Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  My dear Caroline:

  I do not know where to begin, and so I will begin in the middle. Mr. Ardith and I are engaged, and the circumstances are such that I think you ought to be the very first to know it, outside of my own family. It happened this afternoon, quite out of a clear sky, though I guess there must have been an electrical disturbance somewhere ever since we met here in December. The disturbance was increased by something I imagined, the other day, and there has been a very low pressure in the region of the heart for the whole week past. But now it is all over, and I am so happy! He has been so brave in explaining everything away; he is the soul of truth and honor, and if I had always understood the literary temperament as well as I do now, I would never have had the least anxiety.

  It may seem rather heartless for me to be parading this before you, Caro, but I do not believe you ever really cared for him, or you would not have given him up; and now if I don’t let you have a second chance you can’t blame me, exactly, can you? My first idea was, “Now I must write to Caro Deschenes, and take back that invitation,” but I am not going to take it back, and you must come the same as ever. We haven’t either of us done anything to be ashamed of, have we? Any way, I’m not ashamed, and you must come and help me brazen it out. That is what we both think, Wallace and I, and he joins me in wishing to see you again, and in asking your blessing. I can’t exactly ask you to come and be my bridesmaid, for we haven’t got quite so far along as that, yet, but if you will come and visit me, you will be a ministering angel. I will not write the great news to any one else in Wottoma, and I will ask you not to say anything just at present. My, but what a chapter for the Sunday edition of the Day! If they come to you for a photograph, I wish you would give them that one with the lifted profile — the one with the Madonna look. Mr. Wibbert has got lots of Wallace. With all the love I can spare from him, Yours devotedly,

  AMERICA.

  XXXIII.

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

  NEW YORK, Feb. 7th, 1902.

  Dear Lincoln:

  I feel that I left you at the close of an exciting installment last night, as if I were writing some wretched romance, instead of this wretched reality.

  I posted my letter on the way to the doctor, who found things not so bad as they had looked to the family, but it is a severe case, with the peculiarities of the sudden sort of seizure. As I cannot go to the sick room, I am rather left out of it; and what do you think? I have spent the morning, while waiting to be sent on errands, and doing odd jobs about the house, in writing more “Impressions of a Provincial” for the Signal! How strangely we are made, we who are born to scribble! I feel a sort of disgrace in it, but it is not as bad as the other sort of disgrace I feel, and it is a change, any way.

  I was to have gone down to the Walhondia this morning, to breakfast there, but I had to send a note instead. I was afraid it would bring America back with it, on one of her magnificent impulses, but women’s instincts are to be trusted in these matters. She merely answered me with a note of beautiful sympathy (that made me want to have the mountains fall on me,) and forbade me to think of coming near her if I could be of the least use in the world here. But I had better go, and I shall, as soon as old Baysley gets home this afternoon; there ought to be some man about, here. I beg his pardon for calling him old Baysley; my light-hearted disrespect for him is gone, along with the rest of my light-heartedness. I can only pity the poor old fellow, and hope that I am not pitying myself at the same time. I will keep you posted, of course.

  Yours ever,

  W. A.

  XXXIV.

  From Mr. Otis Binning to Mrs. WALTER Binning, Boston.

  NEW YORK, February 14, 1902.

  My Dear Margaret:

  In writing the date of this letter I have realized what day it is, and I venture to offer myself for your Valentine: I do not believe Wally will really mind much.

