Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes; I go there every week or so.”

  “How are they getting on?”

  “Very well, I believe.” Ray mused a moment, and then he said: “If it were not contrary to all our preconceptions of a sort of duty in people who have been through what they have been through, I should say they were both happier than I ever saw them before. I don’t think Mrs. Denton cared a great deal for her children or husband, but in her father’s last days he wouldn’t have anybody else about him. She strikes one like a person who would get married again.”

  Mr. Brandreth listened with the air of one trying to feel shocked; but he smiled.

  “I don’t blame her,” Ray continued. “Perhaps old Kane’s habit of not blaming people is infectious. She once accounted for herself on the ground that she didn’t make herself; I suppose it might be rather dangerous ground if people began to take it generally. But Miss Hughes did care for those poor little souls and for that wretched creature, and now the care’s gone, and the relief has come. They both miss their father; but he was doomed; he had to die; and besides, his fatherhood struck me as being rather thin, at times, from having been spread out over a community so long. I can’t express it exactly, but it seems to me that the children of a man who is trying to bring about a millennium of any kind do not have a good time. Still, I suppose we must have the millenniums.”

  “You said that just like old Kane,” Mr. Brandreth observed.

  “Did I? I just owned he was infectious. If I’ve caught his habit of mind, I dare say I’ve caught his accent. I don’t particularly admire either. But what I mean is that Miss Hughes and her sister are getting on very comfortably and sweetly. Their place is as homelike as any I know in New York.”

  “As soon as we get back in the fall, Mrs. Brandreth is going to call on them. Now that Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are out of the way, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t show them some attention. Miss Hughes, at least, is a perfect lady. I’m going to see that she doesn’t overwork; the success of A Modern Romeo has killed us nearly all; I’m going to give her a three weeks’ vacation toward the end of August” Ray called upon Peace one evening in the beginning of her vacation, and found her with the manuscript of a book before her; Mrs. Denton was sitting with the Simpsons on their front steps, and sent him on up to Peace when he declined to join her there.

  He said, “I supposed I should find you reading up the Adirondack guide-books, or trying to decide between Newport and Saratoga. I don’t see how your outing differs very much from your inning.”

  “This was only a book I brought home because I had got interested in it,” the girl explained in self-defence. “We’re not going away anywhere.”

  “I think I would stay myself,” said Ray, “if it were not for wanting to see my family. My vacation begins to-morrow.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes; and I should be very willing to spend my fortnight excursioning around New York. But I’m off at once to-night; I came in to say good-by. I hope you’ll miss me.”

  “We shall miss you very much,” she said; and she added, “I suppose most of our fashionable friends have gone out of town.”

  “Have they?”

  “I should think you would know. We had them at second-hand from you.”

  “Oh! Those?” said Ray. “Yes. They’re gone, and I’m going. I hate to leave you behind. Have you any message for the country?”

  “Only my love.” She faced the manuscript down on the table before her, and rocked softly to and fro a moment. “It does make me a little homesick to think of it,” she said, with touching patience.

  He felt the forlornness in her accent, and a sense of her isolation possessed him. When Mrs. Denton should marry again, Peace would be alone in the world. He looked at her, and she seemed very little and slight, to make her way single-handed.

  “Peace!” he said, and the intensity of his voice startled him. “There is something I wanted to say to you — to ask you,” and he was aware of her listening as intensely as he spoke, though no change of attitude or demeanor betrayed the fact; he had to go on in a lighter strain if he went on at all. “You know, I suppose, what a rich man I am going to be when I get the copyright on my book. It’s almost incredible, but I’m going to be worth five or six thousand dollars; to be as rich as most millionaires. Well —— I asked you to let me be your friend once, because I didn’t think a man who was turning out a failure had the right to ask to be more. Or, no! That isn’t it!” he broke off, shocked by the false ring of his words. “I don’t know how to say it I was in love once — very much in love; the kind of love that I’ve put into my book; and this — this worship that I have for you, for I do worship you! — it isn’t the same, Peace. It’s everything that honors you, and once it was like that; but now I’m not sure. But I couldn’t go away without offering you my worship, for you to accept for all our lives; or reject, if it wasn’t enough. Do you understand?”

  “I do understand,” the girl returned, and she nervously pressed the hand which she allowed to gather hers into it.

