Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. “Ah, the old ideals!” he sighed. “The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it’s a vertiginous whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of their cars.”

  The younger sage laughed. “You’ve been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you’d believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving their lady-friends joy-rides.”

  “Few?” the elder retorted. “There are lots of them. I’ve counted twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful myself.”

  As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, “It is certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year.”

  The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: “Not at all. I’ve seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October.”

  “They didn’t set their fruit, I suppose.”

  “Well — no.”

  “Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It’s the soft weather that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till the first cold snap, and there won’t be a single victoria or butterfly left.”

  “Yes,” the elder assented, “we butterflies and victorias belong to the youth of the year and the world. And the sad thing is that we won’t have our palingenesis.”

  “Why not?” the younger sage demanded. “What is to prevent your coming back in two or three thousand years?”

  “Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn’t find room, for one reason. Haven’t you noticed how full to bursting the place seems? Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city’s shell hasn’t been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough, swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I’ve an idea that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha’n’t quite despair. And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it’s the rumble), but of all the young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I’ve tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven’t seen it, and I’ve decided it wasn’t a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past.”

  “Four-horse dream,” the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.

  The elder did not seem quite pleased. “A joke?” he challenged.

  “Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme.”

  “I didn’t know you were a poet.”

  “I’m not, always. But didn’t it occur to you that danger for danger your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing human creature?”

  “It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But there was only one of it, and it wasn’t going twenty miles an hour.”

  “That’s true,” the younger sage assented. “But there was always a fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were tamed, but, after all, they were only trained animals, like Hagenback’s.”

  “And what is a chauffeur?”

  “Ah, you have me there!” the younger said, and he laughed generously. “Or you would have if I hadn’t noticed something like amelioration in the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time. They’re talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have another hero to win one.”

  “Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting home alive if we had them. Now if I’m not telephoned for at a hospital before I’m restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays, since I had a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth Street. Now I couldn’t count as many horse vehicles.”

  The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried to be serious. “We don’t realize the absolute change. Our streets are not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It’s pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter.”

  “Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting, once, but I don’t any more; it would be no use.”

  “No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I’m on foot I feel all my rights invaded, but when I’m in a taxi it amuses me to see the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it’s “Go” and “Stop” in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and sex ought to be killed.”

  “Yes, there’s something always in the point of view; and there’s some comfort when you’re stopped in your taxi to feel that they often do get killed.”

  The sages laughed together, and the younger said: “I suppose when we get aeroplanes in common use, there’ll be annoying traffic regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central blue to enforce them. After all—”

  What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced upon the elder sage: “Now, see here, grandfather! This won’t do at all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and here you are away down by the Falconer, and we’ve been looking everywhere for you. It’s too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at all after this. Why, it’s horrid of you, grandfather! You might have got killed crossing the drive.”

  The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity which he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly yet fondly over her grandfather.

  The younger
sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the path. The other finally gave an “Oh!” of recognition, and then said, for all explanation and excuse, “I didn’t know what had become of you,” and then they all laughed.

  SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY

  I

  MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT

  Miss Ramsey: “And they were really understood to be engaged?” Miss Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two lady’s umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey’s tea-table and looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey’s absent face. Both are very young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional lapses into extreme girlhood.

  Miss Garnett: “Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn’t know, and I thought you ought to.” She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and conviction-carrying voice. “If he has been coming here so much.”

  Miss Ramsey, with what seems temperamental abruptness: “Sit down. One can always think better sitting down.” She catches a chair under her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks provisionally into her seat. “And I think it needs thought, don’t you?”

  Miss Garnett: “That is what I expected of you.”

  Miss Ramsey: “And have some more tea. There is nothing like fresh tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for this.” She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till the maid appears. “More tea, Nora.” She is silent again while the maid reappears with the tea and disappears. “I don’t know that he has been coming here so very much. But he has no right to be coming at all, if he is engaged. That is, in that way.”

  Miss Garnett: “No. Not unless — he wishes he wasn’t.”

  Miss Ramsey: “That would give him less than no right.”

  Miss Garnett: “That is true. I didn’t think of it in that light.”

  Miss Ramsey: “I’m trying to decide what I ought to do if he does want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?”

  Miss Garnett: “As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn’t say whom she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later, and she did not quite feel like asking, don’t you know.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr. Ashley?”

