Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Jove,” Rulledge broke in at this point of Wanhope’s story, which I am telling again so badly, “I think Alford was in luck.”

  Minver gave a harsh cackle. “The only thing Rulledge finds fault with in this club is ‘the lack of woman’s nursing and the lack of woman’s tears.’ Nothing is wanting to his enjoyment of his victuals but the fact that they are not served by a neat-handed Phyllis, like Alford’s.”

  Rulledge glanced towards Wanhope, and innocently inquired, “Was that her first name?”

  Minver burst into a scream, and Rulledge looked red and silly for having given himself away; but he made an excursion to the buffet outside, and returned with a sandwich with which he supported himself stolidly under Minver’s derision, until Wanhope came to his relief by resuming his story, or rather his study, of Alford’s strange experience.

  Mrs. Yarrow first gave Alford his tea, as being of a prompter brew than the rarebit, but she was very quick and apt with that, too; and pretty soon she leaned forward, and in the glow from the lamp under the chafing-dish, which spiritualized her charming face with its thin radiance, puffed the flame out with her pouted lips, and drew back with a long-sighed “There! That will make you see your grandmother, if anything will.”

  “My grandmother?” Alford repeated.

  “Yes. Wouldn’t you like to?” Mrs.. Yarrow asked, pouring the thick composition over the toast (rescued stone-cold from the frigid tray) on Alford’s plate. “I’m sure I should like to see mine — dear old gran! Not that I ever saw her — either of her — or should know how she looked. Did you ever see yours — either of her?” she pursued, impulsively.

  “Oh yes,” Alford answered, looking intently at her, but with so little speculation in the eyes he glared so with that he knew her to be uneasy under them.

  She laughed a little, and stayed her hand on the bail of the teapot. “Which of her?”

  “Oh, both!”

  “And — and — did she look so much like me?” she said, with an added laugh, that he perceived had an hysterical note in it. “You’re letting your rarebit get cold!”

  He laughed himself, now, a great laugh of relaxation, of relief. “Not the least in the world! She was not exactly a phantom of delight.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford. Now, it’s your tea’s getting cold.”

  They laughed together, and he gave himself to his victual with a relish that she visibly enjoyed. When that question of his grandmother had been pushed he thought of an awful experience of his childhood, which left on his infant mind an indelible impression, a scar, to remain from the original wound forever. He had been caught in a lie, the first he could remember, but by no means the last, by many immemorable thousands. His poor little wickedness had impugned the veracity of both these terrible old ladies, who, habitually at odds with each other, now united, for once, against him. He could always see himself, a mean little blubbering-faced rascal, stealing guilty looks of imploring at their faces, set unmercifully against him, one in sorrow and one in anger, requiring his mother to whip him, and insisting till he was led, loudly roaring, into the parlor, and there made a liar of for all time, so far as fear could do it.

  When Mrs. Yarrow asked if he had ever seen his grandmother he expected instantly to see her, in duplicate, and as a sole refuge, but with little hope that it would save him, he kept his eyes fast on hers, and to his unspeakable joy it did avail. No other face, of sorrow or of anger, rose between them. For the time his thought was quit of its consequence; no eidolon outwardly repeated his inward vision. A warm gush of gratitude seemed to burst from his heart, and to bathe his whole being, and then to flow in a tide of ineffable tenderness towards Mrs. Yarrow, and involve her and bear them together heavenward. It was not passion, it was not love, he perceived well enough; it was the utterance of a vital conviction that she had saved him from an overwhelming subjective horror, and that in her sweet objectivity there was a security and peace to be found nowhere else.

  He greedily ate every atom of his rarebit, he absorbed every drop of the moisture in the teapot, so that when she shook it and shook it, and then tried to pour something from it, there was no slightest dribble at the spout. But they lingered, talking and laughing, and perhaps they might never have left the place if the hard handmaiden who had brought the tea-tray had not first tried putting her head in at the swing-door from the kitchen, and then, later, come boldly in and taken the tray away.

  Mrs. Yarrow waited self-respectfully for her disappearance, and then she said, “I’m afraid that was a hint, Mr. Alford.”

  “It seemed like one,” he owned.

  They went out together, gayly chatting, but she would not encourage the movement he made towards the veranda. She remained firmly attached to the newel-post of the stairs, and at the first chance he gave her she said good-night and bounded lightly upward. At the turn of the stairs she stopped and looked laughing down at him over the rail. “I hope you won’t see your grandmother.”

