“Oh, come, now!” Minver protested.
“It is like an old-fashioned story, where things are operated by accident instead of motive, isn’t it?” Halson smiled with radiant recognition.
“Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time enough,” I said.
“Had they got back to the other picnickers?” Rulledge asked with a tense voice.
“In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn’t going to bring him into camp in that state; besides she couldn’t. She got some water out of the trout-brook they’d been fishing — more water than trout in it — and sprinkled his face, and he came to, and got on his legs, just in time to pull on to the others, who were organizing a search-party to go after them. From that point on, she dropped Braybridge like a hot coal, and as there was nothing of the flirt in her, she simply kept with the women, the older girls, and the tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along with the secret of his turned ankle. He doesn’t know how he ever got home alive; but he did somehow manage to reach the wagons that had brought them to the edge of the woods, and then he was all right till they got to the house. But still she said nothing about his accident, and he couldn’t; and he pleaded an early start for town the next morning, and got off to bed, as soon as he could.”
“I shouldn’t have thought he could have stirred in the morning,” Rulledge employed Halson’s pause to say.
“Well, this beaver had to,” Halson said. “He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him.”
“What!” Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and Wanhope’s eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.
“She came right towards him. ‘Mr. Braybridge,’ says she, ‘I couldn’t let you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn’t choose to have these people laughing at the notion of my having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn’t bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they’d have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don’t you see?’ Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and little. He said, ‘It would have seemed rather absurd,’ and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot.”
“It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the station,” Minver cynically suggested.
“Groom nothing!” Halson returned with spirit. “She paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station.”
“Jove!” Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.
“She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of praise — it made Braybridge feel awfully flat — and ran back through the bushes to the boat-landing, and — that was the last he saw of her till he met her in town this fall.”
“And when — and when — did he offer himself?” Rulledge entreated breathlessly. “How—”
“Yes, that’s the point, Halson,” Minver interposed. “Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear him out.”
Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson’s answer even for the sake of righting himself.
“I have heard,” Minver went on, “that Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other shore for her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself.” We others stared at Minver in astonishment. Halson glanced covertly toward him with his gay eyes. “Then that wasn’t true?”
“How did you hear it?” Halson asked.
“Oh, never mind. Is it true?”
“Well, I know there’s that version,” Halson said evasively. “The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer — the when and the how — I don’t know that I’m exactly at liberty to say.”
“I don’t see why,” Minver urged. “You might stretch a point for Rulledge’s sake.”
Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive passage of his eye over Rulledge’s intense face. “There was something rather nice happened after — But really, now!”
“Oh, go on!” Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.
“I haven’t the right — Well, I suppose I’m on safe ground here? It won’t go any farther, of course; and it was so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge — he’d followed her down to the shore of the lake — found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and called back: ‘Never mind. I can’t return for it, now.’ Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and she said ‘Yes,’ over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and said ‘No, no, you mustn’t, you mustn’t! You can send it to me.’ He asked where, and she said, ‘In New York — in the fall — at the Walholland.’ Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her — she was paddling on again— ‘May I bring it?’ and she called over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was enough, ‘If you can’t get any one to bring it for you.’ The words barely reached him, but he’d have caught them if they’d been whispered; and he watched her across the lake, and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in time.”
Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said, “Yes, that’s rather nice.” After a moment he added, “Rulledge thinks she put it there.”
“You’re too bad, Minver,” Halson protested. “The charm of the whole thing was her perfect innocence. She isn’t capable of the slightest finesse. I’ve known her from a child, and I know what I say.”
“That innocence of girlhood,” Wanhope said, “is very interesting. It’s astonishing how much experience it survives. Some women carry it into old age with them. It’s never been scientifically studied—”
“Yes,” Minver allowed. “There would be a fortune for the novelist who could work a type of innocence for all it was worth. Here’s Acton always dealing with the most rancid flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness and beauty of a girlhood which does the cheekiest things without knowing what it’s about, and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes and fires at nothing. But I don’t see how all this touches the point that Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer.”
“Well, hadn’t the offer already been made?”
“But how?”
“Oh, in the usual way.”
“What is the usual way?”
“I thought everybody knew that. Of course, it was from Braybridge finally, but I suppose it’s always six of one and half a dozen of the other in these cases, isn’t it? I dare say he couldn’t get any one to take her the handkerchief. My dinner?” Halson looked up at the silent waiter who had stolen upon us and was bowing toward him.
