Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Nobody could have explained the letter: it was a crazy whirl of words, almost from the beginning, and at the end it went off into mere scribble. But we made out that why they wanted us to see it was that in one place he spoke of his mother, and wished he was at home. The letter was to some friend of his in the Iowa town where the Ralsons used to live, and America said she knew where his mother lived, and she would telegraph her at once. She had been perfectly cowed ever since she came into the apartment, and the Baysley girl’s bringing her the letter, and making her feel how she hated her had been the last touch. But as soon as she could find something to do, she braced right up, and it didn’t make any difference whether it was the wrong thing. I had the greatest time to get her to wait till she had seen her own doctor and got his opinion of Mr. Ardith before she went out to telegraph his mother; but I did manage it, and when the doctor came at last, I persuaded her to let me speak with him first.

  It was a good thing I did, and got him to modify what he said, for he told me it was the worst kind of an attack, and there were nine chances out of ten against Mr. Ardith. He said it was useless to telegraph his mother, at least till later in the day, for if he did not improve she could not get here in time, and if he did, we could send some encouraging message. I prepared him for America, with some hint of how the land lay, so that when he came in to see her, he fibbed nobly. He said there was absolutely nothing we could do there, and we had better go away. He promised to stay himself, and laughed at her anxiety. The nurse was the very best on his list, and besides — here he made his little break — the people of the house seemed to be devotedly attached to the young man, and would give any help that the nurse could need. We could come again when his fever had been subdued, but until it was, it would be worse than useless for his friends to see him. We could do no good; we could only do harm.

  I could see America wince when he praised the devotion of the Baysleys, and I knew what a pang it was for her to think that other girl could be there with him and do things for him, and she could not. Don’t you think it was rather cruel yourself, mother? I changed all round, anyway, and pitied her as much as I had pitied the Baysley girl before; for whatever Mr. Ardith has done, America Ralson has done nothing wrong. She has as good a right to care for him as if there were no other girl in the world, and she hasn’t done the Baysley girl any more harm than the Baysley girl has done her. In fact they are both of them perfectly guiltless toward each other. It has taken me a good while to reason this out, but now I have got hold of the truth of the matter, I am going to hang on to it whether Mr. Ardith lives or dies. His living or dying has got nothing to do with the justice of the case; and the only thing that troubles me now is that those two innocent creatures should have such hate for each other in their hearts on his account. But that is perfectly inevitable, and I suppose that women will go on hating each other as they do as long as there is a man left to make trouble between them. When I realize that, I could almost wish there were no men, and I have to remember father, and what an angel he was, before I can reconcile myself. I do not know that men are so much to blame; they are just weak, and pulled about this way and that wherever they see a pretty face. Perhaps there ought not to be any pretty faces; if we were all plain, like me, I dare say the men would be all right. Not that I think Mr. Ardith has meant to do wrong: I want to keep that in mind, while I realize that Miss Ralson is as good as the Baysley girl, and that just now she is not as happy, and not as fortunate, with all the money of the Cheese and Churn Trust behind her.

  I am writing this at the hotel, and America is in her room writing a letter to Mr. Ardith’s mother, to be sent as soon as the doctor says she can be told of his sickness. Every now and then she runs in to ask me whether she had better say this or that, or leave so and so out. My heart aches for her; but when she puts her tragedy face in to ask whether I spell grippe with one p and a final e, I want to laugh.

  Your affectionate daughter,

  FRANCES.

  XXXVIII.

  From Miss AMERICA RALSON to MRS. REBECCA ARDITH, Timber Creek, Iowa.

  THE WALHONDIA, NEW YORK, February the Fifteenth, Nineteen Hundred and Two.

  Dear Mrs. Ardith:

  I hope you will not be alarmed at getting this letter from a total stranger to you personally; though you may have heard your son speak of our family in Wottoma. The doctor wishes me to tell you that he is recovering from a pretty severe attack of the grippe, and will be about again in a few days. He is in good hands, and is having the best of medical care, and a trained nurse; so that you need feel no anxiety. The doctor did not want me to write to you, but I thought that if there was an interruption of his letters you would be uneasy, and I shall send this without consulting him, and keep you posted right along.

  I do not know whether Mr. Ardith has told you how much he has let us see him this winter. It has been very pleasant for us, especially for my mother, who enjoys talking with him about Wottoma; and my father thinks there is no one like him. He is away from home, at Washington, just now, or he would join my mother and myself in best regards.

  Yours sincerely,

  AMERICA RALSON.

  P. S. I will write again to-morrow, and let you know how Mr. Ardith is. I suppose he has told you that he has rooms with a family from your place. They are very good people, and have every reason to be kind to him, for he helped them in their own sickness, and I am afraid he has taken the disease from them. But that is not their fault, though I think that as soon as he can be moved, he ought to be in more comfortable quarters. I do not mean that his present room is uncomfortable. It is at the back, and has the sun, and it is very quiet, but the flat is small, and they are a good deal crowded, especially as some of them are not quite well themselves yet.

  XXXIX.

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

  NEW YORK, February 19, 1902.

