Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  But as I have so often said, the American life is in nowise logical, and you will not be surprised, though you may be shocked or amused to learn that the festival of Thanksgiving is now so generally devoted to witnessing a game of foot-ball between the Elevens of two great universities, that the services at the churches are very scantily attended. The Americans are practical, if they are not logical, and this preference of foot-ball to prayer and praise on Thanksgiving day has gone so far that now a principal church in the city holds its services on Thanksgiving eve, so that the worshippers may not be tempted to keep away from their favorite game.

  There is always a heavy dinner at home after the game, to console the friends of those who have lost, and to heighten the joy of the winning side, among the comfortable people. The poor recognize the day largely as a sort of carnival. They go about in masquerade on the eastern avenues, and the children of the foreign races who populate that quarter, penetrate the better streets, blowing horns, and begging of the passers. They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival of catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times. Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a foot-ball game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent misapprehension of the holiday on the East side. I am not more censorious of it than I am of the displays of festival cheer at the provision stores, or green-groceries throughout the city at this time. They are almost as numerous on the avenues as the drinking saloons, and thanks to them, the wasteful housekeeping is at least convenient in a high degree. The waste is inevitable with the system of separate kitchens, and it is not in provisions alone, but in labor and in time, a hundred cooks doing the work of one; but the Americans have no conception of our cooperative housekeeping, and so the folly goes on. Meantime, the provision stores add much to their effect of crazy gayety on the avenues.

  The variety and harmony of color is very great, and this morning I stood so long admiring the arrangement in one of them, that I am afraid I rendered myself a little suspicious to the policeman guarding the liquor store on the nearest corner; there seems always to be a policeman assigned to this duty. The display was on either side of the provisioner’s door, and began on one hand with a basal line of pumpkins well out on the sidewalk. Then it was built up with the soft white and cool green of cauliflowers, and open boxes of red and white grapes, to the window that flourished in banks of celery and rosy apples. On the other side, gray-green squashes formed the foundation, and the wall was sloped upward with the delicious salads you can find here, the dark red of beets, the yellow of carrots, and the blue of cabbages. The association of colors was very artistic and even the line of mutton carcases overhead, with each a brace of grouse, or half a dozen quail in its embrace, and flanked with long sides of beef at the four ends of the line, was picturesque, though the sight of the carnage at the provision stores here would always be dreadful to an Altrurian; in the great markets it is intolerable. This sort of business is mostly in the hands of the Germans, who have a good eye for such effects as may be studied in it; but the fruiterers are nearly all Italians, and their stalls are charming. I always like, too, the cheeriness of the chestnut and peanut ovens of the Italians; the pleasant smell and friendly smoke that rise from them suggest a simple and homelike life, which there are so many things in this great, weary, heedless city to make one forget.

  A. HOMOS.

  VIII.

  New York, December 1, 1893.

  My dear Cyril:

  I did not suppose that I should be writing you so soon again, but I was out for my first dinner of the season, last night, and I must try to give you my impressions of it while they are still fresh. Only the day after I posted my last letter, I received the note which I enclose:

  My dear Mr. Homos:

  Will you give me the pleasure of your company, at dinner, on Thanksgiving Day, at eight o’clock, very informally. My friend, Mrs. Bellington Strange, has unexpectedly returned from Europe, within the week, and I am asking a few friends, whom I can trust to excuse this very short notice, to meet her.

  With Mr. Makely’s best regards,

  Yours cordially,

  Dorothea Makely.

  The Sphinx,

  November the twenty-sixth,

  Eighteen hundred and Ninety-three.

  I must explain to you that it has been a fad with the ladies here to spell out their dates, and though the fashion is waning, Mrs. Makely is a woman who would remain in such an absurdity among the very last. I will let you make your own conclusions concerning her, for though, as an Altrurian, I cannot respect her, I like her so much, and I have so often enjoyed her generous hospitality, that I cannot bring myself to criticise her except by the implication of the facts. She is anomalous, but to our way of thinking, all the Americans I have met are anomalous, and she has the merits that you would not logically attribute to her character. Of course, I cannot feel that her evident regard for me is the least of these, though I like to think that it is more founded in reason than the rest.

  I have by this time become far too well versed in the polite insincerities of the plutocratic world to imagine, that because she asked me to come to her dinner, very informally, I was not to come in all the state I could put into my dress. You know what the evening dress of men is, here, from the costumes in our museum, and you can well believe that I never put on those ridiculous black trousers without a sense of their grotesqueness, that scrap of waistcoat reduced to a mere rim, so as to show the whole white breadth of the starched shirt bosom, and that coat chopped away till it seems nothing but tails and lapels. It is true that I might go out to dinner in our national costume; in fact, Mrs. Makely has often begged to me to wear it, for she says the Chinese wear theirs; but I have not cared to make the sensation which I must if I wore it; my outlandish views of life, and my frank study of theirs signalize me quite sufficiently among the Americans.

