Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Well, at this reception of Casman’s the other day, there were carriages stretching from his house to the ends of the block both ways, on both sides of the street, and coming and going all the time — all kinds of horse and horseless vehicles, glitteringly new and authoritatively old, with footmen and coachmen on the boxes, sitting on their overcoats like in the English illustrations, the footman with his hands on his knees, and the coachman holding the reins in one hand, and the butt of his whip on his thigh with the other. The people were streaming in and out, a steady current, under a long canopy from the curbstone to the door, and the barkers, as they call them, giving the coachmen their numbers when they came, and yelling out their numbers when they went. I suppose there were four or five thousand men and women at that reception, but after you got inside the house was so big that everybody had room. A desultory Hungarian band was modestly tucked away somewhere among the tubs of palms and banks of flowers, where it could be heard and not seen; and after you had got your hat and coat check, and joined the ladies of your party, and been inspected by old Casman and his sister-in-law, and been presented to his niece, and asked if you had met Miss Everwort, and told, Well, you must; you sidled off with your ladies, and looked round to see if you knew any one, and pretended to be glad you didn’t; and talked to America and her companion as vivaciously as if you had just been introduced. Then you asked them if they were not hungry, and when they owned up, you found them the way into the dining room, where a lot of men waiters were in charge, and you ordered anything you wanted, and they brought it to you. Everywhere were hundreds of people, looking like half a dozen in the big spaces, and all having the same good time you were. Then you went back to the drawing room to try for a glimpse of Miss Everwort, and if you had our luck with that nice old Bostonian, you were presented to her, and came away feeling that you had had the time of your life, among the five thousand if not the Four Hundred.

  Of course, Casman had overdone it a little; he is new to the world, though he has been in it about sixty years; but his reception wasn’t a bad type; and you were excited by it, and leaned forward in the automobile, and flirted with America so far as to ask for a flower out of her bunch of violets, and tried to smell it, when she gave it to you, under the cold eye of the companion; the old gentleman, after a talking to America gave him for being rather curt with our nice old Bostonian, seemed to think he would rather walk. Yes, it was all mighty interesting, and I could feel it taking on just the right phrases, at the time. It was the best kind of material, but not socially the finest, though I don’t know whether I could make you understand the difference between that Afternoon, and another Afternoon, which my fine old Boston cock got us asked to yesterday at the Van der Doeses, whom he seems to be on familiar terms with. We couldn’t make out what the occasion was, but the excuse was a monologue by Miss Crawford; and I wouldn’t want a better excuse! It was the most exquisite piece of characterization I could have imagined; I never saw, or dreamt of seeing, anything like its perfection; and after it was over, a little well-bred murmur, and a little tender tapping of finger-tips ran round the room, and then the host and hostess went inconspicuously up to the monologuist — the wonderful little genius! — and inaudibly complimented her; and tea began to come round of itself, somehow. I did not know but America had made a break with that laugh of hers, but I guess not. The note of those people seemed to be doing what they pleased, if they had known what; and I suppose they would have laughed if they had felt like it; but if it wont appear invidious to such an aristocrat as you, I will say that they hardly seemed up to the art of the thing as the people at Casman’s would. Our old Bostonian was, though, and he asked America if she would like to speak to Miss Crawford, and he got Mrs. Van der Does to introduce her; and America took both her hands into hers, and I looked away for fear she was going to kiss her.

  Now, what I mean by the quantitative difference between New York and other places, is that these two sorts of things keep going on here all the time, the Casman sort and the Van der Does sort, on a scale that you simply can’t imagine in Wottoma. You can have the Casman sort once in a winter, but of course not the Casman size, when the right lecturer comes along to make it with; and you have got the root of the Van der Does sort in the first settlers, which will break out a hundred years from now, maybe, like a century plant, but here the century plant blooms every day. Understand? No, you wont, you can’t! You will have to come here and see for yourself; and that makes me want to tell you something. Don’t give it away, especially in print, till I’ve tried my hand; but old Casman sent for me the morning after his reception, and asked me how I would like to do something for the Sunday Signal. I guess Miss Hally had been putting up a job on him, and he had got the idea that I could write, say, “The Impressions of a Provincial,” giving a simple, frank account of New York, from a fresh country arrival’s point of view, that would sweep “this fair land of ours” from ocean to ocean. I took to the notion, at once, and I am going to make the effort. It will give me a chance to work in the material that has been piling up on my hands since I came, and I believe I can do something that will plant me at the feet, at least, of George Ade, if I can get the right attitude; I’m going to invent a character for my provincial. And then, Linc, don’t you see? If I’m ever in the saddle, here, I am going to pull you up behind. If New York can’t carry double, I am very much mistaken.

  The grippe still hangs on with poor old Baysley, but we manage to rub along, somehow; the old lady and Jenny have got it, but they are light cases. I still make the fires for Essie, though I feel as if I were kindling them with the budding laurels from my own brow.

  Always yours,

  Linc.

  W.A.

  XVI.

  From Miss AMERICA RALSON to Miss CAROLINE

  DUCHENES, Wottoma.

