Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Canvasback duck?” she asked, and at that moment the servant set before the anxious inquirer a platter of these renowned birds, which you know something of already from the report our emissaries have given of their cult among the Americans.

  Every one laughed, and after the gentleman had made a despairing flourish over them with a carving knife in emulation of Mr. Makely’s emblematic attempt upon the turkey, both were taken away, and carved at a sideboard. They were then served in slices, the turkey with cranberry sauce, and the ducks with currant jelly; and I noticed that no one took so much of the turkey that he could not suffer himself to be helped also to the duck. I must tell you that there was a salad with the duck, and after that there was an ice-cream, with fruit and all manner of candied fruits, and candies, different kinds of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs to drink after the coffee.

  “Well, now,” Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, “I must let you imagine the pumpkin pie. I meant to have it, because it isn’t really Thanksgiving without it. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, see where it would come in.”

  This made them all laugh, and they began to talk about the genuine American character of the holiday, and what a fine thing it was to have something truly national. They praised Mrs. Makely for thinking of so many American dishes, and the facetious gentleman said that she rendered no greater tribute than was due to the overruling Providence which had so abundantly bestowed them upon the Americans as a people. “You must have been glad, Mrs. Strange,” he said, to the lady at my side, “to get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else so potent to bring us home from Europe.”

  “I’m afraid,” she answered, “that I don’t care so much for the American oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back.”

  “In time for the turkey, perhaps?”

  “No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native land,” said the lady.

  “Ah, well, say the canvasback duck then. The canvasback duck is no alien. He is as thoroughly American as the turkey, or as any of us.”

  “No, I should not have missed him, either,” persisted the lady.

  “What could one have missed,” the gentleman said, with a bow to the hostess, “in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been nothing, I should not have missed it,” and when the laugh at his drolling had subsided, he asked Mrs. Strange: “Then, if it is not too indiscreet, might I inquire what in the world has lured you again to our shores, if it was not the oyster, nor the turkey, nor yet the canvasback.”

  “The American dinner-party,” said the lady, with the same burlesque.

  “Well,” he consented, “I think I understand you. It is different from the English dinner-party in being a festivity rather than a solemnity; though after all the American dinner is only a condition of the English dinner. Do you find us much changed, Mrs. Strange?”

  “I think we are every year a little more European,” said the lady. “One notices it on getting home.”

  “I supposed we were so European already,” returned the gentleman, “that a European landing among us would think he had got back to his starting point in a sort of vicious circle. I am myself so thoroughly Europeanized in all my feelings and instincts, that do you know, Mrs. Makely, if I may confess it without offence—”

  “Oh, by all means!” cried the hostess.

  “When that vast bird which we have been praising, that colossal roast turkey, appeared, I felt a shudder go through my delicate substance, such as a refined Englishman might have experienced at the sight, and I said to myself, quite as if I were not one of you, ‘Good heavens! now they will begin talking through their noses and eating with their knives. It’s what I might have expected!’”

  It was impossible not to feel that this gentleman was talking at me; if the Americans have a foreign guest, they always talk at him more or less; and I was not surprised when he said, ‘I think our friend, Mr. Homos, will conceive my fine revolt from the crude period of our existence which the roast turkey marks as distinctly as the graffiti of the cave-dweller proclaim his epoch.”

  “No,” I protested, “I am afraid that I have not the documents for the interpretation of your emotion. I hope you will take pity On my ignorance, and tell me just what you mean.”

  The others said they none of them knew either, and would like to know, and the gentleman began by saying that he had been going over the matter in his mind on his way to dinner, and he had really been trying to lead up to it ever since we sat down. “I’ve been struck, first of all, by the fact, in our evolution, that we haven’t socially evolved from ourselves; we’ve evolved from the Europeans, from the English. I don’t think you’ll find a single society rite with us now that had its origin in our peculiar national life, if we have a peculiar national life; I doubt it, sometimes. If you begin with the earliest thing in the day, if you begin with breakfast, as society gives breakfasts, you have an English breakfast, though American people and provisions.”

  “I must say, I think they’re both much nicer,” said Mrs. Makely.

  “Ah, there I am with you! We borrow the form, but we infuse the spirit. I am talking about the form, though. Then, if you come to the society lunch, which is almost indistinguishable from the society breakfast, you have the English lunch, which is really an undersized English dinner. The afternoon tea is English again, with its troops of eager females and stray, reluctant males; though I believe there are rather more men at the English teas, owing to the larger leisure class in England. The afternoon tea and the “at home” are as nearly alike as the breakfast and the lunch. Then, in the course of time, we arrive at the great society function, the dinner; and what is the dinner with us but the dinner of our mother-country?”

  “It is livelier,” suggested Mrs. Makely, again.’

