Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The gentlemen at Mrs. Montgomery’s were fewer than the ladies, and they were for several reasons in greater favor. For one thing they gave less trouble: they had a less lively fear of mice, and they were not so apt to be out of health and to want their meals sent up; they ate more, but they did not waste so much, and they never did any sort of washing in their rooms. Cornelia did not know who or what some of them were; but she made sure of a theatrical manager; two or three gentlemen in different branches of commerce; a newspaper writer of some sort, and an oldish gentleman who had been with Mrs. Montgomery a great while, and did not seem to be anything but a gentleman boarder, pure and simple. They were all very civil and quiet, and they bore with the amiable American fortitude the hardships of the common lot at Mrs. Montgomery’s, which Cornelia underwent ignorantly as necessary incidents of life in New York.

  She now fell asleep where she lay, and she was startled from her nap, but hardly surprised, to hear her name spoken in the hall far below, as if it were a theme of contention between the bass-voiced Irish girl and some one at the street door, who supported the other side of the question in low, indistinct, lady-like murmurs.

  “No, she don’t be in,” said the Irish girl bluntly. The polite murmur insisted, and the Irish girl said, with finality, “Well, then, yous can go up yourselves and see; the room is right over the dure, four flights up.”

  Cornelia jumped up and tried to pull her hair into a knot before the glass. There came a tap at her door and the voice of Charmian Maybough asked, “May I come in, Miss Saunders, — Cornelia?”

  “Yes,” said Cornelia, and she opened the door as far as her trunk would let her.

  Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.

  “Oh,” she said, whirling about, so as to sweep the whole room with her glance, before sinking down on Cornelia’s trunk, “why can’t I have something like this? Well, I shall have, I hope, before I die, yet. What made her say you weren’t in? I knew you were.” She rose and flew about the room, and examined it in detail. She was very beautifully dressed, in a street costume of immediate fashion, without a suggestion of the æstheticism of the picturesque gown she wore at the Synthesis; that had originality, but Cornelia perceived with the eye trained to see such differences, that this had authority. Charmian could not help holding and carrying herself differently in it, too. She was exquisitely gloved, and Cornelia instinctively felt that her hat was from Paris, though till then she had never seen a Paris hat to know it. She might have been a little overawed by it, if the wearer had not abruptly asked her what she thought of it.

  “Well,” said Cornelia, with her country directness, which was so different from the other’s abruptness, “I think it’s about the most perfect thing I ever saw.”

  Charmian sighed. “I saw you looking at it. Yes, it is a dream. But it’s a badge of slavery. So’s the whole costume. Look how I’m laced!” She flung open the jacket and revealed a waist certainly much smaller than she had earlier in the day. “That’s the way it goes through my whole life. Mamma is dead set against the artistic, and I’m dead set against the fashionable. As long as I’m at the Synthesis, I do as the Synthetics do. I dress like the Synthesis, and I think like it, and I act like it. As soon as I get home in the afternoon, I have to be of the world worldly. I put on a Worth frock, and mamma would make me put on a Worth spirit, if she could. I do my best to conform, because it’s the bargain, and I’ll keep my word if it kills me. Now you see what a double life I lead! If I could only be steeped in hopeless poverty to the lips! If I could have a room like this, even! Sometimes I’m so bewildered by the twofold existence I’m leading, I don’t really know what I’m saying. Those your things, of course?” She sprang from Cornelia’s trunk, which she had sank down upon again, and swiftly traversed the sketches Cornelia had pinned about the wall. “What touch! Yes, you merely have to live on, to be anything you like. It’ll do itself for you. Well, I suppose you’ll have to see her.” She turned about to Cornelia with an air of deprecation. “Mamma, you know. She’s down stairs waiting for us. She thinks it right to come with me always. I dare say it is. She isn’t so very bad, you know. Only she insists upon knowing all the girls I take a fancy to, herself. You needn’t be afraid of her.”

  “I don’t know why I should be afraid of anybody,” said Cornelia.

