Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Yours ever,

  W. A.

  I find a note here from the glorious America, reminding me of my promise (I never made any!) for the opera Monday night. I am to dine at their hotel first, she tells me.

  XVIII.

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

  NEW YORK, Jan. 19, 1902.

  Dear Mother:

  This has been “my busy day” with Miss Ralson, and Mrs. Ralson has not been in it for a moment. It has lasted for a good while, and I have just now got home after dining at the hotel, and talking over with Miss Ralson the matinée we were at this afternoon. That is, I talked of the matinée, and she talked of Mr. Ardith, who went with us. He came on here, you know, in December to put his broken heart together; and now it seems that the girl who broke it is sorry she did it. At any rate she has disengaged herself from the man that she jilted him for, and is feeling round to see how she can get Mr. Ardith back. This is the short of it, but the long of it is much more exciting, and I wish I could give it to you. As Miss Ralson says, it would make a book, and I am not writing a book. I am not sure that I ought to be writing this letter, but I know that you will be as silent as the grave, and so I will keep on.

  The joke is that before Miss Ralson knew anything about the disengagement she had asked the girl here to visit her; they are old friends, and she was very cordial, but to-day I have written a letter for her, taking back a good deal of the cordiality, and a little of the invitation; and if you can’t guess why, you are not the mother I took you for. Mr. Ardith seems to have been here, day in and day out, ever since he came to New York, and he has not had to push in. There! I will say that much, and I am ashamed of saying anything. If I add that there is no accounting for tastes, and that if Mr. Ardith was the Last Man, I would take my chance with the next, you can understand how I feel about it. Of course I keep a straight face, and when Miss Ralson takes ground so high that no personal feeling can be supposed to be up there with her, I don’t do anything to let her dream that I am on, as she would say. It is no business of mine if she wants to throw herself away; only if she does I suppose I shall be out of a job.

  And I had begun to like the job, so much! Yes mother, your bad little girl finds life in the Walhondia very, very comfortable, and if there were no money in the job still it is so comfortable that she could not bear to have it stop. Besides, I do like the Ralsons, the whole family, and I don’t know but my affections would go round the whole Trust. They are good people; even the wicked father is good in his way; and as for the mother, well, I won’t say you haven’t some cause to be jealous. She depends upon me so much that perhaps she would want me to keep on here, after her daughter left off; but I’m afraid I should be so heartbroken I couldn’t stay.

  I got my envelope, as the wage-earners say, this evening, and I enclose the pleasing contents to you. I don’t suppose you will want to anticipate the interest, and I certainly don’t want to give old Grottel any agreeable surprises. But my first earnings were news too good to keep. They may be my last, so be careful of them. If Miss Ralson asked me my honest opinion of Mr. Ardith, and pressed me to give it, I am afraid I should, and that would settle me. With love to Lizzie,

  Your affectionate daughter,

  FRANCES,

  XIX.

  From WALLACE ARDITH to A. LINCOLN WIBBERT, Wottoma.

  NEW YORK, Jan’y 20, 1902.

  My dear Linc:

  I wish, while it is fresh in my mind, that I could give you a notion of my whole evening, as a pendant for you to hang on memory’s wall with the picture of Bohemian life which I painted for you in my last. This has in fact been another episode of Bohemian life as far as I’m concerned, and in a kind of way — a more expensive way — the Ralsons are gypsying here, too. Perhaps even our ancient Boston friend has broken bounds in our company, and is secretly outlawed along with us; though as far as looks go we were all as absolutely conventional as any party in the boxes of the opera to-night.

  Apparently the party was made for him, and I was asked to meet him at dinner, either from the social poverty of the Ralsons, or because I am social riches, which they chose to lavish on him with the gilt-edge victuals and drink. I leave you to decide the question, as old Ralson himself would. He was rather pressed into the service of America, and he did not go beyond looking the part of indulgent father, and munificent host. He had one of the best tables, especially decorated for the occasion, with the costliest floral exhibit that money could buy, and served by several of the handsomest and most exorbitant slaves, under the eye of their chief who kept it vigilantly out for them from any quarter where he happened to be. In that vast, indiscriminate splendor, Ralson had bought himself as much personal attention as he could have got at Larmarque’s for fifty cents; but having achieved the distinction, he rested in his dignity of host, and let his daughter manage the talk. I must say, he looked the part of an old barbaric aristocrat to perfection, with his long white mustache sweeping across his face, and his white hair snowily drifted on his head. I hope I am not indiscreet in saying that America’s shoulders dismayed me with their marble mass; I ought to be used to them by this time, but to-night they seemed to me a fresh revelation of her beauty.

