Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes’m,” said Clementina.

  She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful apathy in his face.

  Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him. “Albe’t, what made you want me to see that child?”

  Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came to it at once. “I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to come and live with us.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re both of us gettin’ pretty well on, and you’d ought to have somebody to look after you if — I’m not around. You want somebody that can do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to you — well, moa like a daughta than a suvvant — somebody that you’d get attached to, maybe—”

  “And don’t you see,” Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, “what a ca’e that would be? Why, it’s got so already that I can’t help thinkin’ about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I’d have her on my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be tewin’ around to do for her. I shouldn’t have any peace of my life any moa. Can’t you see that?”

  “I guess if you see it, I don’t need to,” said Lander.

  “Well, then, I want you shouldn’t eva mention her to me again. I’ve had the greatest escape! But I’ve got her off home, and I’ve give her money enough! had a time with her about it — so that they won’t feel as if we’d made ’em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again. I don’t want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be frettin’ if I’m in reach of her, and I shan’t get any good of the ai’a. Will you promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then!” Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she was insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door suggested. She once more twisted her head in that direction and called, “Come in!”

  The door opened and Clementina came in. She advanced to the bedside smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon the counterpane.

  “Why, you haven’t been home, child?”

  “No’m,” said Clementina, breathlessly. “But I couldn’t take it. I knew they wouldn’t want me to, and I thought you’d like it better if I just brought it back myself. Good-mo’ning.” She slipped out of the door. Mrs. Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail. “Now we got to go! And it’s all youa fault, Albe’t.”

  Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau. He sighed profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.

  V.

  The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina’s mother decided that she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or left.

  She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called her Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man who much preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort, and after he had endured Clementina’s gaze as long as he could, he said, “Perhaps you don’t allow anybody but the chef to call you that?”

  She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her for him, and went away.

  It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying to bully her.

  He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the forenoon and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the student’s fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.

  Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he wore habitually; but he thought Gregory’s educational advantages told in his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.

  One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in the distant parlor, Fane said. “Now, what’ll you bet that they won’t every one of ’em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there’s no place like a hotel to study ‘em.”

  “I don’t want to study them,” said Gregory, harshly.

  “Think Greek’s more worth your while, or know ’em well enough already?” Fane suggested.

  “No, I don’t know them at all,” said the student.

  “I don’t believe,” urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, “that there’s a girl in the house that you couldn’t marry, if you gave your mind to it.”

  Gregory twitched irascibly. “I don’t want to marry them.”

  “Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean that,” retorted the student. “But I’ve got other things to think of.”

  “Don’t you believe,” the clerk modestly urged, “that it is natural for a man — well, a young man — to think about girls?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “And you don’t consider it wrong?”

  “How, wrong?”

  “Well, a waste of time. I don’t know as I always think about wanting to marry ‘em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on ‘em. There’s something about a girl that, well, you don’t know what it is, exactly. Take almost any of ‘em,” said the clerk, with an air of inductive reasoning. “Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don’t know what it is about her. She’s good-looking, I don’t deny that; and she’s got pretty manners, and she’s as graceful as a bird. But it a’n’t any one of ‘em, and it don’t seem to be all of ’em put together that makes you want to keep your eyes on her the whole while. Ever noticed what a nice little foot she’s got? Or her hands?”

  “No,” said the student.

  “I don’t mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some girls that would. But she’s not that kind. She ain’t much more than a child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman. Noticed the kind of
way she’s got?”

  “No,” said the student, with impatience.

  The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke. “Well, it’s something as if she’d been trained to it, so that she knew just the right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it’s nature. You know how the chef always calls her the Boss? That explains it about as well as anything, and I presume that’s what my mind was running on, the other day, when I called her Boss. But, my! I can’t get anywhere near her since!”

  “It serves you right,” said Gregory. “You had no business to tease her.”

  “Now, do you think it was teasing? I did, at first, and then again it seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right one. I presume I couldn’t explain that to her.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy.”

  “I look upon her,” said Fane, with an effect of argument in the sweetness of his smile, “just as I would upon any other young lady in the house. Do you spell apology with one p or two?”

  “One,” said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of paper.

  “I feel badly for the girl. I don’t want her to think I was teasing her or taking any sort of liberty with her. Now, would you apologize to her, if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your chance and speak to her?”

  Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of the place. “You make me sick, Fane,” he said.

  The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down the piazzas, and storm into the office. Several of them fluttered up to the desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes bearing their initials. They called him out, and asked if he had not forgotten something for them. He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently said, Well, they guessed they must go; and went. Fane turned to encounter Gregory, who had come in by a side door.

  “Fane, I want to beg your pardon. I was rude to you just now.”

  “Oh, no! Oh, no!” the clerk protested. “That’s all right. Sit down a while, can’t you, and talk with a fellow. It’s early, yet.”

  “No, I can’t. I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way. Good-night. Is there anything in particular?”

  “No; good-night. I was just wondering about — that girl.”

  “Oh!”

  VI.

  Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with. He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused with anger much of the time. He was not only good-looking but he was a college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him for the hurts he did them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was too cross for anything. They were mostly young school-mistresses, and whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper, they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose thoughts were not running upon girls all the time. Women, even in their spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all, the silliest of them, as if they had souls. Very likely they responded more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that this was not his fault.

  The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner between them and the girls whom they served. The knot between his brows did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.

  They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity, but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness, and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.

  He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.

  The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk’s business to forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant. “Very well, I’ll wait here for him a little while,” Gregory answered.

  “So do,” said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, “I have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back,” and then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept listening for Clementina to say, “No’m, there a’n’t. Perhaps, the’e’ll be something the next mail,” and “Yes’m, he’e’s one, and I guess this paper is for some of youa folks, too.”

  Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet, to go away.

  The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. “Oh! I thought something had happened.”

  “No, nothing has happened,” said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair springing from the mass that defined her pretty head. “Don’t you know that you oughtn’t to say ‘No’m’ and ‘Yes’m?”’ he demanded, bitterly, and then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into her cheeks.

  Clementina merely looked interested. “Did I say that? I meant to say Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am; but I keep forgetting.”

  “You oughtn’t to say anything!” Gregory answered savagely, “Just say Yes, and No, and let your voice do the rest.”

  “Oh!” said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the novelty of the idea. “I should be afraid it wasn’t polite.”

  Gregory took an even brutal tone. It seemed to him as if he were forced to hurt her feelings. But his words, in spite of his tone, were not brutal; they might have even been thought flattering. “The politeness is in the manner, and you don’t need anything but your manner.”

  “Do you think so, truly?” asked the girl joyously. “I should like to try it once!”

  He frowned again. “I’ve no business to criticise your way of speaking.”

  “Oh yes’m — yes, ma’am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed! The’a! It does sound just as well, don’t it?” Clementina laughed in triumph at the outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon Gregory’s face, too. “I’m very mach obliged to
you, Mr. Gregory — I shall always want to do it, if it’s the right way.”

  “It’s the right way,” said Gregory coldly.

  “And don’t they,” she urged, “don’t they really say Sir and Ma’am, whe’e — whe’e you came from?”

  He said gloomily, “Not ladies and gentlemen. Servants do. Waiters — like me.” He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.

  “But I thought — I thought you was a college student.”

  “Were,” Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, “Were, I mean.”

  “I’m a student at college, and here I’m a servant! It’s all right!” he said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, “My Master was the servant of the meanest, and I must — I beg your pardon for meddling with your manner of speaking—”

  “Oh, I’m very much obliged to you; indeed I am. And I shall not care if you tell me of anything that’s out of the way in my talking,” said Clementina, generously.

  “Thank you; I think I won’t wait any longer for Mr. Fane.”

  “Why, I’m su’a he’ll be back very soon, now. I’ll try not to disturb you any moa.”

  Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, “I wish you would tell Mr. Fane something.”

  “For you? Why, suttainly!”

  “No. For you. Tell him that it’s all right about his calling you Boss.”

  The indignant color came into Clementina’s face. “He had no business to call me that.”

  “No; and he doesn’t think he had, now. He’s truly sorry for it.”

  “I’ll see,” said Clementina.

  She had not seen by the time Fane got back. She received his apologies for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she told what had passed between Gregory and herself.

  “Is he truly so proud?” she asked.

  “He’s a very good young man,” said Mrs. Atwell, “but I guess he’s proud. He can’t help it, but you can see he fights against it. If I was you, Clem, I wouldn’t say anything to the guls about it.”