Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It seems strange that it should be only three nights ago that I parted from you with that awful wrench in the dirty old depot at Wottoma, and took the sleeper for Chicago. Aeons of experience, swept down by deluges of emotion, have passed since then, and I feel older than the earth. I do not think I was very-young then; I had gone through what is supposed to age a man, and if it had not been for you, and your sympathy in it all, I do not know what I should have done. But I believe I was wise to wait till I had a better excuse for running away than I had six months ago. I am all right, now, and I am all the better for being at a distance from a Certain Person. If you happen to see her, will you kiss my hand to her, very airily, and say, “Merci, ma chère”? If she asks you why, will you tell her that you have heard from W. A., and that his health is perfectly restored? Understand, Linc, I don’t blame her now, if I ever did; you will bear me witness that I would not let you do it. She had a perfect right to turn me down, but to turn me down for him, oh, that hurt! I could stand being near her (and yet so far!) but it was being within nose-pulling distance of him that I could not stand. I am glad that I came here to face the ghost down in the midst of men, instead of taking the woods, as I was tempted to do. It would have faced me down, if I had gone home, and it would have killed my poor old mother to see my hopeless love-sickness.

  That’s what I was, Linc: love-sick, and now I am love-well and it is New York that has completed my cure. Or rather, she has inspired me with a new passion; she herself is my passion, and I will never leave to love her evermore! Radiant, peerless divinity, but majestic and awful too, her splendor dazzles me, her sovereign beauty enthralls me, her charm intoxicates, maddens me! What is any mortal girl to this apotheosis of Opportunity, this myriad-visaged Chance, this Fortune on a million wheels! There is more material in a minute here, Linc, than there is in Wottoma in a year. I don’t want to go back on the dear old place — or to it, as George Ade said about Indiana; but there is no Wottoma when you think of New York; it wipes itself from the map, and vanishes from the gazetteer.

  You will never understand why till you come here, but you will come some day, and then you will know all about it. I was wishing to-night when I came out of the little French restaurant where I dine (it was the first time, but I am always going to dine there) that you could have been here to put your hand in mine, and walk up Broadway with me, just for one breath, one glimpse of it all. You would not have needed that dinner — six courses, with wine included, for fifty cents — warm under your waistcoat, to make you feel yourself not merely a witness of the great procession of life, but a part of it. By that time every one’s work is over, and the people are streaming to the theatres, past the shining shops on foot, and cramming the trolleys, the women in furs and diamonds, and the men in crush hats and long overcoats, with just enough top buttons open to betray the dress tie and dress shirt. (I have laid in one of those majestic overcoats already, and I have got a silk hat, and I would like to show it to you in Wottoma, where you can’t buy a silk hat unless you send to Chicago for it.) At the doors of the theatres, more gorgeons women and more correct men are getting out of hansoms, and coupés, and automobiles, and trailing in over the pavements between rows of resplendent darkeys in livery; and life is worth living.

  But when I begin anywhere on New York, I want to leave off and begin somewhere else, for the job is always hopeless. Take the Christmas streets alone, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and if you have a soul in you it soars sky-scraper high at the sight of the pavements packed with people, and the street jammed with cars, wagons, carriages, and every vehicle you can imagine, and many you can’t, you poor old provincial! I ache to get at it all in verse; I want to write the Epic of New York, and I am going to. I would like to walk you down Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and wake you up to the fact that you have got a country. Only you would think you were dreaming; and it is a dream. What impresses me most is the gratis exhibition that goes on all the time, the continuous performance of the streets that you could not get for money any where else, and that here is free to the poorest. In fact, is for the poor. There is one window on Fourteenth Street where the sidewalk is a solid mass of humanity from morning till night, entranced by the fairy scene inside; and most of the spectators look as if they had not been to breakfast or dinner, and were not going to supper. But they are enraptured; and that is the great secret of New York; she takes you out of yourself; she annihilates you and disperses you, and you might starve to death here without feeling hungry, for your mind wouldn’t be on it. That is what convinces me that I have come to the best place for that little heart-cure.