  “Livelier, I grant you, but I am still speaking of the form, and not of the spirit. The evening reception, which is gradually fading away, as a separate rite, with its supper and its dance, we now have as the English have it, for the people who have not been asked to dinner. The ball, which brings us round to breakfast again, is again the ball of our Anglo-Saxon kin beyond the seas. In short, from the society point of view we are in everything their mere rinsings.”

  “Nothing of the kind!” cried Mrs. Makely. “I won’t let you say such a thing! On Thanksgiving Day, too! Why, there is the Thanksgiving dinner itself! If that isn’t purely American, I should like to know what is.”

  “It is purely American, but it is strictly domestic; it is not society. Nobody but some great soul like you, Mrs. Makely, would have the courage to ask any body to a Thanksgiving dinner, and even you ask only such easy-going house-friends as we are proud to be. You wouldn’t think of giving a dinner-party on Thanksgiving?”

  “No, I certainly shouldn’t. I should think it was very presuming; and you are all as nice as you can be to have come today; I am not the only great soul at the table. But that is neither here nor there. Thanksgiving is a purely American thing, and it’s more popular than ever. A few years ago you never heard of it outside of New England.”

  The gentleman laughed. “You are perfectly right, Mrs. Makely, as you always are. Thanksgiving is purely American. So is the corn-husking, so is the apple-bee, so is the sugar-party, so is the spelling-match, so is the church-sociable; but none of these have had their evolution in our society entertainments. The New Year’s call was also purely American, but that is now as extinct as the dodo, though I believe the other American festivities are still known in the rural districts.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “and I think it’s a great shame that we can’t have some of them in a refined form in society. I once went to a sugar-party up in New Hampshire, when I was a girl, and I never enjoyed myself so much in my life. I should like to make up a party to go to one somewhere in the Catskills, in March, Will you all go? It would be something to show Mr. Homos. I should like to show him something really American before he goes home. There’s nothi
ng American left in society!”

  “You forget the American woman,” suggested the gentleman. “She is always American, and she is always in society.”

  “Yes,” returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, “you’re quite right in that. One always meets more women than men in society. But it’s because the men are so lazy, and so comfortable at their clubs, they won’t go. They enjoy themselves well enough in society after they get there, as I tell my husband, when he grumbles over having to dress.”

  “Well,” said the gentleman, “a great many things, the day-time things, we really can’t come to, because we don’t belong to the aristocratic class, as you ladies do, and we are busy down town. But I don’t think we are reluctant about dinner; and the young fellows are nearly always willing to go to a ball, if the supper’s good, and it’s a house where they don’t feel obliged to dance. But what do you think, Mr. Homos?” he asked. “How does your observation coincide with my experience?”

  I answered that I hardly felt myself qualified to speak, for though I had assisted at the different kinds of society rites he had mentioned, thanks to the generous hospitality of my friends in New York, I only knew the English functions from a very brief stay in England on my way here, and from what I had read of them in English fiction, and in the relations of our emissaries. He inquired into our emissary system, and the company appeared greatly interested in such account of it as I could briefly give.

  “Well,” he said, “that would do while you kept to yourselves; but now that your country is opened to the plutocratic world, your public documents will be apt to come back to the countries your emissaries have visited, and make trouble. The first thing you know some of our bright reporters will get onto one of your emissaries, and interview him, and then we shall get what you think of us at first hands. By the way, have you seen any of those primitive social delights which Mrs. Makely regrets so much?”

  “I?” our hostess protested. But, then, she perceived that he was joking, and she let me answer.

  I said that I had seen them nearly all, during the past year, in New England and in the West, but they appeared to me inalienably of the simpler life of the country, and that I was not surprised they should not have found an evolution in the more artificial society of the cities.

  “I see,” he returned, “that you reserve your opinion of our more artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it out of you yet, before you leave us.”

  “Those horrid reporters!” one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.

  The gentleman resumed:— “In the meantime, I don’t mind saying how it strikes me. I think you are quite right about the indigenous American things being adapted only to the simpler life of the country and the small towns. It is so everywhere. As soon as people become at all refined, they look down upon what is their own as something vulgar. But it is peculiarly so with us. We have nothing national that is not connected with the life of work, and when we begin to live the life of pleasure, we must borrow from the people abroad, who have always lived the life of pleasure.”

  “Mr. Homos, you know,” Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the aptest moment, “thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn’t to have any servants.”

  “Oh, no, dear lady,” I put in. “I don’t think that of you, as you are. None of you could see more plainly than I do, that in your conditions you must have servants, and that you cannot possibly work, unless poverty obliges you.”

  The other ladies had turned upon me with surprise and horror at Mrs. Makely’s Words, but they now apparently relented, as if I had fully redeemed myself from the charge made against me. Mrs. Strange alone seemed to have found nothing monstrous in my supposed position. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we could be freed from our servile bondage to servants.”

