Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was always on her conscience, in the meantime, to give some of the first moments of her recovery to going with Maxwell and thanking Mrs. Harley for the kindness she had shown her in her accident. She was the more strenuous in this intention because the duty was so distasteful, and she insisted upon Maxwell’s company, though he argued that he had already done enough himself in thanking her preserver, because she wished to punish a certain reluctance of her own in having him go. She promised herself that she would do everything that was right by the creature; and perhaps she repaired to her presence in rather overwhelming virtue. If this was so, Mrs. Harley showed herself equal to the demand upon her, and was overwhelming in her kind. She not only made nothing of what she had done for Louise, but she made nothing of Louise, and contrived with a few well-directed strokes to give her distinctly the sense of being a chit, a thing Louise was not at all used to. She was apparently one of those women who have no use for persons of their own sex; but few women, even of that sort, could have so promptly relegated Louise to the outside of their interest, or so frankly devoted themselves to Maxwell. The impartial spectator might easily have imagined that it was his ankle which had been strained, and that Louise was at best an intrusive sympathizer. Sometimes Mrs. Harley did not hear what she said; at other times, if she began a response to her, she ended it in a question to him; even when she talked to Louise, her eyes were smouldering upon Maxwell. If this had all or any of it been helpless or ignorant rudeness, it could have been borne and forgiven; but Louise was aware of intention, of perfect intelligence in it; she was sensible of being even more disliked than disliking, and of finally being put to flight with a patronizing benevolence for her complete recovery that was intolerable. What was worse was that, while the woman had been so offensive, she could not wholly rid herself of the feeling that her punishment was in a measure merited, though it was not justice that had dealt with her.

  “Well, that is over,” said Maxwell, when they were again by themselves.

  “Yes, forever,” sighed Louise, and for once she was not let have the last word.

  “I hope you’ll remember that I didn’t want to go.”

  At least, they had not misunderstood each other about Mrs. Harley.

  Towards the end of the month, Louise’s father and mother came on from Boston. They professed that they had been taken with that wish to see the autumn exhibition at the National Academy which sometimes affects Bostonians, and that their visit had nothing to do with the little hurt that Louise wrote them of when she was quite well of it. They drove over from their hotel the morning they arrived, and she did not know anything of their coming till she heard their voices at the door; her father’s voice was rather husky from the climb to her apartment.

  The apartment was looking somewhat frouzy, for the Maxwells breakfasted late, and the house-maid had not had time to put it in order. Louise saw it through her father’s and mother’s eyes with the glance they gave it, and found the rooms ridiculously little, and furnished with cheap Fourteenth Street things; but she bragged all the more noisily of it on that account, and made her mother look out of the window for the pretty view they had from their corner room. Mrs. Hilary pulled her head back from the prospect of the railroad-ridden avenue with silent horror, and Louise burst into a wild laugh. “Well, it isn’t Commonwealth Avenue, mamma; I don’t pretend that, you know.”

  “Where’s Maxwell?” asked Hilary, still puffing from the lounge he had sunk upon as soon as he got into the room.

  “Oh, he’s down town interviewing a manager about his play.”

  “I thought that fellow out West had his play. Or is this a new one?”

  “No,” said Louise, very slowly and thoughtfully, “Brice has taken back his play from Mr. Godolphin.” This was true; he had taken it back in a sense. She added, as much to herself as to her father, “But he has got a new play — that he’s working at.”

  “I hope he hasn’t been rash with Godolphin; though I always had an idea that it would have been better for him to deal with a manager. It seems more business-like.”

  “Oh, much,” said Louise.

  After a little while they were more at home with each other; she began to feel herself more their child, and less Maxwell’s wife; the barriers of reluctance against him, which she always knew were up with them, fell away from between them and herself. But her father said they had come to get her and Maxwell to lunch with them at their hotel, and then Louise felt herself on her husband’s side of the fence again. She said no, they must stay with her; that she was sure Brice would be back for lunch; and she wanted to show them her house-keeping. Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother’s tacit censure apply to her slatternly dressing-gown.

  “I know what you’re thinking, mamma. But I got the habit of it when I had my strained ankle.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it must be very comfortable,” Mrs. Hilary said, of the dressing-gown. “Is it entirely well now?” she added, of the ankle; and she and Hilary both looked at Louise in a way that would have convinced her that their final anxiety concerning it had brought them to New York, if she had not guessed it already. “The doctor,” and by this she meant their old family doctor, as if he were the only one, “said you couldn’t be too careful.”

  “Well, I haven’t been careful,” said Louise, gayly; “but I’m quite well, and you can go back at once, if that’s all, mamma.”

  Hilary laughed with her. “You haven’t changed much, Louise.”

  Her mother said, in another sense, “I think you look a little pulled down,” and that made her and her father laugh again. She got to playing with him, and poking him, and kissing him, in the way she had with him when she was a girl; it was not so very long ago.

  Her mother bore with this for awhile, and then she rose to go.

  “You’re not going to stay!” Louise protested.

