Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  My point is, at any rate, that I designate THEM as Poor only in the abysmal confidence of these occult pages: into which I really believe even my poor wife — for it’s universal! — has never succeeded in peeping. It will be a shock to me if I some day find she has so far adventured — and this not on account of the curiosity felt or the liberty taken, but on account of her having successfully disguised it. She knows I keep an intermittent diary — I’ve confessed to her it’s the way in which I work things in general, my feelings and impatiences and difficulties, off. It’s the way I work off my nerves — that luxury in which poor Charles Edward’s natural narrow means — narrow so far as ever acknowledged — don’t permit him to indulge. No one for a moment suspects I have any nerves, and least of all what they themselves do to them; no one, that is, but poor little Mother again — who, however, again, in her way, all timorously and tenderly, has never mentioned it: any more than she has ever mentioned her own, which she would think quite indecent. This is precisely one of the things that, while it passes between us as a mute assurance, makes me feel myself more than the others verily HER child: more even than poor little Peg at the present strained juncture.

  But what I was going to say above all is that I don’t care that poor Lorraine — since that’s my wife’s inimitable name, which I feel every time I write it I must apologize even to myself for! — should quite discover the moments at which, first and last, I’ve worked HER off. Yet I’ve made no secret of my cultivating it as a resource that helps me to hold out; this idea of our “holding out,” separately and together, having become for us — and quite comically, as I see — the very basis of life. What does it mean, and how and why and to what end are we holding? I ask myself that even while I feel how much we achieve even by just hugging each other over the general intensity of it. This is what I have in mind as to our living to that extent by the vain phrase; as to our really from time to time winding ourselves up by the use of it, and winding each other. What should we do if we didn’t hold out, and of what romantic, dramatic, or simply perhaps quite prosaic, collapse would giving in, in contradistinction, consist for us? We haven’t in the least formulated that — though it perhaps may but be one of the thousand things we are afraid of.

  At any rate we don’t, I think, ever so much as ask ourselves, and much less each other: we’re so quite sufficiently sustained and inflamed by the sense that we’re just doing it, and that in the sublime effort our union is our strength. There must be something in it, for the more intense we make the consciousness — and haven’t we brought it to as fine a point as our frequently triumphant partnership at bridge? — the more it positively does support us. Poor Lorraine doesn’t really at all need to understand in order to believe; she believes that, failing our exquisite and intimate combined effort of resistance, we should be capable together of something — well, “desperate.” It’s in fact in this beautiful desperation that we spend our days, that we face the pretty grim prospect of new ones, that we go and come and talk and pretend, that we consort, so far as in our deep-dyed hypocrisy we do consort, with the rest of the Family, that we have Sunday supper with the Parents and emerge, modestly yet virtuously shining, from the ordeal; that we put in our daily appearance at the Works — for a utility nowadays so vague that I’m fully aware (Lorraine isn’t so much) of the deep amusement I excite there, though I also recognize how wonderfully, how quite charitably, they manage not to break out with it: bless, for the most part, their dear simple hearts! It is in this privately exalted way that we bear in short the burden of our obloquy, our failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other; and above all of our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness. We’re really not meek a bit — we’re secretly quite ferocious; but we’re held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business incompetence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well: it being now definitely on record that we’ve never yet designed a single type of ice-pitcher — since that’s the damnable form Father’s production more and more runs to; his uncanny ideal is to turn out more ice-pitchers than any firm in the world — that has “taken” with their awful public. We’ve tried again and again to strike off something hideous enough, but it has always in these cases appeared to us quite beautiful compared to the object finally turned out, on their improved lines, for the unspeakable market; so that we’ve only been able to be publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to plead practically, in extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle them with, that such things are, alas, the worst we can do.

  We so far succeed in our plea that we’re held at least to sit, as I say, in contrition, and to understand how little, when it comes to a reckoning, we really pay our way. This actually passes, I think for the main basis of our humility, as it’s certainly the basis of what I feel to be poor Mother’s unuttered yearning. It almost broke her heart that we SHOULD have to live in such shame — she has only got so far as that yet. But it’s a beginning; and I seem to make out that if I don’t spoil it by any wrong word, if I don’t in fact break the spell by any wrong breath, she’ll probably come on further. It will glimmer upon her — some day when she looks at me in her uncomfortable bewildered tenderness, and I almost hypnotize her by just smiling inscrutably back — that she isn’t getting all the moral benefit she somehow ought out of my being so pathetically wrong; and then she’ll begin to wonder and wonder, all to herself, if there mayn’t be something to be said for me. She has limped along, in her more or less dissimulated pain, on this apparently firm ground that I’m so wrong that nothing will do for either of us but a sweet, solemn, tactful agreement between us never to mention it. It falls in so richly with all the other things, all the “real” things, we never mention.

