Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Yours ever,

  W. ARDITH.

  XIII.

  From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

  NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 1902.

  Dear Mother:

  I have been waiting till I could get warm in my place before writing again, and now I am not only warm, but I seem to be the centre of a life-giving heat for the whole Ralson family. This has its drawbacks. You may think it is easy to sit reading to Mrs. Ralson and cheering her up, and at the same time go out with Miss Ralson in her automobile to those semi-public functions where she needs a chaperon, and I do not need an invitation, only a ticket; but when it comes to the test, it is different. As for Mr. Ralson, I all but sew on his buttons: Miss Ralson seemed disposed, one while, to draw the line at mending his gloves, but she has since withdrawn it. They are all as good to me as they can be, and if I could ever love the daughter of a Trust, I should love Miss Ralson. I have gone back so far on my principles as to love the wife of a Trust, and she seems to reciprocate my passion. I have had to hear so much talk about the “beautiful home” in Wottoma, from her, that I begin to feel as if I had come from it, and I have made a picture of it from memory on the next leaf. You cannot see the Mississippi from Mrs. Ralson’s window, because it is not in the picture, but you could if you were in the room there, for the “home” stands on the bluff overlooking the river.

  I am not the only pebble on the beach with the Ralsons, as Miss Ralson would say, or the only sun in the universe, as I should say. There is a young Wottoma man who comes to see them and seems to be a general favorite. Miss Ralson says he is “literary,” and has been disappointed, not in literature, but in love; and she is doing what she can to comfort him, by taking him out to teas, and matinées and operas, and giving him lunches and dinners here between times. The old folks are comforting him, too. Mrs. Ralson almost thinks he helped build the “beautiful home,” and he spells me with her when Miss America takes me out and talks to me about him. I don’t know whether I quite like his taking to comfort so kindly. He is very handsome and very pretty-behaved, but I thing a literary man ought to lit, sometimes, and I don’t see when Mr. Ardith does, unless it’s when he gets home from the opera, and ought to be in bed. He may burn the one o’clock oil, then, but he comes to lunch as blooming the next day as if he had not been sicklied over the least bit. I wouldn’t say it to everybody, but you’re a mother, or a sister if I include Lizzie, and I’m afraid Mr. Ardith is something of a social self-seeker, and has too good an appetite for the loaves and fishes. I don’t really know anything against him, and he’s always nice to me, and I’m quite ashamed, but that’s the way I feel about him. If you feel differently, don’t mind me!

  The other day Miss Ralson came home from a tea with him, where they had met an old gentleman from Boston who seemed to take both their fancies. It seems that Mr. Ralson had been rather rough with the old Bostonian, and Miss Ralson made him go back and try to make it right, and Mr. Ralson asked him to call, and got a good going-over from his daughter for doing it, which he took as meekly as if he hadn’t a cent in the world. But it was not such a mistake after all, and yesterday afternoon Mr.

  Binning’s card came up, and he after it. Nobody was at home but Miss Ralson and Mr. Ardith, and she sent him in to stay with her mother, and brought me out. She told him she was not going to have him hanging round, unless she could say he was a cousin, and she couldn’t conscientiously say any such thing; and she wanted me because I looked more proper, anyway. This Mr. Binning didn’t seem to think I did, but I could see that he didn’t know what to make of me, anyway, when she introduced him.

  Mother, you’re such a purely country person that you won’t understand, but my presence said in much better English than I ever use, “Companion, or Secretary, or possibly Typewriter, or Provincial Friend, or Poor Relation, at the best;” and Mr. Binning was all the while trying to fit his behavior to one or the other or all of the possibilities. Every now and then he would say something to me so respectful that I could feel the consideration, and almost the compassion, sticking through, and before I could get off a half-frozen answer, he was switched onto the mainline after Miss Ralson. He had really come to see her, anyway, and I could see that he was perfectly struck up with her gorgeousness. She is gorgeous, and makes anybody else in the room look like thirty cents, as she would say; all the slang you find in my letters is from her. He was very cultivated and talked with her about Europe, and I don’t know what else, but especially pictures, I remember. I believe he led up to pictures, and got her to talking of the Titians, so that he could say he must have felt herself quite at home among them. Now, mother, this was where I fell down, (Miss Ralson’s expression) for I had to look in a cyclopedia at the Lenox Library to find out that Titian was a painter who mostly painted golden red blondes, and I didn’t know till then what Mr. Binning was driving at. But it was pretty when you got it, and Miss Ralson said it was one of the nicest compliments she ever had, when I explained it fully to her this morning. In fact he was as nice as he could be. He is very fine-looking, in an old family portrait way; we have been trying ever since to make out how old a family portrait he is. He is either preternaturally young or prematurely gray, and he is either exquisitely refined or inexpressibly rude. He brought the cards of some ladies of the name of Van der Does, which he framed in the most beautiful apologies for their not calling with him, and begged Miss Ralson’s acceptance of an invitation to a tea where there is to be a monologue by a famous monologuist. I shall never know exactly whether he made the invitation include me or not, but if it did it was so delicately done that I might have supposed that it didn’t.

