Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What is he?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well!”

  The woman had sunk their voices low, and now they dropped into silence, unbroken by the creak of their rockers.

  The young man made a louder rustling of his newspaper, and a clash, self-explained as final when it was followed by a sound of his rising. He came across the hall with what Mrs. Kelwyn, even in her dismay, decided to be a cultivated walk, and showed himself in the office doorway. He was well enough dressed, but by the clothier rather than the tailor; his bearing was gentle, with a trace of involuntary authority of some sort. He had a thoughtful knot between his thoughtful eyes; his face, of a clean-shavenness rare in those days, showed a delicate surface; his chin, to which he put up a long, spare hand, was fine; his cheeks were rather thin, as those of youth are apt to be; his still gray eyes looked out under straight, brownish brows, and a crop of light-colored hair refused to observe any careful order above it.

  “I had to overhear what you ladies were saying,” he began, in a quiet, unimpassioned tone, as if he had thought the matter out and had made himself personally exterior to it as far as his sensibilities might have been concerned. “I wanted to tell you that you mustn’t have me on your minds, any of you. I can understand why it wouldn’t always be desirable to receive a stranger under one’s roof, and I’m not afraid but I can get a room somewhere if it is all right about the work. As for what I am, I am a laborer, in one sense. I am a teacher, or have been; but I was brought up on a farm, and I know about gardening. This is my vacation, and I like to work while I’m resting.” He paused, and then he made a seriously deferential bend toward the ladies, and turned and walked down the hall toward the threshold, where he stood leaning against the doorjamb looking out, while Mrs. Kelwyn and the Office Sisters sat looking at one another.

  It appeared that he had gone to the front door to be the more readily rid of his embarrassment, for he returned presently toward the door of the parlor, where Mrs. Kelwyn arrested him with an apologetic noise in her throat. “I beg your pardon?” he questioned.

  “I am sorry,” she said, “that you should have heard what I said. But perhaps it was best. I wish to explain that besides never having thought of an inmate, we are in the hands of such a terrible family that we don’t know from hour to hour whether we shall stay ourselves in the house we have taken. It’s a delightful house, and there is such an abundance of rooms that I don’t wonder Brother Jasper, and the Sisters here, thought we might spare one for you, and under some circumstances—” She found herself speaking from a kindness for this young man which had won upon her, and she had to check herself somewhat haughtily. “But as it is, it isn’t to be thought of.” She added, with new relenting: “I mean quite as much on your account as our own. I couldn’t give you an idea of the strait we are in. The people who have, as our tenants — it’s rather complicated, but I needn’t burden you with the details — undertaken to board us and keep house for us have turned out perfect failures. They can’t cook, and they are careless to the last degree; and what we shall do, after getting so well settled, I’m sure I don’t know.”

  She addressed her troubles to a certain general interest in the young man’s face, but he caught at one point only. “Cook?” he tardily echoed.

  “No, not cook! Not the least in the world!”

  “I meant,” he said, “are they willing to learn?”

  “Really,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, in a putting-down tone, “I don’t know. But I am not willing to teach.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” the young man returned, gently.

  Though he was still not what she would have called a gentleman, he was more and more evidently a person of some sort of refinement. She felt a rise of respect for him when he now added: “As a visitor for the Associated Charities, I saw a good deal of the domestic life of the poor, and I didn’t find the cooking so had in any of the foreign households as our New England country fare. Somebody ought to go into the farm kitchens and teach the women, by precept and example both, that cookery is a science, and that it is to be studied and respected as such.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn had gone forward to the door of the parlor where the young man had halted when she addressed him, and they had remained there talking, while the Office Sisters went about their household functions. She was going to reply in cordial acquiescence with him, when she was arrested by the noise of wheels on the gravel before the office, and the voice of her husband calling a more vigorous “Whoa!” to their old mare than would have brought a far more impetuous animal to a stand. At the same time a girl’s voice joyously shouted, “Hello, Cousin Carry!”