  As a metropolis we are in tiptoe expectation of Prince Henry’s coming, and if we can believe the newspapers, which we never can, our businesses and bosoms are penetrated with a generous impatience, alloyed by no base respect of persons, or love of royalties, but inspired solely by a hitherto unimagined sympathy for the great German people and their magnanimous ruler. Some of us do not see quite how we are going to express this in the municipal reception of a representative who was born and not chosen for the business, but we are going to try, on a scale never before attempted. You will read all that in the public prints, and I have nothing subjective to offer you concerning it. If there is anything that really interests or amuses me it is the fact that while this storm is going on in the newspapers, the depths of our life are quite unstirred by it. We read of the Prince’s coming, and perhaps we fleetingly think of it, but, in a wonderful measure, nobody speaks of it. We are queer, we Americans, and if any one takes up the study of us in that dark future when we shall have ceased to be Americans, he will find the New Yorkers, and not the frontiersmen, the queerest Americans of all. In fact the New Yorkers are the frontiersmen, as I will explain to you, some day; but now the postulate would be too exhausting to handle.

  I usually have a nap in a secluded armchair at the club after lunch, and then I cross the dangerous trolley lines for a stroll into the Park. In common with a great many other very young and very old people, I make it a large part of my business there to feed the squirrels, which are of a tameness curiously flattering to human pride. Privately, I think the squirrel is an extremely stupid little beast, with but small and imperfect use of even such minor perceptive faculties as seeing and hearing. But when, after starting up on his hind feet, and holding his forearms pressed to his throbbing breast, he makes me out at a little distance, and comes loping across the grass to get the nut I am holding out to him, I feel very much as I think I should if a great beauty should mistake me for a splendid youth, or Prince Henry should shake hands with me. It seems to single me out from my race as worthy the Creator’s peculiar confidence, which this small creature is commissioned to express; and though I see plenty of other squirrels making for nuts held out to them by other men, the fact does not affect my self-approval; I am still singly our Creator’s choice. In fact I think I have some really special reason to be satisfied with myself, for in the Ramble there is one squirrel who is my personal acquaintance: not because I think he knows me, for I doubt it, but because I know him, though I should not know him by his mental or moral difference from other squirrels so much as by the fact that one of his paws has been hurt, perhaps in the day of —

  —” Old, unhappy, far-off things,

  And battles long ago.”

  The scar may be from a wound received in the worst of causes, but it serves: it distinguishes that squirrel, and gives him a limp to which my imagination bows. I am not sure that it does not make him cross; at any rate he is rather bad-tempered, and he does me the honor, when he climbs upon my knee, to bite my finger if I am slow in getting out the kernels of the nuts I give him. He prefers them crumbled up, and he noses for them in my palm like a minute pig. This gives me a delight which the cleanest conscience could not impart. I glow with the most agreeable self-righteousness, and I am aware of smiling in my rapture like a sinner who has made sure of the forgiveness he has been rather uncertain of.

  This afternoon I found my squirrel, or my squirrel found me, with unusual ease in the Ramble, and I was sitting with him on my knee, feeding him crumbled peanuts (he prefers peanuts) and rejoicing in the excellent terms which I was on with my Maker through some merit of mine which that sagacious animal had divined, when I was sensible of being rather steadily gazed at. Steps had paused a little way from me and I surmised another squirrel amateur: we often stop to look at one another and envy one another in moments of high success. I enjoyed my triumph for a due space, and then I looked up to meet the gaze which I felt, and found that it was my pretty boy from Iowa who was looking at me. I dare say he would have respected my preoccupation with superior interests, and passed on, but just then the
squirrel finished the last morsel of his peanuts, and ran away. This allowed me to give Mr. Ardith a less divided inspection, and I discovered such tragedy in his face as I have not often seen off the stage. What will you say, Margaret, when I declare that I discovered there a hardy cynicism, mixed with a fine grief, and an utter despondency, such as one does not often find in the human countenance even on the stage? But I know you will say that I discovered them there after he told me what was the matter.

