Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “No, no! Not on any account! I’d rather think it out for myself. You couldn’t help me. After all, it hasn’t done me any harm—”

  “And you’ve had a great escape! And I won’t say a word more now, but I’ll be back soon, and then we — Oh, I’m so sorry I’m going.”

  Verrian gave a laugh. “You couldn’t do anything if you stayed, mother. Do go!”

  “Well—” She looked at him, smoothing her muff with her hand a moment, and then she dropped a fond kiss on his cheek and obeyed him.

  IV

  Verrian still sat at his desk, thinking, with his burning face in his hands. It was covered with shame for what had happened to him, but his humiliation had no quality of pity in it. He must write to that girl, and write at once, and his sole hesitation was as to the form he should give his reply. He could not address her as Dear Miss Brown or as Dear Madam. Even Madam was not sharp and forbidding enough; besides, Madam, alone or with the senseless prefix, was archaic, and Verrian wished to be very modern with this most offensive instance of the latest girl. He decided upon dealing with her in the third person, and trusting to his literary skill to keep the form from clumsiness.

  He tried it in that form, and it was simply disgusting, the attitude stiff and swelling, and the diction affected and unnatural. With a quick reversion to the impossible first type, he recast his letter in what was now the only possible shape.

  “MY DEAR MISS BROWN, — The editor of the American Miscellany has

  sent me a copy of his recent letter to you and your own reply, and

  has remanded to me an affair which resulted from my going to him

  with your request to see the close of my story now publishing in his

  magazine.

  “After giving the matter my best thought, I have concluded that it

  will be well to enclose all the exhibits to you, and I now do this

  in the hope that a serious study of them will enable you to share my

  surprise at the moral and social conditions in which the business

  could originate. I willingly leave with you the question which is

  the more trustworthy, your letter to me or your letter to him, or

  which the more truly represents the interesting diversity of your

  nature. I confess that the first moved me more than the second,

  and I do not see why I should not tell you that as soon as I had

  your request I went with it to Mr. Armiger and did what I could to

  prompt his compliance with it. In putting these papers out of my

  hands, I ought to acknowledge that they have formed a temptation to

  make literary use of the affair which I shall now be the better

  fitted to resist. You will, of course, be amused by the ease with

  which you could abuse my reliance on your good faith, and I am sure

  you will not allow any shame for your trick to qualify your pleasure

  in its success.

  “It will not be necessary for you to acknowledge this letter and its

  enclosures. I will register the package, so that it will not fail

  to reach you, and I will return any answer of yours unopened, or, if

  not recognizably addressed, then unread.

  “Yours sincerely,

  “P. S. VERRIAN.”

  He read and read again these lines, with only the sense of their insufficiency in doing the effect of the bitterness in his heart. If the letter was insulting, it was by no means as insulting as he would have liked to make it. Whether it would be wounding enough was something that depended upon the person whom he wished to wound. All that was proud and vain and cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that had been played upon him, and all that was sweet and kind and gentle in him, when he believed the trick was a genuine appeal, turned to their counter qualities. Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew that he could not do more or worse by trying, and he so much feared that by waiting he might do less and better that he hurried it into the post at once. If his mother had been at hand he would have shown it her, though he might not have been ruled by her judgment of it. He was glad that she was not with him, for either she would have had her opinion of what would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought of difference or delay.

  He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of his letter or not, and he decided that he would not. But when she came into his study on her return he showed it her.

  She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking, “Where are her two letters?”

  “I’ve sent them back with the answer.”

  His mother let the paper drop from her hands. “Philip! You haven’t sent this!”

  “Yes, I have. It wasn’t what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do at the moment. Don’t you like it?”

  “Oh—” She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying anything she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.

  “Well!” he demanded, with impatience.

  “Oh, you may have been right. I hope you’ve not been wrong.”

  “Mother!”

  “She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet—”

  “Well?”

  “Perhaps she was punished enough already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t like your being-vindictive.”

  “Vindictive?”

  “Being so terribly just, then.” She added, at his blank stare, “This is killing, Philip.”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t think it will kill her. She isn’t that kind.”

  “She’s a girl,” his mother said, with a kind of sad absence.

  “But not a single-minded girl, you warned me. I wish I could have taken your warning. It would have saved me from playing the fool before myself and giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give himself away. I don’t think Miss Brown will suffer much before she dies. She will ‘get together,’ as she calls it, with that other girl and have ‘a real good time’ over it. You know the village type and the village conditions, where the vulgar ignorance of any larger world is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Don’t be troubled by my vindictiveness or my justice, mother! I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short of it, as I was afraid.”

  Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter back to her son. “Perhaps you are right, Philip. She is probably so tough as not to feel it very painfully.”

  “She’s not so tough but she’ll be very glad to get out of it so lightly. She has had a useful scare, and I’ve done her a favor in making the scare a sharp one. I suppose,” Verrian mused, “that she thinks I’ve kept copies of her letters.”

  “Yes. Why didn’t you?” his mother asked.

  Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than before. “I shall begin to believe you’re all alike, mother.”

  I didn’t keep copies of her letters because I wanted to get her and her letters out of my mind, finally and forever. Besides, I didn’t choose. to emulate her duplicity by any sort of dissimulation.

  “I see what you mean,” his mother said. “And, of course, you have taken the only honorable way.”

  Then they were both silent for a time, thinking their several thoughts.

  Verrian broke the silence to say, “I wish I knew what sort of ‘other girl’ it was that she ‘got together with.’”

  “Why?”

  “Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this magnanimous creature who takes all the blame to herself.”

  “Then you don’t believe they’re both the same?”

  “They are both the same in stationery and chirography, but not in literature.”

  “I hope you won’t get to thinking about her, then,” his mother entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.

/>   “Not seriously,” Verrian reassured her. “I’ve had my medicine.”

  V.

  Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a life by no means long it becomes the instinctive expectation. The event that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series of recurrences by which each one’s episode shares in the unending history of all. The sense of this is so pervasive that humanity refuses to accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the shattered hopes, of those who remain, the severed life keeps on unbrokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as to the life here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and the belief of immortality holds against the myriad years in which none of the numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of it. The lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed habit mechanically attempts its repetition when the conditions render it impossible.

  Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the incident which he had done his utmost to close, when he found himself expecting an answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent. He perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he had really hoped for some protest, some excuse, some extenuation, which in the end would suffer him to be more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her into silence, and to forbid her all hope of his forgiveness, he had, in a manner, not meant to do it. He had kept a secret place in his soul where the sinner against him could find refuge from his justice, and when this sanctuary remained unattempted he found himself with a regret that he had barred the way to it so effectually. The regret was so vague, so formless, however, that he could tacitly deny it to himself at all times, and explicitly deny it to his mother at such times as her touch taught him that it was tangible.

  One day, after ten or twelve days had gone by, she asked him, “You haven’t heard anything more from that girl?”

  “What girl?” he returned, as if he did not know; and he frowned. “You mean the girl that wrote me about my story?”

  He continued to frown rather more darkly. “I don’t see how you could expect me to hear from her, after what I wrote. But, to be categorical, I haven’t, mother.”

  “Oh, of course not. Did you think she would be so easily silenced?”

  “I did what I could to crush her into silence.”

  “Yes, and you did quite right; I am more and more convinced of that. But such a very tough young person might have refused to stay crushed. She might very naturally have got herself into shape again and smoothed out the creases, at least so far to try some further defence.”

  “It seems that she hasn’t,” Verrian said, still darkly, but not so frowningly.

  “I should have fancied,” his mother suggested, “that if she had wanted to open a correspondence with you — if that was her original object — she would not have let it drop so easily.”

  “Has she let it drop easily? I thought I had left her no possible chance of resuming it.”

  “That is true,” his mother said, and for the time she said no more about the matter.

  Not long after this he came home from the magazine office and reported to her from Armiger that the story was catching on more and more with the best class of readers. The editor had shown Verrian some references to it in newspapers of good standing and several letters about it.

  “I thought you might like to look at the letters,” Verrian said, and he took some letters from his pocket and handed them to her across the lunch-table. She did not immediately look at them, because he went on to add something that they both felt to be more important. “Armiger says there has been some increase of the sales, which I can attribute to my story if I have the cheek.”

  “That is good.”

  “And the house wants to publish the book. They think, down there, that it will have a very pretty success — not be a big seller, of course, but something comfortable.”

  Mrs. Verrian’s eyes were suffused with pride and fondness. “And you can always think, Philip, that this has come to you without the least lowering of your standard, without forsaking your ideal for a moment.”

  “That is certainly a satisfaction.”

  She kept her proud and tender gaze upon him. “No one will ever know as I do how faithful you have been to your art. Did any of the newspapers recognize that — or surmise it, or suspect it?”

  “No, that isn’t the turn they take. They speak of the strong love interest involved in the problem. And the abundance of incident. I looked out to keep something happening, you know. I’m sorry I didn’t ask Armiger to let me bring the notices home to you. I’m not sure that I did wisely not to subscribe to that press-clippings bureau.”