  Dear Mother:

  I have been so busy, the last three or four days, flying back and forth between the Raisons and the Baysleys, that I have scarcely had time to write; and as I had nothing decided to write about Mr. Ardith, I thought I would wait. I knew, from your answer to my last, how much you were interested, and now I am glad to report that he is so much better as to be almost out of danger. There is always danger that pneumonia may set in, the doctor says, but as yet it has not. Day before yesterday they nearly lost hope, and when I found it out, I just wouldn’t hold in any longer. America was fairly frantic about him, in spite of the lies we had kept telling her, but when I told her the truth, it steadied her in the most wonderful way. She insisted on going up and staying under the same roof with him, and helping do what could be done for him outside of his room. Her idea seemed to be to do as much for him as any of the Baysleys were doing, and not to let that other girl have it to say or to think that she had failed in anything; which was perfectly natural. But really there was nothing that either of them could do. In fact it needed a man, and the doctor substituted a man nurse for the woman. Mr. Ardith was so delirious at one time that he had to be held, to keep him from getting out of the window. But now he is in his right mind, and they are not afraid of anything but pneumonia.

  I have had to stay here most of the time with Mrs. Ralson, and I have slept here the whole week. Mr. Ralson is still at Washington. There is some trouble about the Trust, and he is there on that account; I guess he is afraid of the government prosecuting him, or something of that kind; I don’t know exactly. At any rate there he is, and we don’t know just when he will be back.

  FRANCES.

  P. S. Miss Ralson had put a postscript to her letter to Mrs. Ardith, kind of blaming the Baysleys for Mr. Ardith’s having got the grippe from them; but I persuaded her to leave it out, and write her letter over. It was just as well, for it seems that Mrs. Ardith is having some trouble with her eyes, and had to take the letter to Mr. Baysley’s brother, who is a minister out there, to have it read. He answered it for her and I don’t know what he would have thought if he had had t
o answer that postscript. But now, that many of the pieces have been saved.

  XL.

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

  NEW YORK, February 20, 1902.

  Dear Mother:

  All continues to go well with Mr. Ardith, who isn’t exactly bounding about yet, but is not so much in danger of pneumonia as the doctor thought. At any rate, Miss Ralson has felt it safe to come back here for the night, and I have got her in her room, making her write to her father, and tell him of her engagement. They take each other so casually that she thought it would be just as well if she waited till he got home. But I sat down on that good and hard, and she has listened to reason. She is not always as biddable as I should like, and I have just found out, by a letter that came from Timber Creek to-day, that she has not kept a promise she made me not to write anything to Mrs. Ardith without showing it to me. I do not blame her altogether, for when she found that Mr. Ardith was in danger, she felt the responsibility of not writing so awfully that she wrote, and told his mother the truth.

  The letter that came back was not from her, but from that Rev. Mr. Baysley again. He said that at first he had hesitated about reading Miss Ralson’s letter to Mrs. Ardith, because she had not only the eye-trouble which prevented her from reading it herself, but was otherwise not able to take the journey to New York. Finally, he had decided to read it to her, and he said that he was glad, for she had taken it just as he could have wished. She sent messages to her son, to be given him as soon as he was in his right mind, telling him that she knew he would have patience with her not coming, and for him not to worry about her, for she would have courage for him. I thought when I was reading this word from her that if he was the kind of son that such a kind of mother could talk so to, he could not have acted heartlessly with that poor Baysley girl, and I have felt better about him than I did before.

  But, mother, I wonder why people do not always come out with the whole truth at once when there is any kind of trouble or danger. The first thing when we knew that Mr. Ardith was very sick, we wanted to keep it from one another, but as soon as we owned the facts, Miss Ralson took courage from the instant she ought to have despaired, and when she told his mother how bad he was, his mother faced the chance of never seeing him again as bravely as if she could have come on here and saved him. I hope that if there is ever anything seriously the matter with you or Lizzie, you won’t spare me a moment, to see how the cat is going to jump; and if I get the grippe, I promise to let you hear of my very worst symptoms from the start.

  I only wish I could tell you what a nice, dignified letter that Mr. Baysley wrote to America for Mr. Ardith’s mother. He is nothing but a poor country Baptist minister, and probably gets about five hundred dollars a year, and preaches the dullest kind of sermons. But when it came to being a ministering angel, he was there with the goods, as America would say; and I just know how he must have talked to that poor mother, and cheered her up. There wasn’t anything pious in his letter; it was humble Christianity all through, and it was so delicate and refined in feeling. You lose your bearings a good deal in New York, with the talk about classes, upper and lower and middle, and in some of the newspapers that try to be “smart” you read things about common Americans that make your blood boil, if you haven’t lost your bearings. But a letter like that country minister’s out there in Iowa, makes me glad that I am a common American, and I believe the commoner we are the better we are. Those other Baysleys are as common as they can be, but they have behaved like saints; perhaps the saints are common; and what makes me love these Ralsons is that they are just as common as the Baysleys, in spite of their money, and always will be whether they get into the Four Hundred or not. May be the Four Hundred themselves would be common if you boiled them down. But that doesn’t personally matter so much any more, for I don’t believe Miss Ralson —