  “Not to-day, my dear. I’ve got some shopping to do before lunch.”

  “Well,” said Louise, “I didn’t suppose you would stay the first time, such swells as you and papa. But I shall insist upon your coming to-morrow when you’ve recovered a little from the blow this home of virtuous poverty has given you, and I’ve had a chance to dust and prepare for you. And I’ll tell you what, mamma; Brice and I will come to dinner with you to-night, and we won’t take any refusal. We’ll be with you at seven. How will that do, papa?”

  “That will do,” said Hilary, with his arm round her waist, and they kissed each other to clinch the bargain.

  “And don’t you two old things go away and put your frosty paws together and say Brice and I are not happy. We do quarrel like cats and dogs every now and then, but the rest of the time we’re the happiest couple in the universe, and an example to parents.”

  Hilary would have manifestly liked to stay and have her go on with her nonsense, but his wife took him away.

  When Maxwell came in she was so full of their visit that she did not ask him what luck he had with his play, but told him at once they were going to dine with her father and mother. “And I want you to brace up, my dear, and not let them imagine anything.”

  “How, anything?” he asked, listlessly.

  “Oh, nothing. About your play not going perfectly. I didn’t think it necessary to go into particulars with them, and you needn’t. Just pass it over lightly if they ask you anything about it. But they won’t.”

  Maxwell did not look so happy as he might at the prospect of dining with his wife’s father and mother, but he did not say anything disagreeable, and after an instant of silent resentment Louise did not say anything disagreeable either. In fact, she devoted herself to avoiding any displeasures with him, and she arrived with him at the Hilarys’ hotel on perfectly good terms, and, as far as he was concerned, in rather good spirits.

  Upon the whole, they had a very good time. Hilary made occasion to speak t
o Maxwell of his letters to the Abstract, and told him they were considered by far the best letters of the kind published anywhere, which meant anywhere in Boston.

  “You do that sort of thing so well, newspaper writing,” he continued, with a slyness that was not lost upon Louise, though Maxwell was ignorant of his drift, “that I wonder you don’t sometimes want to take it up again.”

  “It’s well enough,” said Maxwell, who was gratified by his praise.

  “By the way,” said Hilary, “I met your friend, Mr. Ricker, the other day, and he spoke most cordially about you. I fancy he would be very glad to have you back.”

  “In the old way? I would rather be excused.”

  “No, from what he said, I thought he would like your writing in the editorial page.”

  Maxwell looked pleased. “Ricker’s always been very good, but he has very little influence on the Abstract. He has no money interest in the paper.”

  Hilary said, with the greatest artfulness, “I wonder he doesn’t buy in. I hear it can be done.”

  “Not by Ricker, for the best of all possible reasons,” said Maxwell, with a laugh.

  Louise could hardly wait till she had parted from her father and mother before she began on her husband: “You goose! Didn’t you see that papa was hinting at buying you a share in the Abstract?”

  “He was very modest about it, then; I didn’t see anything of the kind.”

  “Oh, do you think you are the only modest man? Papa is very modest, and he wouldn’t make you an offer outright, unless he saw that you would like it. But I know that was what he was coming to, and if you’ll let me—”

  A sentiment of a reluctance rather than a refusal was what made itself perceptible from his arm to hers, as they hurried along the street together, and Louise would not press the question till he spoke again.

  He did not speak till they were in the train on their way home. Then he said, “I shouldn’t care to have a money interest in a newspaper. It would tie me up to it, and load me down with cares I should hate. It wouldn’t be my real life.”

  “Yes,” said his wife, but when they got into their little apartment she cast an eye, opened to its meanness and narrowness, over the common belongings, and wondered if he would ask himself whether this was her real life. But she did not speak, though she was apt to speak out most things that she thought.

  XVIII.

  Some people began to call, old friends of her mother, whose visit to New York seemed to have betrayed to them the fact of Louise’s presence for the first time, and some friends of her own, who had married, and come to New York to live, and who said they had just got back to town long enough to learn that she was there. These all reproached her for not having let them know sooner where she was, and they all more or less followed up their reproaches with the invitations which she dreaded because of Maxwell’s aversion for them. But she submitted them to him, and submitted to his refusal to go with her, and declined them. In her heart she thought he was rather ungracious, but she did not say so, though in two or three cases of people whom she liked she coaxed him a little to go with her. Meeting her mother and talking over the life she used to lead in Boston, and the life so many people were leading there still, made her a little hungry for society; she would have liked well enough to find herself at a dinner again, and she would have felt a little dancing after the dinner no hardship; but she remembered the promise she had made herself not to tease Maxwell about such things. So she merely coaxed him, and he so far relented as to ask her why she could not go without him, and that hurt her, and she said she never would go without him. All the same, when there came an invitation for lunch, from a particularly nice friend of her girlhood, she hesitated and was lost. She had expected, somehow, that it was going to be a very little lunch, but she found it a very large one, in the number of people, and after the stress of accounting for her husband’s failure to come with her, she was not sorry to have it so. She inhaled with joy the atmosphere of the flower-scented rooms; her eye dwelt with delight on their luxurious and tasteful appointments, the belongings of her former life, which seemed to emerge in them from the past and claim her again; the women in their chic New York costumes and their miracles of early winter hats hailed her a long-lost sister by every graceful movement and cultivated tone; the correctly tailored and agreeably mannered men had polite intelligence of a world that Maxwell never would and never could be part of; the talk of the little amusing, unvital things that began at once was more precious to her than the problems which the austere imagination of her husband dealt with; it suddenly fatigued her to think how hard she had tried to sympathize with his interest in them. Her heart leaped at sight of the long, rose-heaped table, with its glitter of glass and silver, and the solemn perfection of the serving-men; a spectacle not important in itself was dear to her from association with gayeties, which now, for a wicked moment, seemed to her better than love.