  “I couldn’t leave you,” he went on, “without telling you that there is no one in the world that I honor so much as you. I had it in my heart to say this long ago; but it seems such a strange thing to stop with. If I didn’t think you so wise and so good, I don’t believe I could say it to you. I know that now whatever you decide will be right, and the best for us both. I couldn’t bear to have you suppose I would keep coming to see you without — I would have told you this long ago, but I always expected to tell you more.

  But I’m twenty-six now, and perhaps I shall never feel in that old way again. I know our lives would be united in the highest things; and you would save me from living for myself alone. What do you say, Peace?”

  He waited for her to break the silence which he did not know how to interpret At last she said “No!” and she drew back from him and took her hand away. “It wouldn’t be right I shouldn’t be afraid to trust you” —

  “Then why” —

  “For I know how faithful you are. But I’m afraid —— I know — I don’t love you! And without that it would be a sacrilege. That isn’t enough of itself, but everything else would be nothing without it” As if she felt the wound her words must have dealt to his self-love, she hurried on: “I did love you once. Yes! I did. And when Mr. Brandreth wanted me to read your book that time, I wouldn’t, because I was afraid of myself. But afterwards it — went.”

  “Was it my fault?” Ray asked.

  “It wasn’t any one’s fault,” said the girl. “If I had not been so unhappy, it might have been different.”

  “Oh, Peace!”

  “But I had no heart for it. And now my life must go on just as it is. I have thought it all out I thought that some time you might tell me — what you have — or different — and I tried to think what I ought to do. I shall never care for any one else; I shall never get married. Don’t think I shall be unhappy! I can take good care of myself, and Jenny and I will not be lonesome together. Even if we don’t always live together — still, I can always make myself a home. I’m not afraid to be an old maid. There is work in the world for me to do, and I can do it. Is it so strange I should be saying this?”

  “No, no. It’s right.”

  “I suppose that most of the girls you know wouldn’t do it But I have been brought up differently. In the Family they did not think that marriage was always the best thing; and when I saw how Jenny and Ansel —— I don’t mean that it would ever have been like that! But I don’t wish you to think that life will be hard or unhappy for me. And you — you will find somebody that you can feel towards as you did towards that first girl.”

  “Never! I shall never care for any one again!” he cried. At the bottom of his heart there was a relief which he tried to ignore, though he could not deny himself a sense of the unique literary value of the situation. It was from a consciousness of this relief that he asked, “And what do you think of me, Peace? Do you blame me?”

&
nbsp; “Blame you? How? For my having changed?”

  “I feel to blame,” said the young man. “How shall we do, now? Shall I come to see you when I return?”

  “Yes. But we won’t speak of this again.”

  “Shall you tell Mrs. Denton?”

  “Of course.”

  “She will blame me.”

  “She will blame me” said Peace. “But — I shall not be troubled, and you mustn’t,” she said, and she lightly touched him. “This is just as I wish it to be. I’ve been afraid that if this ever happened, I shouldn’t have the courage to tell you what I have. But you helped me, and I am so glad you did! I was afraid you would say something that would blind me, and keep me from going on in the right way; but now — Good-night.”

  “Good-night,” said Ray, vaguely. “May I — dream of you, Peace?”

  “If you’ll stop at daybreak.”

  “Ah, then I shall begin to think of you.”

  XLV.

  THEY had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!

  The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more simply and probably be that she had received his strange declaration as she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.

  A cold perspiration broke out over him at the notion, which he rejected upon a moment’s reflection as unworthy of Peace. He got back to his compassionate admiration of her, as he walked down to the ferry and began his homeward journey. He looked about the boat, and fancied it the same he had crossed to New York in, when he came to the city nearly a year before. The old negro who whistled, limped silently through the long saloon; he glanced from right to left on the passengers, but he must have thought them too few, or not in the mood for his music. Ray wondered if he whistled only for the incoming passengers. He recalled every circumstance of his acquaintance with Peace, from the moment she caught his notice when Mrs. Denton made her outcry about the pocket-book. He saw how once it had seemed to deepen to love, and then had ceased to do so, but he did not see how. There had been everything in it to make them more to each other, but after a certain time they had grown less. It was not so strange to him that he had changed; he had often changed; but we suppose a constancy in others as to all passions which we cannot exact of ourselves. He tried to think what he had done to alienate the love which she confessed she once had for him, and he could not remember anything unless it was his cruelty to her when he found that she was the friend who would not look at his story a second time. She said she had forgiven him that; but perhaps she had not; perhaps she had divined a potential brutality in him, which made her afraid to trust him. But after that their lives had been united in the most intimate anxieties, and she had shown absolute trust in him. He reviewed his conduct toward her throughout, and he could find no blame in it except for that one thing. He could truly feel that he had been her faithful friend, and the friend of her whole uncomfortable family, in spite of all his prejudices and principles against people of that kind. In the recognition of this fact he enjoyed a moment’s sense of injury, which was heightened when he reflected that he had even been willing to sacrifice his pride, after his brilliant literary success, so far as to offer himself to a girl who worked for her living; it had always galled him that she held a place little better than a type-writer’s. No, he had nothing to accuse himself of, after a scrutiny of his behavior repeated in every detail, and applied in complex, again and again, with helpless iteration. Still he had a remote feeling of self-reproach, which he tried to verify, but which forever eluded him. It was mixed up with that sense of escape, which made him ashamed.

