Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes,” Minver said, facing about toward me. “How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you’re always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?”

  “No, I can’t,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why.”

  “No, you couldn’t, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It’s part of your swindler to assume that you do know why. You ought to find out.”

  Wanhope interposed abstractly, or as abstractly as he could: “The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”

  “Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don’t you do it, Acton?”

  I returned, as seriously as could have been expected: “Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don’t like to talk of such things.”

  “They’re ashamed,” Minver declared. “The lovers don’t either of them, in a given ease, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little the man.”

  Minver’s point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the same time. We begged each other’s pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I should go on.

  “Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don’t think they’re so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say?”

  “Very much what you said. It’s astonishing how people forget the vital things, and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generation knows nothing of it.”

  “That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But how do you know what you were saying, Wanhope?”

  “I’ve ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn’t inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed.” Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them.”

  “Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood—” Rulledge began, but Minver’s laugh arrested him.

  “Nothing so concrete, I’m afraid,” Wanhope gently returned. “I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. There’s something pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at.”

  “They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game of love,” Minver said. “Especially when they’re not in earnest about it.”

  “Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope admitted. “But I don’t mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with her.”

  “Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge asked.

  “You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, “that if she didn’t know it, he never would.” Then Wanhope answered for himself:

  “I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any appeal.”

  “And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I suggested.

  “Yes,” Wanhope admitted after a thoughtful reluctance.

  “Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”

  “If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the case in point; we won’t mention any names. She is sailing through time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can’t be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure about that, professor,” Minver put in. “Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you.”

  “It’s all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life,” Wanhope resumed. “I don’t believe I could make out the case, as I feel it to be.”

  “Braybridge’s part of the case is rather plain, isn’t it?” I invited him.

  “I’m not sure of that. No man’s part of any case is plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the psychologist added with one of his deep breaths, “is so complex as a simple nature.”

  “Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if his case isn’t.”

  “Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.

  “My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”

  “I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel the attraction of such a man — the fascination of his being grizzled, and slovenly, and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop. He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and I don’t vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess’s end of the party, and was watching for a chance to—”

  Wanhope cast about for the word, and Winver supplied it: “Pull out.”

  “Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rulledge said.

  “When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late, the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it’s rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?”

  We others looked at each other. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a jam of people; but this girl — I’ve understood it was she — looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”

  “And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I
said. “Good selling name.”

  “Don’t reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name.”

  “Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don’t see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women.”

  “In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.

  “Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.

  “No; the response must be in kind, to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn’t be afraid.”

  “Oh! That’s the way you get out of it!”

  “Well?” Rulledge urged.

  “I’m afraid,” Wanhope modestly confessed, “that from this point I shall have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn’t able to be very definite, except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he had said he mustn’t think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped she had refused to hear of Braybridge’s going. She said she hadn’t heard of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn’t give Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin thought it was odd that Braybridge didn’t insist; and he made a long story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each other’s charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs. Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and — Well, their engagement has come out, and—” Wanhope paused with an air that was at first indefinite, and then definitive.

  “You don’t mean,” Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, “that that’s all you know about it?”

  “Yes, that’s all I know,” Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised himself at the fact.

  “Well!”

  Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. “I can conjecture — we can all conjecture—”

  He hesitated; then, “Well, go on with your conjecture,” Rulledge said forgivingly.

  “Why—” Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson, whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. “Private?”

  “Come in, come in!” Minver called to him. “Thought you were in Japan?”

  “My dear fellow,” Halson answered, “you must brush up your contemporary history. It’s more than a fortnight since I was in Japan.” He shook hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at once: “Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge’s engagement? It’s humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes, and find the nation absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I’ve met here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I’d heard of it, and if I knew how it could have happened.”

  “And do you?” Rulledge asked.

  “I can give a pretty good guess,” Halson said, running his merry eyes over our faces.

  “Anybody can give a good guess,” Rulledge said. “Wanhope is doing it now.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt.” Halson turned to him politely.

  “Not at all. I’d rather hear your guess. If you know Braybridge better than I,” Wanhope said.

  “Well,” Halson compromised, “perhaps I’ve known him longer.” He asked, with an effect of coming to business, “Where were you?”

  “Tell him, Rulledge,” Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked nothing better. He told him in detail, all we knew from any source, down to the moment of Wanhope’s arrested conjecture.

