Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

  “Good Heavens! is it money you need? Here, take this and send; or go yourself in the carriage waiting below.”

  She hurried out breathless, and I went back to the bedside, much disturbed by what I had seen and heard. But Miss Grief’s eyes were full of life, and as I sat down beside her she whispered earnestly, “Tell me.”

  And I did tell her—a romance invented for the occasion. I venture to say that none of my published sketches could compare with it. As for the lie involved, it will stand among my few good deeds, I know, at the judgment-bar.

  And she was satisfied. “I have never known what it was,” she whispered, “to be fully happy until now.” She closed her eyes, and when the lids fell I again thought that she had passed away. But no, there was still pulsation in her small, thin wrist. As she perceived my touch she smiled. “Yes, I am happy,” she said again, though without audible sound.

  The old aunt returned; food was prepared, and she took some. I myself went out after wine that should be rich and pure. She rallied a little, but I did not leave her: her eyes dwelt upon me and compelled me to stay, or rather my conscience compelled me. It was a damp night, and I had a little fire made. The wine, fruit, flowers, and candles I had ordered made the bare place for the time being bright and fragrant. Aunt Martha dozed in her chair from sheer fatigue—she had watched many nights—but Miss Grief was awake, and I sat beside her.

  “I make you my executor,” she murmured, “as to the drama. But my other manuscripts place, when I am gone, under my head, and let them be buried with me. They are not many—those you have and these. See!”

  I followed her gesture, and saw under her pillows the edges of two more copybooks like the one I had. “Do not look at them—my poor dead children!” she said tenderly. “Let them depart with me—unread, as I have been.”

  Later she whispered, “Did you wonder why I came to you? It was the contrast. You were young—strong—rich—praised—loved—successful: all that I was not. I wanted to look at you—and imagine how it would feel. You had success—but I had the greater power. Tell me, did I not have it?”

  “Yes, Aaronna.”

  “It is all in the past now. But I am satisfied.”

  After another pause she said with a faint smile, “Do you remember when I fell asleep in your parlor? It was the good and rich food. It was so long since I had had food like that!”

  I took her hand and held it, conscience-stricken, but now she hardly seemed to perceive my touch. “And the smoking?” she whispered. “Do you remember how you laughed? I saw it. But I had heard that smoking soothed—that one was no longer tired and hungry—with a cigar.”

  In little whispers of this sort, separated by long rests and pauses, the night passed. Once she asked if her aunt was asleep, and when I answered in the affirmative she said, “Help her to return home—to America: the drama will pay for it. I ought never to have brought her away.”

  I promised, and she resumed her bright-eyed silence.

  I think she did not speak again. Toward morning the change came, and soon after sunrise, with her old aunt kneeling by her side, she passed away.

  All was arranged as she had wished. Her manuscripts, covered with violets, formed her pillow. No one followed her to the grave save her aunt and myself; I thought she would prefer it so. Her name was not “Crief,” after all, but “Moncrief;” I saw it written out by Aunt Martha for the coffin-plate, as follows: “Aaronna Moncrief, aged forty-three years, two months, and eight days.”

  I never knew more of her history than is written here. If there was more that I might have learned, it remained unlearned, for I did not ask.

  And the drama? I keep it here in this locked case. I could have had it published at my own expense; but I think that now she knows its faults herself, perhaps, and would not like it.

  I keep it; and, once in a while, I read it over—not as a memento mori exactly, but rather as a memento of my own good fortune, for which I should continually give thanks. The want of one grain made all her work void, and that one grain was given to me. She, with the greater power, failed—I, with the less, succeeded. But no praise is due to me for that. When I die “Armor” is to be destroyed unread: not even Isabel is to see it. For women will misunderstand each other; and, dear and precious to me as my sweet wife is, I could not bear that she or any one should cast so much as a thought of scorn upon the memory of the writer, upon my poor dead, “unavailable,” unaccepted “Miss Grief.”

  In Sloane Street

  * * *

  “WELL, I’ve seen the National Gallery, and that’s over,” said Mrs. Moore, taking off her smart little bonnet and delicately drying with her handkerchief two drops which were visible on its ribbons. “And I think I’m very enterprising. You would never have got Isabella to go in such a rain.”

  “Of course not. Isabella likes to stay at home and read Memorials of a Quiet Life; it makes her feel so superior,” answered Gertrude Remington.

  “Superior?” commented Mrs. Moore, contemptuously. “Mary would not have gone, either.”

  “No. But Mary—that’s another affair. Mary would not touch the Memorials with the tip of her finger, and she wouldn’t have minded the rain; but she doesn’t care for galleries. With her great love for art, she prefers a book, or, rather, certain books, about pictures, to the pictures themselves. For she thinks that painters, as a rule, are stupid—have no ideas; whereas the art critics—that is, the two or three she likes—really know what a picture means.”

  “Better than the painters themselves?”

  “Oh, far!” answered Miss Remington. “Mary thinks that the work of the painters themselves is merely mechanical; it is the art critic—always her two or three—who discovers the soul in their productions.”

  “The only art critics I know are Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin,” remarked Mrs. Moore, in a vague tone, as she drew off her closely fitting jacket by means of a contortion.

