“Where do you want the things?” the young fellow asked of the company at large, as he advanced upon them from the green portals of the roadway, pulling off his soft wool hat, and wiping his wet forehead with his blue-bordered white handkerchief.
“Oh, right here, Jeff!” The nimblest of the nymphs sprang to her feet from the lounging and crouching circle about Westover. She was a young nymph no longer, but with a daughter not so much younger than herself as to make the contrast of her sixteen years painful. Westover recognized the officious, self-approving kind of the woman, but he admired the brisk efficiency with which she had taken possession of the affair from the beginning and inspired every one to help, in strict subordination to herself.
When the cloths were laid on the smooth, elastic moss, and the meal was spread, she heaped a plate without suffering any interval in her activities.
“I suppose you’ve got to go back to your horses, Jeff, and you shall be the first served,” she said, and she offered him the plate with a bright smile and friendly grace, which were meant to keep him from the hurt of her intention.
Jeff did not offer to take the plate which she raised to him from where she was kneeling, but looked down at her with perfect intelligence. “I guess I don’t want anything,” he said, and turned and walked away into the woods.
The ill-advised woman remained kneeling for a moment with her ingratiating smile hardening on her face, while the sense of her blunder petrified the rest. She was the first to recover herself, and she said, with a laugh that she tried to make reckless, “Well, friends, I suppose the rest of you are hungry; I know I am,” and she began to eat.
The others ate, too, though their appetites might well have been affected by the diplomatic behavior of Whitwell. He would not take anything, just at present, he said, and got his long length up from the root of a tree where he had folded it down. “I don’t seem to care much for anything in the middle of the day; breakfast’s my best meal,” and he followed Jeff off into the woods.
“Really,” said the lady, “what did they expect?” But the question was so difficult that no one seemed able to make the simple answer.
The incident darkened the day and spoiled its pleasure; it cast a lessening shadow into the evening when the guests met round the fire in the large, ugly new parlor at the hotel.
The next morning the ladies assembled again on the piazza to decide what should be done with the beautiful day before them. Whitwell stood at the foot of the flag-staff with one hand staying his person against it, like a figure posed in a photograph to verify proportions in the different features of a prospect.
The heroine of the unhappy affair of the picnic could not forbear authorizing herself to invoke his opinion at a certain point of the debate, and “Mr. Whitwell,” she called to him, “won’t you please come here a moment?”
Whitwell slowly pulled himself across the grass to the group, and at the same moment, as if she had been waiting for him to be present, Mrs. Durgin came out of the office door and advanced toward the ladies.
“Mrs. Marven,” she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used to note in her when they came over to Lion’s Head Farm in the tally-hos, “the stage leaves here at two o’clock to get the down train at three. I want you should have your trunks ready to go on the wagon a little before two.”
“You want I should have my — What do you mean, Mrs. Durgin?”
“I want your rooms.”
“You want my rooms?”
Mrs. Durgin did not answer. She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter: “Why, you can’t have my rooms! I don’t understand you. I’ve taken my rooms for the whole of August, and they are mine; and—”
“I have got to have your rooms,” said Mrs. Durgin.
“Very well, then, I won’t give them up,” said the lady. “A bargain’s a bargain, and I have your agreement—”
“If you’re not out of your rooms by two o’clock, your things will be put out; and after dinner to-day you will not eat another bite under my roof.”
Mrs. Durgin went in, and it remained for the company to make what they could of the affair. Mrs. Marven did not wait for the result. She was not a dignified person, but she rose with hauteur and whipped away to her rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations. She knew at least how to give her going the effect of quitting the place with disdain and abhorrence.
The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be so. It made Westover a little sick, and he would have liked to pity Mrs. Marven more than he could. The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin’s behavior was an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to their own rooms and packing their things and leaving on the same stage with Mrs. Marven. None of them did so, and their talk veered around to something extenuating, if not justifying, Mrs. Durgin’s action.
“I suppose,” one of them said, “that she felt more indignant about it because she has been so very good to Mrs. Marven, and her daughter, too. They were both sick on her hands here for a week after they came, first one and then the other, and she looked after them and did for them like a mother.”
“And yet,” another lady suggested, “what could Mrs. Marven have done? What did she do? He wasn’t asked to the picnic, and I don’t see why he should have been treated as a guest. He was there, purely and simply, to bring the things and take them away. And, besides, if there is anything in distinctions, in differences, if we are to choose who is to associate with us — or our daughters—”
“That is true,” the ladies said, in one form or another, with the tone of conviction; but they were not so deeply convinced that they did not want a man’s opinion, and they all looked at Westover.
He would not respond to their look, and the lady who had argued for Mrs. Marven had to ask: “What do you think, Mr. Westover?”
“Ah, it’s a difficult question,” he said. “I suppose that as long as one person believes himself or herself socially better than another, it must always be a fresh problem what to do in every given case.”
The ladies said they supposed so, and they were forced to make what they could of wisdom in which they might certainly have felt a want of finality.
Westover went away from them in a perplexed mind which was not simplified by the contempt he had at the bottom of all for something unmanly in Jeff, who had carried his grievance to his mother like a slighted boy, and provoked her to take up arms for him.
