Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  ‘Look at this beautiful heath. Mrs. Ross is very proud of her heaths. ‘The small white fingers scarcely touched the beautiful blossoms of the plant; but which were the more palely roseate and waxen? If one were to grasp that hand — in some sudden moment of entreaty, in the sharp joy of reconciliation, in the agony of farewell — would it not be crushed like a frail flower? ‘This is our elm,’ said she, lightly. ‘Mrs. Ross and I regard it as our own, we have sketched it so often.’ They had emerged from the conservatory into a small square room, which was practically a continuation of the drawing-room, but which was decorated in pale blue and silver, and filled with a lot of knickknacks that showed it was doubtless Mrs. Ross’s boudoir. And out there, in the clear June sunshine, lay the broad green sward behind Prince’s Gate, with the one splendid elm spreading his broad branches into the blue sky, and throwing a soft shadow on the corner of the gardens next to the house. How sweet and still it was I — as still as the calm clear light in this girl’s eyes. There was no passion there, and no trouble; only the light of a June day, and of blue skies, and a peaceful soul. She rested the tips of her fingers on a small rosewood table that stood by the window: surely if a spirit ever lived in any table, the wood of this table must have thrilled to its core.”

  Macleod in his dreaming did not dream her an actress, but because her very life was an art she was not less acting now than she was the night of the same day, when he saw her on the stage, in a comedy which had been a very stupid conventional play till she appeared. “Suddenly his heart seemed to stand still altogether. It was a light, glad laugh — the sound of a voice he knew — that seemed to have pierced him as with a rifle ball; and at the same moment from the green shimmer of foliage in the balcony there stepped into the glare of the hall a young girl with life and laughter and a merry carelessness in her face and eyes. She threw her arm around her mother’s neck and kissed her. She bowed to the legal person. She flung her garden hat on to a couch, and got up on a chair to get fresh seed put in for her canary. It was all done so simply and naturally and gracefully that in an instant a fire of life and reality sprang into the whole of this sham thing. The woman was no longer a marionette, but the anguish-stricken mother of this gay and heedless girl. And when the daughter jumped down from the chair again — her canary on her finger — and when she came forward to pet and caress and remonstrate with her mother, and when the glare of the lights flashed on the merry eyes, and on the white teeth and laughing lips, there was no longer any doubt possible. Macleod’s face was quite pale. He took the programme from Agilvie’s hand, and for a minute or two stared mechanically at the name of Miss Gertrude White, printed on the pink-tinted paper.”

  Again she is acting, but neither more nor less consciously, when Macleod comes to luncheon, and she makes the maid give her the salad to dress, while the keen eyes of her young sister divine her and deride her. “‘There is no use making any pretense,’ said she, sharply. ‘You know quite well why you are making that salad dressing.’ ‘Did you never see me make salad dressing before?’ said the other, quite as sharply. ‘You know it is simply because Sir Keith Macleod is coming to lunch. I forgot all about it Oh, and that’s why you had the clean curtains put up yesterday!’...

  What else had this precocious brain ferreted out? ‘Yes, and that’s why you bought papa a new necktie,’ continued the tormentor, and then she added, triumphantly, ‘But he hasn’t put it on this morning — ha, Gerty?’ A calm and dignified silence is the best answer to the fiendishness of thirteen. Miss White went on with the making of the salad dressing. She was considered very clever at it. A smart young maid-servant, very trimly dressed, made her appearance. ‘Sir Keith Macleod, miss,’ said she. ‘Oh, Gerty, you’re caught,’ muttered the fiend. But Miss White was equal to the occasion. The small white fingers plied the fork without a tremor. ‘Ask him to step this way, please,’ she said. And then the subtle imagination of this demon of thirteen jumped to another conclusion. ‘Oh, Gerty, you want to show him that you are a good housekeeper — that you can make salad’—”

  IV

  It will be remembered that Macleod is instantly in love with Gertrude, and has no thought but of marrying her and making her leave the stage. He has found her in society intellectually inferior to her, of course, but rich and refined, and delicately appreciative of such bricabrac as she; and though he is a splendid young fellow with generous possibilities of life-long adoration for the woman he loves, he has no conception of the sacrifice she must make in giving up her career, to be the wife of a Highland chieftain on the wild Scottish shore. She has no conception of it, either, when she promises.

