Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered a couple making a tour of the island on foot. But none of these people were young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited only by persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating lunch to the music of the shouting Rapids, on the outer edge of the last Sister, were no younger, apparently.

  Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she preferred to refute his story of her former panic on those islands by remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb novelty which nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock has fallen and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in celebrating the display, with the purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather keep her Niagara unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood him, there must be something rather cheap and conscious in the new feature. She approved, however, of the change that had removed that foolish little Terrapin Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she confessed that she could have enjoyed a little variety in the stories the driver told them of the Indian burial-ground on the island: they were exactly the stories she and Basil had heard twelve years before, and the ill-starred goats, from which the island took its name, perished once more in his narrative.

  Under the influence of his romances our travellers began to find the whole scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little sooner than they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous village on foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of the local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world so large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill them? They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all these magnificent equipages are waiting about the empty streets for the people who never come to hire them.

  “It seems to me that I don’t see so many strangers here as I used,” Basil had suggested to their driver.

  “Oh, they haven’t commenced coming yet,” he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended that they were plenty enough in July and August.

  They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who advertised a table d’hote dinner on a board at his door; and they put their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended that Niagara was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In fact, they observed that their regret for the supposed decline of the Falls as a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in their offers of sympathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.

  Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them there, while he walked down the village street, for a closer inspection of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk’s island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for consolation into the barber’s shop, where he found himself the only customer, and no busy sound of “Next” greeted his ear. But the barber, like all the rest, said that Niagara was not unusually empty; and he came out feeling bewildered and defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats which descend the Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil went to him and pretended that he was going to buy a ticket. But a glance at the agent’s sign showed Basil that the agent, with his brave jollity of manner and his impressive “Good-morning,” had passed away from the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited by his widow, who in turn was absent, and temporarily represented by their son. The boy, in supplying Basil with an advertisement of the line, made a specious show of haste, as if there were a long queue of tourists waiting behind him to be served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a spectral line there, but Basil was the only tourist present in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation, and fled with the advertisement in his hand. Isabel met him at the door of the station with a frightened face.

  “Basil,” she cried, “I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the brides?”

  He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at the news-man’s booth the moccasins and the birch-bark bricabrac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.

  “My dear,” he said, “there are no brides; everybody was married twelve years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and don’t come to Niagara if they are wise.

  “Yes,” she desolately asserted, “that is so! Something has been hanging over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the absence of the brides. But — but — Down at the hotels — Didn’t you see anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of minstrelsy? Was there” — She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat. “Perhaps,” said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting in his remoter mind the probable consequences, “there were both brides and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time, and we live amid contemporary things. I dare say there were middle-aged people at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them, nor they us. I dare say that the place is now swarming with bridal couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the reason why they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness. Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do anything to bring us en rapport with that lost bridal world again?”

  Isabel caught away her hand. “Basil,” she cried, “it would be disgusting! I wouldn’t do it for the world — not even for that world. I saw one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the Cave of the Winds, or somewhere, with the children. They were sitting on some steps, he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put his head on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn’t dare. We should look like them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don’t you think we should look like them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Basil. “You are certainly a little wrinkled, my dear.”

  “And you are very fat, Basil.”

  They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they both laughed. “We couldn’t look young if we quarreled a week,” he said. “We had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall do if we live to be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they don’t see our bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper of cherries, Isabel? The children seem to be enjoying them.”

  Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair. “Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall not have a wink of sleep with them to-night. Where is that nux?” She hunted for the medicine in her bag, and the children submitted; for they had eaten all the cherries, and they took their medicine without a murmur. “I wonder at your letting them eat the sour things, Basil,” said their mother, when the children had run off to the news-stand again.

  “I wonder that you left me to see what they were doing,” promptly retorted their father.

  “It was your nonsense about the brides,” said Isabel; “and I t
hink this has been a lesson to us. Don’t let them get anything else to eat, dearest.”

  “They are safe; they have no more money. They are frugally confining themselves to the admiration of the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why have our Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?”

  Isabel despised the small pleasantry. “Then you saw nobody at the hotel?” she asked.

  “Not even the Ellisons,” said Basil.

  “Ah, yes,” said Isabel; “that was where we met them. How long ago it seems! And poor little Kitty! I wonder what has become of them? But I’m glad they’re not here. That’s what makes you realize your age: meeting the same people in the same place a great while after, and seeing how old they’ve grown. I don’t think I could bear to see Kitty Ellison again. I’m glad she didn’t come to visit us in Boston, though, after what happened, she couldn’t, poor thing! I wonder if she’s ever regretted her breaking with him in the way she did. It’s a very painful thing to think of, — such an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as if they ought to meet again, somewhere.”