  The darker corner of the long parlor was occupied by a young couple in the earnest inquiry into each other’s psychological peculiarities which marks a stage of the passion of love. It obliged them to get very close together, where they sat, she on a lounge and he in the chair, which he kept pulling nearer and nearer; they fulfilled these conditions and exchanged their observations with a freedom that ignored the presence of the lady sitting somewhat severely upright between the two long, front windows, exactly midway of the dingy lace curtains, trained fan-wise on the carpet. They were not disturbed when Cornelia and Charmian appeared; the young lady continued to dangle the tassel of a cushion through her fingers, and the young man leaned toward her with his face in his hand, and his elbow sunk in the arm of the lounge; but the other lady rose at once and came quickly forward, as if escaping from them. Beside the tall girls she looked rather little, and she was decidedly blonde against their brunette color. She wore a veil that came just between her upper and her lower lip, and that stirred lightly when she spoke. She was dressed with the same authoritative fashion as Charmian, but not so simply.

  She did not wait for her daughter to speak, but took Cornelia’s hand, and said in a soft voice, “Miss Saunders? I am very glad we found you at home. My daughter has been speaking to me about you, and we hoped to have come sooner, but we couldn’t manage together before.”

  “Won’t you sit down?” asked Cornelia.

  “No, I thank you,” Mrs. Maybough returned, with a velvety tenderness of tone that seemed to convey assent. “We shall be rather late, as it is. I hope you’re comfortably situated here.”

  “Oh, very,” said Cornelia. “I’ve never been away from home before, and of course it isn’t like home.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Maybough, “one misses the refinements of home in such places.” She turned and swept the appointments of the room, including the students of psychology, with a critical eye.

  “I wish I could come here,” sighed the daughter. “If I could have a room like Cornelia’s, mamma! I wish you could see it.”

  “I’m glad you’re pleasantly placed, Miss Saunders. I hope you’re not working too hard at the Synthesis. I understand the young ladies there are so enthusiastic.”

  “Oh, no,” Cornelia protested.

  “Of course she is!” said Charmian. “Everybody works too hard at the Synthesis. It’s the ideal of the place. We woke her out of a nap, and I know she was tired to death.”

  Cornelia could not deny it, and so she said nothing.

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Maybough, non-committally; “that won’t do.” She paused, without intermitting the scrutiny which Cornelia felt she had been subjecting her to from the first moment through her veil. “You mustn’t wear yourself out.” She paused again, and then while Charmian turned away with an effect of impatience, she asked, “Do you ever go out on Sundays?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” Cornelia began, not certain whether Mrs. Maybough meant walking out or driving out; young people did both in Pymantoning.

  Mrs. Maybough pursued: “We receive on Thursdays, but we have a few friends coming in to-morrow afternoon, and we should be very glad to see you, if you have nothing better.”

  The invitation was so tentatively, so gingerly offered in manner, if not in words, that Cornelia was not quite sure it had been given. She involuntarily searched her memory for something better before she spoke; for the first time in her life she was about to invent a previous engagement, when Charmian suddenly turned and laid her arms about her neck.

  “You’ll come, of course!”

  “Charmian!” said Mrs. Maybough. It
would have been hard to tell whether she was reproving the action or the urgence. “Then we shall hope to see you?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Cornelia.

  “Do come!” said Charmian, as if she had not yet accepted. “I can’t let it be a whole day and two nights before I see you again!” She put her arm round Cornelia’s waist, as the girl went with them to the outer door, to open it for them, in her village fashion. In the hall, Charmian whispered passionately, “Don’t you envy them? Oh, if I could live in such a house with you, and with people like that just to look at!”

  “My dear!” said Mrs. Maybough.

  “They seem to be engaged,” said Cornelia placidly, without sense of anything wrong in the appearance of the fact.

  “Evidently,” said Mrs. Maybough.

