Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Bridget wouldn’t be coming to you on my errand,” said Helen with a bluntness which at once made its way with Miss Root.

  “What is your errand?” she asked, taking three pins out of her mouth for the purpose.

  “I must earn some money, somehow. I thought perhaps you could tell me — advise me—”

  “I can tell you, but I can’t advise you,” said Miss Root, bending over her work, and treating Helen’s extremity as one of the most natural things in life, “I earned money enough to come to Boston and study Art” — she pronounced it with the conventional capital rather disdainfully, as if she would have chosen a homelier expression if she could have thought of one—” by helpin’ mother take boarders. We took ’em our summers, and I taught winters. That’s the way I earned some money. But I suppose you don’t want to take boarders.”

  Helen hardly knew how to interpret the gleam in Miss Root’s eye. But, “No,” she answered simply, “I shouldn’t know how to do that.”

  “Well, neither do most of the boardin’-house keepers.” She stopped here so definitively that Helen was obliged to take the word if the conversation was to go on.

  “I thought,” she faltered, “that perhaps you could tell me how to do something with my pencil that would sell. I can sketch a little.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Root non-committally; “I remember.”

  “And it seems to me, that if I knew how to go about it, I ought to be able to turn the study I have given it to some account.”

  “I suppose,” said Miss Root, “that it’s for some charity.”

  “For some charity!” cried Helen. “No, indeed! it’s for myself.”

  “Oh,” said the other. “Then if I were you, I wouldn’t throw my time away. You’ll never succeed.”

  “I don’t want to succeed — as an artist,” retorted Helen with a little pique. “But I have really come to the point where I must either earn some money, or else borrow or beg it. There are plenty of people who would be ready to give it or lend it, but I can’t let them, and I hoped that you might be able to tell me how to earn it.”

  Miss Root shook her head. “Of course, I like your spirit; it’s the right spirit; but I can’t help you in that way. I’ve never sold a thing yet, and I don’t know when I shall, if I ever shall. If I didn’t love to paint, I should quit and go home by the first train. But I do love it, and I’m goin’ to stick to it till I begin to starve. I don’t ever expect to get married — that was finished up long ago! — and mother’s married again, and here I am without a chick or a child to trouble me, or trouble about me. But if I had a cat to keep, I shouldn’t try to keep it on Art. Oh, I presume that after years and years, I can sell a picture, maybe; but I know painters in this city — real artists” — she put the words unsparingly, as with a conscience against letting Helen suppose herself for a moment anything of the kind—” that would be glad to give all they do for a regular income of a thousand dollars a year. If you’ve a mind to paint gimcracks,” she added, and this was the only way in which she deigned to acknowledge her privity to Helen’s previous performance, “you can sell ’em if some simpleton sets the fashion of buying ‘em, or if people know you did ‘em. But I presume that ain’t what you want.”

  “No, indeed,” said Helen, shuddering at the thought of Mr. Trufitt, and helplessly loathing herself for being at that moment a pensioner on his bounty; “it would be better to starve.”

  “Or,” pursued Miss Root, “you might teach drawing. People have to throw away their money somehow. But, if I understand, you don’t want to go to people that have money to throw away for that any more than the other thing.”

  “No,” murmured Helen. She knew that Miss Root had at once divined that she had come to her instead of going to any friends of her former life because she did not choose to let them pity her, and help her to any sort of trivial work out of pity. In the girl’s straightforward sincerity she felt the comfort that the feminine soul finds in the frankness of a man, and she subtly perceived that, for all her show of indifference, Cornelia liked her, and was touched by the advance she had made in coming to her. In fact, Miss Root prided herself on her large-mindedness, a quality which she applied more impartially to people about her than is generally done. Her liberality was not merely for people of her own origin and experience, but for others who had known better fortunes, and had lost them, or who had them still and were unhappy in them; and the severity which accompanied her large-mindedness began with herself, and extended only to envious and detracting spirits. If the secrets of Miss Root’s soul could be unveiled, it would be seen that she had been obliged from the beginning to discipline herself into accepting Helen as worthy her esteem and regard, in spite of her beauty, her style, and her air of a finer world than Cornelia Root had known, except at a distance. The struggle was sharp, but it had ended in the interest of large-mindedness. When Mrs. Hewitt assumed, in Helen’s absence from dinner, while she was lunching at Miss Kingsbury’s, to be confidentially speculative about the English lord who seemed to be coming to see Miss Harkness pretty often, and spending a good deal of time when he did come, and so tittered, Cornelia led off a generous opposition.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “how much a lord’s time is worth; but if it ain’t worth any more than some of the fellows’ time that used to come flirtin’ round with our summer boarders, I don’t see how he could put it in much better. I guess he ain’t after her fortune, any way; and I guess he ain’t goin’ to find much more of a lady anywhere. If he wants to marry her, I shan’t object, even if they don’t ask me to the weddin’. I shouldn’t want much to marry a lord for my own pleasure; but I don’t believe but what if Miss Harkness does she’ll be a credit to him.”

  Cornelia had steadfastly set her face against knowing or caring anything about the affair, and such was now her discipline that she believed she could keep it up till the end, whenever that was. She had not only snubbed Mrs. Hewitt the day before, but this evening, when Helen early withdrew from tea, pale, and with the evidence of having passed a day of great nervous excitement, she refused even to enter into discussion of what Mr. Evans called the phenomena, in the light of philosophico-economic speculation.

