Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And I wouldn’t have hair like corn-silk,” he returned. “At least not on my own head.”

  “Yes, it is coarse. And it’s yours quite as much as mine,” she said, thoughtfully. “We do belong to each other utterly, don’t we? I never thought of it in that light before. And now our life has gone into your work, already! I can’t tell you, Brice, how sweet it is to think of that love-business being our own! I shall be so proud of it on the stage! But as long as we live no one but ourselves must know anything about it. Do you suppose they will?” she asked, in sudden dismay.

  He smiled. “Should you care?”

  She reflected a moment. “No!” she shouted, boldly. “What difference?”

  “Godolphin would pay any sum for the privilege of using the fact as an advertisement. If he could put it into Pinney’s hands, and give him carte blanche, to work in all the romance he liked—”

  “Brice!” she shrieked.

  “Well, we needn’t give it away, and if we don’t, nobody else will.”

  “No, and we must always keep it sacredly secret. Promise me one thing!”

  “Twenty!”

  “That you will let me hold your hand all through the first performance of that part. Will you?”

  “Why, we shall be set up like two brazen images in a box for all the first-nighters to stare at and the society reporters to describe. What would society journalism say to your holding my hand throughout the tender passages? It would be onto something personal in them in an instant.”

  “No; now I will show you how we will do.” They were sitting in a nook of the rocks, in the pallor of the late September sunshine, with their backs against a warm bowlder. “Now give me your hand.”

  “Why, you’ve got hold of it already.”

  “Oh yes, so I have! Well, I’ll just grasp it in mine firmly, and let them both rest on your knee, so; and fling the edge of whatever I’m wearing on my shoulders over them, or my mantle, if it’s hanging on the back of the chair, so” — she flung the edge of her shawl over their clasped hands to illustrate— “and nobody will suspect the least thing. Suppose the sea was the audience — a sea of faces you know; would any one dream down there that I was squeezing your hand at all the important moments, or you squeezing mine?”

  “I hope they wouldn’t think me capable of doing anything so indelicate as squeezing a lady’s hand,” said Maxwell. “I don’t know what they might think of you, though, if there was any such elaborate display of concealment as you’ve got up here.”

  “Oh, this is merely rehearsing. Of course, I shall be more adroit, more careless, when I really come to it. But what I mean is that when we first see it together, the love-business, I shall want to feel that you are feeling every instant just as I do. Will you?”

  “I don’t see any great objection to that. We shall both be feeling very anxious about the play, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean in one sense,” Louise allowed. “Sha’n’t you be very anxious to see how they have imagined Salome and Atland?”

  “Not so anxious as about how Godolphin has ‘created’ Haxard.”

  “I care nothing about that. But if the woman who does me is vulgar, or underbred, or the least bit coarse, and doesn’t keep the character just as sweet and delicate as you imagined it, I don’t know what I shall do to her.”

  “Nothing violent, I hope,” Maxwell suggested languidly.

  “I am not so sure,” said Louise. “It’s a dreadfully intimate affair with me, and if I didn’t like it I should hiss, anyway.”

  Maxwell laughed long and loud. “What a delightful thing that would be for society journalism. ‘At one point the wife of the author was apparently unable to control her emotions, and she was heard to express her disapprobation by a prolonged sibilation. All eyes were turned upon the box where she sat with her husband, their hands clasped under the edge of her mantle.’ No, you mustn’t hiss, my dear; but if you find Salome getting too much for you you can throw a dynamite bomb at the young woman who is doing her. I dare say we shall want to blow up the whole theatre before the play is over.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe we shall. I know the piece will go splendidly if the love-business is well done. But you can understand, can’t you, just how I feel about Salome?”

  “I think I can, and I am perfectly sure that you will be bitterly disappointed in her, no matter how she’s done, unless you do her yourself.”

  “I wish I could!”

  “Then the other people might be disappointed.”

  XI.

  The Maxwells went to New York early in October, and took a little furnished flat for the winter on the West Side, between two streets among the Eighties. It was in a new apartment-house, rather fine on the outside, and its balconies leaned caressingly towards the tracks of the Elevated Road, whose trains steamed back and forth under them night and day. At first they thought it rather noisy, but their young nerves were strong, and they soon ceased to take note of the uproar, even when the windows were open.