  Her selfish old father, the collector of other bricabrac than she, does not like the match, and consents unwillingly that she shall leave the life for which he has had her so carefully trained, and in which her success has so far been so brilliant “ ‘I will beg you to remember, Gerty,’ he remarked with some dignity, ‘that I did not make you an actress, if that is what you imply. If it had not been entirely your own wish, I should never have encouraged you; and I think it shows great ingratitude, not only to me, but to the public also, that when you have succeeded in obtaining a position such as any woman in the country might envy, you treat your good fortune with indifference, and show nothing but discontent. I cannot tell what has come over you of late. You ought certainly to be the last to say anything against a profession that has gained for you such a large share of public favor—’ ‘Public favor!’ she said, with a bitter laugh. ‘Who is the favorite of the public in this very town? Why, the girl that plays in that farce — who smokes a cigarette, and walks round the stage like a man, and dances a break-down. Why wasn’t I taught to dance break-downs?”’

  Here once more, doubtless, the girl is unconsciously acting, and it is not till she has seen Macleod on his native heath, and among the clansmen to whom he is a demi-god, in a semi-feudal, almost semi-barbarous environment, that she is fully awakened to the reality. She sees no beauty or grandeur in the life to which his love destines her as remorselessly as if it were hate, and she finds that she cannot give up all that she has made herself in the world that seems to her great and worth winning. She begins to pull at the leash which binds her, and when she gets back to London she breaks with Macleod. Then he ventures upon that wild, that mad scheme of luring her aboard his yacht, and carrying her off to the highlands to make her his wife against her will, but not, as he believes, against her love. “‘ You cannot go ashore, Gertrude,’ he repeated. ‘We have already left Erith. Gerty, Gerty,’ he continued, for she was struck dumb with a sudden terror, ‘don’t you understand now? I have stolen you away from yourself. There was but the one thing left; the one way of saving you. And you will forgive me, Gerty, when you understand it all—’ She was gradually recovering from her terror. She did understand it now. And he was not ill at all ‘Oh, you coward! you coward! you coward!’ she exclaimed, with a blaze of fury in her eyes. ‘And I was to confer a kindness on you — a last kindness! But you dare not do this thing! I tell you, you dare not do it! I demand to be put on shore at once! Do you hear me?’ She turned wildly round as if to seek for some way of escape. The door of the ladies’ cabin stood open; the daylight was streaming down into that cheerful little place; there were some flowers on the dressing-table. But the way by which she had descended was barred over and dark. She faced him again, and her eyes were full of fierce indignation and anger; she drew herself up to her full height; she overwhelmed him with taunts, and reproaches, and scorn. That was a splendid piece of acting seeing that it had never been rehearsed. He stood unmoved before all this theatrical rage. ‘Oh, yes, you were proud of your name,’ she was saying, with bitter emphasis; ‘and I thought you belonged to a race of gentlemen, to whom lying was unknown. And you were no longer murderous and revengeful; but you can take your revenge on a woman, for all that! And you ask me to come and see you because you are ill. And you have laid a trap — like a coward!’ ‘And if I am what you say, Gerty,’ said he, quite gently,
‘it is the love of you that has made me that. Oh, you do not know!’ She saw nothing of the lines that pain had written on this man’s face, she recognized nothing of the very majesty of grief in the hopeless eyes. He was only her jailer, her enemy. ‘Of course — of course,’ said she. ‘It is the woman — it is always the woman who is in fault! That is a manly thing, to put the blame on the woman! And it is a manly thing to take your revenge on a woman! I thought, when a man had a rival, that it was his rival whom he sought out.