  “Good gracious!” Mrs. Kelwyn groaned, in a sotto voce dismay; but she cried gayly, as she hurried toward the front door, “Why, are you there, Thennie?”

  “Yes,” the girl’s voice answered. “I decided I wouldn’t wait for my letter to reach you; I would come and tell you myself. Wasn’t that thoughtful of me?” An emotional tumult of cries and kisses now reached the young man where Mrs. Kelwyn had left him, and amid a jubilation of welcome from her, and ejaculated explanations from the girl, he heard from Mrs. Kelwyn such specific bursts of anxiety, addressed to her husband, as: “Did you get the steak? And some fresh butter? And bakers’ bread? I hope you remembered the bacon! And the prunes? You didn’t forget some English breakfast tea and a bit of cheese! The crackers? Well, then, I think we can live through your visit, Thennie.”

  There followed question of whether the buggy seat would hold all three of them, and then there followed a sound of creaking springs and a crunching and grinding of wheels, with some laughs of terror, and the buggy rattled away, and the young man went to the parlor window and watched its retreat down the road toward the South Family House.

  VIII

  PARTHENOPE BROOK was not Kelwyn’s cousin, as one might have inferred from the note of inculpation in Mrs. Kelwyn’s voice when she read her letter over in the Office. She was a just woman, as she believed; Parthenope was her own cousin, and she could not deny it; she would not, perhaps, have denied it if she could. The girl was not even a first cousin; she was a first cousin once removed, and in this fact Mrs. Kelwyn had an additional motive for acquitting her husband of the blame which she at first involuntarily laid upon him. If the girl’s coming without being asked was, under the circumstances, an indiscretion not far from a liberty, still it was not a liberty from his side of the family, as she more and more clearly recognized in more and more reconciling herself to the situation. She began, on the way from the Office to the South Family House, to bow to the stroke, and before she reached the house she was ready to acknowledge that nobody was to blame; hardly the girl herself was to blame. The way Parthenope listened to the story which Mrs. Kelwyn more continuously than coherently poured out upon her was a positive merit, and it ended in a climax of the virtues inherent in Mrs. Kelwyn’s family.

  The girl was no longer in her early twenties, but she seemed much younger, perhaps because she had been born of very youthful parents, who had gone out from a Boston suburb to Italy in those simple days when living in Italy was almost a brevet of genius. The Brooks were both artists, but after their baby came Mrs. Brook grew rather more a mother and less a painter, and her husband rather more a sculptor if not less a father. He devoted himself to the sort of genre sculpture which was then of easier sale than now, but he thought himself fortunate to be put under agreement with a Boston house which dealt in objects of art as well as watches, clocks, and jewelry to give it all he could do, or, as the contracting partner phrased it, his entire output, for a fixed sum annually. The first year of this arrangement had not expired when he and his wife both died of Roman fever, which foreigners living in Rome formerly contended could be taken only in Naples, where the Brooks had gone for some of the classic motives of genre sculpture to be best studied there in the Museo Borbonico.

  It was in Naples that their little one was born, and in recognition of the classic name of the city they called her Par
thenope. At times they did not know but they had weighed the child down with a name too massive for such a mite; but they justly held that Parthenope and Brook were words that flowed musically together; they began by calling her Thennie, and in their lifetime they never got so far as Parthenope. The aunt, who had brought her home after they died, had wished to use the full name, but she was not able to do so at once, in her tenderness for the orphan baby. Parthenope herself, as soon as she arrived at the consciousness of young ladyhood, and the sense of dignity which is more abounding at sixteen than at twenty-six, always wrote herself Parthenope Brook. She asked her girl friends to address her so, and two or three of the nearest tried to do it, but to the others she was Thennie Brook, as she continued to be with Miss Brook, her aunt, and with her cousins the Kelwyns, and all her elder contemporaries. The world had not yet arrived at the mood in which it now rejects pet names and nicknames, and gives young people the full count of their baptismal syllables, and with most of Parthenope’s fellow-students at the Art School, to whom she condescended from a higher social level, there was an instinctive reluctance to add possibly to the altitude she maintained by any sort of concession. She was not exactly conceited, the girls who analyzed their feelings toward her said; she was not exactly topping; but, if you could understand, she was so full of initiative (her critics valued themselves on the word, which one of them had got out of a review) as to need all the putting down you could quietly give her; in fact, her initiative might be called selfsufficiency, though that, her critics owned, was oversaying it rather. At the worst, perhaps, she was disposed to offer gratuitous instruction, which would have come with better grace from one who was herself a more devoted student, and did not help herself out so much with chic. But she was often really very nice, and her wish to control other people sometimes passed into selfcontrol, and then she really was nice.