The sympathy for Mrs. Marven mounted again when it was seen that she did not come to dinner, or permit her daughter to do so, and when it became known later that she had refused for both the dishes sent to their rooms. Her farewells to the other ladies, when they gathered to see her off on the stage, were airy rather than cheery; there was almost a demonstration in her behalf, but Westover was oppressed by a kind of inherent squalor in the incident.
At night he responded to a knock which he supposed that of Frank Whitwell with ice-water, and Mrs. Durgin came into his room and sat down in one of his two chairs. “Mr. Westover,” she said, “if you knew all I had done for that woman and her daughter, and how much she had pretended to think of us all, I don’t believe you’d be so ready to judge me.”
“Judge you!” cried Westover. “Bless my soul, Mrs. Durgin! I haven’t said a word that could be tormented into the slightest censure.”
“But you think I done wrong?”
“I have not been at all able to satisfy myself on that point, Mrs. Durgin. I think it’s always wrong to revenge one’s self.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Mrs. Durgin, humbly; and the tears came into her eyes. “I got the tray ready with my own hands that was sent to her room; but she wouldn’t touch it. I presume she didn’t like having a plate prepared for her! But I did feel sorry for her. She a’n’t over and above strong, and I’m afraid she’ll be sick; there a’n’t any rest’rant at our depot.”
Westover fancied this a fit mood in Mrs. Durgin for her further instruct
ion, and he said: “And if you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Durgin, I don’t think what you did was quite the way to keep a hotel.”
More tears flashed into Mrs. Durgin’s eyes, but they were tears of wrath now. “I would ‘a’ done it,” she said, “if I thought every single one of ’em would ‘a’ left the house the next minute, for there a’n’t one that has the first word to say against me, any other way. It wa’n’t that I cared whether she thought my son was good enough to eat with her or not; I know what I think, and that’s enough for me. He wa’n’t invited to the picnic, and he a’n’t one to put himself forward. If she didn’t want him to stay, all she had to do was to do nothin’. But to make him up a plate before everybody, and hand it to him to eat with the horses, like a tramp or a dog—” Mrs. Durgin filled to the throat with her wrath, and the sight of her made Westover keenly unhappy.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “it was a miserable business.” He could not help adding: “If Jeff could have kept it to himself — but perhaps that wasn’t possible.”
“Mr. Westover!” said Mrs. Durgin, sternly. “Do you think Jeff would come to me, like a great crybaby, and complain of my lady boarders and the way they used him? It was Mr. Whit’ell that let it out, or I don’t know as I should ever known about it.”
“I’m glad Jeff didn’t tell you,” said Westover, with a revulsion of good feeling toward him.
“He’d ‘a’ died first,” said his mother. “But Mr. Whit’ell done just right all through, and I sha’n’t soon forget it. Jeff’s give me a proper goin’ over for what I done; both the boys have. But I couldn’t help it, and I should do just so again. All is, I wanted you should know just what you was blamin’ me for—”
“I don’t know that I blame you. I only wish you could have helped it — managed some other way.”
“I did try to get over it, and all I done was to lose a night’s rest. Then, this morning, when I see her settin’ there so cool and mighty with the boarders, and takin’ the lead as usual, I just waited till she got Whit’ell across, and nearly everybody was there that saw what she done to Jeff, and then I flew out on her.”
Westover could not suppress a laugh. “Well, Mrs. Durgin, your retaliation was complete; it was dramatic.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Mrs. Durgin, rising and resuming her self-control; she did not refuse herself a grim smile. “But I guess she thought it was pretty perfect herself — or she will, when she’s able to give her mind to it. I’m sorry for her daughter; I never had anything against her; or her mother, either, for that matter, before. Franky look after you pretty well? I’ll send him up with your ice-water. Got everything else you want?”
“I should have to invent a want if I wished to complain,” said Westover.
“Well, I should like to have you do it. We can’t ever do too much for you. Well, good-night, Mr. Westover.”
“Good’-night, Mrs. Durgin.”
XIII.
Jeff Durgin entered Harvard that fall, with fewer conditions than most students have to work off. This was set down to the credit of Lovewell Academy, where he had prepared for the university; and some observers in such matters were interested to note how thoroughly the old school in a remote town had done its work for him.
None who formed personal relations with him at that time conjectured that he had done much of the work for himself, and even to Westover, when Jeff came to him some weeks after his settlement in Cambridge, he seemed painfully out of his element, and unamiably aware of it. For the time, at least, he had lost the jovial humor, not too kindly always, which largely characterized him, and expressed itself in sallies of irony which were not so unkindly, either. The painter perceived that he was on his guard against his own friendly interest; Jeff made haste to explain that he came because he had told his mother that he would do so. He scarcely invited a return of his visit, and he left Westover wondering at the sort of vague rebellion against his new life which he seemed to be in. The painter went out to see him in Cambridge, not long after, and was rather glad to find him rooming with some other rustic Freshman in a humble street running from the square toward the river; for he thought Jeff must have taken his lodging for its cheapness, out of regard to his mother’s means. But Jeff was not glad to be found there, apparently; he said at once that he expected to get a room in the Yard the next year, and eat at Memorial Hall. He spoke scornfully of his boarding-house as a place where they were all a lot of jays together; and Westover thought him still more at odds with his environment than he had before. But Jeff consented to come in and dine with him at his restaurant, and afterward go to the theatre with him.