  But you — you kept out of the way—’ He strode forward and caught her by the wrist. There was a look in his face that for a second terrified her into silence. ‘Gerty,’ said he. ‘I warn you! Do not mention that man to me — now or at any time; or it will be bad for him and you!’ She twisted her hand from his grasp. ‘How dare you come near me!’ she cried.”

  As is well known the yacht is wrecked, and they are drowned together; and there is an implication that somehow Macleod is a fine fellow, and that Gertrude White is not a good girl, and has met a merited fate. But I do not know why she is not a good girl. The charge against her, so far as it is made out, is brought by her sister Carry who accuses her of flirting with Macleod. She certainly did nothing to prevent his loving her, no doubt because she was in love with him; but when she found that his love demanded more of her than she could give, she did nothing worse than try to break her engagement. Under the circumstances that was the best thing to do, and if she wished to break it gently and not roughly, that was not proof of a bad heart in her, but a good one. She had the histrionic nature, but that is not necessarily an insincere nature, though it means the dangerous power of self-deception. Imaginably the subjective process of Gertrude White’s tragedy was the capacity of being charmed by what was new and picturesque in Macleod, and of not being sufficiently repelled by his latent race-savagery, which she latently feared. She could figure the world and the mimic-world well lost for love with him on the barren crag to which he invited her at the cost of all she had hitherto held dear; but when she saw the barren crag she would over-realize the immense sacrifice demanded of her, and her recoil would be the imperative mandate of what was the law of her being. She could not change that law, which was not an evil law, though it set the artist instinct against the woman instinct; and the lesson of her experience is not that you must not be an artist if you are a woman, but that if you are a man in love with that kind of woman, you must count upon her duplex instinct, which is by no means duplicity. If you offer her the fulfilment of one instinct, you must leave her to fulfil the other, and to demand its extirpation is stupid as well as cruel.

  Macleod of Dare was both stupid and cruel, though he was so fine, and generous, and brave. If we consider the story of his love tragedy as something that simply happened through the war of his temperament with that of the woman he loved, then it is a great tragedy, of the quality of the Greek destiny play; but if we regard it as a morality, it is weak and foolish unless it teaches that Macleod was wrong and Gertrude was right. It is enough for a man to ask that a woman shall merge her woman life in his, and more than most men can fully justify in marriage, but that she shall lose her artist life too is asking something monstrous. Whenever they talk of this sacrifice which Macleod requires the girl tries tenderly to make him understand how vital the sacrifice is, but she cannot He remains the true, simple, masterful soul who thinks he is asking something wholly fit and proper for a husband to ask.

  We have no hint of the author’s feeling except so far as it may appear in his obvious fondness for Macleod, and his willingness to depreciate Gertrude White. He does not weaken so far as to use Thackeray’s ironical method with her, though he applies it now and then to her sarcastic little sister; but he loses the greater opportunity in the less when he rejects the subjective for the objective tragedy. It wrings the reader’s heart to have the heroine die with her lover; but it would be better than heart-break for him if he could realize her living with the husband for whom she had given up too much. That would set him thinking, and though a reader does not like to think, it is often the best thing he can do. To feel is comparatively cheap and easy.

  MR. BRET HARTE’S MIGGLES, AND MR. T. B. ALDRICH’S MARJORIE DAW

  SO far in these explorations of Anglo-Saxon fiction, we have come upon only three American novelists, apparently, whose heroines may match with those of the English novelists. Such a fact may be accounted for upon a theory wounding to our patriotism, if we like the pain, or it may be more gratifyingly explained upon the ground that during the past century the English novelists have probably outnumbered ours quite in the proportion of their representation here. Besides, the heroine is a flower of slow growth, which thrives best in a tempered air, and a soil mellowed by long cultivation. Our heroines, compared with the English, are wilding off-shoots, of a sylvan sweetness and grace and a fresh loveliness, at their best, and at their second-best such as actual women are, much too good for men, no doubt, but not such as are easily gathered in this sort of florist’s window. They are scattered widely in a thousand short stories, all over the north, east, south, and west, and the research that would give a just notion of their quantitative fascination would form a complete study of that branch of our fiction.

