As if it recalled him, she said, “My husband was just going out with the twins when you came in with Mr. Kane. He was taking them over to the Park. Do you like cats?” She leaned over and lugged up into her lap a huge Maltese from the further side of her. “My sister doesn’t because they eat sparrows.” She passed her hand slowly down the cat’s smooth flank, which snapped electrically, while the cat shut its eyes to a line of gray light.

  “If your cat’s fond of sparrows, he ought to come and live with me,” said Ray. “I’ve got a whole colony of them outside of my dormer-window.”

  Mrs. Denton lifted the cat’s head and rubbed her cheek on it. “Oh, we’ve got plenty of sparrows here, too. Where do you live? Down town? Mr. Kane does.”

  Ray gave a picturesque account of his foreign hotel; but he had an impression that its strangeness was thrown away upon his hearers, who seemed like children in their contact with the world; it was all so strange that nothing was stranger than another to them. They thought what he told them of life in Midland as queer as life in New York.

  The talk went on without sequence or direction, broken with abrupt questions and droll comments; and they laughed a good deal. They spoke of poems and of dreams. Ray told of a fragment of a poem he had made in a dream, and repeated it; they thought it was fine, or at least Mrs. Denton said she did. Her sister did not talk much, but she listened, and now and then she threw in a word. She sat against the light, and her face was in shadow to Ray, and this deepened his sense of mystery in her; her little head, so distinctly outlined, was beautiful. Her voice, which was so delicate and thin, had a note of childish innocence in it Mrs. Denton cooed deep and low. She tried to make her sister talk more, and tell this and that The girl did not seem afraid or shy, but only serious. Several times they got back to books, and at one of these times it appeared that she knew of Ray’s manuscript, and that it was going through the hands of the readers.