Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I don’t mind saving Mr. Durgin’s,” said the girl, “if he wants it saved.”

  “Oh, I know he’s just dying to have you save it,” said the host, and he left them, to inspire other people to follow their example. But such as glanced across the passage into the overflow room seemed to think it now the possession solely of the pioneers of the movement. At any rate, they made no show of joining them; and after Miss Lynde and Jeff had looked at the pictures on the walls and the photographs on the mantel of the room where they found themselves, they sat down on chairs fronting the open door and the door of the room they had left. The window-seat would have been more to Jeff’s mind, and he had proposed it, but the girl seemed not to have heard him; she took the deep easy-chair in full view of the company opposite, and left him to pull up a chair beside her.

  “I always like to see the pictures in a man’s room,” she said, with a little sigh of relief from their inspection and a partial yielding of her figure to the luxury of the chair. “Then I know what the man is. This man — I don’t know whose room it is — seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the theatre.”

  “Isn’t that where most of them spend their time?” asked Jeff.

  “I’m sure I don’t know. Is that where you spend yours?”

  “It used to be. I’m not spending my time anywhere just now.” She looked questioningly, and he added, “I haven’t got any to spend.”

  “Oh, indeed! Is that a reason? Why don’t you spend somebody else’s?”

  “Nobody has any, that I know.”

  “You’re all working off conditions, you mean?”

  “That’s what I’m doing, or trying to.”

  “Then it’s never certain whether you can do it, after all?”

  “Not so certain as to be free from excitement,” said Jeff, smiling.

  “And are you consumed with the melancholy that seems to be balling up all the men at the prospect of having to leave Harvard and go out into the hard, cold world?”

  “I don’t look it, do I? Jeff asked:

  “No, you don’t. And you don’t feel it? You’re not trying concealment, and so forth?”

  “No; if I’d had my own way, I’d have left Harvard before this.” He could see that his bold assumption of difference, or indifference, told upon her. “I couldn’t get out into the hard, cold world too soon.”

  “How fearless! Most of them don’t know what they’re going to do in it.”

  “I do.”

  “And what are you going to do? Or perhaps you think that’s asking!”

  “Oh no. I’m going to keep a hotel.”

  He had hoped to startle her, but she asked, rather quietly, “What do you mean?” and she added, as if to punish him for trying to mystify her: “I’ve heard that it requires gifts for that. Isn’t there some proverb?”

  “Yes. But I’m going to try to do it on experience.” He laughed, and he did not mind her trying to hit him, for he saw that he had made her curious.

  “Do you mean that you have kept a hotel?”

  “For three generations,” he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from his bold eyes.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said, indifferently. “Where is your hotel? In Boston — New York — Chicago?”

  “It’s in the country — it’s a summer hotel,” he said, as before.

  She looked away from him toward the other room. “There’s my brother. I didn’t know he was coming.”

  “Shall I go and tell him where you are?” Jeff asked, following the direction of her eyes.

  “No, no; he can find me,” said the girl, sinking back in her chair again. He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: “If it’s something ancestral, of course—”

  “I don’t know as it’s that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a country tavern, and so it’s in the blood, but the hotel I mean is something that we’ve worked up into from a farm boarding-house.”

  “You don’t talk like a country person,” the girl broke in, abruptly.

  “Not in Cambridge. I do in the country.”

  “And so,” she prompted, “you’re going to turn it into a hotel when you’ve got out of Harvard.”

  “It’s a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I’m going to make the right kind of hotel of it when I take hold of it.”

  “And what is the right kind of a hotel?”

  “That’s a long story. It would make you tired.”

  “It might, but we’ve got to spend the time somehow. You could begin, and then if I couldn’t stand it you could stop.”

  “It’s easier to stop first and begin some other time. I guess I’ll let you imagine my hotel, Miss Lynde.”

  “Oh, I understand now,” said the girl. “The table will be the great thing. You will stuff people.”

  “Do you mean that I’m trying to stuff you?”

  “How do I know? You never can tell what men really mean.”

  Jeff laughed with mounting pleasure in her audacity, that imparted a sense of tolerance for him such as he had experienced very seldom from the Boston girls he had met; after all, he had met but few. It flattered him to have her doubt what he had told her in his reckless indifference; it implied that he was fit for better things than hotel-keeping.

  “You never can tell how much a woman believes,” he retorted.

  “And you keep trying to find out?”

  “No, but I think that they might believe the truth.”

  “You’d better try them with it!”

  “Well, I will. Do you really want to know what I’m going to do when I get through?”

  “Let me see!” Miss Lynde leaned forward, with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and softly kicked the edge of her skirt with the toe of her shoe, as if in deep thought. Jeff waited for her to play her comedy through. “Yes,” she said, “I think I did wish to know — at one time.”

  “But you don’t now?”

  “Now? How can I tell? It was a great while ago!”

  “I see you don’t.”

  Miss Lynde did not make any reply. She asked, “Do you know my aunt, Durgin?”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “Yes, everybody has an aunt — even when they haven’t a mother, if you can believe the Gilbert operas. I ask because I happen to live with my aunt, and if you knew her she might — ask you to call.” Miss Lynde scanned Jeff’s face for the effect of this.