  I

  The difficulty of presenting the short-story heroine will be realized by the faithful reader of Miss Sarah Jewett’s exquisite tales and sketches, to name a single and supreme example. In the case of the more objective heroines of such a writer as Bret Harte, one recalls out of the whole number of his more conventionalized types, his Miggles, who belongs rather with the edifying Magdalenes of the mining communities than with the sinuous and ophidian group of his politer ladies, too recognizably descended from the heroines of Charles Reade. Neither sort forms the forte of a writer who stamped his peculiar literary personality upon the fancy of his generation so vigorously, and who still keeps so large a public faithful to him. He is at his strongest with his men, and of his two kinds of women his Miggles seems, at least in this retrospect, his prime invention.

  It will be remembered by my elder readers, at least, how the storm-bound passengers of Yuba Bill’s mountain stage take refuge in her wayside cabin, during her absence, and before her return have a dull quarter of an hour there in the company of the speechless paralytic, to whom Miggles is dedicating the afternoon of her life because he has helped her pass the forenoon more gaily if not so exemplarily, and has, as she says in her brief explanation, “spent a heap of money on her.”

  “Bill had scarcely ceased growling before we heard a quick step upon the porch, the trailing of a wet skirt, the door was flung open, and with a flash of white teeth, a sparkle of dark eyes, and an utter absence of ceremony or diffidence, a young woman entered, shut the door, and, panting, leaned back against it. ‘Oh, if you please, I’m Miggles!’ And this was Miggles! this bright-eyed, full-throated young woman, whose wet gown of coarse blue stuff could not hide the beauty of the feminine curves to which it clung; from the chestnut crown of whose head, topped by a man’s oil-skin sou’-wester, to the little feet and ankles, hidden somewhere in the recesses of her boy’s brogans, all was grace; — this was Miggles, laughing at us, too, in the most airy, frank, off-hand manner imaginable. ‘You see, boys,’ said she, quite out of breath, and holding one little hand against her side, quite unheeding the speechless discomfiture of our party, or the complete demoralization of Yuba Bill, whose features had relaxed into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness,— ‘you see, boys, I was mor’n two miles away when you passed down the road. I thought you might pull up here, and so I ran the whole way, knowing nobody was home but Jim, — and — and — I’m out of breath — and — that lets me out,’ And here Miggles caught her dripping oil-skin hat from her head, with a mischievous swirl that scattered a shower of rain-drops over us; attempted to put back her hair; dropped two hair-pins in the attempt; laughed, and sat down beside Yuba Bill, with her hands crossed lightly on her lap. The Judge recovered himself first, and essaye
d an extravagant compliment. ‘I’ll trouble you for that hairpin,’ said Miggles, gravely. Half a dozen hands were eagerly stretched forward; the missing hair-pin was restored to its fair owner; and Miggles, crossing the room, looked keenly in the face of the invalid. The solemn eyes looked back at hers with an expression we had never seen before. Life and intelligence seemed to struggle back into the rugged face. Miggles laughed again, — it was a singularly eloquent laugh, — and turned her black eyes and white teeth once more towards us. ‘This afflicted person is’ — hesitated the Judge. ‘Jim!’ said Miggles. ‘Your father?’ ‘No,’ ‘Brother?’ ‘No.’ ‘Husband?’ Miggles darted a quick, half-defiant glance at the two lady passengers, who I had noticed did not participate in the general masculine admiration of Miggles, and said, gravely, ‘No; it’s Jim,’ HEROINES OF FICTION