  This afternoon I was in the Park; my hotel is only a few blocks below it, and the woods called to me across the roofs, and I went. The sunset was dying over the Seventh Avenue entrance as I went in and as I tramped up past a big meadow where they pasture a flock of sheep, and crossed a bridge to a path that follows the border of a lake into what they call the Ramble, far from hoofs and wheels. The twilight was hovering in the naked tree tops, but the sunset was still reflected from the water among the trunks below, and just as I got to a little corner under the hill where there is a bust of Schiller on a plinth, between evergreens that try to curtain it, the red radiance glorified a pair of lovers tilting on the air above the path before me. He had his arm across her shoulders, and she had hers flung round his waist; I stopped, for I felt myself intruding, and that made them look round, and they started apart. Then, after they had taken a few steps, she closed upon him again, and with an action of angelic defiance, as if she said, “I don’t care; suppose we are?” she flung her slim little arm round him, and ran him up the slope of the path past the bust, and round a rock out of sight. It was charming, Linc, but it made me faint, and I dropped down on a bench beside an old fellow who might have been a fellow-sufferer, though he didn’t look it. He was got up in things that reduced mine to an average value of thirty cents, and I saw that if I really meant business I must have a pair of drab gaiters inside of the next twenty-four hours. I don’t know what made me think he was also literary, but I did, and I was flattered to have him speak to me after he had given me a glance over the shoulder next me, through his extremely polite pince-nez. He was clean shaven, except for the neat side whiskers, of the period of 1840-60, as you see them in the old pictures; and very rosy about the gills, with a small, sweet smile. You could see that he was his own ideal of a gentleman, and he looked as if he had been used to being one for several generations; at least, that was the way I romanced him; and perhaps that was why I felt flattered when he suggested, as if I would perfectly understand, “That was rather pretty.” I ventured to answer, “Yes, very pretty, indeed.” I was just thinking how old Schiller would have liked to wink the other eye of his bust there, and tell them he knew how it was himself. So I quoted —

  “Ich habe genossen das irdische Gluck,

  Ich habe geleht und geliehet.”

  My quotation seemed to startle the old fellow, and he said “Ah!” and faced around at me, and asked with an irony that caressed, “Made in Germany?” I made bold to answer, “The verses were. I was made in Iowa.” Then I felt rather flat, for having lugged in my autobiography, hut he did not mind, or if he did, he only laughed, and remarked, “A thing like that would make a nice effect on the stage, if you could get it in.”

  “But you couldn’t,” I said, “you could only get it into a poem. It would be gross and palpable on the stage.”

  “Was it gross and palpable here?”

  “No, here it was the real thing.”

  “I don’t see the logic of your position,” he said. “I don’t know that I could show it to you. It’s something you must feel.” He laughed again, with the revelation of some very well-dentistried teeth, and said, “Well, let’s hope that some time I may be fine enough to feel it. If I put it on the stage will it spoil it for a poem?”

  “Not if I get it into a poem first.”

  “I shouldn’t object to that; I could d
ramatize the poem. Or perhaps you could.” He got up, and made me a beautiful bow, with his hat off. “We may be rivals,” he said, “but I hope we part friends?” and I got back with, “Oh, yes, or the best of enemies.”

  That made him smile again, and he walked away down the path I had come. He might have been a fine old actor: he had the effect of “going off” at the end of the scene. But think of this happening to me all at once, and out of a clear sky, after the chronic poverty of incident in Wottoma! I suppose I shall never see him again, but once is enough to enrich the imagination with boundless possibilities. He had an English accent, but I feel sure that he was not English; they study that accent for the stage, of course.

  Well, I might as well stop first as last, if this is first; I never should get through; and I should have todispatch this letter in sections, like a big through train, if it went on much longer. Good-by. I shall not wait for you to write. It would kill me not to write, and you may expect something every day.