  The weather was charming, as the weather of the New York October is apt to be. The month proved much milder than September had been at Magnolia. They were not very far from Central Park, and they went for whole afternoons into it. They came to have such a sense of ownership in one of the seats in the Ramble, that they felt aggrieved when they found anybody had taken it, and they resented other people’s intimacy with the squirrels, which Louise always took a pocketful of nuts to feed; the squirrels got a habit of climbing into her lap for them. Sometimes Maxwell hired a boat and rowed her lazily about on the lake, while he mused and she talked. Sometimes, to be very lavish, they took places in the public carriage which plied on the drives of the Park, and went up to the tennis-grounds beyond the reservoirs, and watched the players, or the art-students sketching the autumn scenery there. They began to know, without acquaintance, certain attached or semi-attached couples; and no doubt they passed with these for lovers themselves, though they felt a vast superiority to them in virtue of their married experience; they looked upon them, though the people were sometimes their elders, as very young things, who were in the right way, but were as yet deplorably ignorant how happy they were going to be. They almost always walked back from these drives, and it was not so far but they could walk over to the North River for the sunset before their dinner, which they had late when they did that, and earlier when they did not do it. Dinner was rather a matter of caprice with them. Sometimes they dined at a French or Italian table d’hôte; sometimes they foraged for it before they came in from their sunset, or their afternoon in the park. When dinner consisted mainly of a steak or chops, with one of the delicious salads their avenue abounded in, and some improvisation of potatoes, and coffee afterward, it was very easy to get it up in half an hour. They kept one maid, who called herself a Sweden’s girl, and Louise cooked some of the things herself. She did not cook them so well as the maid, but Maxwell never knew what he was eating, and he thought it all alike good.

  In their simple circumstances, Louise never missed the affluence that had flattered her whole life in her father’s house. It seemed to her as if she had not lived before her marriage — as if she had always lived as she did now. She made the most of her house-keeping, but there was not a great deal of that, at the most. She knew some New York people, but it was too early yet for them to be back to town, and, besides, she doubted if she should let them know where she was; for society afflicted Maxwell, and she could not care for it unless he did. She did not wish to do anything as yet, or be anything apart from him; she was timid about going into the street without him. She wished to be always with him, and always talking to him; but it soon came to his imploring her not to talk when she was in the room where he was writing; and he often came to the table so distraught that the meal might have passed without a word but for her.

  He valued her all she could possibly have desired in relation to his work, and he showed her how absolutely he rested upon her sympathy, if not her judgment
, in it. He submitted everything to her, and forbore, and changed, and amended, and wrote and rewrote at her will; or when he revolted, and wrote on in defiance of her, he was apt to tear the work up. He destroyed a good deal of good literature in this way, and more than once it happened that she had tacitly changed her mind and was of his way of thinking when it was too late. In view of such a chance she made him promise that he would always show her what he had written, even when he had written wholly against her taste and wish. He was not to let his pride keep him from doing this, though, as a general thing, she took a good deal of pride in his pride, having none herself, as she believed. Whether she had or not, she was very wilful, and rather prepotent; but she never bore malice, as the phrase is, when she got the worst of anything, though she might have been quite to blame. She had in all things a high ideal of conduct, which she expected her husband to live up to when she was the prey of adverse circumstances. At other times she did her share of the common endeavor.

  All through the month of October he worked at the new play, and from time to time they heard from the old play, which Godolphin was still giving, here and there, in the West. He had not made any reply to Maxwell’s letter of regret that he could not come to the rehearsals at Chicago, but he sent the notices marked in the newspapers, at the various points where he played, and the Maxwells contented themselves as they could with these proofs of an unbroken amity. They expected something more direct and explicit from him when he should get to Chicago, where his engagement was to begin the first week in November. In the meantime the kind of life they were living had not that stressful unreality for Louise that it had for Maxwell on the economic side. For the first time his regular and serious habits of work did not mean the earning of money, but only the chance of earning money. Ever since he had begun the world for himself, and he had begun it very early, there had been some income from his industry; however little it was, it was certain; the salary was there for him at the end of the week when he went to the cashier’s desk. His mother and he had both done so well and so wisely in their several ways of taking care of themselves, that Maxwell had not only been able to live on his earnings, but he had been able to save out of them the thousand dollars which Louise bragged of to her father, and it was this store which they were now consuming, not rapidly, indeed, but steadily, and with no immediate return in money to repair the waste. The fact kept Maxwell wakeful at night sometimes, and by day he shuddered inwardly at the shrinkage of his savings, so much swifter than their growth, though he was generously abetted by Louise in using them with frugality. She could always have had money from her father, but this was something that Maxwell would not look forward to. There could be no real anxiety for them in the situation, but for Maxwell there was care. He might be going to get a great deal out of the play he was now writing, but as yet it was in no form to show to a manager or an actor; and he might be going to get a great deal out of his old play, but so far Godolphin had made no sign that he remembered one of the most essential of the obligations which seemed all to rest so lightly upon him. Maxwell hated to remind him of it, and in the end he was very glad that he never did, or that he had not betrayed the slightest misgiving of his good faith.