  His mother smiled. “You mustn’t let prosperity corrupt you, Philip. Wouldn’t seeing what the press is saying of it distract you from the real aim you had in your story?”

  “We’re all weak, of course. It might, if the story were not finished; but as it is, I think I could be proof against the stupidest praise.”

  “Well, for my part, I’m glad you didn’t subscribe to the clippings bureau. It would have been a disturbing element.” She now looked down at the letters as if she were going to take them up, and he followed the direction of her eyes. As if reminded of the fact by this, he said:

  “Armiger asked me if I had ever heard anything more from that girl.”

  “Has he?” his mother eagerly asked, transferring her glance from the letters to her son’s face.

  “Not a word. I think I silenced her thoroughly.”

  “Yes,” his mother said. “There could have been no good object in prolonging the affair and letting her confirm herself in the notion that she was of sufficient importance either to you or to him for you to continue the correspondence with her. She couldn’t learn too distinctly that she had done — a very wrong thing in trying to play such a trick on you.”

  “That was the way I looked at it,” Verrian said, but he drew a light sigh, rather wearily.

  “I hope,” his mother said, with a recurrent glance at the letters, “that there is nothing of that silly kind among these.”

  “No, these are blameless enough, unless they are to be blamed for being too flattering. That girl seems to be sole of her kind, unless the girl that she ‘got together with’ was really like her.”

  “I don’t believe there was any other girl. I never thought there was more than one.”

  “There seemed to be two styles and two grades of culture, such as they were.”

  “Oh, she could easily imitate two manners. She must have been a clever girl,” Mrs. Verrian said, with that admiration for any sort of cleverness in her sex which even very good women cannot help feeling.

  “Well, perhaps she was punished enough for both the characters she assumed,” Verrian said, with a smile that was not gay.

  “Don’t think about her!” his mother returned, with a perception of his mood. “I’m only thankful that she’s out of our lives in every sort of way.”

  VI.

  Verrian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of gloomy amusement how impossible it was for any woman, even a woman so wide-minded and high-principled as his mother, to escape the personal view of all things and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the fact, as the novelist notes whatever happens or appears to him, but he let the occasion drop out of his mind as soon as he could after it had dropped out of his talk.

  The night when the last number of his story came to them in the magazine, and was already announced as a book, he sat up with his mother celebrating, as he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past. They had a little supper, which she cooked for him in a chafing-dish, in the dining-room of the tiny apartment where they lived together, and she made some coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the Newburg lobster. Perhaps because there was nothing to carry off the effect of the coffee, he heard her, through the partition of their rooms, stirring restlessly after he had gone to bed, and a little later she c
ame to his door, which she set ajar, to ask, “Are you awake, Philip?”

  “You seem to be, mother,” he answered, with an amusement at her question which seemed not to have imparted itself to her when she came in and stood beside his bed in her dressing-gown.

  “You don’t think we have judged her too harshly, Philip?”

  “Do you, mother?”

  “No, I think we couldn’t be too severe in a thing like that. She probably thought you were like some of the other story-writers; she couldn’t feel differences, shades. She pretended to be taken with the circumstances of your work, but she had to do that if she wanted to fool you. Well, she has got her come-uppings, as she would probably say.”

  Verrian replied, thoughtfully, “She didn’t strike me as a country person — at least, in her first letter.”

  “Then you still think she didn’t write both?”

  “If she did, she was trying her hand in a personality she had invented.”

  “Girls are very strange,” his mother sighed. “They like excitement, adventure. It’s very dull in those little places. I shouldn’t wish you to think any harm of the poor thing.”

  “Poor thing? Why this magnanimous compassion, mother?”

  “Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when I was a girl. I used almost to die of hunger for something to happen. Can you remember just what you said in your letter?”

  Verrian laughed. “NO, I can’t. But I don’t believe I said half enough. You’re nervous, mother.”

  “Yes, I am. But don’t you get to worrying. I merely got to thinking how I should hate to have anybody’s unhappiness mixed up with this happiness of ours. I do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure, not tainted with the pain of any human creature.”

  Verrian answered with light cynicism: “It will be tainted with the pain of the fellows who don’t like me, or who haven’t succeeded, and they’ll take care to let me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean that merry maiden up country, she’s probably thinking, if she thinks about it at all, that she’s the luckiest girl in the United States to have got out of an awful scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun with her in my letter. Probably she sees that she has nothing to grieve for but her own break.”