  Yours ever,

  W. ARDITH.

  P. S. — I shall use that lovers incident in a story. Then I can get my unknown friend in, and I can make use of myself. I see a way to relate our common fortunes to those of the lovers. I believe I can make something out of it. But now I like to let it lie a silent joy in my soul — No, I don’t believe I can risk waiting. That old fellow may be going to use the material at once. I believe I shall try making a poem of it, and if I hit it off, I will send you a copy to let you see what I have done with it. If I could only get that thing out as it is in my mind! I think I will imagine some old fellow, seeing in that pair of lovers the phantom of his own love, dead forty years. That would allow me to put in some Thackeray touches, (that elderly unknown was quite a Thackeray type,) and I could use my own experience with a Certain Person. Linc, that girl looked just like a Certain Person: I mean her figure, so slight and light and electrical and the way she glanced defiantly back at us over her shoulder, when she put her arm round him again!

  III.

  From. ABNER J. BAYSLEY to Rev. WILLIAM BAYSLEY, Timber Creek, Iowa.

  NEW YORK, December 19, 1901.

  Dear Brother:

  Yours of the 15th received, and contents noted. Would say that we are all usually well, and getting used to our life here as well as we can. It is worse for wife and I than it is for the girls, but I guess they are a little homesick, too. Am not sure but what it is worse for them, because the girls have not much to do, and mother and me are pretty well taken up, her with her housekeeping, and me getting settled in the business here, and feeling anxious whether I can make it go or not. When the company offered me the place here, at $2,500, I thought it was a fortune, but money does not go quite so far in New York as what it would in Timber Creek; I have to pay forty dollars a month for rent alone, and we live in a six-room flat, with two of the rooms so dark that we have to burn gas in them by day, and gas costs. But the kitchen is sunny, and Ma likes that. We set there of an evening when the girls are carrying on in the parlor, with their music, and try to make ourselves believe that we are in the old home-kitchen at Timber Creek; but with a gas range it is difficult. Was you really thinking of renting the old place? Would let you have it on easy terms. I can’t bear to think of it standing empty the whole winter long. Would say, go into it, William, and welcome, for anything you are a mind to pay. If you didn’t mean that, all right; Ma thought may he you did. I know your wife would use it well. Would say, you can have the horse over the winter for his keep, and if you can sell him for anything in the spring, will allow you a fair percentage. I know you will do the best you can for me. Perhaps Watson will take him off your hands; he wanted a horse.

  My, but it brings the old place up to talk about these things! But a man can’t afford to indulge in much sentiment if he expects to get along in New York. He has got to be business from the word go. I try to push things all I can, but sometimes, William, I am most afraid I am getting too old for it, and if the company finds that out it will be all day with me. A trust has no bowels, but I don’t blame them, I suppose I should be just so myself. William do you ever think people live too long? There, you will say, he is flying in the face of providence, and the Lord knows I don’t mean to, but am thankful for all my blessings. I don’t know how ma and the girls could get along without me, old as I am, in this awful city, or me without them for that matter. The girls have not got acquainted much, if any, yet. It is not very sociable here. We have been in this house nearly two weeks, and although as much as twenty families live above and below us, in the six stories, nobody has called. Well its like this, its more like living in the same street than what it is in the same house, but in Timber Creek we wouldn’t have been in the same street or hardly in the same town without pretty much everybody calling inside of two weeks. But the girls say they like it, and that it gives them more of a chance to choose their own acquaintance. Speaking of acquaintance, they say that New-Yorkers never meet each other on the street, but if two country fellows happen to be in New York at the same time they are sure to bump against each other before the day’s out. And that is just exactly what happened to me this morning in Broadway. You remember the Widow Ardith’s boy that went onto the paper in Wottoma? Well, who should I run right into but him day before yesterday, just off the train with his grip in his hand. I told him to come round, and he said he would, the first chance he got, and its fired the girls all up, the idea of a gentleman caller. He always did dress pretty well when he come home from Wottoma on a visit, and he was looking just out of a bandbox, though he never was anyways stuck up. If we could get him for a boarder or to take one of the rooms it would help out considerable, but the girls said they would have my scalp if I dared to hint at such a thing to him, so I am going to lay low. Would say, take the old place William, and if you cannot afford to pay any rent till you have disposed of your house, all right; you can have it for nothing till then. I know you must be uncomfortable where you are, so far from your church, especially evening meetings. You could send us some of the apples. One of them old Bambos or Sheeps Noses would taste good. Ma and the girls joins me in love to you and Emmeline. When you write give our love to the rest of your family. I hope Sally is getting along all right.