  Her initiative had early made itself felt with her aunt, who lapsed year by year from the pitying authority in which the child’s bereavement had placed her, and let Parthenope have her way in most things. The consequence was that Parthenope grew up with something like over - initiative as regarded her aunt, whose life she regulated according to her own conceptions of what was good for her, rather than her aunt’s vague preferences. Her aunt went, or came, or remained, much as Parthenope decided, and neither realized that Parthenope had decided, though the fact was clear to spectators. Certainly the girl was all affection and thoughtfulness; and if in the present late cold spring she had decided that they had better stay in Boston till well toward the summer instead of going as early as usual to Pigeon Cove, where one died of one’? own dulness in the old-fashioned resort, she had not decided selfishly, if she could judge from her sufferings in the wilderness that Boston had become in June. It was a wilderness that she said did not even howl, and amid its silence there had one night come to her the question whether she was getting all the good out of the Art School which might have come to her in some atelier abroad, say Paris. While her aunt, in the comfort of her old home on the Hill, contentedly waited Parthenope’s initiative, and sometimes even said that she did not see why they should go away at all, the girl began to let her initiative get the better of her in the direction of Europe. In tacitly yielding to it, she hoped that she was not unreasonable, and she knew she was not fantastic; but if not Europe, was there not some other place they could go to for the summer? This question recurred the more persistently because her aunt would have been so placidly willing to go anywhere she said, and thus put her on her conscience.

  What she really wanted, it now came to her in a flash, was a fresh point of view, and in another flash it came to her that there could be no point of view so fresh as that of her cousins the Kelwyns, from that house which they had so quaintly taken from a Shaker community. It was a thing so original that she would not have expected it of them on any other ground than economy, for she knew they were rather poor; at the first she had felt some stirrings of curiosity as to their experiment, but these had already quite subsided before she now suddenly perceived that there was no one she could advise with so hopefully. She at first thought of surprising the Kelwyns and then not quite surprising them, and when she wrote that she was coming she did not really mean to leave them without the choice or the chance of forbidding her to come.

  One of Parthenope Brook’s ideals was a regard for others which she did not attempt to realize in an altruistic devotion to need of any kind, so much as in the divination of comfortable people’s rights and the resolution to square them with her duties. She was strictly a product of the country and city which she could hardly remember were not her native country and city, and of her time, which was the same wherever cultivated persons were born. It was the time when youth was very much characterized by its reading, which was very much more in poetry than it is now, and by fiction which it must be owned was better, with all its faults, than the fiction glutting the souls of our contemporary youth. After the prevalence of Italian with the better class intellectuals, there had followed a tide of German, in the ebb of which Parthenope was stranded upon a narrow acquaintance with German poetry; she had read a few songs of Heine and ballads of Uhland in the original; she could sing two or three, and she was considered by other girls a perfect German scholar. In English literature Swinburne had then risen and filled the sky with a light which was not quite steadfast, and Browning was a growing cult, but Tennyson was supremely read and quoted in such measure as almost to color the whole parlance of emotion. Longfellow was held in a tender and reverent esteem; the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table still ruled the words and thoughts of his fellow-citizens and fellow-countrymen, and the cold fire of Emerson was increasingly lighting if not heating their minds. In Parthenope’s peculiar circle, Thackeray was held a cynic and a pessimist, especially regarding women, and was only found out by the prophetic few a kindly sentimentalist. She had been taken by her aunt to hear Dickens read in Tremont Temple, after her aunt’s serving-man had stood in line all night to get tickets for them in the coldest December weather known even in Boston. Lectures of all kinds were still much frequented, but they were already degenerating from the edification of the intellectually elect to the amusement of the common-schooled masses. The theatre held a doubtful place in the honor and pleasure of the great world, which was in Boston as elsewhere the small world. Fechter, Salvini, Bernhardt, Ristori, the younger Kean, were some of the planets from the remoter skies which lured the upper classes to the noble old Boston Theatre, where strange meteoric splendors of Offenbach opera misled them from the truth illustrated by the Symphony Concerts.

