Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Maxwell showed himself ignorant of the observances in every way, and if Louise had not rather loved him the more for what he made her suffer because of them, she must certainly have given him up at times. He had never, to her thinking, known how to put a note properly on paper; his letters were perfectly fascinating, but they lacked a final charm in being often written on one side of half-sheets, and numbered in the upper right-hand corner, like printer’s copy. She had to tell him that he must bring his mother to call upon her; and then he was so long doing it that Louise imagined a timidity in his mother which he was too proud to own, and made her own mother go with her to see Mrs. Maxwell in the house which she partly let out in lodgings on a very modest street. It really did not matter about any of those things though, and she and Maxwell’s mother got on very well after the first plunge, though the country doctor’s widow was distinctly a country person, with the narrow social horizons of a villager whose knowledge of the city was confined to the compass of her courageous ventures in it.

  To her own mother Louise feigned to see nothing repulsive in the humility of these. She had been rather fastidiously worldly, she had been even aggressively worldly, in her preference for a luxurious and tasteful setting, and her mother now found it hard to bear her contented acceptance of the pervading commonness of things at Mrs. Maxwell’s. Either her senses were holden by her fondness for Maxwell, or else she was trying to hoodwink her mother by an effect of indifference; but Mrs. Hilary herself was certainly not obtuse to that commonness. If she did not rub it into Louise, which would have done no good, she did rub it into Louise’s father, though that could hardly have been said to do any good either. Her report of the whole affair made him writhe, but when she had made him writhe enough she began to admit some extenuating circumstances. If Mrs. Maxwell was a country person, she was not foolish. She did not chant, in a vain attempt to be genteel in her speech; she did not expand unduly under Mrs. Hilary’s graciousness, and she did not resent it. In fact, the graciousness had been very skilfully managed, and Mrs. Maxwell had not been allowed to feel that there was any condescension to her. She got on with Louise very well; if Mrs. Maxwell had any overweening pride in her son, she kept it as wholly to herself as any overweening pride she might have had in her son’s choice.

  Mrs. Hilary did not like her daughter’s choice, but she had at last reached such resignation concerning it as the friends of a hopeless invalid may feel when the worst comes. She had tried to stop the affair when there was some hope or some use in trying, and now she determined to make the best of it. The worst was that Maxwell was undoubtedly of different origin and breeding, and he would always, in society, subject Louise to a consciousness of his difference if he did nothing more. But when you had said this, you seemed to have said all there was to say against him. The more the Hilarys learned about the young fellow the more reason they had to respect him. His life, on its level, was blameless. Every one who knew him spoke well of him, and those who knew him best spoke enthusiastically; he had believers in his talent and in his character. In a society so barometrical as ours, even in a city where it was the least barometrical, the obstacles to the acceptance of Maxwell were mainly subjective. They were formed not so much of what people would say as of what Mrs. Hilary felt they had a right to say, and, in view of the necessities of the case, she found herself realizing that if they did not say anything to her it would be much as if they had not said anything at all. She dealt with the fact before her frankly, and in the duties which it laid upon her she began to like Maxwell before Hilary did. Not that Hilary disliked him, but there was something in the young fellow taking his daughter away from him, in that cool matter-of-fact way, as if it were quite in the course of nature that he should, instead of being abashed and overwhelmed by his good fortune, which left Hilary with a misgiving lest he might realize it less and less as time went on.

  Hilary had no definite ambition for her in marriage, but his vague dreams for her were not of a young man who meant to leave off being a newspaper writer to become a writer of plays. He instinctively wished her to be of his own order of things; and it had pleased him when he heard from his wife’s report that Louise had seen the folly of her fancy for the young journalist whom a series of accidents had involved with their lives, and had decided to give him up. When the girl decided again, more tacitly, that she could not give him up, Hilary submitted, as he would have submitted to anything she wished. To his simple idolatry of her she was too good for anything on earth, and if he were to lose her, he found that after all he had no great choice in the matter. As soon as her marriage appeared inevitable, he agreed with his wife that their daughter must never have any unhappiness of their making; and they let her reverse without a word the purpose of going to spend the winter abroad which they had formed at her wish when she renounced Maxwell.

