Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “All right,” said Bartley, with hauteur; and he added, for no reason, “Be quick about it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy.

  “What time is supper — dinner, I mean?”

  “It’s ready now, sir.”

  “Good. Take up the things. Come just as you are, Marcia. Let him take your cap, — no, keep it on; a good many of them come down in their bonnets.”

  Marcia put off her sack and gloves, and hastily repaired the ravages of travel as best she could. She would have liked to go to her room just long enough to brush her hair a little, and the fur cap made her head hot; but she was suddenly afraid of doing something that would seem countrified in Bartley’s eyes, and she promptly obeyed: they had come from Portland in a parlor car, and she had been able to make a traveller’s toilet before they reached Boston.

  She had been at Portland several times with her father; but he stopped at a second-class hotel where he had always “put up” when alone, and she was new to the vastness of hotel mirrors and chandeliers, the glossy paint, the frescoing, the fluted pillars, the tessellated marble pavements upon which she stepped when she left the Brussels carpeting of the parlors. She clung to Bartley’s arm, silently praying that she might not do anything to mortify him, and admiring everything he did with all her soul. He made a halt as they entered the glittering dining-room, and stood frowning till the head-waiter ran respectfully up to them, and ushered them with sweeping bows to a table, which they had to themselves. Bartley ordered their dinner with nonchalant ease, beginning with soup and going to black coffee with dazzling intelligence. While their waiter was gone with their order, he beckoned with one finger to another, and sent him out for a paper, which he unfolded and spread on the table, taking a toothpick into his mouth, and running the sheet over with his eyes. “I just want to see what’s going on to-night,” he said, without looking at Marcia.

  She made a little murmur of acquiescence in her throat, but she could not speak for strangeness. She began to steal little timid glances about, and to notice the people at the other tables. In her heart she did not find the ladies so very well dressed as she had expected the Boston ladies to be; and there was no gentleman there to compare with Bartley, either in style or looks. She let her eyes finally dwell on him, wishing that he would put his paper away and say something, but afraid to ask, lest it should not be quite right: all the other gentlemen were reading papers. She was feeling lonesome and homesick, when he suddenly glanced at her and said, “How pretty you look, Marsh!”

  “Do I?” she asked, with a little grateful throb, while her eyes joyfully suffused themselves.

  “Pretty as a pink,” he returned. “Gay, — isn’t it?” he continued, with a wink that took her into his confidence again, from which his study of the newspaper had seemed to exclude her. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to take you to the Museum after dinner, and let you see Boucicault in the ‘Colleen Bawn.’” He swept his paper off the table and unfolded his napkin in his lap, and, leaning back in his chair, began to tell her about the play. “We can walk: it’s only just round the corner,” he said at the end.

  Marcia crept into the shelter of his talk, — he sometimes spoke rather loud, — and was submissively silent. When they got into their own room, — which had gilt lambrequin frames, and a chandelier of three burners, and a marble mantel, and marble-topped table and washstand, — and Bartley turned up the flaring gas, she quite broke down, and cried on his breast, to make sure that she had got him all back again.

  “Why, Marcia!” he said. “I know just how you feel. Don’t you suppose I understand as well as you do that we’re a country couple? But I’m not going to give myself away; and you mustn’t, either. There wasn’t a woman in that room that could compare with you, — dress or looks!”

  “You were splendid,” she whispered, “and just like the rest! and that made me feel somehow as if I had lost you.”

  “I know, — I saw just how you felt; but I wasn’t going to say anything for fear you’d give way right there. Come, there’s plenty of time before the play begins. I call this nice! Old-fashioned, rather, in the decorations,” he said, “but pretty good for its time.” He had pulled up two arm-chairs in front of the glowing grate of anthracite; as he spoke, he cast his eyes about the room, and she followed his glance obediently. He had kept her hand in his, and now he held her slim finger-tips in the fist which he rested on his knee. “No; I’ll tell you what, Marcia, if you want to get on in a city, there’s no use being afraid of people. No use being afraid of anything, so long as we’re good to each other. And you’ve got to believe in me right along. Don’t you let anything get you on the wrong track. I believe that as long as you have faith in me, I shall deserve it; and when you don’t—”

  “Oh, Bartley, you know I didn’t doubt you! I just got to thinking, and I was a little worked up! I suppose I’m excited.”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” cried her husband. “Don’t you suppose I understand you?”

  They talked a long time together, and made each other loving promises of patience. They confessed their faults, and pledged each other that they would try hard to overcome them. They wished to be good; they both felt they had much to retrieve; but they had no concealments, and they knew that was the best way to begin the future, of which they did their best to conceive seriously. Bartley told her his plans about getting some newspaper work till he could complete his law studies. He meant to settle down to practice in Boston. “You have to wait longer for it than you would in a country place; but when you get it, it’s worth while.” He asked Marcia whether she would look up his friend Halleck if she were in his place; but he did not give her time to decide. “I guess I won’t do it. Not just yet, at any rate. He might suppose that I wanted something of him. I’ll call on him when I don’t need his help.”