  At the hour named, I appeared at Mrs. Makely’s drawing-room in all the formality that I knew her invitation, to come very informally, really meant. I found myself the first, as I nearly always do, but I had only time for a word or two with my hostess before the others began to come. She hastily explained that as soon as she knew Mrs. Strange was in New York, she had dispatched a note telling her that I was still here; and that as she could not get settled in time to dine at home, she must come and take Thanksgiving with her. “She will have to go out with Mr. Makely; but I am going to put you next to her at table, for I want you both to have a good time. But don’t you forget that you are going to take me out.” I said that I should certainly not forget it, and I showed her the envelope with my name on the outside, and hers on a card inside, which the serving man at the door had given me in the hall, as the first token, after her letter, that the dinner was to be in the last degree unceremonious. She laughed, and said: “I’ve had the luck to pick up two or three other agreeable people that I know will be glad to meet you. Usually, it’s such a scratch lot at Thanksgiving, for everybody dines at home that can, and you have to trust to the highways and the byways for your guests, if you give a dinner. But I did want to bring Mrs. Strange and you together, and so I chanced it. Of course, it’s a sent-in dinner, as you must have inferred from the man at the door; I’ve given my servants a holiday, and had Claret’s people do the whole thing. It’s as broad as it’s long, and as my husband says, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb; and it saves bother. Everybody will know it’s sent in, so that nobody will be deceived. There’ll be a turkey in it somewhere, and cranberry sauce; I’ve insisted on that: but it won’t be a regular American Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m rather sorry, on your account, for I wanted you to see one, and I meant to have had you here, just with ourselves; but Eveleth Strange’s coming back put a new face on things, and so I’ve gone in for this affair, which isn’t at all what you would like. That’s the reason I tell you at once, it’s sent in.”

  I am so often at a loss for the connection in Mrs. Makely’s ideas that I
am more patient with her incoherent jargon than you will be, I am afraid. It went on to much the effect that I have tried to report, until the moment she took the hand of the guest who came next. They arrived, until there were eight of us in all; Mrs. Strange coming last, with excuses for being late. I had somehow figured her as a person rather mystical and recluse in appearance, perhaps on account of her name, and I had imagined her tall and superb. But she was, really, rather small, though not below the woman’s average, and she had a face more round than otherwise, with a sort of businesslike earnestness, but a very charming smile, and presently, as I saw, an American sense of humor. She had brown hair and gray eyes, and teeth not too regular to be monotonous; her mouth was very sweet, whether she laughed, or sat gravely silent.

  She at once affected me like a person who had been sobered beyond her nature by responsibilities, and had steadily strengthened under the experiences of life. She was dressed with a sort of personal taste, in a rich gown of black lace, which came up to her throat; and she did not subject me to that embarrassment I always feel in the presence of a lady who is much décolleté, when I sit next her, or face to face with her: I cannot always look at her without a sense of taking an immodest advantage. Sometimes I find a kind of pathos in this sacrifice to fashion, as if the poor lady were wearing that sort of gown because she thought she really ought, and then I keep my eyes firmly on hers, or avert them altogether; but there are other cases which have not this appealing quality. Yet in the very worst of the cases it would be a mistake to suppose that there was a display personally meant of the display personally made. Even then it would be found that the gown was worn so because the dressmaker had made it so, and, whether she had made it in this country or in Europe, that she had made it in compliance with a European custom. In fact, all the society customs of the Americans follow some European original, and usually some English original; and it is only fair to say that in this particular custom they do not go to the English extreme.

  We did not go out to dinner at Mrs. Makely’s by the rules of English precedence, because there are nominally no ranks here, and we could not; but I am sure it will not be long before the Americans will begin playing at precedence just as they now play at the other forms of aristocratic society. For the present, however, there was nothing for us to do but to proceed, when dinner was served, in such order as offered itself, after Mr. Makely gave his arm to Mrs. Strange, though, of course, the white shoulders of the other ladies went gleaming out before the white shoulders of Mrs. Makely shone beside my black ones. I have now become so used to these observances that they no longer affect me as they once did, and as I suppose my account of them must affect you, painfully, comically. But I have always the sense of having a part in amateur theatricals, and I do not see how the Americans can fail to have the same sense, for there is nothing spontaneous in them, and nothing that has grown even dramatically out of their own life.