  “Oh, not a bit of it,” he called back. He felt that he failed to give his reply the quality of epigram, but he was not unhappy in his failure.

  Many light-hearted days followed this joyous evening. No eidolons haunted Alford’s horizon, perhaps because Mrs. Yarrow filled his whole heaven. She was very constantly with him, guiding his wavering steps up the hill of recovery, which he climbed with more and more activity, and keeping him company in those valleys of relapse into which he now and then fell back from the difficult steeps. It came to be tacitly, or at least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she had somehow earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common charge; or that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford from killing himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case amounted to impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow. They did not put this in terms, but they felt it and acted it.

  She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do. In her hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf. She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such good exercise. She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things. When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned together with twigs. She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.

  There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too late to the pleasanter reality. It will seem strange enough, but it is true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in love with him. He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.

  “Well!” Rulledge snarled at this point, “he was a chump.”

  Wanhope at the moment opposed nothing directly to the censure, but said that something pathetically reproachful in Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling looks penetrated to Alford as she nodded gayly from the car window to him in the little group which had assembled to see her off at the station when she left, by no means the first of their happy hotel circle to go.

  “Somebody,” Rulledge burst out again, “ought to have kicked him.”

  “What’s become,” Minver asked, “of all the dear maids and widows that you’ve failed to marry at the end of each summer, Rulledge?”

>   The satire involved flattery so sweet that Rulledge could not perhaps wish to make any retort. He frowned sternly, and said, with a face averted from Minver: “Go on, Wanhope!”

  Wanhope here permitted himself a philosophical excursion in which I will not accompany him. It was apparently to prepare us for the dramatic fact which followed, and which I suppose he was trying rather to work away from than work up to. It included some facts which he had failed to touch on before, and which led to a discussion very interesting in itself, but of a range too great for the limits I am trying to keep here. It seems that Alford had been stayed from declaring his love not only because he doubted of its nature, but also because he questioned whether a man in his broken health had any right to offer himself to a woman, and because from a yet finer scruple he hesitated in his poverty to ask the hand of a rich woman. On the first point, we were pretty well agreed, but on the second we divided again, especially Rulledge and Minver, who held, the one, that his hesitation did Alford honor, and quite relieved him from the imputation of being a chump; and the other that he was an ass to keep quiet for any such silly reason. Minver contended that every woman had a right, whether rich or poor, to the man who loved her; and, moreover, there were now so many rich women that, if they were not allowed to marry poor men, their chances of marriage were indefinitely reduced. What better could a widow do with the money she had inherited from a husband she probably did not love than give it to a man like Alford — or to an ass like Alford, Minver corrected himself.

  His reductio ad absurdum allowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, and say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road carried it out of sight. Then he lifted his eyes with a long sigh, and looked round. Everywhere he saw Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling face with that inner pathos. It swarmed upon him from all points; and wherever he turned it repeated itself in the distances like that succession of faces you see when you stand between two mirrors.

  It was not merely a lapse from his lately hopeful state with Alford, it was a collapse. The man withered and dwindled away, till he felt that he must audibly rattle in his clothes as he walked by people. He did not walk much. Mostly he remained shrunken in the arm-chair where he used to sit beside Mrs. Yarrow’s rocker, and the ladies, the older and the older-fashioned, who were “sticking it out” at the hotel till it should close on the 15th of September, observed him, some compassionately, some censoriously, but all in the same conviction.

  “It’s plain to be seen what ails Mr. Alford, now.”

  “Well, I guess it is.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Seems kind of heartless, her going and leaving him so.”

  “Like a sick kitten!”

  “Well, I should say as much.”

  “Your eyes bother you, Mr. Alford?” one of them chanted, breaking from their discussion of him to appeal directly to him. He was rubbing his eyes, to relieve himself for the moment from the intolerable affliction of those swarming eidolons, which, whenever he thought of this thing or that, thickened about him. They now no longer displaced one another, but those which came first remained fadedly beside or behind the fresher appearances, like the earlier rainbow which loses depth and color when a later arch defines itself.

  “Yes,” he said, glad of the subterfuge. “They annoy me a good deal of late.”

  “You want to get fitted for a good pair of glasses. I kept letting it go, when I first began to get old-sighted.”

  Another lady came to Alford’s rescue. “I guess Mr. Alford has no need to get fitted for old sight yet a while. You got little spidery things — specks and dots — in your eyes?”