  He said, gravely: “If you’ll introduce me to her, I’ll ask her to let me.”

  “Would you, really?” said the girl. “I’ve half a mind to try. I wonder if you’d really have the courage.”

  “I don’t think I’m easily rattled.”

  “You mean that I’m trying to rattle you.”

  “No—”

  “I’m not. My aunt is just what I’ve said.”

  “You haven’t said what she was. Is she here?”

  “No; that’s the worst of it. If she were, I should introduce you, just to see if you’d dare. Well, some other time I will.”

  “You think there’ll be some other time?” Jeff asked.

  “I don’t know. There are all kinds of times. By-the-way, what time is it?”

  Jeff looked at his watch. “Quarter after six.”

  “Then I must go.” She jumped to her feet, and faced about for a glimpse of herself in the little glass on the mantel, and put her hand on the large pink roses massed at her waist. One heavy bud dropped from its stem to the floor, where, while she stood, the edge of her skirt pulled and pushed it. She moved a little aside to peer over at a photograph. Jeff stooped and picked up the flower, which he offered her.

  “You dropped it,” he said, bowing over it.

  “Did I?” She looked at it with an effect of surprise and doubt.

  “I thought so, but if you don’t, I shall keep it.”

  The girl removed her careless eyes from it. “When they break off so short, they won’t go back.”
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br />   “If I were a rose, I should want to go back,” said Jeff.

  She stopped in one of her many aversions and reversions, and looked at him steadily across her shoulder. “You won’t have to keep a poet, Mr. Durgin.”

  “Thank you. I always expected to write the circulars myself. I’ll send you one.”

  “Do.”

  “With this rose pressed between the leaves, so you’ll know.”

  “That would, be very pretty. But you must take me to Mrs. Bevidge, now, if you can.”

  “I guess I can,” said Jeff; and in a minute or two they stood before the matronizing hostess, after a passage through the babbling and laughing groups that looked as impossible after they had made it as it looked before.

  Mrs. Bevidge gave the girl’s hand a pressure distinct from the official touch of parting, and contrived to say, for her hearing alone: “Thank you so much, Bessie. You’ve done missionary work.”

  “I shouldn’t call it that.”

  “It will do for you to say so! He wasn’t really so bad, then? Thank you again, dear!”

  Jeff had waited his turn. But now, after the girl had turned away, as if she had forgotten him, his eyes followed her, and he did not know that Mrs. Bevidge was speaking to him. Miss Lynde had slimly lost herself in the mass, till she was only a graceful tilt of hat, before she turned with a distraught air. When her eyes met Jeff’s they lighted up with a look that comes into the face when one remembers what one has been trying to think of. She gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to illumine him from head to foot, and before it was quenched he felt as if she had kissed her hand to him from her rich mouth.

  Then he heard Mrs. Bevidge asking something about a hall, and he was aware of her bending upon him a look of the daring humanity that had carried her triumphantly through her good works at the North End.

  “Oh, I’m not in the Yard,” said Jeff, with belated intelligence.

  “Then will just Cambridge reach you?”

  He gave his number and street, and she thanked him with the benevolence that availed so much with the lower classes. He went away thrilling and tingling, with that girl’s tones in his ear, her motions in his nerves, and the colors of her face filling his sight, which he printed on the air whenever he turned, as one does with a vivid light after looking at it.

  XXIX

  When Jeff reached his room he felt the need of writing to Cynthia, with whatever obscure intention of atonement. He told her of the college tea he had just come from, and made fun of it, and the kind of people he had met, especially the affected girl who had tried to rattle him; he said he guessed she did not think she had rattled him a great deal.

  While he wrote he kept thinking how this Miss Lynde was nearer his early ideal of fashion, of high life, which Westover had pretty well snubbed out of him, than any woman he had seen yet; she seemed a girl who would do what she pleased, and would not be afraid if it did not please other people. He liked her having tried to rattle him, and he smiled to himself in recalling her failure. It was as if she had laid hold of him with her little hands to shake him, and had shaken herself. He laughed out in the dark when this image came into his mind; its intimacy flattered him; and he believed that it was upon some hint from her that Mrs. Bevidge had asked his address. She must be going to ask him to her house, and very soon, for it was part of Jeff’s meagre social experience that this was the way swells did; they might never ask you twice, but they would ask you promptly.

  The thing that Mrs. Bevidge asked Jeff to, when her note reached him the second day after the tea, was a meeting to interest young people in the work at the North End, and Jeff swore under his breath at the disappointment and indignity put upon him. He had reckoned upon an afternoon tea, at least, or even, in the flights of fancy which he now disowned to himself, a dance after the Mid-Years, or possibly an earlier reception of some sort. He burned with shame to think of a theatre-party, which he had fondly specialized, with a seat next Miss Lynde.