  Girls of Parthenope’s age, however, were formed rather upon the novel than the drama. George Eliot, Charles Reade, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell and lesser sybils, with the nascent American fictionists of the Atlantic Monthly school, inculcated a varying doctrine of eager conscience, romanticized actuality, painful devotion, and bullied adoration, with auroral gleams of religious sentimentality. Womanhood stood high in the temple of the cult where the votaries of these authors worshipped. Parthenope herself had never observed among her acquaintance that girls were really nicer than young men, but she believed that they ought to be won by heroes who sacrificed or ventured a great deal for them, rescued them from some sort of peril, or risked their lives for them even when they were not in danger; if not, they must fall a prey themselves to some terrible accident, or be seized with some sickness in which the heroines could nurse them up from the brink of death to the loftier levels of life in happy marriage. If a hero would not fall sick, or imperil life or limb, or sublimely rest guiltless under the blame of some shame or crime that would otherwise be laid to the heroine’s charge, he could believe some other man in love with her and give her up to him. This would go far to win her, especially if the hero died of his renunciation or fell into a decline. On her part there was a reciprocal duty to give him up to some girl whom she knew to be in love with him, though she knew also that he was in love with herself. But, generally speaking, heroines were
born, not made or selfmade; one need only be of the female sex in order to be the aim and desire of the noblest of men. As yet the baddish heroine did not abound, and the married flirt spread ruin only in a restricted area. A hero might properly be of the moneyed or leisure classes, but he was best as some sort of artist, because more portable than the business or professional man, who could not follow the heroine so far afield in her summer disoccupation. He must not keep a shop or be a mechanic, but he could very well be of the simplest origin, like David Dodd in Love Me Little, Love Me Long, and could easily win a fastidious and patrician heroine by the force of his native genius or fervent passion.

  There was a moment when Parthenope had thought of writing stories; she sent a few manuscripts about to editors; but her attention was turned to art in time to console her for their rejection. Athletics, on anything like the present scale, were as yet not; but aesthetics were even more than they are now. In the form then called household art they abandoned themselves to the decoration of interiors; their storks stood about on one leg on stone bottles, flower-pots, and chair-backs everywhere; their lilies and rushes bent and bristled on the panels of all the doors. Almost anything might be done with tiles, especially encaustic tiles, and a great deal might be accomplished in the simpler interiors with square-headed brass spikes; Eastlake furniture and Morris’ wall-paper were equally sources of inspiration. Ruskin was the absolute authority in the realm of architecture; much was still expected of the Gothic; and in the mean time the cities and suburbs were filled with empirical guesses in brick and wood, which still largely remain the wonder of posterity. Parthenope had once fancied in her early revolt from the unrealities of household art of being herself an architect; but, as she was a girl of decided and unswerving purpose, she ended by entering the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, which she might or might not make the gateway to the great world of painting in Europe. In the mean time she drew with fitful industry under her masters, and chicqued a kind of water-colors, which she knew she had not invented and which she did not wholly respect.