  To think of you being a grandfather before me when so much younger, but so it goes.

  Your affectionate brother,

  AB.

  IV.

  From Miss AMERICA RALSON to Miss CAROLINE DESCHENES, Wottoma.

  My Dearest Caro:

  I owe you a great many apologies for not writing before this, but if you only knew all I have been through you would not ask for a single one. I thought it was bad enough when we got here late in the spring after everybody one knows had gone out of town, but since the season began this fall it has been simply a whirl. It began with the Horse Show, of course, and now we are in the midst of the Dog Show which opened to-day with twelve hundred dogs; and I thought I should go insane with their barking all at once, and when I got mother home, I was afraid she was going to he down ill. But in New York you have got to get used to things, and that is what I keep telling mother, or else go back to Wottoma, where she never put her nose out of the house once in a month, and went to bed every night at nine. After the Dog Show there will not be much of anything till the opera begins. Father has taken a box for the nights when the owner does not go, and it is going to cost him a thousand dollars for the time he has it.

  We have had a great many cards already, and invitations to Teas and At Homes; they seem to be the great thing in New York, and I think it is just as well to begin that way till we know the ropes a little better. You may be in society all your life in Wottoma, and yet you have got to go slow in New York. We have been to one dinner at a gentleman’s that father was thrown with in business, but they seemed to think we did not want to meet anybody but Western people; and there was nothing about it in the society column. Father had a good time, for he always takes his good time with him, and the lady and her daughter were as pleasa
nt to me as could be; mother could not be got to go; but I did not come to New York to meet Western people, and I shall think over the next invitation we get from that house. They are in the Social Register, and so I suppose they are all right themselves, but if it had not been for a crowd of people that came in after dinner, I should not have thought they knew anybody but strangers. I should say nearly all of these after-dinner people were New-Yorkers; there is something about the New York way of dressing and talking that makes you know them at once as far as you can see them. I had some introductions, but I did not catch the names any of the time, and I could not ask for them the way father does, so I did not know who I was talking with.

  They all seemed to talk about the theatre, and that was lucky for me, because you know I am so fond of it, and I have been to nearly everything since the season began: Irving, of course, and Maude Adams, and John Drew, and “Colorado,” and “Way Down East,” and “Eben Holden,” and I don’t know what all. Father likes one thing and I like another, and so we get in pretty much all the shows. We always take a box, and that gives father practice in wearing his dress suit every night for dinner; I could hardly get him to at first; and he kept wearing his derby hat with his frock coat till I had to hide it, and now I have to hide his sackcoats to keep him from wearing them with his top-hat.

  Now, Caro, I know you will laugh, but I will let you all you want to; and I am not going to put on any airs with you, for you would know they were airs the minute you saw them. We do bump along in New York, but we are going to get there all the same, and we mean to have fun out of it on the way. Mother don’t because it is not her nature to, like father’s and mine. She still thinks we are going to pay for it, somehow, if we have fun, but that is only the New England in her, and does not really mean anything; as I tell her, she was not bred in Old Kentucky, but brown bread and baked beans in Old Massachusetts, and if ever she is born again it will be in South Reading. The fact of it is she is lonely, with father and me out so much, and I am trying to make her believe that she ought to have a companion, who can sit with her, and read to her, and chipper her up when we go out. I need some one myself to write notes for me, and my idea is that we can make one hand wash another by having some one to be a companion for mother who can be a chaperon for me when father cannot go with me. We have advertised, and we shall soon see whether the many in one that we want will appear.