Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, pshaw! I believe as much in the holy estate of matrimony as anybody, but I don’t believe it’s the begin-all or the end-all for a woman, any more than it is for a man. What, Katy?” she spoke to a girl who appeared and disappeared in the doorway. “Oh! Well, come in to supper, now. I hope you have an appetite, Mr. Ludlow. Mr. Burton’s such a delicate eater, and I like to have somebody keep me in countenance.” She suddenly put her hand on the back of her husband’s chair, and sprung it forward from its incline against the wall, with a violence that bounced him fearfully, and extorted a roar of protest from him.

  They were much older than Ludlow, and they permitted themselves the little rowdy freedoms that good-natured married people sometimes use, as fearlessly in his presence as if he were a grown-up nephew. They prized him as a discovery of their own, for they had stumbled on him one day before any one else had found him out, when he was sketching at Fontainebleau. They liked the look of his picture, as they viewed it at a decent remove over his shoulder, and after they got by Burton proposed to go back and kill the fellow on account of the solemn coxcombery of his personal appearance. His wife said: “Well, ask him what he’ll take for his picture, first,” and Burton returned and said with brutal directness, while he pointed at the canvas with his stick, “Combien?” When Ludlow looked round up at him and answered with a pleasant light in his eye, “Well, I don’t know exactly. What’ll you give?” Burton spared his life, and became his friend. He called his wife to him, and they bought the picture, and afterwards they went to Ludlow’s lodging, for he had no studio, and conscientiously painted in the open air, and bought others. They got the pictures dog cheap, as Burton said, for Ludlow was just beginning then, and his reputation which has never since become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant. They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up, and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range. Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for impressionism; and then he changed his mind all at once, and under an impulse of sudden patriotism, declared for the American sky, and the thin, crystalline, American air. His faith included American subjects, and when, after his arrival in New York, Burton wrote to claim a visit from him and ironically proposed the trotting-match at the County Fair as an attraction for his pencil, Ludlow remembered the trotting-matches he had seen in his boyhood, and came out to Pymantoning with a seriousness of expectation that alarmed and then amused his friends.

  He was very glad that he had come, and that night, after the supper which lasted well into the early autumn lamp-light, he went out and walked the village streets under the September moon, seeing his picture everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them. Within their shadowy porches, or beside their gates, was

  “The delight of happy laughter,

  The delight of low replies,”

  hushing itself at his approach, and breaking out again at his retreat. The air seemed full of love, and in the midst of his proud, gay hopes, he felt smitten with sudden isolation, such as youth knows in the presence of others’ passion. He walked back to Burton’s rather pensively, and got up to his room and went to bed after as little stay for talk with his hosts as he could make decent; he did not like to break with his melancholy.

  He was roused from his first sleep by the sound of singing, which seemed to stop with his waking. There came a confused murmur of girls’ and young men’s voices, and Ludlow could see from his open window the dim shapes of the serenaders in the dark of the trees below. Then they were still, and all at once the silence was filled with a rich contralto note, carrying the song, till the whole choir of voices took up the burden. Nothing prettier could have happened anywhere in the world. Ludlow hung rapt upon the music till Burton flung up his window, as if to thank the singers. They stopped at the sound, and with gay shouts and shrieks, and a medley of wild laughter, skurried away into the farther darkness, where Ludlow heard them begin their serenade again under distant windows as little localized as any space of the sky.

  VI.

  Ludlow went back to New York and took up his work with vigor and with fervor. The picture of the County Fair, which he exhibited at the American Artists’, ran a gauntlet of criticism in which it was belabored at once for its unimaginative vulgarity and its fantastic unreality; then it returned to his studio and remained unsold, while the days, weeks, months and years went by and left each their fine trace on him. His purposes dropped away, mostly unfulfilled, as he grew older and wiser, but his dreams remained and he was still rich in a vast future. His impressionism was somewhat modified; he offered his palette less frequently to the public; he now and then permitted a black object to appear in his pictures; his purples and greens were less aggressive. His moustache had grown so thick that it could no longer be brushed up at the points with just the effect he desired, and he suffered it to branch straight across his cheeks; his little dot of an imperial had become lost in the beard which he wore so conscientiously trimmed to a point that it might be described as religiously pointed. He was now twenty-seven.

  At sixteen Cornelia Saunders had her first love-affair. It was with a young man who sold what he called art-goods by sample — satin banners, gilt rolling-pins, brass disks and keramics; he had permitted himself to speak to her on the train coming over from the Junction, where she took the cars for Pymantoning one afternoon after a day’s shopping with her mother in Lakeland. It did not last very long, and in fact it hardly survived the brief stay which the young man made in Pymantoning, where his want of success in art-goods was probably owing to the fact that he gave his whole time to Cornelia, or rather Cornelia’s mother, whom he found much more conversable; he played upon the banjo for her, and he danced a little clog-dance in her parlor, which was also her shop, to the accompaniment of his own whistling, first setting aside the bonnet-trees with their scanty fruitage of summer hats, and pushing the show-table against the wall. “Won’t hurt ’em a mite,” he reassured her, and he struck her as a careful as well as accomplished young man. His passion for Cornelia lingered a while in letters, which he proposed in parting, and then, about six months later, Mrs. Saunders received the newspaper announcement of his marriage to Miss Tweety Byers of Lakeland. There were “No Cards,” but Mrs. Saunders made out, with Mrs. Burton’s help, that Tweety was the infantile for the pet name of Sweety; and the marriage seemed a fit union for one so warm and true as the young traveller in art-goods.