“Look here, Halson,” Minver detained him, “how is it none of the rest of us have heard all those details?”
“I don’t know where you’ve been, Minver. Everybody knows the main facts,” Halson said, escaping.
Wanhope observed musingly: “I suppose he’s quite right about the reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There’s probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding before there’s an explanation. In many cases the offer and the acceptance must really be tacit.”
“Yes,” I ventured, “and I don’t know why we’re so severe with women when they seem to take the initiative. It’s merely, after all, the call of the maiden bird, and there’s nothing lovelier or more endearing in nature than that.”
“Maiden bird is good, Acton,” Minver approved. “Why don’t y
ou institute a class of fiction, where the love-making is all done by the maiden birds, as you call them — or the widow birds? It would be tremendously popular with both sexes. It would lift a tremendous responsibility off the birds who’ve been expected to shoulder it heretofore if it could be introduced into real life.”
Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. “Well, it’s a charming story. How well he told it!”
The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.
“Yes,” he said, as he rose. “What a pity you can’t believe a word Halson says.”
“Do you mean—” we began simultaneously.
“That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying, people don’t speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly remember it.”
“Yes, but see here, Minver!” Rulledge said with a dazed look. “If it’s all a fake of his, how came you to have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?”
“That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I knew he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn’t strike you. It’s the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!”
He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to say: “That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself — how much he believes of his own fiction.”
“I don’t see,” Rulledge said gloomily, “why they’re so long with my dinner.” Then he burst out, “I believe every word Halson said. If there’s any fake in the thing, it’s the fake that Minver owned to.”
AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE
First published in Impressions and Experiences (New York: Harpers & Brothers, 1896)
The New Yorkers, following the custom of Europe, often fence themselves about with a great deal of ceremony in social matters, even such small social matters as making calls.
Some ladies have days when they receive calls; others have no specified day, and then you take your chance of being turned from the door without seeing them, of if you find them, of finding them reluctant and preoccupied. A friend of mine says he has often felt as if he had been admitted through the error of the man or the maid who opened the door to him at such houses, and who returned, after carrying up his name, to say, with a frightened air, that the lady would be down in a moment.
But when there are days there is never any misgiving about letting you in. The door is whisked open before you have had time to ring, sometimes by a servant who has the effect of not belonging to the house, but hired for the afternoon. Then you leave your card on a platter of some sort in the hall to attest the fact of your visit, and at the simpler houses find your way into the drawing-room unannounced, though the English custom of shouting your name before you is very common and is always observed where there is any pretense to fashion. Certain ladies receive once a week throughout the season; others receive on some day each week of December or January or February, as the case may be. When there is this limit to a month, the reception insensibly takes on the character of an afternoon tea, and, in fact, it varies from that only in being a little less crowded. There is tea or chocolate or mild punch and a table spread with pastries and sweets, which hardly any one touches. A young lady dedicates herself to the service of each urn and offers you the beverage that flows from it. There is a great air of gayety, a very excited chatter of female voices, a constant flutter of greeting and leave-taking and a general sense of amiable emptiness and bewildered kindness when you come away. The genius of these little affairs is supposed to be informality, but at some houses where you enjoy such informalities you find two men in livery on the steps outside, a third opens the door for you, a fourth takes your hat and stick, a fifth receives your overcoat and a sixth catches at your name and miscalls it into the drawing room.
I.
But I must not give too exclusive an impression of ceremony in the New-Yorkers. I made some calls about Christmas-time last year in a quarter of the city where the informalities are real and where the hospitalities, such as they were, I thought as sincere as in the houses where the informalities are more apparent. The sort of calls I made were rather fashionable some years ago, but are so no longer. It was a fad to make them, and the fad, like all really nice fads, came from England, and perhaps it has now died out here because it has died out there. At any rate, it seems certain that there is now less interest, less curiosity, concerning the home life of the poor than there was then among the comfortable people. I do not say there is less sympathy — there must be still a good deal of sympathy — but I should say there was less hope with the well-to-do of bettering the condition of the ill-to-do; some philosophers even warn us against indulging a feeling of commiseration, lest it should encourage the poor to attempt themselves to better their condition.