  He tore Mrs. Bevidge’s note to pieces, and decided not to answer it at all, as the best way of showing how he had taken her invitation. But Mrs. Bevidge’s benevolence was not wanting in courage; she believed that Jeff should pay his footing in society, such as it was, and should allow himself to be made use of, the first thing; when she had no reply from him, she wrote him again, asking him to an adjourned meeting of the first convocation, which had been so successful in everything but numbers. This time she baited her hook, in hoping that the young men would feel something of the interest the young ladies had already shown in the matter. She expressed the fear that Mr. Durgin had not got her earlier letter, and she sent this second to the care of the man who had given the tea.

  Jeff’s resentment was now so far past that he would have civilly declined to go to the woman’s house; but all his hopes of seeing that girl, as he always called Miss Lynde in his thought, were revived by the mention of the young ladies interested in the cause. He accepted, though all the way into Boston he laid wagers with himself that she would not be there; and up to the moment of taking her hand he refused himself any hope of winning.

  There was not much business before the meeting; that had really been all transacted before; it was mainly to make sure of the young men, who were present in the proportion of one to five young ladies at least. Mrs. Bevidge explained that she had seen the wastefulness of amateur effort among the poor, and announced that hereafter she was going to work with the established charities. These were very much in want of visitors, especially young men, to go about among the applicants for relief, and inquire into their real necessities, and get work for them. She was hers self going to act as secretary for the meetings during the coming month, and apparently she wished to signalize her accession to the regular forces of charity by bringing into camp as large a body of recruits as she could.

  But Jeff had not come to be made use of, or as a jay who was willing to work for his footing in society. He had come in the hope of meeting Miss Lynde, and now that he had met her he had no gratitude to Mrs. Bevidge as a means, and no regret for the defeat of her good purposes so far as she intended their fulfilment in him. He was so cool and self-possessed in excusing himself, for reasons that he took no pains to make seem unselfish, that the altruistic man who had got him asked to the college tea as a friendless jay felt it laid upon him to apologize for Mrs. Bevidge’s want of tact.

  “She means well, and she’s very much in earnest, in this work; but I must say she can make herself very offensive — when she doesn’t try! She has a right to ask our help, but not to parade us as the captives of her bow and spear.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Jeff. He perceived that the amiable fellow was claiming for all an effect that Jeff knew really implicated himself alone. “I couldn’t load up with anything of that sort, if I’m to work off my conditions, you know.”

  “Are you in that boat?” said the altruist, as if he were, too; and he put his hand compassionately on Jeff’s iron shoulder, and left him to Miss Lynde, whose side he had not stirred from since he had found her.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that where there are so many of you in the same boat, you might manage to get ashore somehow.”

  “Yes, or all go down together.” Jeff laughed, and ate Mrs. Bevidge’s bread-and-butter, and drank her tea, with a relish unaffected by his refusal to do what she asked him. He was right, perhaps, and perhaps she deserved nothing better at his hands, but the altruist, when he glanced at him from the other side of the room, thought that he had possibly wasted his excuses upon Jeff’s self-complacence.

  He went away in a halo of young ladies; several of the other girls grouped themselves in their departure; and it happened that Miss Lynde and Jeff took leave together. Mrs. Bevidge said to her, with the caressing tenderness of one in the same set, “Good-bye, dear!” To Jeff she said, with the cold conscience of those whom their nobility obliges, “I am always at home on Thursdays, Mr. Durgin.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Jeff. He unde
rstood what the words and the manner meant together, but both were instantly indifferent to him when he got outside and found that Miss Lynde was not driving. Something, which was neither look, nor smile, nor word, of course, but nothing more at most than a certain pull and tilt of the shoulder, as she turned to walk away from Mrs. Bevidge’s door, told him from her that he might walk home with her if he would not seem to do so.

  It was one of the pink evenings, dry and clear, that come in the Boston December, and they walked down the sidehill street, under the delicate tracery of the elm boughs in the face of the metallic sunset. In the section of the Charles that the perspective of the street blocked out, the wrinkled current showed as if glazed with the hard color. Jeff’s strong frame rejoiced in the cold with a hale pleasure when he looked round into the face of the girl beside him, with the gray film of her veil pressed softly against her red mouth by her swift advance. Their faces were nearly on a level, as they looked into each other’s eyes, and he kept seeing the play of the veil’s edge against her lips as they talked.

  “Why sha’n’t you go to Mrs. Bevidge’s Thursdays?” she asked. “They’re very nice.”

  “How do you know I’m not going?” he retorted.

  “By the way you thanked her.”

  “Do you advise me to go?”

  “I haven’t got anything to do with it. What do mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. Curiosity, I suppose.”

  “Well, I do advise you to go,” said the girl. “Shall you be there next Thursday?”

  “I? I never go to Mrs. Bevidge’s Thursdays!”

  “Touche,” said Jeff, and they both laughed. “Can you always get in at an enemy that way?”

  “Enemy?”

  “Well, friend. It’s the same thing.”

  “I see,” said the girl. “You belong to the pessimistic school of Seniors.”

  “Why don’t you try to make an optimist of me?”

  “Would it be worth while?”

  “That isn’t for me to say.”

  “Don’t be diffident! That’s staler yet.”

  “I’ll be anything you like.”