  All this was still recent in point of time, and though marriage had remanded it to an infinite distance apparently with the young people, it had not yet taken away the importance or the charm of the facts and the feelings that had seemed the whole of life before marriage. When Louise turned from her retrospect she went in through the window that opened on the veranda and stood beside her husband, where he sat with his manuscript before him, frowning at it in the lamplight that made her blink a little after the dark outside. She put her hand on his head, and carried it down his cheek over his mouth, so that he might kiss its palm.

  “Going to work much longer, little man?” she asked, and she kissed the top of his head in her turn. It always amused her to find how smooth and soft his hair was. He flung his pen away and threw himself back in his chair. “Oh, it’s that infernal love business!” he said.

  She sat down and let her hands fall on her lap. “Why, what makes it so hard?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. But it seems as if I were fighting it, as the actors say, all the way. It doesn’t go of itself at all. It’s forced, from the beginning.”

  “Why do you have it in, then?”

  “I have to have it in. It has to be in every picture of life, as it has to be in every life. Godolphin is perfectly right. I talked with him about leaving it out to-day, but I had to acknowledge that it wouldn’t do. In fact, I was the first to suggest that there must be some sort of love business when I first talked the play over with him. But I wish there hadn’t. It makes me sick every time I touch it. The confounded fools don’t know what to do with their love.”

  “They might get married with it,” Louise suggested.

  “I don’t believe they have sense enough to think of that,” said her husband. “The curse of their origin is on them, I suppose. I tried to imagine them when I was only fit to imagine a man hating a woman with all his might.”

  Louise laughed out her secure delight. “If the public could only know why your lovers were such feeble folk it would make the fortune of the play.”

  Maxwell laughed, too. “Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday edition of the Events!”

  Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell’s acquaintance, who stood to Louise for all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. “Don’t!” she shrieked.

  Maxwell went on. “He would have both our portraits in, and your father’s and mother’s, and my mother’s; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue, and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it.” He laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.

  “I know what you’re thinking of now,” said his wife.

  “What?”

  “Whether you couldn’t use our affair in the play?”

  “You’re a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn’t do.”

  “Stuff! It will do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the cause of your hating love so much t
hat you failed with your lovers on the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your succeeding on lines that had never been tried before.”

  “Generous girl!” He bent over — he had not to bend far — and kissed her. Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: “I could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I’ll just take a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I have him some sort of subordinate in her father’s business? It doesn’t matter much what; it’s easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again.”

  “That’s what I did,” said his wife, “and you hadn’t offered yourself either.”

  Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. “You wouldn’t like me to use that point, then?”

  “What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn’t care if all the world knew it.”

  “Ah, well, we won’t give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out about her father’s crime, and then—” He stopped again with a certain air of distaste.

  “That would be rather romantic, wouldn’t it?” his wife asked.

  “That was what I was thinking,” he answered. “It would be confoundedly romantic.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Louise; “you could have them squabbling all the way through, and doing hateful things to one another.”

  “That would give it the cast of comedy.”

  “Well?”

  “And that wouldn’t do either.”

  “Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!”

  “Oh yes, I know that—”

  “And it would be very effective to leave the impression of their happiness with the audience, so that they might have strength to get on their rubbers and wraps after the tremendous ordeal of your Haxard death-scene.”

  “Godolphin wouldn’t stand that. He wants the gloom of Haxard’s death to remain in unrelieved inkiness at the end. He wants the people to go away thinking of Godolphin, and how well he did the last gasp. He wouldn’t stand any love business there. He would rather not have any in the play.”

  “Very well, if you’re going to be a slave to Godolphin—”

  “I’m not going to be a slave to Godolphin, and if I can see my way to make the right use of such a passage at the close I’ll do it even if it kills the play or Godolphin.”

  “Now you’re shouting,” said Louise. She liked to use a bit of slang when it was perfectly safe — as in very good company, or among those she loved; at other times she scrupulously shunned it.

  “But I can do it somehow,” Maxwell mused aloud. “Now I have the right idea, I can make it take any shape or color I want. It’s magnificent!”

  “And who thought of it?” she demanded.

  “Who? Why, I thought of it myself.”