Yet there are no signs of rebellion on the part of the poor, whom I found as tame and peaceful, apparently, when I went the rounds of their unceremonious at-homes as the most anxious philosopher could desire. My calls were by no means of the nature of a perquisition, but they left very little unknown to me, I fancy, of the way the poor live, so frank and simple is their life. They included some tenements of the American quarter, near the point of the island, on the West Side, and a rather greater number on the East Side, in the heart of the district abandoned chiefly to the Russian Jews, though there are no doubt other nationalities to be found there. It is said to be more densely populated than any other area in the world, or at least in Christendom, for within a square mile there are more than three hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children. One can imagine from this fact alone how they are housed and what their chances of the comforts and decencies of life may be. But I must not hurry to the region of these homes before I have first tried to show the interiors of that quarter called American, where I found the Americans represented, as they are so often, by Irish people. The friend who went with me on my calls led me across the usual surface tracks, under the usual elevated tracks, and suddenly dodged before me into an alleyway about two feet wide. This crept under houses fronting on the squalid street we had left and gave into a sort of court some ten or twelve feet wide by thirty or forty feet long. The buildings surrounding it were low and very old. One of them was a stable, which contributed its stench to the odors that rose from the reeking pavement and from the closets filling an end of the court, with a corner left beside them for the hydrant that supplied the water of the whole inclosure. It is from this court that the inmates of the tenements have their sole chance of sun and air. What the place must be in summer I had not the heart to think, and on the wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the skies which my guide said would have been evident to me if I had seen it in August. I could better fancy this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one of the houses and found myself in a typical New York tenement. Then I almost choked at the thought of what a hot day, what a hot night, must be in such a place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled by the passage through the living-room, to the black hole in the rear, where the whole family lay on the heap of rags that passed for a bed.
We had our choice which door to knock at on the narrow landing, a yard wide at most, which opened into such tenements to the right and left, as many stories up as the stairs mounted. We stood at once in the presence of the hostess; there was no ceremony of sending in our cards here, or having our names called to her. In one case we found her over the washtub, with her three weeks’ babe bundled in a chair beside it. A table, with a half-eaten loaf, that formed her breakfast, on it, helped, with the cooking-stove, to crowd the place past any possibility of sitting down, if there had been chairs to sit in; so we stood, as people do at an afternoon tea. At sig
ht of us the woman began to cry and complain that her man had been drunk and idle for a month and did nothing for her; though in these times he might have been sober and idle and done as little. Some good soul was paying the rent for her, which was half as great as would have hired a decent flat in a good part of the town; but how her food came or the coal for her stove remained a mystery which we did not try to solve. She wiped her tears at the exhibition of a small coin, which she had perhaps dimly foreseen through them from the moment they began to flow. It was wrong, perhaps, to give her money, but it was not very wrong, perhaps, for the money was not very much, and if it pauperized her it could not have been said that she was wholly unpauperized before she took it. These are very difficult cases, but all life is a hopeless tangle, and the right is something that does not show itself at once, especially in economical affairs.
In another tenement we found a family as gay and hopeful as this was dismal and desperate. An Irish lady with a stylish fringe of red hair decorating her forehead, welcomed us with excuses for the state of the apartment, which in the next breath she proved herself very proud of, for she said that if people were not comfortable in their houses it was because they were slovenly and untidy. I could not see that she was neater than her neighbor on the landing below. She had a florid taste in pictures, and half a dozen large colored prints went far to hide the walls, which she said, the landlord had lately had whitewashed, though to eyes less fond than hers they showed a livid blue. The whitewashing was the sole repairs which had been put upon her tenement since she came into it, but she seemed to think it quite enough; and her man, who sat at leisure near the stove, in the three days’ beard which seems inseparable from idle poverty, was quite boastful of its advantages. He said that he had lived in the court for thirty years and there was no such air anywhere else in this world. I could readily believe him, being there to smell it and coming away with the taste of it in my mouth. Like other necessaries of life, it must have been rather scanty in that happy home, especially at night, when the dark fell outside and a double dark thickened in the small bin which stood open to our gaze at the end of the room. The whitewash seemed not to have penetrated to this lair, where a frowzy mattress showed itself on a rickety bedstead. The beds in these sleeping-holes were never made up; they were rounded into a heap and seemed commonly of a coarse brown sacking. They had always a horrible fascination for me. I fancied them astir with a certain life which, if there had been a consensus of it to that effect, might have walked off with them.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1088