  She has just been in here to show me her letter to her father, and she has come very near making me change my mind about her. We decided on some changes in the letter and then we sat talking, and suddenly she came out with something that happened the other night at the Baysleys’. She was sitting up after the family had gone to bed, in hopes that she might be asked to do something for Mr. Ardith and when she heard his muffled raving from the other end of the flat, she could not bear it, and crept down the corridor to his room, to try and make out what he was saying. The light in the corridor had been turned out, and it was so dark that she had to feel her way to the door, but she found it, and crouched on the floor there. She heard her own name, and Essie Baysley’s, and he seemed to be talking to that friend of his in Wottoma that he was writing to when he was taken sick; but it was just a jumble of repetitions, and she could not make anything out of it. She was so anxious and absorbed that she did not notice at first something like some one catching their breath, very near her in the dark, but it must have come louder; and then she put out her hand. “And what do you think it was?” she fairly hissed out. “It was that Baysley girl! I felt as if I had touched a snake. She was there listening!”

  She seemed to expect that I would be horrified and disgusted, but at first I could hardly help thinking that she must be joking. When I realized that she was not, I just hopped on her. “Why, what in the world were you doing? Hadn’t she as much right to, listen as you had? If that poor thing had left her own sick-bed, to come and hear his ravings, in the hopes of hearing something that would give her a little comfort or a little strength to bear her disappointment, I don’t see why you should call her a snake for it. She was no more snake than you were, and there is just one thing that keeps me from hating you, and that is that you’ve been up so much, and are so crazy for want of sleep that you don’t know what you’re saying.” I gave it to her good and hot, and she seemed perfectly dumbfounded. She turned white, and then red, and then she burst out, “I will never speak to you again!” and flung into her own room, and slammed the door after her.

  I thought I knew just how much that meant, and I did not have to wait a great while, hearing her sob inside there, before she flung back again, and came and threw herself on her knees, and clutched me round the waist, and pulled me down to her. “I am crazy, and I don’t know what I’m saying! There!” she shouted, and she looked so much like a big, unhappy child, that I could not help bending over and kissing her, though you know I am not much on the kiss. She begged my pardon, and I said she had not done me any harm, and then she wanted to know what she should do to make that Baysley girl forgive her, and I tried to find out whether she had said anything to the poor child or not. She was so ashamed that she would hardly confess, hut it came out that she had said, “What are you eavesdropping here, for?” and the girl had burst out crying, and broken away from her, and run back to her room; and that was all.

  You will think it was quite enough, and so do I; but what would you have advised Miss Ralson to do? She wanted to know whether she ought not to give Mr. Ardith up to that girl as soon as he was well enough for the sacrifice; but it seemed to me that this was the very last thing she ought to do, and that was what I said. I told her that it was for Mr. Ardith to give himself, or keep himself, and that her being willing to part with him had nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the case. I talked her quiet at last, and she decided that all she could do was to beg the girl’s pardon, and confess that she was sorry and ashamed. She has gone off to try and get some sleep, and in the morning she is going up to the Baysley’s to offer reparation. The good thing about her is that she can feel for that child, and that if she could, she would hate herself because he likes her the best. But is there any real harm in his doing that? He is cruelly to blame for letting that poor thing care for him, and yet perhaps he could not have prevented it, and he may have been very much tempted. I have never seen the girl yet that could make me lose my head, but I see more and more that men are different. You ought to be glad that I am not

  Your affectionate son,

  FRANCES.

  XLI.

  F
rom MR. OTIS BINNTNG to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

  NEW YORK, February 23, 1902.

  Dear Margaret:

  The Prince of Prussia has gone off to the West, and given us a little breathing-space, and I am able to detach my thoughts from him, and devote them to this sort of one-sided communion with you. Do you know, I am becoming really fond of it, and should miss it if you happened to telegraph me some fine day that you were rather tired of my letters? I haven’t written such long ones since my first year at Harvard, when I “corresponded” with a young lady of this city, about whom I was just then very much in earnest. I have not the least notion what became of her, except that she married some one beside myself, and is perhaps no longer extant. I do not account for this conjecture except from the feeling that it is graceful and becoming for our first loves to die; I should hate meeting mine, in this world, of all things.

  The literary superstition concerning us elderly fellows is (or used to be in the good old Thackeray times,) that we are always thinking of our first loves, and are going about rather droopingly on account of them. My own experience is that we are doing nothing of the kind. We are the only cheerful people in the world, and so long as we keep single, we are impartially impassioned of almost every interesting type of woman that we meet. I find the greatest pleasure in bestowing my affections right and left, and I enjoy a delightful surprise in finding them hold out in spite of my lavish use of them. If I totted up the number of my loves, young and old, since I came here early in December, Leperello’s list would be nothing to it. And they are such innocent infatuations! As you must own, they certainly do not interfere with my devotion to you, in that friendship which constitutes us the mirror of brothers-and-sisters-in-law, and I know you will not mind my being very much absorbed just now in Miss Ralson’s secretary. In fact, the absorption is quite in your interest, and involves the hope of surprising some further facts of the little romance in which I seem to have interested you so much beyond its merits or mine.