  Perhaps, if they had not planned to go to the theatre, they would have staid where they were, for they were tired, and it was very cosey. But when they were once in the street, they were glad they had come out. Bowdoin Square and Court Street and Tremont Row were a glitter of gas-lights, and those shops, with their placarded bargains, dazzled Marcia.

  “Is it one of the principal streets?” she asked Bartley.

  He gave the laugh of a veteran habitu� of Boston. “Tremont Row? No. Wait till I show you Washington Street to-morrow. There’s the Museum,” he said, pointing to the long row of globed lights on the fa�ade of the building. “Here we are in Scollay Square. There’s Hanover Street; there’s Cornhill; Court crooks down that way; there’s Pemberton Square.”

  His familiarity with these names estranged him to her again; she clung the closer to his arm, and caught her breath nervously as they turned in with the crowd that was climbing the stairs to the box-office of the theatre. Bartley left her a moment, while he pushed his way up to the little window and bought the tickets. “First-rate seats,” he said, coming back to her, and taking her hand under his arm again, “and a great piece of luck. They were just returned for sale by the man in front of me, or I should have had to take something ‘way up in the gallery. There’s a regular jam. These are right in the centre of the parquet.”

  Marcia did not know what the parquet was; she heard its name with the certainty that but for Bartley she should not be equal to it. All her village pride was quelled; she had only enough self-control to act upon Bartley’s instructions not to give herself away by any conviction of rusticity. They passed in through the long, colonnaded vestibule, with its paintings, and plaster casts, and rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side, and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects, endeared by association, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston play-goer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him; the painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass bell; the governors’ portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full length, on canvas; and the pagan months and s
easons in plaster, — if all these are, indeed, the subjects, — were dim phantasmagoria amid which she and Bartley moved scarcely more real. The usher, in his dress-coat, ran up the aisle to take their checks, and led them down to their seats; half a dozen elegant people stood to let them into their places; the theatre was filled with faces. At Portland, where she saw the “Lady of Lyons,” with her father, three-quarters of the house was empty.

  Bartley only had time to lean over and whisper, “The place is packed with Beacon Street swells, — it’s a regular field night,” — when the bell tinkled and the curtain rose.

  As the play went on, the rich jacqueminot-red flamed into her cheeks, and burnt there a steady blaze to the end. The people about her laughed and clapped, and at times they seemed to be crying. But Marcia sat through every part as stoical as a savage, making no sign, except for the flaming color in her cheeks, of interest or intelligence. Bartley talked of the play all the way home, but she said nothing, and in their own room he asked: “Didn’t you really like it? Were you disappointed? I haven’t been able to get a word out of you about it. Didn’t you like Boucicault?”

  “I didn’t know which he was,” she answered, with impassioned exaltation. “I didn’t care for him. I only thought of that poor girl, and her husband who despised her—”

  She stopped. Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end. “And you thought — you thought,” he cried, trying to get his breath,— “you thought you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan! Oh, I see, I see!” He went on making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she laughed with him at last. When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he began his joking afresh. “The real thing for Hardress to do,” he said, fumbling for the key, “is to blow it out. That’s what Hardress usually does when he comes up from the rural districts with Eily on their bridal tour. That finishes off Eily, without troubling Danny Mann. The only drawback is that it finishes off Hardress, too: they’re both found suffocated in the morning.”

  XIV.

  The next day, after breakfast, while they stood together before the parlor fire, Bartley proposed one plan after another for spending the day. Marcia rejected them all, with perfectly recovered self-composure.

  “Then what shall we do?” he asked, at last.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, rather absently. She added, after an interval, smoothing the warm front of her dress, and putting her foot on the fender, “What did those theatre-tickets cost?”

  “Two dollars,” he replied carelessly. “Why?”

  Marcia gasped. “Two dollars! Oh, Bartley, we couldn’t afford it!”

  “It seems we did.”

  “And here, — how much are we paying here?”

  “That room, with fire,” said Bartley, stretching himself, “is seven dollars a day—”

  “We mustn’t stay another instant!” said Marcia, all a woman’s terror of spending money on anything but dress, all a wife’s conservative instinct, rising within her. “How much have you got left?”

  Bartley took out his pocket-book and counted over the bills in it. “A hundred and twenty dollars.”

  “Why, what has become of it all? We had a hundred and sixty!”

  “Well, our railroad tickets were nineteen, the sleeping-car was three, the parlor-car was three, the theatre was two, the hack was fifty cents, and we’ll have to put down the other two and a half to refreshments.”

  Marcia listened in dismay. At the end she drew a long breath. “Well, we must go away from here as soon as possible, — that I know. We’ll go out and find some boarding-place. That’s the first thing.”

  “Oh, now, Marcia, you’re not going to be so severe as that, are you?” pleaded Bartley. “A few dollars, more or less, are not going to keep us out of the poorhouse. I just want to stay here three days: that will leave us a clean hundred, and we can start fair.” He was half joking, but she was wholly serious.

  “No, Bartley! Not another hour, — not another minute! Come!” She took his arm and bent it up into a crook, where she put her hand, and pulled him toward the door.