  Several of the ladies admitted that it was the greatest slavery in the world, and that it would be comparative luxury to do one’s own work. But they all asked, in one form or another, what were they to do, and Mrs. Strange owned that she did not know. The facetious gentleman asked me how the ladies did in Altruria, and when I told them, as well as I could, they were, of course, very civil about it, but I could see that they all thought it impossible, or, if not impossible, then ridiculous. I did not feel bound to defend our customs, and I knew very well that each woman there was imagining herself in our conditions with the curse of her plutocratic tradition still upon her. They could not do otherwise, any of them, and they seemed to get tired of such effort as they did make.

  Mrs. Makely rose, and the other ladies rose with her, for the Americans follow the English custom in letting the men remain at table after the women have left. But on this occasion I found it varied, by a pretty touch from the French custom, and the men, instead of merely standing up while the women filed out, gave each his arm, as far as the drawing-room, to the lady he had brought in to dinner. Then we went back, and what is the pleasantest part of the dinner to most men began for us.

  I must say, to the credit of the Americans, that although the eating and drinking among them appear gross enough to an Altrurian, you are not often revolted by the coarse stories which the English tell as soon as the ladies have left them. If it is a men’s dinner, or more especially a men’s supper, these stories are pretty sure to follow the coffee; but when there have been women at the board, some sense of their presence seems to linger in the more delicate American nerves, and the indulgence is limited to two or three things off color, as the phrase is here, told with anxious glances at the drawing-room doors, to see if they are fast shut.

  I do not remember just what brought the talk back from these primrose paths, to that question of American society forms, but presently some one said he believed the church sociable was the thing in most towns beyond the apple-bee and sugar-party stage, and this opened the inquiry as to how far the church still formed the social life of the people in cities. Some one suggested that in Brooklyn it formed it altogether, and then they laughed, for Brooklyn is always a joke with the New Yorkers; I do not know exactly why, except that this vast city is so largely a suburb, and that it has a great number of churches, and is comparatively cheap. Then another told of a lady who had come to New York (he admitted, twenty years ago,) and was very lonely, as she had no letters, until she joined a church. This at once brought her a general acquaintance, and she began to find herself in society; but as soon as she did so, she joined a more exclusive church where they took no notice of strangers. They all laughed at that bit of human nature, as they called it, and they philosophized the relation of women to society as a purely business relation. The talk ranged to the mutable character of society, and how people got into it, and were of it, and how it was very different from what it once was, except that with women it was always business. They spoke of certain new rich people with affected contempt; but I could see that they were each proud of knowing such millionaires as they could claim for acquaintance, though they pretended to make fun of the number of men-servants you had to run the gauntlet of in A. HOMOS. their houses before you could get to your hostess.

  One of my commensals said he had noticed that I took little or no wine, and when I said that we seldom drank it in Altruria, he answered that he did not think I could make that go in America, if I meant to dine much. “Dining, you know, means overeating,” he explained, “and if you wish to overeat, you must overdrink. I venture to say that you will pass a worse night than any of us, Mr. Homos, and that you will be sorrier to-morrow than I shall.” They were all smoking, and I confess that their tobacco was secretly such an affliction to me that I was at one moment in doubt whether I should take a cigar myself, or ask leave to join the ladies.

  The gentleman who had talked so much already said: “Well, I don’t mind dining so much, especially with Makely, here, but I do object to supping, as I have to do now and then, in the way of pleasure. Last Saturday night I sat down at eleven o’clock to blue-point oysters, consommé soup,
stewed terrapin — yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had taken more of it — lamb chops with peas, redhead duck with celery mayonnaise, Nesselrode pudding, fruit, cheese, and coffee, with sausages, caviare, radishes, celery, and olives interspersed wildly, and drinkables and smokables ad libitum; and I can assure you that I felt very devout when I woke up after churchtime in the morning. It is this turning night into day that is killing us. We men, who have to go to business the next morning, ought to strike, and say we won’t go to anything later than eight o’clock dinner.’’

  “Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four o’clock tea,” said another.

  Our host seemed to be reminded of something by the mention of the women, and he said, after a glance round at the state of the different cigars, “Shall we join the ladies?”

  One of the men-servants had evidently been waiting for this question. He held the door open, and we all filed into the drawing-room.

  Mrs. Makely hailed me with, “Ah, Mr. Homos, I’m so glad you’ve come! We poor women have been having the most dismal time!”

  “Honestly,” asked the funny gentleman, “don’t you always, without us?”

  “Yes, but this has been worse than usual. Mrs. Strange has been asking us how many people we supposed there were in this city, within five minutes’ walk of us, who had no dinner to-day. Do you call that kind?”

  “A little more than kin, and less than kind, perhaps,” the gentleman suggested.

  “But what does she propose to do about it?”

  He turned toward Mrs. Strange, who answered, “Nothing. What does any one propose to do about it?”