  “To Mary, those two are Tupper and Sandford and Merton,” responded Miss Remington. “And I agree with her about Ruskin; all his later books are the weakest twaddle in the world—violent, ignorant, childish.”

  But Mrs. Moore’s interest in the subject was already exhausted. “It’s too dreadful that we’re forced to be at sea on Christmas day,” she said, complainingly. “Philip ought to have done something—arranged it in some other way. At home, already they are busy with the presents and everything. And by the 22d the whole house will be fragrant with the spices and the fruit and the wine for the plum-pudding. If we could only have some oysters, it would not be quite so dreadful. But I have not seen anything I could call an oyster since I came abroad.” She sat poised on the edge of the sofa, as though she intended to rise the next moment. Her small boots, splashed with mud, were visible under her skirt.

  “The oysters are rather dwarfish,” replied Gertrude Remington. “But as England is the home of the plum-pudding, I dare say you can have that, if you like; we could anticipate Christmas by a week or two.”

  “There’s an idea! Do ring.” (To the entering servant.) “Oh, Banks, I should like to speak to Mrs. Sharpless for a moment. She is out? Then send up the cook.”

  “Mrs. Pollikett, mum? Yes, mum,” answered Banks, disappearing.

  Presently they heard a heavy step coming up the stairs. It stopped outside the door while Mrs. Pollikett regained her breath; then there was a knock.

  “Come in,” said Mrs. Moore. “Oh, cook, we have taken a fancy to have a plum-pudding, as we shall be at sea on Christmas day! Do you think that you can give us a good one to-morrow night for dinner? Or, if that is not possible, the day after?”

  “Hany time, mum; to-day, if you like,” responded Mrs. Pollikett, with the suggestion of a courtesy—it was little more than a trembling of the knees for a moment. She wore a print gown, and a cap adorned with cherry ribbons; her weight was eighteen stone, or two hundred and fifty-two pounds.


  “To-day? How can you possibly have it to-day? It’s afternoon already,” said Mrs. Moore, surveying the big woman (as she always did) with fascinated eyes.

  “I’ve one on hand, mum,” replied cook, with serene pride. “And an hexcellent one ’tis. ’Twere made a little over a year ago, and the materials being hof the best, ’tis better now than ’tever was; they himprove with keeping, mum. It’s large, but what’s left you can take with you in a tin box. With care ’twill be as good as hever another year, if you don’t require to heat it all now, mum.”

  Mrs. Moore gave a gasping glance at Miss Remington. Then she laughed, putting the veil which she held in her hand to her lips, to hide in part her merriment.

  “I’ll let you know later, cook,” she said. “I’ll send word by nurse.”

  And Mrs. Pollikett, unconscious of ridicule, calmly withdrew. Amy Moore put her head down upon the pile of sofa cushions beside her, and ground it into them as if in desperation.

  “Plum-pudding a year old, and warranted to keep another year! Hard as a stone, of course, and black as lead. Think of ours at home! Think how light it will be, almost like a soufflé! And its delicate color and fragrance!” She took up her jacket, lifted her bonnet, and pinned the little lace veil to it with the long bonnet-pin; then, still laughing, she rose. On her way to the door her eyes caught sight of a figure which was passing the window outside. “There is Philip going out again. How he does slouch!”

  “Slouch?” said Miss Remington, inquiringly. She also had seen the figure from her chair by the fire.

  “I don’t mean slouch exactly; I mean that he is so bent. Curiously enough, it isn’t his back either. But up at the top of his shoulders behind, between there and the head, there’s a stoop, or rather a lunge forward. But there’s no hollow; it’s a roll of flesh. The truth is that Philip is growing too stout.”

  “That bend you speak of is the scholar’s stoop,” observed Miss Remington.

  “I suppose you mean writer’s. He could stand when he writes, couldn’t he? But probably it’s too late now. How do you manage to be always so tremendously straight, Gertrude?”

  “Don’t you know that spinsters—those at least who have conquered the dejection of their lot—are always straight-backed?” said Miss Remington. “Their one little pride is a stiff spine and light step. Because, you know, the step of their married contemporaries is sometimes rather heavy.”

  “You think you can say that because I happen to weigh only ninety-eight pounds,” answered Amy Moore. “But let me tell you one thing—you overdo your straightness; your shoulders in those tailor-made dresses you are so fond of look as though they were moulded of iron plate. You’d be a great deal more attractive and comfortable to look at, Gertrude, if you had a few cozy little habits, nice homelike little ways. You never lounge; you never lean back against anything—that is, with any thorough enjoyment. Who ever saw you stretched out lazily in a rocking-chair by the fire, with a box of chocolate creams and a novel?”

  Miss Remington laughed. “But if I don’t care for chocolates?”

  “That’s just what I am saying; if you cared for them, you’d be much more cozy. A tall thin woman in a tailor-made gown, with her hair dragged tightly back from her face, and all sorts of deep books—why, naturally, all men are afraid of her.”

  “Are you kind enough to be still thinking of matrimonial hopes for me?” inquired Miss Remington.