  It came quite at the end, and when he had gone Miss Ralson stood with the cards in her fingers, twisting them as if she were going to tear them in two, and getting redder and redder, till she was all over the color of her hair, and her blue eyes were like blue fire-works. Then she stopped, and opened her mother’s door, and called in, “Come out here, Mr. Ardith,” and when he came out she put the whole case to him. He didn’t hesitate a moment. “Why, go, of course,” he said. “It’s a semi-public thing, and you needn’t more than speak to your hostesses.” She ran toward him with her arms open as if she were going to hug him, and shouted out, “You good little worldly angel! You’ve been six weeks in New York and you know more about it already than I do after a year. But,” and this was where she seemed more disappointed than she had been offended before, “I almost wish it had been purely social.”

  Mother, even the rich have to eat humble pie in New York, I can tell you. I can see that Miss Ralson is going to this function, as they call it, and I can see that this horrid Mr. Ardith wanted her to go because he saw that she wanted to go, and because he thinks he can get in with the Four Hundred himself. It fairly makes me despise him. She was ready to tear up the cards, if he said so, and fling them in the fire, and he ought to have been man enough to encourage her. She is a climber; they came here to get up; but such a fellow as this Mr. Ardith is a creeper and a crawler. Ugh!

  Your affectionate daughter,

  FRANCES

  XIV.

  From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

  NEW YORK, January 19, 1902.

  My Dear Sister:

  I am only too glad to respond to your curiosity as I find it framed in the fine doubts, the delicate sniffs, of your yesterday’s letter. I do not know that I can add new expression to the physiognimies of my fellow sojourners here, but perhaps I can treat the background so as to throw them into more significant relief.

  You ask me whether these Ralson’s of mine (you are so good to give them me) are like certain types of the new rich who used to come on from the West to Boston in rather greater force than they do now, to see their sons through Harvard; and I must indefinitively answer, Not quite. They are Western and they are rich, but the sort of people you instance appeared among us on a semblance of the old duteous terms, which people like the Ralsons frankly ignore. They came among
us because they believed, or made believe, that their sons could get through Harvard better with them than without them; and the fact that their presence proved to have nothing to do with the end in view, did not affect the moral elevation of their pretence. But people like the Ralsons come to New York simply because they have got too rich to stay at home, and because they think they can spend their money more agreeably here than where they made it. They come in numbers and variety unknown to our pastoral aforetimes, and without any stay in the St. Louises, the Chicagos, the Cincinnatis, the Pittsburgs, of their native regions. It is said that these provincial centres, which you might think would attract them for a winter or two, have not the social force, or the glamour of the unknown, or the charm of an incomparable grandeur. Boston itself has not this last, and they can come only to New York in the hope of getting their money’s worth of whatever they dream of buying here.

  In a way their dream is sordid, but they are not always so sordid as their dream, and there is often an ingenuousness in their hope that touches. Some of them come without knowing a soul in the city, but trusting to the fortuities to bring them acquaintance; and they wait upon these with the patience of martyrs and heroes, or, rather, heroines: for it is not the men of their kind who have usually decided the family move on New York. The men might be satisfied to remain at home in the castles or palaces which they seem always to build in their first opulence, to over-awe the imaginations of their fellow-townsmen; but for their womenkind to be in, if they cannot be of, the metropolis, they leave their local supremacy behind, their great mansions, galleries, greenhouses, libraries of first editions, their whole undisputed state among people who envy if they do not revere them, and come here, and accept seats far below the salt at the second table or the third. They may not always know that they are not sitting in the best places, for there is a great deal of what is apparently society in New York, which is not the real thing, but which satisfies an ignorant aspiration as fully as if it were. The Walhondia for instance, looks like society; the fathers and husbands do not know the difference, and if the wives and daughters find it out, they say nothing about it beyond their family circles. At times, in fact, no one seems more on the outside of society here than another; that is, society itself seems to have no inside. If these newcomers do not find themselves in it, they may think that it is merely a mistake in regard to themselves; that they have been not counted in through accident. Coming here with their ten or twenty millions, they cannot disabuse themselves of the infatuation in which they have lived at home that they are persons of social consequence: they cannot imagine that there are native New Yorkers as rich as they, who are anxious to keep their riches unknown, and would not think it nice to be accepted on account of them; to whom the existence of the vulgar Four Hundred is a matter of supreme indifference; who figure in the society intelligence as little as possible.