  Well, it’s doubtless an odd fact to be setting down even here; but I SHALL be sorry for her on the day when her glimmer, as I have called it, broadens — when it breaks on her that if I’m as wrong as this comes to, why the others must be actively and absolutely right. She has never had to take it quite THAT way — so women, even mothers, wondrously get on; and heaven help her, as I say, when she shall. She’ll be immense— “tactfully” immense, with Father about it — she’ll manage that, for herself and for him, all right; but where the iron will enter into her will be at the thought of her having for so long given raison, as they say in Paris — or as poor Lorraine at least says they say — to a couple like Maria and Tom Price. It comes over her that she has taken it largely from THEM (and she HAS) that we’re living in immorality, Lorraine and I: ah THEN, poor dear little Mother — ! Upon my word I believe I’d go on lying low to this positive pitch of grovelling — and Lorraine, charming, absurd creature, would back me up in it too — in order precisely to save Mother such a revulsion. It will be really more trouble than it will be worth to her; since it isn’t as if our relation weren’t, of its kind, just as we are, about as “dear” as it can be.

  I’d literally much rather help her not to see than to see; I’d much rather help her to get on with the others (yes, even including poor Father, the fine damp plaster of whose composition, renewed from week to week, can’t be touched anywhere without letting your finger in, without peril of its coming to pieces) in the way easiest for her — if not easiest TO her. She couldn’t live with the others an hour — no, not with one of them, unless with poor little Peg — save by accepting all their premises, save by making in other words all the concessions and having all the imagination. I ask from her nothing of this — I do the whole thing with her, as she has to do it with them; and of this, au fond, as Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware — just as, FOR it, she’s ever so dumbly grateful. Let these notes stand at any rate for my fond fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood; let them do this even if everything else registers meaner things. I’m perfectly willing to recognize, as grovellingly as any one likes, that, as grown-up
and as married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least as battered and seasoned (by adversity) as possible, I’m in respect to HER as achingly filial and as feelingly dependent, all the time, as when I used, in the far-off years, to wake up, a small blubbering idiot, from frightening dreams, and refuse to go to sleep again, in the dark, till I clutched her hands or her dress and felt her bend over me.

  She used to protect me then from domestic derision — for she somehow kept such passages quiet; but she can’t (it’s where HER ache comes in!) protect me now from a more insidious kind. Well, now I don’t care! I feel it in Maria and Tom, constantly, who offer themselves as the pattern of success in comparison with which poor Lorraine and I are nowhere. I don’t say they do it with malice prepense, or that they plot against us to our ruin; the thing operates rather as an extraordinary effect of their mere successful blatancy. They’re blatant, truly, in the superlative degree, and I call them successfully so for just this reason, that poor Mother is to all appearance perfectly unaware of it. Maria is the one member of all her circle that has got her really, not only just ostensibly, into training; and it’s a part of the general irony of fate that neither she nor my terrible sister herself recognizes the truth of this. The others, even to poor Father, think they manage and manipulate her, and she can afford to let them think it, ridiculously, since they don’t come anywhere near it. She knows they don’t and is easy with them; playing over Father in especial with finger-tips so lightly resting and yet so effectively tickling, that he has never known at a given moment either where they were or, in the least, what they were doing to him. That’s enough for Mother, who keeps by it the freedom other soul; yet whose fundamental humility comes out in its being so hidden from her that her eldest daughter, to whom she allows the benefit of every doubt, does damnably boss her.

  This is the one case in which she’s not lucid; and, to make it perfect, Maria, whose humility is neither fundamental nor superficial, but whose avidity is both, comfortably cherishes, as a ground of complaint — nurses in fact, beatifically, as a wrong — the belief that she’s the one person without influence. Influence? — why she has so much on ME that she absolutely coerces me into making here these dark and dreadful remarks about her! Let my record establish, in this fashion, that if I’m a clinging son I’m, in that quarter, to make up for it, a detached brother. Deadly virtuous and deadly hard and deadly charmless — also, more than anything, deadly sure I — how does Maria fit on, by consanguinity, to such amiable characters, such REAL social values, as Mother and me at all? If that question ceases to matter, sometimes, during the week, it flares up, on the other hand, at Sunday supper, down the street, where Tom and his wife, overwhelmingly cheerful and facetious, contrast so favorably with poor gentle sickly (as we doubtless appear) Lorraine and me. We can’t meet them — that is I can’t meet Tom — on that ground, the furious football-field to which he reduces conversation, making it echo as with the roar of the arena — one little bit.