  One morning near the end of the month, when he was lower in his spirits than usual from this cause, there came a letter from the editor of the Boston Abstract asking him if he could not write a weekly letter from New York for his old newspaper. It was a temptation, and Maxwell found it a hardship that his wife should have gone out just then to do the marketing for the day; she considered this the duty of a wife, and she fulfilled it often enough to keep her sense of it alive, but she much preferred to forage with him in the afternoon; that was poetry, she said, and the other was prose. He would have liked to talk the proposition over with her; to realize the compliment while it was fresh, to grumble at it a little, and to be supported in his notion that it would be bad business just then for him to undertake a task that might draw him away from his play too much; to do the latter well would take a great deal of time. Yet he did not feel quite that he ought to refuse it, in view of the uncertainties of the future, and it might even be useful to hold the position aside from the money it would bring him; the New York correspondent of the Boston Abstract might have a claim upon the attention of the managers which a wholly unaccredited playwright could not urge; there was no question of their favor with Maxwell; he would disdain to have that, even if he could get it, except by the excellence, or at least the availability of his work.

  Louise did not come in until much later than usual, and then she came in looking very excited. “Well, my dear,” she began to call out to him as soon as the door was opened for her, “I have seen that woman again!”

  “What woman?” he asked.

  “You know. That smouldering-eyed thing in the bathing-dress.” She added, in answer to his stupefied gaze: “I don’t mean that she was in the bathing-dress still, but her eyes were smouldering away just as they were that day on the beach at Magnolia.”

  “Oh!” said Maxwell, indifferently. “Where did you see her?”

  “On the avenue, and I know she lives in the neighborhood somewhere, because she was shopping here on the avenue, and I could have easily followed her home if she had not taken the Elevated for down town.”

  “Why didn’t you take it, too? It might have been a long way round, but it would have been certain. I’ve been wanting you here badly. Just tell me what you think of that.”

  He gave her the editor’s letter, and she hastily ran it through. “I wouldn’t think of it for a moment,” she said. “Were there any letters for me?”

  “It isn’t a thing to be dismissed without reflection,” he began.

  “I thought you wanted to devote yourself entirely to the drama?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ve always said there was nothing so killing to creative work as any sort of journalism.”

  “This wouldn’t take more than a day or two each week, and twenty-five dollars a letter would be convenient while we are waiting for our cards to turn up.”

  “Oh, very well! If you are so fickle as all that, I don’t know what to say to you.” She put the letter down on the table before him, and went out of the room.

  He tried to write, but with the hurt of what he felt her unkindness he could not, and after a certain time he feigned an errand into their room, where she had shut herself from him, and found her lying down. “Are you sick?” he asked, coldly.

  “Not at all,” she answered. “I suppose one may lie down without being sick, as you call it. I should say ill, myself.”

  “I’m so glad you’re not sick that I don’t care what you call it.”

  He was going out, when she spoke again: “I didn’t know you cared particularly, you are always so much taken up with your work. I suppose, if you wrote those letters for the Abstract, you need never think of me at all, whether I was ill or well.”

  “You would take care to remind me of your existence from time to time, I dare say. You haven’t the habit of suffering in silence a great deal.”

  “You would like it better, of course, if I had.”

  “A great deal better, my dear. But I didn’t know that you regarded my work as self-indulgence altogether. I have flattered myself now and then that I was doing it for you, too.”

  “Oh yes, very likely. But if you had never seen me you would be doing it all the same.”

  “I’m afraid so. I seem to have been made that way. I’m sorry you don’t approve. I supposed you did once.”

  “Oh, I do approve — highly.” He left her, and she heard him getting his hat and stick in the little hallway, as if he were going out of doors. She called to him, “What I wonder is how a man so self-centred that he can’t look at his wife for days together, can tell whether another woman’s eyes are smouldering or not.”

  Maxwell paused, with his hand on the knob, as if he were going to make some retort, but, perhaps because he could think of none, he wen
t out without speaking.

  He stayed away all the forenoon, walking down the river along the squalid waterside avenues; he found them in sympathy with the squalor in himself which always followed a squabble with his wife. At the end of one of the westward streets he found himself on a pier flanked by vast flotillas of canal-boats. As he passed one of these he heard the sound of furious bickering within, and while he halted a man burst from the gangway and sprang ashore, followed by the threats and curses of a woman, who put her head out of the hatch to launch them after him.

  The incident turned Maxwell faint; he perceived that the case of this unhappy man, who tried to walk out of earshot with dignity, was his own in quality, if not in quantity. He felt the shame of their human identity, and he reached home with his teeth set in a hard resolve to bear and forbear in all things thereafter, rather than share ever again in misery like that, which dishonored his wife even more than it dishonored him. At the same time he was glad of a thought the whole affair suggested to him, and he wondered whether he could get a play out of it. This was the notion of showing the evil eventuation of good. Their tiffs came out of their love for each other, and no other quarrels could have the bitterness that these got from the very innermost sweetness of life. It would be hard to show this dramatically, but if it could be done the success would be worth all the toil it would cost.

  At his door he realized with a pang that he could not submit the notion to his wife now, and perhaps never. But the door was pulled open before he could turn his latch-key in the lock, and Louise threw her arms round his neck.

  “Oh, dearest, guess!” she commanded between her kisses.

  “Guess what?” he asked, walking her into the parlor with his arms round her. She kept her hands behind her when he released her, and they stood confronted.