  “Yes — multitudes,” he said, hopelessly.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what: you want to build up. That was the way with me, and the oculist said it was from getting all run down. I built up, and the first thing I knew my sight was as clear as a bell. You want to build up.”

  “You want to go to the mountains,” a third interposed. “That’s where Mrs. Yarrow’s gone, and I guess it’ll do her more good than sticking it out here would ever have done.”

  Alford would have been glad enough to go to the mountains, but with those illusions hovering closer and closer about him, he had no longer the courage, the strength. He had barely enough of either to get away to Boston. He found his doctor this time, after winning and losing the wager he made himself that he would not have returned to town yet, and the good-fortune was almost too much for his shaken nerves. The cordial of his friend’s greeting — they had been chums at Harvard — completed his overthrow. As he sank upon the professional sofa, where so many other cases had been diagnosticated, he broke into tears. “Hello, old fellow!” the doctor said, encouragingly, and more tenderly than he would have dealt with some women. “What’s up?”

  “Jim,” Alford found voice to say, “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”

  The doctor smiled provisionally. “Well, that’s one of the signs you’re not. Can you say how?”

  “Oh yes. In a minute,” Alford sobbed, and when he had got the better of himself he told his friend the whole story. In the direct examination he suppressed Mrs. Yarrow’s part, but when the doctor, who had listened with smiling seriousness, began to cross-examine him with the question, “And you don’t remember that any outside influence affected the recurrence of the illusions, or did anything to prevent it?” Alford answered promptly: “Oh yes. There was a woman who did.”

  “A woman? What sort of a woman?”

  Alford told.

  “That is very curious,” the doctor said. “I know a man who used to have a distressing dream. He broke it up by telling his wife about it every morning after he had dreamt it.”

  “Unluckily, she isn’t my wife,” Alford said, gloomily.

  “But when she was with you, you got rid of the illusions?”

  “At first, I used to see hers; then I stopped seeing any.”

  “Did you ever tell her of them?”

  “No; I didn’t.”

  “Never tell anybody?”

  “No one but you.”

  “And do you see them now?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think, because you’ve told me of them?”

  “It seems so.”

  The doctor was silent for a marked space. Then he asked, smiling: “Well, why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Tell your wife.”

  “How, my wife?”

  “By marriage.”

  Alford looked dazed. “Do you mean Mrs. Yarrow?”

  “If that’s her name, and she’s a widow.”

  “And do you think it would be the fair thing for a man on the verge of insanity — a physical and mental wreck — to ask a woman to marry him?”

  “In your case, yes. In the first place, you’re not so bad as all that. You need nothing but rest for your body and change for your mind. I believe you’ll get rid of your illusions as soon as you form the habit of speaking of them promptly when they begin to trouble you. You ought to speak of them to some one. You can’t always have me around, and Mrs. Yarrow would be the next best thing.”

  “She’s rich, and you know what I am. I’ll have to borrow the money to rest on, I’m so poor.”

  “Not if you marry it.”

  Alford rose, somewhat more vigorously than he had sat down. But that day he did not go beyond ascertaining that Mrs. Yarrow was in town. He found out the fact from the maid at her door, who said that she was nearly always at home after dinner, and, without waiting for the evening of another day, Alford went to call upon her.

  She said, coming down to him in a rather old-fashioned, impersonal drawing-room which looked distinctly as if it had been left to her: “I was so glad to get your card. When did you leave Woodbeach?”

  “Mrs. Yarrow,” he returned, as if that were the answer,
“I think I owe you an explanation.”

  “Pay it!” she bantered, putting out her hand.

  “I’m so poverty-stricken that I don’t know whether I can. Did you ever notice anything odd about me?”

  His directness seemed to have a right to directness from her. “I noticed that you stared a good deal — or used to. But people do stare.”

  “I stared because I saw things.”

  “Saw things?”

  “I saw whatever I thought of. Whatever came into my mind was externated in a vision.”

  She smiled, he could not make out whether uneasily or not. “It sounds rather creepy, doesn’t it? But it’s very interesting.”

  “That’s what the doctor said; I’ve been to see him this morning. May I tell you about my visions? They’re not so creepy as they sound, I believe, and I don’t think they’ll keep you awake.”

  “Yes, do,” she said. “I should like of all things to hear about them. Perhaps I’ve been one of them.”

  “You have.”

  “Oh! Isn’t that rather personal?”

  “I hope not offensively.”

  He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but that he saw it. At the end he said: “You may wonder that I come to you with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman.”