  He lay awake in the sleeping-car the greater part of the night, and turned from side to side, seeking for the reason of a thing that can never have any reason, and trying to find some parity between his expectations and experiences of himself in such an affair. It went through his mind that it would be a good thing to write a story with some such situation in it; only the reader would not stand it. People expected love to begin mysteriously, but they did not like it to end so; though life itself began mysteriously and ended so. He believed that he should really try it; a story that opened with an engagement ought to be as interesting as one that closed with an engagement; and it would be very original. He must study his own affair very closely when he got a little further away from it. There was no doubt but that when the chances that favored love were so many and so recognizable, the chance that undid it could at last be recognized. It was merely a chance, and that ought to be shown.

  He began to wonder if life had not all been a chance with him. Nothing, not even the success of his book, in the light he now looked at it in, was the result of reasoned cause. That success had happened; it had not followed; and he didn’t deserve any praise for what had merely happened. If this apparent fatality were confined to the economic world alone, he would have been willing to censure civilization, and take his chance dumbly, blindly, with the rest. He had not found it so. On the contrary, he had found the same caprice, the same rule of mere casualty, in the world which we suppose to be ordered by law — the world of thinking, the world of feeling. Who knew why or how this or that thought came, this or that feeling? Then, in that world where we lived in the spirit, was wrong always punished, was right always rewarded?

  We must own that we often saw the good unhappy, and the wicked enjoying themselves. This was not just; yet somehow we felt, we knew, that justice ruled the universe. Nothing, then, that seemed chance was really chance. It was the operation of a law so large that we caught a glimpse of its vast orbit once or twice in a lifetime. It was Providence.

  The car rushed on through the night with its succession of smooth impulses. The thought of the old friends he should soon meet began to dispossess the cares and questions that had ridden him; the notion of certain girls at Midland haunted him sweetly, warmly. He told that one who first read his story all about Peace Hughes, and she said they had never really been in love, for love was eternal. After a while he drowsed, and then he heard her saying that he had got that notion of the larger law from old Kane. Then it was not he, and not she. It was nothing.

  THE COAST OF BOHEMIA

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  XXV.

  XXVI.

  XXVII.

  XXVIII.

  XXIX.

  XXX.

  XXXI.

  XXXII.

  XXXIII.

  XXXIV.


  XXXV.

  XXXVI.

  XXXVII.

  XXXVIII.

  XXXIX.

  INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.

  In one of the old-fashioned books for children there was a story of the adventures of a cent (or perhaps that coin of older lineage, a penny) told by itself, which came into my mind when the publishers suggested that the readers of a new edition of this book might like to know how it happened to be written. I promptly fancied the book speaking, and taking upon itself the burden of autobiography, which we none of us find very heavy; and no sooner had I done so than I began actually to hear from it in a narrative of much greater distinctness than I could have supplied for it.

  “You must surely remember,” it protested to my forgetfulness, “that you first thought of me in anything like definite shape as you stood looking on at the trotting-races of a county fair in Northern Ohio, and that I began to gather color and character while you loitered through the art-building, and dwelt with pitying interest upon the forlorn, unpromising exhibits there.

  “But previous to this, my motive existed somewhere in that nebulous fore-life where both men and books have their impalpable beginning; for even you cannot have forgotten that when a certain passionately enterprising young editor asked you for a novel to be printed in his journal, you so far imagined me as to say that I would be about a girl. When you looked over those hapless works of art at the Pymantoning County Fair, you thought, ‘What a good thing it would be to have a nice village girl, with a real but limited gift, go from here to study art in New York! And get in love there! And married!’ Cornelia and her mother at once stepped out of the inchoate; Ludlow advanced from another quarter of Chaos, and I began really to be.