  Mrs. Saunders was a good deal surprised, but she did not suffer keenly from the disappointment which she had innocently done her best to bring upon her daughter. Cornelia, who had been the passive instrument of her romance, did not suffer from it at all, having always objected to the thickness of the young man’s hands, and to the early baldness which gave him the Shakespearian brow he had so little use for. She laughed his memory to scorn, and employed the episode as best she could in quelling her mother’s simple trust of passing strangers. They worked along together, in the easy, unambitious village fashion, and kept themselves in the average comfort, while the time went by and Cornelia had grown from a long, lean child to a tall and stately young girl, who carried herself with so much native grace and pride that she had very little attention from the village youth. She had not even a girl friendship, and her chief social resource was in her intimacy at the Burtons. She borrowed books of them, and read a good deal; and when she was seventeen she rubbed up her old studies and got a teacher’s certificate for six months, and taught a summer term in a district at Burnt Pastures. She came home in the fall, and when she call
ed at the Burtons’ to get a book, as usual, Mrs. Burton said, “Nelie, you’re not feeling very well, are you? Somehow you looked fagged.”

  “Well, I do feel queer,” said the girl. “I seem to be in a kind of dream. It — scares me. I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

  “Oh, I guess not,” Mrs. Burton answered comfortably. “You’re just tired out. How did you like your school?”

  “I hated it,” said the girl, with a trembling chin and wet eyes. “I don’t believe I’m fit for teaching. I won’t try it any more; I’ll stay at home and help mother.”

  “You ought to keep up your drawing,” said Mrs. Burton in general admonition. “Do you draw any now?”

  “Nothing much,” said the girl.

  “I should think you would, to please your mother. Don’t you care anything for it yourself?”

  “Yes; but I haven’t the courage I had when I thought I knew it all. I don’t think I should ever amount to anything. It would be a waste of time.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Burton. “I believe you could be a great artist.”

  The girl laughed. “What ever became of that painter who visited you year before last at fair time?”

  “Mr. Ludlow? Oh, he’s in New York. He thought your sketches were splendid, Nelie.”

  “He said the girls half-killed themselves there studying art.”

  “Did he?” demanded Mrs. Burton with a note of wrath in her voice.

  “Mm. He told mother so that day.”

  “He had no business to say such a thing before you. Was that what discouraged you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I got discouraged. Of course, I should like to please mother. How much do you suppose it would cost a person to live in New York? I don’t mean take a room and board yourself; I shouldn’t like to do that; but everything included.”

  “I don’t know, indeed, Nelie. Jim always kept the accounts when we were there, and we stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

  “Do you suppose it would be twice as much as it is here? Five dollars a week?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it would,” Mrs. Burton admitted.

  “I’ve got sixty-five dollars from my school. I suppose it would keep me three months in New York, if I was careful. But I’m not going to throw it away on any such wild scheme as that. I know that much.”

  They talked away from the question, and then talked back to it several times, after they had both seemed to abandon it. At last Mrs. Burton said, “Why don’t you let me write to Mr. Ludlow, Nelie, and ask him all about it?”

  The girl jumped to her feet in a fright. “If you do, Mrs. Burton, I’ll kill myself! No, I didn’t mean to say that. But I’ll never speak to you again. Now you won’t really, will you?”

  “No, I won’t, Nelie, if you don’t want me to; but I don’t see why —— Why, bless the child!”

  Mrs. Burton sprang forward and caught the girl, who was reeling as if she were going to fall. “Katy! Katy! Bring some water here, quick!”

  When they had laid Cornelia on a sofa and restored her from her faint, Mrs. Burton would not let her try to rise. She sent out to Burton, who was reading a novel in the mild forenoon air under the crimson maples, and made him get the carryall and take Cornelia home in it. They thought they would pretend that they were out for a drive, and were merely dropping her at her mother’s door; but no ruse was necessary. Mrs. Saunders tranquilly faced the fact; she said she thought the child hadn’t been herself since she got back from her school, and she guessed she had better have the doctor now.

  VII.

  It was toward the end of January before Cornelia was well enough to be about in the old way, after her typhoid fever. Once she was so low that the rumor of her death went out; but when this proved false it was known for a good sign, and no woman, at least, was surprised when she began to get well. She was delirious part of the time, and then she raved constantly about Ludlow, and going to New York to study art. It was a mere superficial effect from her talk with Mrs. Burton just before she was taken down with the fever; but it was pathetic, all the same, to hear her pleading with him, quarrelling, protesting that she was strong enough, and that she was not afraid but that she should get through all right if he would only tell her how to begin. “Now you just tell me that, tell me that, tell me that! It’s the place that I can’t find. If I can get to the right door! But it won’t open! It won’t open! Oh, dear! What shall I do!”