When he came, Westover did not quite like his despatch of the half-bottle of California claret served each of them with the Italian table d’hote. He did not like his having already seen the play he proposed; and he found some difficulty in choosing a play which Jeff had not seen. It appeared then that he had been at the theatre two or three times a week for the last month, and that it was almost as great a passion with him as with Westover himself. He had become already a critic of acting, with a rough good sense of it, and a decided opinion. He knew which actors he preferred, and which actresses, better still. It was some consolation for Westover to find that he mostly took an admission ticket when he went to the theatre; but, though he could not blame Jeff for showing his own fondness for it, he wished that he had not his fondness.
So far Jeff seemed to have spent very few of his evenings in Cambridge, and Westover thought it would be well if he had some acquaintance there. He made favor for him with a friendly family, who asked him to dinner. They did it to oblige Westover, against their own judgment and knowledge, for they said it was always the same with Freshmen; a single act of hospitality finished the acquaintance. Jeff came, and he behaved with as great indifference to the kindness meant him as if he were dining out every night; he excused himself very early in the evening on the ground that he had to go into Boston, and he never paid his dinner-call. After that Westover tried to consider his whole duty to him fulfilled, and not to trouble himself further. Now and then, however, Jeff disappointed the expectation Westover had formed of him, by coming to see him, and being apparently glad of the privilege. But he did not make the painter think that he was growing in grace or wisdom, though he apparently felt an increasing confidence in his own knowledge of life.
Westover could only feel a painful interest tinged with amusement in his grotesque misconceptions of the world where he had not yet begun to right himself. Jeff believed lurid things of the society wholly unknown to him; to his gross credulity, Boston houses, which at the worst were the homes of a stiff and cold exclusiveness, were the scenes of riot only less scandalous than the dissipation to which fashionable ladies abandoned themselves at champagne suppers in the Back Bay hotels and on their secret visits to the Chinese opium-joints in Kingston Street.
Westover tried to make him see how impossible his fallacies were; but he could perceive that Jeff thought him either wilfully ignorant or helplessly innocent, and of far less authority than a barber who had the entree of all these swell families as hair-dresser, and who corroborated the witness of a hotel night-clerk (Jeff would not give their names) to the depravity of the upper classes. He had to content himself with saying: “I hope you will be ashamed some day of having believed such rot. But I suppose it’s something you’ve got to go through. You may take my word for it, though? that it isn’t going to do you any good. It’s going to do you harm, and that’s why I hate to have you think it, for your own sake. It can’t hurt any one else.”
What disgusted the painter most was that, with all his belief in the wickedness of the fine world, it was clear that Jeff would have willingly been of it; and he divined that if he had any strong aspirations they were for society and for social acceptance. He had fancied, when the fellow seemed to care so little for the studies of the university, that he might come forward in its sports. Jeff gave more and more the effect of tremendous strength in his peculiar phy
sique, though there was always the disappointment of not finding him tall. He was of the middle height, but he was hewn out and squared upward massively. He felt like stone to any accidental contact, and the painter brought away a bruise from the mere brunt of his shoulders. He learned that Jeff was a frequenter of the gymnasium, where his strength must have been known, but he could not make out that he had any standing among the men who went in for athletics. If Jeff had even this, the sort of standing in college which he failed of would easily have been won, too. But he had been falsely placed at the start, or some quality of his nature neutralized other qualities that would have made him a leader in college, and he remained one of the least forward men in it. Other jays won favor and liking, and ceased to be jays; Jeff continued a jay. He was not chosen into any of the nicer societies; those that he joined when he thought they were swell he could not care for when he found they were not.
Westover came into a knowledge of the facts through his casual and scarcely voluntary confidences, and he pitied him somewhat while he blamed him a great deal more, without being able to help him at all.
It appeared to him that the fellow had gone wrong more through ignorance than perversity, and that it was a stubbornness of spirit rather than a badness of heart that kept him from going right. He sometimes wondered whether it was not more a baffled wish to be justified in his own esteem than anything else that made him overvalue the things he missed. He knew how such an experience as that with Mrs. Marven rankles in the heart of youth, and will not cease to smart till some triumph in kind brines it ease; but between the man of thirty and the boy of twenty there is a gulf fixed, and he could not ask. He did not know that a college man often goes wrong in his first year, out of no impulse that he can very clearly account for himself, and then when he ceases to be merely of his type and becomes more of his character, he pulls up and goes right. He did not know how much Jeff had been with a set that was fast without being fine. The boy had now and then a book in his hand when he came; not always such a book as Westover could have wished, but still a book; and to his occasional questions about how he was getting on with his college work, Jeff made brief answers, which gave the notion that he was not neglecting it.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 590