  “Oh no! For what would become of Philip then?” said Philip’s wife. “You are his chief incense-burner; you’re awfully valuable to me just for that.” She was opening the door as she said this; she went out, closing it after her.

  Left alone in the large room, Miss Remington took a newspaper from the table by her side, and vaguely glanced at its page. Her eyes rested by chance upon a series of short lines, each line beginning with a capital letter, like a poem. It was headed “Commercial Matters,” and the first four lines were as follows:

  “Wool is weaker.

  Leather is slow.

  Hides are easy.

  Rice is low.”

  Presently the door opened, and Philip Moore entered.

  “Oh, you’ve come back,” she said, letting the paper drop to her lap.

  “Only went to the corner to put a letter in the box.”

  “Very wet still, isn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  Moore sat down before the fire, extended his legs, and watched the combat between the heat and the dampness of his trousers.

  After a while Miss Remington remarked, “We’ve been to the National Gallery since lunch.”

  He made no answer.

  “We had intended to go to Highgate also,” she went on; “but it was too wet for so long a drive.”

  “To Highgate?”

  “Yes. To George Eliot’s grave.”

  Moore’s gloom was lightened for the moment by a short laugh.

  “You think that’s absurd,” said his companion.

  “Well—yes. Thoughts suitable for the occasion were to have been the attraction, I suppose. But if you can conjure them up in one place, why can’t you in another, and save your cab fare? It was your idea, I know—the going to Highgate. Amy is not devoted to such excursions.”

  “I suppose it was my idea,” answered Gertrude. “I thought you liked George Eliot,” she went on, after a moment.

  “Do you mean her ghost? How can I like a person I have never seen?”

  “I mean her books.”

  “The first two, perhaps,” answered Moore, frowning impatiently. “I suppose I may have said so once—ages before the flood, and you never forget anything, you are merciless about that. But women’s books—what are they? Women can’t write. And they ought not to try.”

  “What can you mean?”

  “What I say,” answered Philip Moore. “Children’s stories—yes; they can write for children, and for young girls, extremely well. And they can write little sketches and episodes if they will confine themselves rigidly to the things they thoroughly know, such as love-stories, and so forth. But the great questions of life, the important matters, they cannot render in the least. How should they? And when in their ignorance they begin, in addition, to preach—good heavens, what a spectacle!” Happening to look up and see the expression of his companion’s face, he added, laughing: “You need not be troubled, you have never tried. And I’m thankful you haven’t. It would be insupportable to me to have any of my personal friends among that band.”

  “No, I have never tried,” Gertrude answered. She hesitated a moment, then added, “My ambition is all for other people.”

  “You mean my things, of course. I should like you much better if you had never read a word of them,” responded Moore, his impatience returning. “After they’re once done I care nothing about them, they are no longer a part of me; they are detached—gone. By the time they’re printed—and that is when you get hold of them—I’m taken up with something else, and miles away. Yet you always try to drag me back.”

  Miss Remington bit her lip, a slight flush rose in her cheeks. But it faded as quickly as it had come, and her companion did not see it; he was staring at the fire.

  He was a man of forty-five, with heavy features and thick dark hair. His eyes and head were fine. His forehead wore almost habitually a slight frown. He was somewhat under medium height, and his wife’s description of his figure and bearing was true enough.

  But Gertrude Remington saw him as he once was—the years when he had been full of life and hope and vigor. She also saw another vision of him as he might be now, perhaps, as he would be (so she told herself) under different influences. It was this possible vision which constantly haunted her, troubled her, tossed her about, and beckoned her hither and thither. She was three years younger than Philip, and she had known him from childhood, as her father’s house w
as next to the house of the elder Philip Moore, in the embowered street of the Massachusetts town which was the home of both. When Philip married, he brought his little wife, the golden-haired, blue-eyed Amy, home to this old house, now his own, owing to the death of his father, and the intimacy of the two families had continued. It was almost a matter of course, therefore, that Miss Remington should be one of the party when the Moores came abroad for six months, their second visit to the Old World. Amy was twelve years younger than her husband, and nine years younger than Gertrude Remington.

  To Moore’s accusation, “You always try to drag me back,” Gertrude had replied in a light tone: “That is because one doesn’t stop to think. ‘Never talk to an author about his books.’ I saw that given somewhere as a wise maxim only the other day.”

  “I saw it too, and in the very review in which you saw it,” replied Moore, in a sarcastic tone. “But you have not given the whole quotation; there was more of it. ‘Never talk to an author about his books unless you really believe (or can make him feel you believe) that they are the greatest of the great; he will accept that!’ In your case there is no hypocrisy, I exonerate you on that score; you really do think my things the greatest of the great. And that’s the very trouble with you, Gertrude; you have no sense of proportion, no discrimination. If I had believed you, I should have been a fool; I should have been sure that my books were the finest of the century, instead of their being what they are—and I know it, too—half failures, all of them.” He got up, went to the window, and looked out. Then he left the room.

  Miss Remington lifted the newspaper from her lap, and again perused unconsciously the same column. This time her eyes rested on the second four lines:

  “Beans are steady.

  Sugars are down.

  Truck is in good demand.