  “I don’t believe she ever wished it.”

  “A man can’t tell what a woman wishes.”

  “Well, neither can a woman,” returned Basil, lightly.

  His wife remained serious. “It was a very fine point, — a very little thing to reject a man for. I felt that when I first read her letter about it.”

  Basil yawned. “I don’t believe I ever knew just what the point was.”

  “Oh yes, you did; but you forget everything. You know that they met two Boston ladies just after they were engaged, and she believed that he didn’t introduce her because he was ashamed of her countrified appearance before them.”

  “It was a pretty fine point,” said Basil, and he laughed provokingly.

  “He might not have meant to ignore her,” answered Isabel thoughtfully; “he might have chosen not to introduce her because he felt too proud of her to subject her to any possible misappreciation from them. You might have looked at it in that way.”

  “Why didn’t you look at it in that way? You advised her against giving him another chance. Why did you?”

  “Why?” repeated Isabel, absently. “Oh, a woman doesn’t judge a man by what he does, but by what he is! I knew that if she dismissed him it was because she never really had trusted or could trust his love; and I thought she had better not make another trial.”

  “Well, very possibly you were right. At any rate, you have the consolation of knowing that it’s too late to help it now.”

  “Yes, it’s too late,” said Isabel; and her thoughts went back to her meeting with the young girl whom she had liked so much, and whose after history had interested her so painfully. It seemed to her a hard world that could come to nothing better than that for the girl whom she had seen in her first glimpse of it that night. Where was she now? What had become of her? If she had married that man, would she have been any happier? Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girl imagines it; she herself had found that out. It was a state of trial, of probation; it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken each other’s hearts and parted, would not the fragments of their lives have been on a much finer, much higher plane? Had not the commonplace, every-day experiences of marriage vulgarized them both? To be sure, there were the children; but if they had never had the children, she would never have missed them; and if Basil had, for example, died just before they were married — She started from this wicked reverie, and ran towards her husband, whose broad, honest back, with no visible neck or shirt-collar, was turned towards her, as he stood, with his head thrown up, studying a time-table on the wall; she passed her arm convulsively through his, and pulled him away

  “It’s time to be getting our bags out to the train, Basil! Come, Bella! Tom, we’re going!”

  The children reluctantly turned from the news-man’s trumpery; and they all went out to the track, and took seats on the benches under the colonnade. While they waited, the train for Buffalo drew in, and they remained watching it till it started. In the last car that passed them, when it was fairly under way, a face looked full at Isabel from one of the windows. In that moment of astonishment she forgot to observe whether it was sad or glad; she only saw, or believed she saw, the light ofrecognition dawn into its eyes, and then it was gone.

  “Basil!” she cried, “stop the train! That was Kitty Ellison!”

  “Oh no, it wasn’t,” said Basil, easily. “It looked like her; but it looked at least ten years older.”

  “Why, of course it was! We’re all ten years older,” returned his wife in such indignation at his stupidity that she neglected to insist upon his stopping the train, which was rapidly diminishing in the perspective.

  He declared it was only a fancied resemblance; she contended that this was in the neighborhood of Eriecreek, and it must be Kitty; and thus one of their most inveterate disagreements began.

  Their own train drew into the depot, and they disputed upon the fact in question till they entered on the passage of the Suspension Bridge. Then Basil rose and called the children to his side. On the left hand, far up the river, the great Fall shows, with its mists at its foot and its rainbow on its brow, as silent and still as if it were vastly painted there; and below the bridge, on the right, leap the Rapids in the narrow gorge, like seas on a rocky shore. “Look on both sides, now,” he said to the children. “Isabel, you must see this!”

  Isabel had been preparing for the passage of this bridge ever since she left Boston. “Never!” she exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes, and hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanks to this precaution of hers, the train crossed the bridge in perfect safety.

  BRAYBRIDGE’S OFFER

  We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. With its mixture of Oriental appointments in curtains, cushions, and little tables of teak-wood the Turkish room expressed rather an adventurous conception of the Ottoman taste; but it was always a cozy place whether you found yourself in it with cigars and coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other spot in the club.

  Our rather limited little down-town dining club was almost a celibate community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare what we liked. Some dozed away the intervening time; some read the evening papers, or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now seeing the three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher range of thinking.

  “I shouldn’t have supposed, somehow,” he said with a knot of deprecation between his fine eyes, “that he would have had the pluck.”

  “Perhaps he hadn’t,” Minver suggested.

  Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. “You mean that she—”

  “I don’t see why you say
that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.

  “I didn’t say it,” Minver contradicted.

  “You implied it; and I don’t think it’s fair. It’s easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the case.”

  “So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn’t think you would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where Acton is, Rulledge.”

  “It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.

  Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.