  “I shouldn’t care for the engagement,” said Charmian. “That would be rather horrid. But if you were in love, to feel that you needn’t hide it or pretend not to be! That is life! I’m coming here, mamma!”

  XVII.

  Mrs. Maybough had an apartment in the Mandan Flats, and her windows looked out over miles of the tinted foliage of the Park, and down across the avenue into one of the pretty pools which light up its woodland reaches. The position was superb, and the Mandan was in some sort worthy of it. The architect had done his best to give unity and character to its tremendous mass, and he had failed in much less measure than the architects of such buildings usually do. Cornelia dismounted into the dirty street in front of it from a shabby horse-car, and penetrated its dimmed splendors of mosaic pavement and polished granite pillars and frescoed vaults, with a heart fluttered by a hall-boy all over buttons, and a janitor in blue and silver livery, and an elevator-man in like keeping with American ideals. She was disgusted with herself that she should be so scared, and she was ashamed of the relief she felt when a servant in plain clothes opened Mrs. Maybough’s door to her; she knew he must be a servant because he had on a dress-coat and a white tie, and she had heard the Burtons joke about how they were always taking the waiters for clergymen at first in Europe, He answered her with subdued respectfulness when she asked for the ladies, and then he went forward and for the first time in her life she heard her name called into a drawing-room, as she had read it was done in England, but never could imagine it. The man held aside the portière for her to pass, but before she could pass there came a kind of joyous whoop from within, a swishing of skirts toward her, and she was caught in the arms of Charmian, who kissed her again and again, and cried out over her goodness in coming.

  “Why, didn’t you expect me?” Cornelia asked bluntly.

  “Yes, but I was just pretending you wouldn’t come, or something had happened to keep you, so that I could have the good of the revulsion when you did come, and feel that it was worth all I had suffered. Don’t you like to do that?”

  “I don’t believe I ever did it,” said Cornelia.

  “That’s what makes you so glorious,” Charmian exulted. “You don’t need to do such things. You’re equal to life as it comes. But I have to prepare myself for it every way I can. Don’t you see?”

  She led her, all embraced, into the drawing-room, where she released her to the smooth welcome of Mrs. Maybough. There was no one else in the vast, high room which was lit with long windows and darkened again with long, thick curtains, but was still light enough to let Cornelia see the elaborate richness of Mrs. Maybough’s dress and the simple richness of Charmian’s. She herself wore her street-dress and she did not know whether she ought to keep her hat on or not; but Charmian said she must pour tea with her, and she danced Cornelia down the splendid length of the three great salons opening into each other along the front of the apartment, toward her own room where she said she must leave it. The drawing-room was a harmony of pictures so rich and soft, and rugs so rich and soft, that the colors seemed to play from wall to floor and back again in the same mellow note; the dimness of the dining-room was starred with the glimmer of silver and cut-glass and the fainter reflected light of polished mahogany; the library was a luxury of low leather chairs and lounges, lurking window-seats, curtained in warm colors, and shelves full of even ranks of books in French bindings of blue and green leather. There was a great carved library table in front of the hearth where a soft-coal fire flickered with a point or two of flame; on the mantel a French clock of classic architecture caught the eye with the gleam of its pendulum as it vibrated inaudibly. It was all extremely well done, infinitely better done than Cornelia could have known. It was tasteful and refined, with the taste and refinement of the decorator who had wished to produce the effect of long establishment and well-bred permanency; the Mandan Flats were really not two years old, and Mrs. Maybough had taken her apartment in the spring and had been in it only a few weeks.