  THE WALHONDIA, January the nineteenth, Nineteen hundred and two.

  My dear Caroline:

  I am so glad you think you can come, and I will try to make a date for you — the earlier the better. I would have written sooner to say so, but I have had more on my hands than usual, as you will see by this being in typewriting. I will have to talk it over with father, and see what his engagements are. March is not a very good month, on account of being nearly all Lent, this year, but if you do not mind having rather a quiet time, it will be all right.

  Thank you for the hint. I supposed it was off for good, but I see no reason why you should not try to have it on again, if you wish. There has been no allusion to the matter, since the first time, and I don’t know just how the land lies. I should say that your engagement had been accepted as final, and that the announcement to the contrary had better not come through me. If you prefer, you can let things rest, till you come on, and then you can look the ground over for yourself. I don’t see how there can be any objection to a girl’s changing her mind once or twice if she wants to.

  Do let me hear from you soon again, and if you are still decided to come in March, I have no doubt that I can arrange for your visit then as well as later. The great thing is to have you here.

  Yours affectionately,

  AMERICA RALSON.

  XVII.

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

  NEW YORK, Jan’y, 19, 1902.

  Dear Linc:

  This afternoon when I got home from a matinée with America Ralson and Miss Dennam, I found the Baysley family very much cheered up. The old gentleman had taken a decided turn for the better, and Jenny and the old lady were able to be about, helping Essie get the “tea” which I knew was to be their evening banquet. My heart smote me when I thought of the dinner I was going down to have at Lamarque’s, and I would have been glad to ask the whole family to join me there; but that was not practicable, and so I compromised on Essie. “What is the reason you can’t go with me to Lamarque’s this evening?” I said, as if we had talked before of her going with me sometime, though we never had; and the joyful color flushed up in her face and faded out, and she an
swered with another question, “What do you mean?” In answer I merely added, “Then we could take in a vaudeville show, and still get home early.”

  “I couldn’t leave,” she said, and she put the plate she was holding softly down on the table, as if it were her last hope, and sighed so pathetically that I saw I must carry the thing through. “You might ask,” I suggested. “Or no, I will,” and I called into the kitchen from the dining-room where we were, “Mrs. Baysley, Essie says she won’t go with me to dinner at Lamarque’s, and to Keith’s afterwards. Can’t you make her?”

  “Oh, you awful” — Essie began, catching her breath, but the joke was so prodigious that none of them were proof against it. When her mother made sure that I was joking in earnest — the Baysley’s think I am a tremendous joker — she said, “Why, of course Essie must;” and then Jenny began to offer Essie her best clothes; and between refusals and protests, and laughs and outcries from the women, and feeble crows of command from the old man in his room, Essie was forced to drop everything, and do as I bid.

  They did get her very tastefully together, and in such good time that when she came to me in the parlor, with her mother and sister following limply but proudly after her, I was disposed to linger over her sympathetically as long as they liked. It is astonishing how soon women take on New York in their dress when they come here. Mrs. Baysley told me that these were just the girls’ old Timber Creek things; they had been too busy since they came to get anything for anybody. But it was Timber Creek with the difference that comes from studying the fashions on the streets and in the shop windows here.

  Essie is too little to look distinguished, but no one is too little to be chic, and chic was what the eyes at Lamarque’s said of her when she showed like a pretty flower through the rifts of the cigarette smoke: the smoking goes on straight through the dinner at Lamarque’s. Those cub authors were out in force at their corner table, and between their talk about themselves and each other, I knew from the way they stared at us that we were giving them a topic. Every fellow there was making mental note of us, and heaven knows how many poems, sketches, studies and stories Essie went into on the spot. I laughed inside to think how I had got the start of them all, and how none of them saw us more objectively than I did, or felt our quality as material half as intelligently. I tried to make Essie understand who they were, and appreciate their greatness; but she was unconscious as a child through everything. Of course a child is not unconscious of its looks or its behavior, and I knew that she knew she was pretty and was anxious to be very correct. She peered round to see whether she should take her hat off, and then kept it on, as if she had dined at Lamarque’s all her life. The lady at the next table had her gloves on the table, and after the soup came I saw Essie’s gloves under the edge of her plate. The garçon — he knows me and my French and flattered me and it with a smiling “Bonsoir, monsieur,” that made Essie’s blue eyes dance — asked whether I would have red wine or white, and when it came white, as I had ordered, I offered to pour it into Essie’s glass, and I saw her tremble as she gasped out, “Oh, do you think I’d better?” I said, “Well, it isn’t very good,” and I put the cork back into the bottle for both of us, and I could feel her heart lighten of the misgivings that the wine had burdened it with. She began to be innocently gay, and to let out that she had noticed everything, and taken in that we were dining in the front parlor of what had been a private house, and that the other dining-room was the back parlor, and the wall-paper had not been changed since the family had left the place. She kept down her surprise at the alertness with which we were served, and she took Lamarque’s personal intervention, in the matter of crowding in a table for new-comers where there was already scarcely room to turn around, as things of a life-long experience, and she helped me receive with dignity the old fellow’s compliment when he visited us to hope that we found everything right. At first she was not going to speak of the food, but I spoke of it and then she was very glad to be allowed by politeness to praise its variety and novelty. I knew she had never seen a dinner in courses before, but she went through it as if it were her habit, keeping an eye on me to see what I liked or left, and following suit. I could see she was anxious not to disgrace me, in any way, and I made it easy for her now and then to pass a dish that she did not want, by saying that I never cared much for that dish. It was not a bouillabaisse night, and I pretended to be very sorry for that; but it was an ice-cream night, and I could see that when the small flat block of chocolate and vanilla came, Essie was without a regret. Over the little cups of coffee she began to betray that she had been noticing the company, and she gave an excellent imitation of being supremely interested in my favorites: the old Spaniard, or old Italian, who always gets half way through his dinner at a small corner table before he is joined by a deeply hatted lady and her husband coming freshly in from the cold outside, and pressing about the grate at their backs till they forget it in their criticism of the dishes; the prematurely grayhaired and eye-glassed lady whom I call my Mystery, and who eats all through her dinner with a book propped open against a tumbler; the middle-aged French mother with her daughter still in short skirts and very jeune fille, whom she lets see nothing except out of the corners of her eyes, but gives half a bottle of Lamarque’s California claret, while the girl sits demure, and does not speak even when Lamarque comes up to compliment her mother in their native tongue.