  “He did leave you at an anxious point, didn’t he?” Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge’s expense, and then said: “Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?”

  “By sight, Minver does,” Rulledge answered for us. “Wants to paint her.” “Of course,” Halson said, with intelligence. “But I doubt if he’d find her as paintable as she looks, at first. She’s beautiful, but her charm is spiritual.”

  “Sometimes we try for that,” the painter interposed.

  “And sometimes you get it. But you’ll allow it’s difficult. That’s all I meant. I’ve known her — let me see — for twelve years, at least; ever since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was bringing her up on the ranche. Her aunt came along, by and by, and took her to Europe; mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was always homesick for the ranche; she pined for it; and after they had kept her in Germany three or four years they let her come back, and run wild again; wild as a flower does, or a vine — not a domesticated animal.”

  “Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge.”

  “Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver,” Halson said, almost austerely. “Her father died two years ago, and then she had to come East, for her aunt simply wouldn’t live on the ranche. She brought her on, here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the girl didn’t take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the ranche.”

  “She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those conventional people.”

  Halson laughed at Minver’s thrust, and went on amiably: “I don’t suppose that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any man or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you’ve done, that it was his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn’t that it?”

  Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.

  “And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic—”

  “Lost?” Rulledge demanded.

  “Why, yes. Didn’t you know? But I ought to go back. They said there never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously went for Braybridge, the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child who wanted things frankly, when she did want them. Then his being ten or fifteen years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it natural for a shy girl like her to assort herself with him when all the rest were assorting themselves, as people do at such things. The consensus of testimony is that she did it with the most transparent unconsciousness, and—”

  “Who are your authorities?” Minver asked; Rulledge threw himself back on the divan, and beat the cushions with impatience.

  “Is it essential to give them?”

  “Oh, no. I merely wondered. Go on.”

  “The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him before the others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no design in it; that would have been out of character. They had got to the end of the wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there wasn’t even a trail, and they walked round looking for a way out, till they were turned completely. They decided that the only way was to keep walking, and by and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was some Canucks clearing a piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them in French, they gave them full directions, and Braybridge soon found the path again.”

  Halson paused, and I said, “But that isn’t all?”

  “Oh, no.” He continued thoughtfully silent for a little while before he resumed. “The amazing thing is that they got lost again, and that when they trie
d going back to the Canucks, they couldn’t find the way.”

  “Why didn’t they follow the sound of the chopping?” I asked.

  “The Canucks had stopped, for the time being. Besides, Braybridge was rather ashamed, and he thought if they went straight on they would be sure to come out somewhere. But that was where he made a mistake. They couldn’t go on straight; they went round and round, and came on their own footsteps — or hers, which he recognized from the narrow tread and the dint of the little heels in the damp places.”

  Wanhope roused himself with a kindling eye. “That is very interesting, the movement in a circle of people who have lost their way. It has often been observed, but I don’t know that it has ever been explained. Sometimes the circle is smaller, sometimes it is larger; but I believe it is always a circle.”

  “Isn’t it,” I queried, “like any other error in life? We go round and round; and commit the old sins over again.”

  “That is very interesting,” Wanhope allowed.

  “But do lost people really always walk in a vicious circle?” Minver asked.

  Rulledge would not let Wanhope answer. “Go on, Halson,” he said.

  Halson roused himself from the reverie in which he was sitting with glazed eyes. “Well, what made it a little more anxious was that he had heard of bears on that mountain, and the green afternoon light among the trees was perceptibly paling. He suggested shouting, but she wouldn’t let him; she said it would be ridiculous, if the others heard them, and useless if they didn’t. So they tramped on till — till the accident happened.”

  “The accident!” Rulledge exclaimed in the voice of our joint emotion.

  “He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot,” Halson explained. “It wasn’t a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. He turned so white that she noticed it, and asked him what was the matter. Of course that shut his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled his motive, and he kept himself from crying out till the sudden pain of the wrench was over. He said merely that he thought he had heard something, and he had — an awful ringing in his ears; but he didn’t mean that, and he started on again. The worst was trying to walk without limping, and to talk cheerfully and encouragingly, with that agony tearing at him. But he managed somehow, and he was congratulating himself on his success, when he tumbled down in a dead faint.”