  Mrs. Burton, who heard this go on through the solemn hours of night, thought that if Ludlow could only hear it he would be careful how he ever discouraged any human being again. It was as much as her husband could do to keep her from writing to him, and making the girl’s fever a matter of personal reproach to him; but she refrained, and when Cornelia got up from it she was so changed that Mrs. Burton was glad she had never tried to involve any one else in her anxieties about her.

  Not only the fever had burned itself out, but Cornelia’s temperament seemed for awhile to have been consumed in the fire. She came out of it more like her mother. She was gentler than she used to be, and especially gentle and good to her mother; and she had not only grown to resemble her in a greater tranquillity and easy-goingness, but to have come into her ambitions and desires. The change surprised Mrs. Saunders a good deal; up to this time it had always surprised her that Cornelia should not have been at all like her. She sometimes reflected, however, that if you came to that, Cornelia’s father had never been at all like her, either.

  It was only a passing phase of the girl’s evolution. With the return of perfect health and her former strength, she got back her old energetic self, but of another quality and in another form. Probably she would have grown into the character she now took on in any case; but following her convalescence as it did, it had a more dramatic effect. She began to review her studies and her examination papers before the doctor knew it, and when the county examiners met in June she was ready for them, and got a certificate authorizing her to teach for a year. With this she need not meet the poor occasions of any such forlorn end-of-the-earth as Burnt Pastures. She had an offer of the school at Hartley’s Mills, and she taught three terms there, and brought home a hundred and fifty dollars at the end. All through the last winter she drew, more or less, and she could see better than any one else that she had not fallen behind in her art, but after having let it drop for a time, had taken it up with fresh power and greater skill. She had come to see things better than she used, and she had learned to be faithful to what she saw, which is the great matter in all the arts.

  She had never formulated this fact, even if she knew it; and Mrs. Burton was still further from guessing what it was that made Cornelia’s sketches so much more attractive than they were, when the girl let her look at them, in one of her proud, shy confidences. She said, “I do wish Mr. Ludlow could see these, Nelie.”

  “Do you think he would be very much excited?” asked the girl, with the sarcastic humor which had risen up in her to be one of the reliefs of her earlier intensity.

  “He ought to be,” said Mrs. Burton. “You know he did admire your drawings, Nelie; even those you had at the fair, that time.”

  “Did he?” returned the girl, carelessly. “What did he say?”

  “Well, he said that if you were a boy there couldn’t be any doubt about you.”

  Cornelia laughed. “That was a pretty safe kind of praise. I’m not likely ever to be a boy.” She rose up from where they were sitting together, and went to put her drawings away in her room. When she came back, she said, “It would be fun to show him, some day, that even so low down a creature as a girl could be something.”

  “I wish you would, Nie,” said Mrs. Burton, “I just wish you would. Why don’t you go to New York, this winter, and study! Why don’t you make her, Mrs. Saunders?”

  “Who? Me?” said Mrs. Saunders, who sat by, in an indolent abeyance. “Oh! I ain’t allowed to open my mouth any more.”

  “Well,” said Cornelia, “don’t be so ungrammatical, then,
when you do it without being allowed, mother.”

  Mrs. Saunders laughed in lazy enjoyment. “One thing I know; if I had my way she’d have been in New York studying long ago, instead of fooling away her time out here, school-teaching.”

  “And where would you have been, mother?”

  “Me?” said Mrs. Saunders again, incorrigibly. “Oh, I guess I should have been somewhere!”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Mrs. Burton broke in, “Nie must go, and that’s all about it. I know from what Mr. Ludlow said that he believes she could be an artist. She would have to work hard, but I don’t call teaching school play, exactly.”

  “Indeed it isn’t!” said Mrs. Saunders. “I’d sooner set all day at the machine myself, and dear knows that’s trying enough!”

  “I’m not afraid of the hard work,” said Cornelia.

  “What are you afraid of, then?” demanded her mother. “Afraid of failing?”

  “No; of succeeding,” answered Cornelia, perversely.

  “I can’t make the child out,” said Mrs. Saunders, with apparent pleasure in the mystery.

  Cornelia went on, at least partially, to explain herself. “I mean, succeeding in the way women seem to succeed. They make me sick!”

  “Oh,” said her mother, with sarcasm that could not sustain itself even by a smile letting Mrs. Burton into the joke, “going to be a Rosa Bonnhure?”

  Cornelia scorned this poor attempt of her mother. “If I can’t succeed as men succeed, and be a great painter, and not just a great woman painter, I’d rather be excused altogether. Even Rosa Bonheur: I don’t believe her horses would have been considered so wonderful if a man had done them. I guess that’s what Mr. Ludlow meant, and I guess he was right. I guess if a girl wants to turn out an artist she’d better start by being a boy.”

  “I guess,” said Mrs. Burton, with admiring eyes full of her beauty, “that if Mr. Ludlow could see you now, he’d be very sorry to have you a boy!”