  I looked at my watch at last, and said, If we expected to get in many of those stunts at Keith’s! and Essie started nervously, and then controlled herself and let old Lamarque help her on with her jacket (he likes to help the ladies on with their jackets) as unconsciously as if she were used to it every night. She bowed silently to his “Bon soir, madame!” and went out before me so gracefully, so prettily, that happening to look back over my shoulder at the cub authors’ table, I saw them all staring their admiration, and one fellow bowed involuntarily. “Do they know you?” she asked, and then I reflected that a girl always has eyes in the back of her head, and need not seem to be turning round to see what concerns her. I mumbled something about its being the custom for people to bow at Lamarque’s to the parting guests; but I was easily more rattled than she was.

  In fact, her ignorance of the world that she has been living on the edge of for the last six months is so untroubled that everything but the innocent joy of our night’s adventure was lost upon her. She is scarcely more than a child in years, and she is still a child in nature, so that I could give her this pleasure as safely as if she were ten years old; and I decided not to do it by halves. The gorgeous old fellow in livery who stands before Keith’s and owns up when you put him on his honor, said there was not a seat left in the house, and her face fell; but I asked coolly, “What is the matter with a couple of box-seats?” and he confessed that there might be some box-seats; I could try inside. So I blew in two extra half dollars, and before Essie knew it we were in the stage-box rapt in the monologue of the Man in the Green Gloves.

  I won’t go through the whole list of standard stunts: the girl with the Southern accent that sings pathetic ballads of the lost cause, and then coon songs for her recalls; the tramp-magician that praises and blames himself with “Oh, pretty good! oh, pretty rotten!” the tremendously fashionable comedy sketch, all butlers and footmen, and criss-cross love-making between Jack and some one else’s wife so as to cure Jack’s wife of making love with the other lady’s husband and convince her that there is nobody like Jack; the Viennese dancers, and the German acrobats and acrobatesses; the colored monologuist, and the man in a high hat and long overcoat, unbuttoned to show his evening dress, who balances feathers on the point of his nose and keeps a paper wad, an open umbrella and a small dinner bell tossing in the air: they were all there and more too, and nothing that any of them said or did was lost upon Essie Baysley. I could see her storing it up for the family’s joy at second hand; and she did not give herself away by any silly outcries or comments. She bore herself like a lady; if not like a real lady, then like
an ideal lady; she watched the stage with one eye, and me with the other, and after she had taken a modest fill of these pleasures, she asked me the time, and said she ought to be going, for she did not want to leave them alone very long.

  She meant the other Baysleys, and would not let me stop for ice-cream on the way home, and then was penitent and apologetic for not thinking I might have wanted it very much. As a study she was charming, but in and for herself, a little of little Essie I found went a long way; and an evening of her conversation did not end prematurely at half past ten. I delivered her over intact to her mother and sister, waiting up for us, without so much as claiming at the foot of the stairs the kiss that Timber Creek usage would have entitled me to. In fact I forced down the ghost of a silly apprehension about myself and the child which I had felt, off and on, ever since she broke down and cried that night when I condoled with her about her father’s sickness, and the trouble they were all in. I had given her the time of her life, and heaven had kept me from saying or doing anything to mar it. I had done the whole hapless family the greatest pleasure that they had had since they came to New York, and made them feel, as the old man, wakeful with the rest, croaked out from his sick room, like they were back in Timber Creek again. Their gratitude cost me just $3.50, counting in carfares and the fee to the waiter at Lamarque’s, and I call that cheap. I don’t exactly see how the experience will work into the “Impressions of a Provincial,” unless as an episode of Bohemia, or something of the sort, but it is pure literature as it lies in my mind, and I lend it to you, my dear Lincoln, for your exclusive enjoyment till I can get a scheme that will carry it to the public.