  The strange part is that he did not tell me. I asked him how he did, and he answered that he did very well, and while he informed himself of my health, I made room for him on my bench, and invited him to sit down. The day was so mild, and I was so well wrapped up that I did not mind his taking cold if he chose to risk it; in fact I was not conscious of his seeming rather pale and pinched till afterwards. He sat down, and told me that we had met first in that place, and I said, “Oh, yes, yes,” till he reminded me of an incident which I had forgotten, but which he seemed to have valued greatly. It was of two young lovers whom we had happened to notice, walking up toward that colossal bust of Schiller, which you may remember here, in a turn of the path by the lake with their arms round each other. They glanced back and saw us, and their arms dropped. Then the young girl in a brave defiance, made a fine rush at her lover, and flung her arm about him again, and so they passed from our sight into the nook beyond the bust. My youth and I had some banter about the little episode, and at his saying it ought to go into a poem, I suggested putting it into a play. But the thing quite went out of my mind, and though when I next met the Iowa youth, I was teased with the sense of having met him before, I took it for one of those intimations of pre-existance which are rather commoner with us as we get on in life than the intimations of postexistence. I now said, “Well, I suppose they are still liebing and lebing,” with Schiller’s line about having done so, in my mind. “Have you got them into a poem yet?” He said, “No more than you in a play, I suppose.” I confessed that I had not immortalized them in drama, and then I suggested that it was perhaps as well to leave them in life, and at that he dropped his head, with a sigh, and said, “Oh, yes; but if it was a mistake of theirs, literature could have helped them out of it much easier than life could.”

  This notion, together with the sigh, interested me, and I scented a bit of psychology that I might purvey to you. “Then you think,” I said, “that such things are sometimes mistakes?” and “Aren’t they usually?” he asked. I said, “Well, that is what they are supposed to be in the first blossoming of the affections,” and he asked again, “The affections are supposed to learn wisdom for the second or third blossoming?” This would have been a sneer, if it had not been so sad, and I did not pounce upon the young man for it, as, for instance, you would have done. I merely said, “That is the accepted attitude toward such matters. Then you think

  ‘They are false guides, the affections,’

  in affairs of the heart?” I claimed that I was quite disinterested in the inquiry, for I was past making a selfish use of any wisdom on the subject that he happened to have. My young man laughed rather desolately, and said the affections seemed to be of so many minds, and perhaps that was the reason why people of experience distrusted them, and thought them false when they were really sincere in their devotion to several objects. I said that was rather interesting, but I asked, “Was it true?” He allowed that it might not be true, and put the burden on me of saying whether it was so or not. I confess that in a swift review of my past, I seemed to find some proofs of his theory, but I said that in all such cases I thought I remembered a supreme goddess of my idolatry, though there might be other demi-goddesses at the same time. I expressed my surprise that the fact had never been adequately treated in literature, and he answered bitterly that life had never been adequately treated in literature, either because life was too bold, or because literature was too timid.

  It seemed to me that this was a point at which I could becomingly put on the moralist with one so much my junior, and I intimated that the man who imagined himself in love with several women at the same time would do well to examine himself for the question whether he was not solely in love with himself. To my surprise, he was not daunted by my attitude, “Yes,” he said, “such a man might be a rascal, and yet he might be least a rascal in the reality of his varied preference. His only excuse for liking one woman for one thing, and another woman for another reason, would be the honesty of his liking.”

  “Well, my dear young friend,” I answered, “I should much rather contemplate such a predicament in literature than in life. In literature, I might be psychologically interested in him, or the author’s skill in working him out, but in life, I am afraid I should wish to kick him.” My mind was playing with the thought of that glowing daughter of the Trust whom I have seen so much with this Mr. Ardith, and I was wondering if he were associating some inferior deity with her in the worship which I have fancied him paying her. I thought it as well to let him know how a dispassionate witness would feel in such an event; but he was not crushed, or at least not silenced by my severity. “The man might wish to kick himself,” he said, “ and yet he might feel a mystery in the affair which the spectator couldn’t, and he might feel that the mystery was something for which kicking was not the just meed. Perhaps the author who treated him in literature would do well to take into account a genuine shame in him for what was so adverse to the general acceptations in such matters; they can’t be called convictions.” His courage interested me, Margaret, and I asked with a tolerence which I hope you won’t call disgraceful.