  Often when I admire the perfection of the mise en scène, it is with a vague feeling that I am derelict in not offering it an explicit applause. In fact, this is permitted in some sort and measure, as now when we sat down at Mrs. Makely’s exquisite table, and the ladies frankly recognized her touch in it. One of them found a phrase for it at once, and pronounced it a symphony in chrysanthemums; for the color and the character of these flowers played through all the appointment of the table, and rose to a magnificent finale in the vast group in the middle of the board, infinite in their caprices of dye and design. Another lady said that, it was a dream, and then Mrs. Makely said: “No, a memory,” and confessed that she had studied the effect from her recollection of some tables at a chrysanthemum show held here last year, which seemed failures because they were so simply and crudely adapted in the china and napery to merely one kind and color of the flower.

  “Then,” she added, “I wanted to do something very chrysanthemummy, because it seems to me the Thanksgiving flower, and belongs to Thanksgiving quite as much as holly belongs to Christmas.”

  Everybody applauded her intention, and we hungrily fell to upon the excellent oysters, with her warning that we had better make the most of everything in its turn, for she had conformed her dinner to the brevity of the notice she had given her guests.

  Just what the dinner was I will try to tell you, for I think that it will interest you to know what people here think a very simple dinner. That is, people of any degree of fashion; for the unfashionable Americans, who are innumerably in the majority, have no more than the Altrurians seen such a dinner as Mrs. Makely’s. This sort generally sit down to a single dish of meat, with two or three vegetables, and they drink tea or coffee, or water only, with their dinner. Even when they have company, as they say, the things are all put on the table at once; and the average of Americans who have seen a dinner served in courses, after the Russian manner, invariable in the fine world here, is not greater than those who have seen a serving-man in livery. Among these the host piles up his guest’s plate with meat and vegetables, and it is passed from hand to hand till it reaches him; his drink arrives from the hostess by the same means. One maid serves the table in a better class, and two maids in a class still better; it is only when you reach people of very decided form that you find a man in a black coat behind your chair; Mrs. Makely, mindful of the informality of her dinner in everything, had two men.

  I should say the difference between the Altrurians and the unfashionable Americans, in view of such a dinner as she gave us, would be that, while it would seem to us abominable for its extravagance, and revolting in its appeals to appetite, it would seem to most of such Americans altogether admirable and enviable, and would appeal to their ambition to give such a dinner themselves as soon as ever they could.

  Well, with our oysters, we had a delicate French wine, though I am told that formerly Spanish wines were served. A delicious soup followed the oysters, and then we had fish, with sliced cucumbers dressed with oil and vinegar, like a salad; and I suppose you will ask what we could possibly have eaten more. But this was only the beginning, and next there came a course of sweetbreads with green peas. With this the champagne began at once to flow, for Mrs. Makely was nothing if not original, and she had champagne very promptly. One of the gentlemen praised her for it, and said you could not have it too soon, and he had secretly hoped it would have begun with the oysters. Next, we had a remove, a tenderloin of beef, with mushrooms, fresh, and not of the canned sort which it is usually accompanied with. This fact won our hostess more compliments from the gentlemen, which could not have gratified her more if she had dressed and cooked the dish herself. She insisted upon our trying the stewed terrapin, for if it did come in a little by the neck and shoulders, it was still in place at a Thanksgiving dinner, because it was so American; and the stuffed peppers, which, if they were not American, were at least Mexican, and originated in the kitchen of a sister republic. There were one or two other side-dishes, and with all the burgundy began to be poured out.

  Mr. Makely said that claret all came now from California, no matter what French château they named it after, but burgundy you could not err in. His guests were now drinking the different wines, and to much the same effect, I should think, as if they had mixed them all in one cup; though I ought to say that several of the ladies took no wine, and kept me in countenance after the first taste that I was obliged to take of each, in order to pacify my host.

  You must know that all the time there were plates of radishes, olives, celery, and roasted almonds set about that every one ate of without much reference to the courses. The talking and the feasting were at their height, but there was a little flagging of the appetite, perhaps, when it received the stimulus of a water-ice flavored with rum. After eating it, I immediately experienced an extraordinary revival of my hunger (I am ashamed to confess that I was gorging myself like the rest), but I quailed inwardly when one of the men-servants set down before Mr. Makely, a roast turkey that looked as large as an ostrich. It was received with cries of joy, and one of the gentlemen said, �
�Ah, Mrs. Makely, I was waiting to see how you would interpolate the turkey, but you never fail. I knew you would get it in somewhere. But where,” he added in a burlesque whisper, behind his hand, “are the—”