  There were all sorts of people: artists and actors, as well as people of fashion. Her friend had given her some society notable to go out with, but she had appointed for the chair next her, on the other hand, a young man in a pretty pointed beard, whom she introduced across from the head of the table as soon as she could civilly take the notable to herself. Louise did not catch his name, and it seemed presently that he had not heard hers, but their acquaintance prospered without this knowledge. He made some little jokes, which she promptly responded to, and they talked awhile as if they were both New-Yorkers, till she said, at some remark of his, “But I am not a New-Yorker,” and then he said, “Well, neither am I,” and offered to tell her what he was if she would tell him what she was.

  “Oh, I’m from Boston, of course,” she answered, but then, instead of saying where he was from, he broke out:

  “Now I will fulfil my vow!”

  “Your vow? What is your vow?”

  “To ask the first Boston person I met if that Boston person knew anything about another Boston person, who wrote a most remarkable play I saw in the fall out at home.”

  “A play?” said Louise, with a total loss of interest in the gentleman’s city or country.

  “Yes, by a Boston man named Maxwell—”

  Louise stared at him, and if their acquaintance had been a little older, she might have asked him to come off. As it was she could not speak, and she let him go on.

  “I don’t know when I’ve ever had a stronger impression in the theatre than I had from that play. Perfectly modern, and perfectly American.” He briefly sketched it. “It was like a terrible experience on the tragic side, and on the other side it was a rapture. I never saw love-making on the stage before that made me wish to be a lover—”

  A fire-red flew over Louise’s face, and she said, almost snubbingly, as if he had made some unwarrantable advance: “I think I had better not let you go on. It was my husband who wrote that play. I am Mrs. Maxwell.”

  “Mrs. Maxwell! You are Mrs. Maxwell?” he gasped, and she could not doubt the honesty of his amaze.

  His confusion was so charming that she instantly relented. “Of course I should like to have you go on all day as you’ve begun, but there’s no telling what exceptions you might be going to make later. Where did you see my husband’s play?”

  “In Midland—”

  “What! You are not — you can’t be — Mr. Ray?”

  “I am — I can,” he returned, gleefully, and now Louise impulsively gave him her hand under the table-cloth.

  The man[oe]uvre caught the eye of the hostess. “A bet?” she asked.

  “Better,” cried Louise, not knowing her pun, “a thousand times,” and she turned without further explanation to the gentleman: “When I tell Mr. Maxwell of this he will suffer as he ought, and that’s saying a great deal, for not coming with me to-day. To think of it’s being you!”

  “Ah, but to think of it’s being he! You acquit me of the poor taste of putting up a job?”

  “Oh, of anything you want to be acquitted of! What crime would you prefer? There
are whole deluges of mercy for you. But now go on, and tell me everything you thought about the play.”

  “I’d rather you’d tell me what you know about the playwright.”

  “Everything, of course, and nothing.” She added the last words from a sudden, poignant conviction. “Isn’t that the way with the wives of you men of genius?”

  “Am I a man of genius?”

  “You’re literary.”

  “Oh, literary, yes. But I’m not married.”

  “You’re determined to get out of it, somehow. Tell me about Midland. It has filled such a space in our imagination! You can’t think what a comfort and stay you have been to us! But why in Midland? Is it a large place?”

  “Would it take such a very big one to hold me? It’s the place I brought myself up in, and it’s very good to me, and so I live there. I don’t think it has any vast intellectual or æsthetic interests, but there are very nice people there, very cultivated, some of them, and very well read. After all, you don’t need a great many people; three or four will do.”

  “And have you always lived there?”

  “I lived a year or so in New York, and I manage to get on here some time every winter. The rest of the year Midland is quite enough for me. It’s gay at times; there’s a good deal going on; and I can write there as well as anywhere, and better than in New York. Then, you know, in a small way I’m a prophet in my own country, perhaps because I was away from it for awhile. It’s very pretty. But it’s very base of you to make me talk about myself when I’m so anxious to hear about Mr. Maxwell.”

  “And do you spend all your time writing Ibsen criticisms of Ibsen plays?” Louise pursued against his protest.