  I will not specify my own share in the ensemble, but together I think we gave an imitation of people who had always been in the habit of dining in that state and going to the opera afterwards, which ought to have imposed upon even such an old worldling as Mr. Binning. I do not know how far he divined us; in the talk between him and Mr. Ralson which I caught, I heard him gently offering the old fellow opportunities of self-interpretation which I do not believe were all wasted. They even left him exhausted in one sense if not another, and America promptly rescued Mr. Binning from his silence, and turned him over to me, with a trust in my ability to take care of him in conversation which I hope was not mistaken. I would rather have talked with her, to be honest, but I was not going back on her.

  I believe the old fellow enjoyed every moment of it, but for us it was work; and it was work between the acts at the opera, where we renewed the struggle with fresh vigor. There is no use pretending, my dear Lincoln, that there is any common ground except mortality between youthfulness and elderliness; they can be a little curious about each other, but not interested after that little curiosity is satisfied. The best time of our evening was once when Mr. Binning went out to call on some friends of his in one of the boxes, and Mr. Ralson went out, as he did at the end of every act for something to support him through the next. Then America became suddenly psychological, and asked me what I thought all that display was like. She meant the necks and arms and dresses and jewels, and the black and blond heads, and the blur of faces, which the opera glass distinguishes and the eye leaves in a shining nebulosity. Of course I said, “Like a terraced garden of flowers,” but she answered, “No, like a glorified confectioner’s,”; and I had to own that with the weak, pale tones of the house decorations and the electric lights accenting the prevailing pinks and whites, and the golden and glassy surfaces of the women, and all the sharp variations of light colors, it was of the effect of candy. Then she rather astonished me by bursting out: “Huylers, Huylers! chocolates, and peppermint candies, and ice-cream sodas! And I am getting sick of it all! Those people seem to be willing to live on sweets, but I should like a few morsels of plain humanity, shouldn’t you?” I suggested that those would be cannibalism for me; and she said “Oh, pshaw! you know what I mean,” and without any act of transition, she said she would like to know what I really thought of her, anyway. I ventured to say, “Everything!” and that made her laugh, but sadly; and she said she hoped no friend of hers supposed she cared for the kind of life she had been leading, or trying to lead. Then again she leaped the chasm and demanded to know how I would like to be like Mr. Binning, at his age; she supposed he was intellectual, too. “If I could write poetry,” she zigzagged on, “I should write a poem about such a thing as this, where everybody is playing a part, as much off th
e stage as on it, and try to show what each one really was thinking, all the time. “A sort of masque,” I suggested, and she said, “I don’t know what a masque is,” and just then Mr. Binning came back, and began to make his neat, apt remarks about the opera. It was Tristan und Isolde, and he said he was of the age of Italian opera himself, and a thing like this made him feel as if he had outlived his youth, “Which people wouldn’t suspect, otherwise,” he concluded.

  He seemed to have felt the hardship of having his flow of soul dammed up in him where he had been. But I wished he had stayed away longer, for that revelation of America was precious. There was a little more of it when we had dropped Mr. Binning at his hotel after the opera, and I could see her kick her revered father on the shin with her slipper; Mr. Binning’s going had left us both on the seat in front of her. “Don’t you wish you were back in Wottoma, old gentleman?” she asked, and when he grunted that New York was good enough for him, she said, “Well, I do.” She rather snubbed me when I offered some excuses for the metropolis, and said, “Oh, yes, it’s all copy for you.” (She has got the word from me, I suppose.) At the hotel she jumped out and ran over the carpeted pavement toward the door, as if she were not going to bid me good-night, and then she whirled round, and caught my hand in her large clasp. “Are you coming to lunch tomorrow — with Miss Dennam?” I answered mechanically, I supposed so, and she said, “Well, see that you do,” and wrung my hand, and ran on again, while her father smiled under one side of his mustache, and winked a sleepy eye at me.

  As I understand it, what this wink expressed was nothing personal to me, but only something to the effect that America was doing exactly what she pleased; it recognized that she always had done so, and could be trusted always to do so, and still to do the right thing. It gave me the sense of a sublime faith in her on his part, which was to the credit of both, and it made me like the old fellow better than I have. I don’t know that I have disliked anything but his money, or rather the way he got it; but even that looks less baleful in the light of his wholesale love for such a wholesouled girl. There is growth in that girl; she can think as well as feel, and I begin to respect her mind as well as her nature, which is laid out on the largest scale. You are not to imagine that there is anything but the most dispassionate appreciation in this. I have had my medicine, and I am cured.

  Yours ever,

  W. Ardith

  XX.

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

  NEW YORK, Jan. 21, 1902.

  My Dear Sister:

  Your letter found itself punctually at the Perennial, this morning, when less punctually I found myself at my nine o’clock breakfast there. It added the fragrant aroma of your spirit to that of my coffee, and the joint stimulus ought to be sufficient for the pleasing task of answering it as instantly as you require. But if, at this pleasant window overlooking two miles of woodland in the Park, I fail of the responsive inspiration, blame not me, but the hospitalities of my Ralsons, which began last night with dinner, and ended with opera. As you hardily deny and disclaim any interest in my generalizations concerning their kind, and desire only my personalizations concerning them, and more specifically her, you will perhaps forgive them for getting so promptly into the excuses with which every letter ought to open.