  But the new-comers are not all, or not altogether bad. My Ralsons are so far from altogether bad that they have a certain wilding charm, and if they can continue sylvanly themselves, they will be the fine fleur of the patriciate in a few generations. Their manner does not betray the delusion of so many parvenues that aristocrats are refined people, instead of being people who on coming into their social advantages have known how to keep the rude force of their disadvantages; whose cooks, coachmen and lackeys have, generally speaking, always had better manners, because they have been obliged to have them. My Ralson, for instance, is no better behaved now than he was when he was beginning to make his millions; he is probably not so well behaved, for then he was trying by every art, even by his notion of politeness, to get on; but now his native rudeness has already a kind of authority, and in his presence I am amused by a forecast of distinction in him which society will recognize later. In the meantime he is himself, for good or bad; he is not afraid to be anything that he really is. If he is repulsive in his savage sincerity, he is no more to blame than his daughter, who is alluring in her savage sincerity, and is so much like him in nature that I am always wondering she is not like him in character. They are both prodigiously simple, and their common satisfaction in that pretty literary youth of mine who is always with them, greatly commends itself to my fancy. With whatever dreams of the jeunesse dorée the daughter may have come to New York it would seem as if she had wakened from them to a delight in him which her father shares, because he is used to deferring to her in matters of taste, and perhaps because he secretly thinks that literature is something the pretty youth will outlive, when he can be eventually worked into the business; for my Ralson is business, “first, last, and all the time,” as he would say, and never so much business as in his abeyance to his daughter.

  What the pretty youth thinks of them in his heart, or in that place where the literary soul has its being in the literary man’s frequent defect of heart, I do not know. He may not feel their difference from himself, so much as I see it, or he may perceive it as material for future literature. No doubt he is as business in his way as Ralson in his other way. At any rate he has come to New York in obedience to the same law of metropolitan attraction that has drawn the chief of the Cheese and Churn Trust. This law, if it was once operative in Boston is no longer so. I think we were once a capital, the capital of New England, but since New England has become more and more lost in the United States, we have ceased to be a capital. We may still be Athens, but we are not the Athens of Socrates, of Pericles; if Athens at all, we are the Athens of the middle or later Empire, whither the young men of generous ambitions resort for culture, but not for the fulfillment of their dreams of a literary career. We are no longer the literary, as we are no longer the commercial or the social metropolis, and the young Ardiths of the land (the youth’s name is Ardith) would no more think of coming up to us than the old Ralsons.

  I am not sure that I have given you the notion of these people which lay so clear in my own mind; I am afraid that I have confused it even there a little; and I am not sure that I can be more convincing about their relation to each other, than about their several psychologies. But I think there can be no cloud in Miss Ralson’s mind, whatever vagueness there may be in the pretty boy’s; and when she makes it plain that she wants him, neither he nor her father will keep her from having him. It may seem to you a very insufficient outcome of her social aspirations — her father really has none, being purely commercial, though I do not mean by this that outside of his business he is immoral — and yet I cannot help thinking it would be very well. I wish I could make you see it as I do, for I should like you to enjoy with me a genuine New York idyl like this. As a mere witness of the affair, I have all sorts of tender perturbations, hopes, misgivings, desires, and at times, a rich potentiality of unhappiness in it. I am not sure that the youth is so consciously in love as the maiden, but I have been given to understand that in things of this kind both sides cannot be active, and I do not know why the youth should not be passive, sometimes, instead of the maiden. It adds a pleasing poignancy to the situation, and though the material is not that which I should once have fancied interesting me, I am now aware of a certain charm in it which I wish I could impart. But you, Margaret, are still in and of Boston, and I am in New York, liberated to the enjoyment of social spectacles which you could only view with abhorrence. If you tell me you cannot taste my pleasure in the loves of a young Western journalist and the daughter of one of the most offensive, and perhaps mischievous of the modern trusts, I shall not be hurt, but I shall not press my pleasure upon you. In fact, I am not sure that at my age I can altogether justify it to myself. We will suppose it is a book about some very commonplace people which I had liked for not very definable reasons, but which I will not insist upon lending you unless you urge me.

  OTIS.

  XV.

  From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

  NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 1902.

  My dear Linc:

  My letter of the 14th, which has crossed yours, must have given you much of the polite information you seek; but I will
try to be a little more specific. The great difference between New York and Wottoma, is quantitative. Most Americans are like most other Americans, whether they have been here two hundred years or twenty, and the New Yorkers have the advantage of the rest principally in being here to the number of two or three millions instead of ten or twelve thousand. Take Wottoma, as a means of comparison. Well, when some high-born dame of yours, say a Daughter of the Black Hawk War, gives an afternoon reception in honor of some weary lecturer on South High Street, most of the ladies come on foot; at the outside you can count up ten or a dozen vehicles at the front gate, including family carryalls, and measly old third-hand hacks from the depot. The men all walk, and when they get inside they find the middle-aged and married women packed round the lecturer, trying to catch the well-worn pearls of wisdom that drop from his lips, and the young fellows carrying tea and chocolate from the tables where the young ladies are pouring, and doing their best to flirt a little on the way without spilling the fluids. The girls are willing enough not to be “presented,” and are having as good a time as they can among themselves in circles that it takes all a fellow’s courage to break into; and they try to act as if he were intruding when he does, or he feels as if they were. The old fellows hulk round on the outskirts, and keep a good deal on the front porch, and look superior and sarcastic. In all, there are about two or three hundred, and that takes in the whole society of the place.