  “Well, after all,” he said, “it will be some fun looking up a room.”

  There was no one else in the parlor; in going to the door they took some waltzing steps together.

  While she dressed to go out, he looked up places where rooms were let with or without board, in the newspaper. “There don’t seem to be a great many,” he said meditatively, bending over the open sheet. But he cut out half a dozen advertisements with his editorial scissors, and they started upon their search.

  They climbed those pleasant old up-hill streets that converge to the State House, and looked into the houses on the quiet Places that stretch from one thoroughfare to another. They had decided that they would be content with two small rooms, one for a chamber, and the other for a parlor, where they could have a fire. They found exactly what they wanted in the first house where they applied, one flight up, with sunny windows, looking down the street; but it made Marcia’s blood run cold when the landlady said that the price was thirty dollars a week. At another place the rooms were only twenty; the position was as good, and the carpet and furniture prettier. This was still too dear, but it seemed comparatively reasonable till it appeared that this was the price without board.

  “I think we should prefer rooms with board, shouldn’t we?” asked Bartley, with a sly look at Marcia.

  The prices were of all degrees of exorbitance, and they varied for no reason from house to house; one landlady had been accustomed to take more and another less, but never little enough for Marcia, who overruled Bartley again and again when he wished to close with some small abatement of terms. She declared now that they must put up with one room, and they must not care what floor it was on. But the cheapest room with board was fourteen dollars a week, and Marcia had fixed her ideal at ten: even that was too high for them.

  “The best way will be to go back to the Revere House, at seven dollars a day,” said Bartley. He had lately been leaving the transaction of the business entirely to Marcia, who had rapidly acquired alertness and decision in it.

  She could not respond to his joke. “What is there left?” she asked.

  “There isn’t anything left,” he said. “We’ve got to the end.”

  They stood on the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the street, and then, by a common impulse, they looked at the house opposite, where a placard in the window advertised, “Apartments to Let — to Gentlemen only.”

  “It would be of no use asking there,” murmured Marcia, in sad abstraction.

  “Well, let’s go over and try,” said her husband. “They can’t do more than turn us out of doors.”

  “I know it won’t be of any use,” Marcia sighed, as people do when they hope to gain something by forbidding themselves hope. But she helplessly followed, and stood at the foot of the door-steps while he ran up and rang.

  It was evidently the woman of the house who came to the door and shrewdly scanned them.

  “I see you have apartments to let,” said Bartley.

  “Well, yes,” admitted the woman, as if she considered it useless to deny it, “I have.”

  “I should like to look at them,” returned Bartley, with promptness. “Come, Marcia.” And, reinforced by her, he invaded the premises before the landlady had time to repel him. “I’ll tell you what we want,” he continued, turning into the little reception-room at the side of the door, “and if you haven’t got it, there’s no need to trouble you. We want a fair-sized room, anywhere between the cellar-floor and the roof, with a bed and a stove and a table in it, that sha’n’t cost us more than ten dollars a week, with board.”

  “Set down,” said the landlady, herself setting the example by sinking into the rocking-chair behind her and beginning to rock while she made a brief study of the intruders. “Want it for yourselves?”

  “Yes,” said Bartley.
<
br />   “Well,” returned the landlady, “I always have preferred single gentlemen.”

  “I inferred as much from a remark which you made in your front window,” said Bartley, indicating the placard.

  The landlady smiled. They were certainly a very pretty-appearing young couple, and the gentleman was evidently up-and-coming. Mrs. Nash liked Bartley, as most people of her grade did, at once. “It’s always be’n my exper’ence,” she explained, with the lazily rhythmical drawl in which most half-bred New-Englanders speak, “that I seemed to get along rather better with gentlemen. They give less trouble — as a general rule,” she added, with a glance at Marcia, as if she did not deny that there were exceptions, and Marcia might be a striking one.

  Bartley seized his advantage. “Well, my wife hasn’t been married long enough to be unreasonable. I guess you’d get along.”

  They both laughed, and Marcia, blushing, joined them.

  “Well, I thought when you first come up the steps you hadn’t been married — well, not a great while,” said the landlady.

  “No,” said Bartley. “It seems a good while to my wife; but we were only married day before yesterday.”

  “The land!” cried Mrs. Nash.

  “Bartley!” whispered Marcia, in soft upbraiding.

  “What? Well, say last week, then. We were married last week, and we’ve come to Boston to seek our fortune.”

  His wit overjoyed Mrs. Nash. “You’ll find Boston an awful hard place to get along,” she said, shaking her head with a warning smile.

  “I shouldn’t think so, by the price Boston people ask for their rooms,” returned Bartley. “If I had rooms to let, I should get along pretty easily.”

  This again delighted the landlady. “I guess you aint goin’ to get out of spirits, anyway,” she said. “Well,” she continued, “I have got a room ‘t I guess would suit you. Unexpectedly vacated.” She seemed to recur to the language of an advertisement in these words, which she pronounced as if reading them. “It’s pretty high up,” she said, with another warning shake of the head.