  “How would you justify him?” He answered, “I wouldn’t justify him; I would ascertain him,” and I thought that neat, if not acute, which I also thought it. “I would find out whether his condition was a real psychological condition, or whether it was only the sort of hallucination which the mere horror of a thing sometimes produces in us, and makes us feel as if it were ‘founded on fact.’” I could not deny that this was a very pretty conjecture, and I did not. “For literature?” he pursued. “Prettier than for life,” I said, and I said also that the thing might merit inquiry in life, too, where the first business of the inquirer would be to find out whether the fellow was not a plain rascal. He consented to that, and I went on. “Such a case I should think might very well be submitted to ‘the finer female sense’ that Tennyson believes more easily offended than ours.” Then I thought I might fitly cover all the possibilities while I was about it. “If it were a case in real life, the fellow couldn’t do better than go with it to some woman whom he suspected of not liking him. Then he would be apt to get an opinion worth having. And if it were a case in literature, he couldn’t have better criticism than such a woman’s mind.”

  To be quite honest, I had begun to fancy something unwholesome in the young man, and I was now willing to defend myself from him at the cost of hurting him. I did not like the direction the conversation had taken, but I don’t say this was very handsome of me; I had led him on to talk freely, and I was making a personal affair of what might be quite an abstraction. He sat still without saying anything, and then he sneezed violently three times. This made me look at him, and I saw that he was wearing a fall overcoat; he shivered, and I said, “Aren’t you made up rather lightly for this evening air? “and he answered that he had put on that coat earlier in the afternoon, and had got warm with walking, but now he did feel the chill. He rose to take leave of me, and I put out my hand to shake his; it was cold. “You must look out for the grippe,” I said, and he answered, “I’ve been living with it for the last three or four weeks. The people where I lodge have all been down with it one after another, like a row of bricks.”

  He lifted his hat, and went off down the walk away from the Schiller, and as he went I followed him with a forgiving pathos which I hope you will share, Margaret.

  Yours affectionately,

  OTIS.

  XXXV.

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

 
NEW YORK, Feb. 14, 1902.

  My Dear Mother:

  I want to tell you to begin with, that I feel as if all my principles had been pulled up by the roots, and flung out on the woodpile in the back yard, like old geraniums that had failed to do their duty indoors, and did not deserve anything better. I haven’t got a single principle left, and though I am not immediately concerned, I feel that I have no dependence but Providence, in case anything should happen.

  I wrote you about the call which Miss Raison made me make with her at the Baysleys’ to see what had become of Mr. Ardith; and I told you that we saw what, only too distinctly. But that seems to have been an optical delusion. Mr. Ardith certainly appeared to be engaged to the youngest Miss Baysley, but if we are to believe subsequent events, he was not engaged to her in the least. A week after we had settled down to our mistake, Mr. Ardith called, and asked for the ladies. This gave Miss Ralson a chance to say that she was sick, or something, but her mother had heard his name, and she insisted on having him come up. I received him, and then while I went in to make Mrs. Ralson up for company — I mean morally, for physically the maid looks after her, of course — Miss Ralson found that she could and would see him, and she did. What took place I shall probably never know in detail, but when I came back to get Mr. Ardith for her mother, he was gone, and Miss Ralson astounded me by grappling my unyielding form to her heart, and announcing that she was engaged to Mr. Ardith. She said that sometime she would tell me about it, but that now she merely wanted to celebrate, and she went on with a celebration in which Mr. Ardith was proclaimed the noblest and wisest and best of his sex. He seemed to have achieved his preeminence by having told her that he was not in love with the youngest Miss Baysley, but only and always with herself, and that the appearances which were so much against this theory could be easily accounted for on the ground that he had felt very sorry for Miss Baysley in her trials with her sick family, and had befriended her in every way he could, to the extent of helping her with the housework, but he had never told her that he cared for her, and he was not responsible for her thinking he did, if she thought so.