  “Now all this is mamma,” Charmian said, suffering Cornelia to pause for a backward glance at the rooms as she pushed open a door at the side of the library. “I simply endure it because it’s in the bargain. But it’s no more me than my gown is. This is where I stay, when I’m with mamma, but I’m going to show you where I live, where I dream.” She glided down the electric-lighted corridor where they found themselves, and apologized over her shoulder to Cornelia behind her: “Of course, you can’t have an attic in a flat; and anything like rain on the roof is practically impossible; but I’ve come as near to it as I could. Be careful! Here are the stairs.” She mounted eight or ten steps that crooked upward, and flung wide a door at the top of the landing. It gave into a large room fronting northward and lighted with one wide window; the ceiling sloped and narrowed down to this from the quadrangular vault, and the cool gray walls rose not much above Cornelia’s head where they met the roof. They were all stuck about with sketches in oil and charcoal. An easel with a canvas on it stood convenient to the light; a flesh-tinted lay-figure in tumbled drapery drooped limply in a corner; a table littered with palettes and brushes and battered tubes of color was carelessly pushed against the window; there were some lustrous rugs hung up beside the door; the floor was bare except for a great tiger-skin, with the head on, that sprawled in front of the fire-place. This was very simple, with rough iron fire-dogs; the low mantel was scattered with cigarettes, cigars in Chinese bronze vases at either end, and midway a medley of pipes, long-stemmed in clay and stubbed in briar-wood.

  “Good gracious!” said Cornelia. “Do you smoke?”

  “Not yet,” Charmian answered gravely, “but I’m going to learn: Bernhardt does. These are just some pipes that I got the men at the Synthesis to give me; pipes are so full of character. And isn’t this something like?” She invited Cornelia to a study of the place by turning about and looking at it herself. “It seemed as if it never would come together, at one time. Everything was in it, just as it should be; and then I found it was the ridiculous ceiling that was the trouble. It came to me like a flash, what to do, and I got this canvas painted the color of the walls, and sloped so as to cut off half the height of the room; and now it’s a perfect symphony. You wouldn’t have thought it wasn’t a real ceiling?”

  “No, I shouldn’t,” said Cornelia, as much surprised as Charmian could have wished.

  “You can imagine what a relief it is to steal away here from all that unreality of mamma’s, down there, and give yourself up to the truth of art; I just draw a long breath when I get in here, and leave the world behind me. Why, when I get off here alone, for a minute, I unlace!”

  Cornelia went about looking at the sketches on the walls; they were all that mixture of bad drawing and fantastic thinking which she was used to in the things Charmian scribbled over her paper at the Synthesis. She glanced toward the easel, but Charmian said, “Don’t look at it! There’s nothing there; I haven’t decided what I shall do yet. I did think I should paint this tiger skin, but I don’t feel easy painting the skin of a tiger I haven’t killed myself. If I could get mamma to take me out to India and let me shoot one! But don’t you think the whole place is perfect? I’ve tried to make it just what a studio ought t
o be, and yet keep it free from pose, don’t you know?”

  “Yes,” said Cornelia. “I’ve never seen a studio, before.”

  “You poor thing, you don’t mean it!” cried Charmian in deep pity. Cornelia said nothing, and Charmian went on with an air of candor, “Well, I haven’t seen a great many myself — only two or three — but I know how they are, and it’s easy enough to realize one. What I want is to have the atmosphere of art about me, all the time. I’m like a fish out of water when I’m out of the atmosphere of art. I intend to spend my whole time here when I’m not at the Synthesis.”

  “I should think it would be a good place to work,” Cornelia conceded.

  “Yes, and I am going to work here,” said Charmian. “The great trouble with me is that I have so many things in my mind I don’t know which to begin on first. That’s why the Synthesis is so good for me; it concentrates me, if it is on a block hand. You’re concentrated by nature, and so you can’t feel what a glorious pang it is to be fixed to one spot like a butterfly with a pin through you. I don’t see how I ever lived without the Synthesis. I’m going to have a wolf-hound — as soon as I can get a good-tempered one that the man can lead out in the Park for exercise — to curl up here in front of the fire; and I’m going to have foils and masks over the chimney. As soon as I’m a member of the Synthesis I’m going to get them to let me be one of the monitors: that’ll concentrate me, if anything will, keeping the rest in order, and I can get a lot of ideas from posing the model; don’t you think so? But you’ve got all the ideas you want, already. Aren’t you going to join the sketch class?”