  Miss Garnett: “Simply by putting two and two together. They two were together the whole time last summer.”

  Miss Ramsey: “I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do.”

  Miss Garnett, admiringly: “I knew you would say that.”

  Miss Ramsey, dreamily: “The question is what the thing is.”

  Miss Garnett: “Yes!”

  Miss Ramsey: “That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?” She offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her shoulder, without rising.

  Miss Garnett: “Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?”

  Miss Ramsey: “They go well with anything. But we mustn’t allow our minds to be distracted. The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling on other girls — well, as if he wasn’t — and he has been calling here a great deal. That is perfectly evident. He must be made to feel that girls are not to be trifled with — that they are not mere toys.”

  Miss Garnett: “How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to understand that Emily has a right—”

  Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I don’t know that I care about her — or not primarily. Or do you say primarily?”

  Miss Garnett: “I never know. I only use it in writing.”

  Miss Ramsey: “It’s a clumsy word; I don’t know that I shall. But what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn’t matter whether the girl has thrown herself at him, or not—”

  Miss Garnett: “She certainly did, from what Conny says.”

  Miss Ramsey: “He must be shown that other girls won’t tolerate his behaving as if he were not engaged. It is wrong.”

  Miss Garnett: “We must stand together.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Yes. Though I don’t infer that he has been attentive to other girls generally.”

  Miss Garnett: “No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much, you want to prevent his trifling with others.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Something like that. But it ought to be more definite. He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one else.”

  Miss Garnett: “And cruel to the girl he is engaged to.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Yes.” She speaks coldly, vaguely. “But that is the personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him purely in the abstract.”

  Miss Garnett: “Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he is so severe himself.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Severe?”

  Miss Garnett: “Not tolerating anything that’s the least out of the way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where you’re wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I like that in him. It’s so invigorating. It braces up all your good resolutions. It makes you ashamed; and shame is sanative.”

  Miss Garnett: “That’s just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway.” She takes another chocolate from the box. “Go on.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act. How do you suppose people do, generally?”

  Miss Garnett: “Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them, after he’s engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it doesn’t matter whether they’re in love with him themselves or not.”

  Miss Ramsey: “I’m not in love with Mr. Ashley, please.”

  Miss Garnett: “No; I’m supposing an extreme case.”

  Miss Ramsey, after a moment of silent thought: “Did you ever hear of anybody doing it?”

  Miss Garnett: “Not just in our set. But I know it’s done continually.”

  Miss Ramsey: “It seems to me as if I had read something of the kind.”

  Miss Garnett: “Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows? They might carry off the effects of the chocolates.” Miss Ramsey passes her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table to look at.

  Miss Ramsey: “And of course they couldn’t get into the books if they hadn’t really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point.”

  Miss Garnett: “Why, there was Peg Woffington—”

  Miss Ramsey, with displeasure: “She was an actress of some sort, wasn’t she?”

  Miss Garnett, with meritorious candor: “Yes, she was. But she was a very good actress.”

  Miss Ramsey: “What did she do?”

  Miss Garnett: “Well, it’s a long time since I read it; and it’s rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her to give him back to her, and she does it. There’s something about a portrait of Peg — I don’t remember exactly; she puts her face through and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is beautiful. They bec
ome the greatest friends.”

  Miss Ramsey: “Rather silly, I should say.”

  Miss Garnett: “Yes, it is rather silly, but I suppose the author thought she had to do something.”

  Miss Ramsey: “And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don’t see any comparison with Mr. Ashley.”

  Miss Garnett: “No, there really isn’t any. Emily has never asked you to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a little — loved him, in fact.”

  Miss Ramsey: “And I don’t like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I respect him — and I admire his intellect; there’s no question about his being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any other way; and now I can’t even respect him.”

  Miss Garnett: “Nobody could. I’m sure Emily would be welcome to him as far as I was concerned. But he has never been about with me so much as he has with you, and I don’t wonder you feel indignant.”

  Miss Ramsey, coldly: “I don’t feel indignant. I wish to be just.”

  Miss Garnett: “Yes, that is what I mean. And poor Emily is so uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers does, she is perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see why the poor girl’s fiancé should be so taken with her. But I’m sure no one could say you had ever given Mr. Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure justice on your part. I think you are grand! I shall always be proud of knowing what you were going to do.”