  As nearly as I can understand, the affair was made for me, in recognition of some civilities of mine, and if they added my young friend from Iowa — I forget whether I have ever said his name was Ardith — it was no more from Miss Ralson’s wish to have him for herself than from her desire to save her father and me from each other. The mysterious Mrs. Ralson is so invalided as never to appear within my social ken, and the Trust himself is not of a conversation that holds out long in my quarter. He early decided that I was intellectual, I think, and with the admirable frankness of his class, he conceived of me — no doubt in a delicate compliment to your sex, — as a kind of mental and moral woman, to whom a real man, a business man, could have nothing to say after the primary politenesses. I do not know why he should rank me below Mr. Ardith, as I feel he does, unless it is because Mr. Ardith is still young enough to be finally saved from intellectuality, and subsequently dedicated to commerciality. But in the meantime he seems to have agreed with his daughter that the interposition of this nice boy’s mental substance was our only hope against wearing upon each other. The boy himself seemed to have the same inspiration, and Miss Ralson and he rent their souls asunder, from time to time, and filled the precarious space between the Trust and me when the friction of our reciprocal silences became too apparent.

  They did not know it, but I fancy, my dear Margaret, that these sacrifices bored them. It was worse at the opera than at the dinner even, for the Trust went out at the end of each act and did not come back till the curtain had risen on the next; so that though it does not much amuse me to call on people in their boxes, I left those poor young things to themselves as often as I could. I would much rather have stayed and talked with them, but beside the congenital difficulty that youth has in orienting itself with age (or middle age, if you civilly insist) and getting all sorts of hindering scruples and respects that intercept the common view, out of the way, they were drawn exclusively together by the passion whose charming play I was so loath to miss the least of. It is in that exquisite moment when alone such a thing can interest a third person: it had not yet owned itself to either, I fancy; when both have owned it, then the blow is given; it might as well be marriage, and done with it.

  That it is coming to that, with whatever fond delays and wanderings, I have no doubt, and that it is arriving more rapidly with her than with him is quite as certain. That is what forms for me its peculiar fascination, which is also a poignant regret that you are not here to share it with me at first hand. These young people are really worthy of your observance, Margaret; for though they are not, by the widest stretch of charity, to be accounted of that Boston cousinship which nature has made so large as to include nearly every type of merit, still they have a wilding beauty of being, at least in this supreme moment, which I think you would feel beyond any one else. You have the poetic imagination to which the girl’s greater courage of her emotions would justify itself; and when you saw her “eyes of sumptuous expectation,” fixed on him, as if in the brute phrase, she could eat him, your generous instinct would find the anthropophagy divine.

  As for the youth, I am sure he would at least not be sorry to be eaten. Yes, I am sure of that; or else I am sure that in his place I should not. It was delightful, when I came back just before the last act, to see them struggle away from their interest in each other, and turn to me with the topic it had masked itself in. “We were talking,” she promptly began, “about the play off the stage here,” and he turned to me as if he were intensely anxious for my wisdom. “Have you ever noticed the programme?” and she gave me her play bill, opened to that monumental leaf on which the names of the box-owners, and the nights when they appear, are inscribed. “Do you think that is good taste?”

  Then I began to take a Polonius part in another play, more subjective than the make-believe of the boxes, and entered upon a disquisition of American civilization, of which that leaf seemed to me one of the most signal expressions. I said that we were the frankest people in the world in recognizing the thing that was, and that when our democracy found itself in the possession of an aristocracy, with coronets and tiaras and diadems of precious stones, it wished to feel the fact in its bones. It was not the nobility in the boxes who wanted that list printed; they existed but for each other alone; and it was the commonalty in the parquet and uppermost galleries who enviously exulted in it. I added that of course it was droll, and that in the presence of the old American ideal it might make one’s flesh creep; but that the old American ideal was nowadays principally appreciable by its absence; and how, after all, did that leaf essentially differ from the repetitions of the society intelligence in all the papers?

  The young people followed me with an ostensible cons
tancy; they applauded the best points; I believe Mr. Ardith felt a literary quality in what I was saying; but she was hearing him in it all, and in the end my discourse was a solution of themselves, in which they were both chiefly conscious of each other. It amused me, but at last saddened me, and when I got home to bed, I reflected long upon the case. It was so old, that love business, and though it had the conceit of an eternal novelty in its dim antiquity and did freshen itself up in the perpetually changing conditions, it was really the most decrepit of the human interests.

  I expect you to deny this, and in making you a present of my evening’s experience, I promise not to take it hard of you if you say it is perfectly charming, and altogether different from the stale rubbish in the novels you have been reading.

  OTIS.