  Of course, with such deep diversity of feeling, we simply loathe each other, he and I; but the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none of the TRUE joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other. If we could intermit that vain superstition somehow, for about three minutes, I often think the air might clear (as by the scramble of the game of General Post, or whatever they call it) and we should all get out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from these positions a happy and natural defiance. Then I shouldn’t be thus nominally and pretendedly (it’s too ignoble!) on the same side or in the same air as my brother-in-law; whose value is that he has thirty “business ideas” a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth fraction of one in my whole life. He just hums, Tom Price, with business ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them; he moves in the densest we carry our heads here on August evenings, each with its own thick nimbus of mosquitoes. I’m but too conscious of how, on the other hand, I’m desolately outlined to all eyes, in an air as pure and empty as that of a fine Polar sunset.

  It was Lorraine, dear quaint thing, who some time ago made the remark (on our leaving one of those weekly banquets at which we figure positively as a pair of social skeletons) that Tom’s facetae multiply, evidently, in direct proportion to his wealth of business ideas; so that whenever he’s enormously funny we may take it that he’s “on” something tremendous. He’s sprightly in proportion as he’s in earnest, and innocent in proportion as he’s going to be dangerous; dangerous, I mean, to the competitor and the victim. Indeed when I reflect that his jokes are probably each going to cost certain people, wretched helpless people like myself, hundreds and thousands of dollars, their abundant flow affects me as one of the most lurid of exhibitions. I’ve sometimes rather wondered that Father can stand so much of him. Father who has after all a sharp nerve or two in him, like a razor gone astray in a valise of thick Jager underclothing; though of course Maria, pulling with Tom shoulder to shoulder, would like to see any one NOT stand her husband.

  The explanation has struck me as, mostly, that business genial and cheerful and even obstreperous, without detriment to its BEING business, has been poor Father’s ideal for his own terrible kind. This ideal is, further, that his home-life shall attest that prosperity. I think it has even been his conception that our family tone shall by its sweet innocence fairly register the pace at which the Works keep ahead: so that he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue. We of course don’t know — that is Mother and Grandmamma don’t, in any definite way (any more than I do, thanks to my careful stupidity) how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success; and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly fenced garden of our little life as could very well be crammed into the space.

  Poor Grandmamma — since I’ve mentioned her — appears to me always the aged wan Flora of our paradise; the presiding divinity, seated in the centre, under whose pious traditions, REALLY quite dim and outlived, our fond sacrifices are offered. Queer enough the superstition that Granny is a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost. She knows as much about the world as a tin jelly-mould knows about the dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that don’t in the least matter and of bland failure to suspect things that intensely do. She lives in short in a weird little waste of words — over the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate; yet hasn’t a notion of any effective earnestness herself except on the subject of empty bottles, which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses. At this time of day it doesn’t matter, but if there could have been dropped into her empty bottles, at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn’t have figured so as the head and front of all our sentimentality.

  I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat “modernity” in this order that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her among us this antique and austere consistency. I don’t talk things over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of perception we neither of us waste on the others. It’s the “antiquity of the age of crinoline,” she said the other day a propos of a little carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestress as a young woman of the time of the War; looking as if she had been violently inflated from below, but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity of expression, from her waist up. Mother, however, I must say, is as wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself, exactly, to appear a mere contemporary illustration (being all the while three times the true picture) in order that her parent shall have the importance of the Family Portrait. I don�
�t mean of course that she has told me so; but she cannot see that if she hasn’t that importance Granny has none other; and it’s therefore as if she pretended she had a ruff, a stomacher, a farthingale and all the rest — grand old angles and eccentricities and fine absurdities: the hard white face, if necessary, of one who has seen witches burned.

  She hasn’t any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity: that’s a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but, exquisitely determined she shall have Character lest she perish — while it’s assumed we still need her — Mother makes it up for her, with a turn of the hand, out of bits left over from her own, far from economically as her own was originally planned; scraps of spiritual silk and velvet that no one takes notice of missing. And Granny, as in the dignity of her legend, imposes, ridiculous old woman, on every one — Granny passes for one of the finest old figures in the place, while Mother is never discovered. So is history always written, and so is truth mostly worshipped. There’s indeed one thing, I’ll do her the justice to say, as to which she has a glimmer of vision — as to which she had it a couple of years ago; I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent, to crown her culture, to that horrid co-educative college from which the poor child returned the other day so preposterously engaged to be married; and, if she had only been a little more actively with me we might perhaps between us have done something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious manner, down into one of the angles of the room — it reduces her protest to a feebleness: she’s incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of Criticism, which is the cardinal sin with her, to see all, or to follow any premise to it in the right direction.