  “Oh, you little wretch!” she cried, in utter fondness, and she ran at him and drove him into a corner. “Now, say that again and I’ll tickle you.”

  “No, no, no!” he laughed, and he fought away the pokes and thrusts she was aiming at him. “We both thought of it together. It was mind transference!”

  She dropped her hands with an instant interest in the psychological phenomena. “Wasn’t it strange? Or, no, it wasn’t, either! If our lives are so united in everything, the wonder is that we don’t think more things and say more things together. But now I want you to own, Brice, that I was the first to speak about your using our situation!”

  “Yes, you were, and I was the first to think of it. But that’s perfectly natural. You always speak of things before you think, and I always think of things before I speak.”

  “Well, I don’t care,” said Louise, by no means displeased with the formulation. “I shall always say it was perfectly miraculous. And I want you to give me credit for letting you have the idea after you had thought of it.”

  “Yes, there’s nothing mean about you, Louise, as Pinney would say. By Jove, I’ll bring Pinney in! I’ll have Pinney interview Haxard concerning Greenshaw’s disappearance.”

  “Very well, then, if you bring Pinney in, you will leave me out,” said Louise. “I won’t be in the same play with Pinney.”

  “Well, I won’t bring Pinney in, then,” said Maxwell. “I prefer you to Pinney — in a play. But I have got to have in an interviewer. It will be splendid on the stage, and I’ll be the first to have him.” He went and sat down at his table.

  “You’re not going to work any more to-night!” his wife protested.

  “No, just jot down a note or two, to clinch that idea of ours in the right shape.” He dashed off a few lines with pencil in his play at several points, and then he said: “There! I guess I shall get some bones into those two flabby idiots to-morrow. I see just how I can do it.” He looked up and met his wife’s adoring eyes.

  “You’re wonderful, Brice!” she said.

  “Well, don’t tell me so,” he returned, “or it might spoil me. Now I wouldn’t tell you how good you were, on any account.”

  “Oh yes, do, dearest!” she entreated, and a mist came into her eyes. “I don’t think you praise me enough.”

  “How much ought I to praise you?”

  “You ought to say that you think I’ll never be a hinderance to you.”

  “Let me see,” he said, and he pretended to reflect. “How would it do to say that if I ever come to anything worth while, it’ll be because you made me?”

  “Oh, Brice! But would it be true?” She dropped on her knees at his side.

  “Well, I don’t know. Let’s hope it would,” and with these words he laughed again and put his arms round her. Presently she felt his arm relax, and she knew that he had ceased to think about her and was thinking about his play again.

  She pulled away, and “Well?” she asked.

  He laughed at being found out so instantly. “That was a mighty good thing your father said when you went to tell him of our engagement.”

  “It was very good. But if you think I’m going to let you use that you’re very much mistaken. No, Brice! Don’t you touch papa. He wouldn’t like it; he wouldn’t understand it. Why, what a perfect cormorant you are!”

  They laughed over his voracity, and he promised it should be held in check as to the point which he had thought for a moment might be worked so effectively into the play.

  The next morning Louise said to her husband: “I can see, Brice, that you are full of the notion of changing that love business, and if I stay round I shall simply bother. I’m going down to lunch with papa and mamma, and get back here in the afternoon, just in time to madden Godolphin with my meddling.”

  She caught the first train after breakfast, and in fifteen minutes she was at Beverly Farms. She walked over to her father’s cottage, where she found him smoking his cigar on the veranda.

  He was alone; he said her mother had gone to Boston for the day; and he asked: “Did you walk from the station? Why didn’t you come back in the carriage? It had just been there with your mother.”

  “I didn’t see it. Besides, I might not have taken it if I had. As the wife of a struggling young playwright, I should have probably thought it unbecoming to drive. But the struggle is practically over, you’ll be happy to know.”

  “What? Has he given it up?
” asked her father.

  “Given it up! He’s just got a new light on his love business!”

  “I thought his love business had gone pretty well with him,” said Hilary, with a lingering grudge in his humor.

  “This is another love business!” Louise exclaimed. “The love business in the play. Brice has always been so disgusted with it that he hasn’t known what to do. But last night we thought it out together, and I’ve left him this morning getting his hero and heroine to stand on their legs without being held up. Do you want to know about it?”