  “Here,” he contended, “are a most interesting series of facts. I suppose that never, since the earliest settlement of Boston, has a member of the British aristocracy called three times, on three successive days, upon a young lady resident in a boarding-house, even of such acknowledged gentility as ours. If Mrs. Hewitt will excuse me, I will assume that it is not the merits of her establishment which have attracted him, but that he has been drawn here by that charm in Miss Harkness which we all feel. He knew her in other days — in better days — and nobly, and like a nobleman, he has sought her out in our humble midst — if that is a correct expression — and laid his coronet — if it is a coronet — which he keeps somewhere concealed about his person, at her feet. As no human girl of the American persuasion was ever known to refuse a lord, if she got the chance, the inference is irresistible that our noble friend was instantly accepted, and has already written home to have his ancestral halls whitewashed up for the reception of his bride.”

  “Well, you may twist it and you may turn it as much as you please, Mr. Evans, and call it philosophico-economic speculation, or anything you want to,” returned Miss Root. “I call it gossip; and I never did gossip, and I never will. I don’t care if she was goin’ to marry twenty lords; it’s none of my business. All I know is that she has behaved herself like a perfect lady ever since she’s been in the house.”

  “New Hampshire for ever!” cried Mr. Evans. “The granite ribs of your native State speak in every syllable, Miss Root. But you will acknowledge that you did hate her just a little, won’t you, for her superiority to us all — which she can’t conceal — and that you would recognise the hand of Providence in the dispensation, if his lordship had jilted her today?”

  “No, I wouldn’t!” retorted Cornelia, all the more vehemently for her p
erception of the malicious truth in the insinuation.

  “Why, that’s exactly what my wife said, when I taxed her with the same thing. It must be so. Now don’t,” said her tormentor, as Cornelia rose from the table, “let her see any change in your manner because you think she’s going to marry a lord.”

  It was the insinuation in this charge that made it extremely difficult for Cornelia Root to adjust her behaviour to the occasion: if Miss Harkness was going to marry that lord — and Cornelia Root was principled against inquiring — she was not going to make the slightest change, and yet she was aware that some extra internal stiffness, which she must be careful not to show, would be requisite for this uniformity. When it appeared from Helen’s application that she could not be going to marry the lord, at least for the present, Cornelia had to guard against self-betrayal in a too precipitate relaxation. The note of despair in Helen’s confession that she could not go to people to ask pupils for the same reason that she could not ask them to buy her gimcracks, touched Cornelia, or as she would have said, it made her feel for the girl. But feeling was the last thing, according to her belief, that any honest person ought to show. She was going to help her, but she was not going to let her see that she was capable of any such weakness as sympathy; and she had before her the difficult task of treating Helen just as she would have treated a girl who had always been poor, and of not treating her any worse. “There are a good many things that women take up nowadays,” she said, with an aspect of hard indifference. “Some of ’em learn telegraphin’ — that must pay almost a cook’s wages; some of ’em go into the hospitals, and learn to be professional nurses — that takes you about two years before you can get a certificate, and then it’s a killin’ life; there are the public schools, but there are so few vacancies, and you have to wait and wait for months, even after you ‘re prepared.”

  She looked at Helen as if she thought that Helen was probably not prepared, and Helen shook her head assentingly. “No,” she sighed, “I couldn’t wait. But perhaps I shouldn’t want to do anything for a great length of time,” she said innocently, with the thought of Robert’s return in her mind. “It might only be for a limited period.”

  “That’s what I supposed,” said Miss Root. “That’s the great trouble., If a man takes a thing up, he takes it up for life, but if a woman takes it up, she takes it up till some fellow comes along and tells her to drop it. And then they ‘re always complainin’ that they ain’t paid as much as men are for the same work. I’m not speakin’ of you, Miss Harkness,” she said, with a glance at Helen’s face, “and I don’t know whether I want to join in any cry that’ll take women’s minds off of gettin’ married. It’s the best thing for ‘em, and it’s about all they ‘re fit for, most of ‘em, and it’s nature: there’s no denyin’ that.

  But if women are to be helped along independent of men — and I never was such a fool as to say they were — why, it’s a drawback. And so most of ’em that can’t wait to prepare themselves for anything, because they don’t expect to stick to anything, they turn book-agents, or sell some little paytented thing; or they try to get a situation in a store.” Cornelia began to sew furiously, as if in an exasperation with her sex, that she could not otherwise express. “And you may be sure,” she said, after a silence, “that every one of ’em tries to do something better than she’s fit for, and that she despises her work, and thinks she ain’t paid half enough for it.” Helen did not heed this last outburst. She was trying, with a sickening chill at heart, to realise herself in the character of those resolute young women who had sometimes won a furtive access to her by asking at the door for Miss Harkness, and sending up their names as if they were acquaintances, and then suddenly developing their specimen copy of the book for which they were taking subscriptions, or the needle-threader or thimble-case, or convertible pen-wiper and boot-buttoner which they were selling. She could as little imagine herself behind the counter of a Washington Streetfancy or variety store, standing all day in the hot, dry air, and shrilly piping “Ca-ish!” as she had heard those poor shop-girls doing while they rapped on the counter with their pencils for the cash-boy, and munched a surreptitious lunch of crackers and chocolate creams. If it must come to this, she did not know what she should do.

  She was as firm as ever that she would not touch the money in Mr. Hibbard’s hands as long as the least doubt tainted it; but she began to be frightened at herself, and at the prospect before her.

  “And is there — is there nothing else?” she asked, in a voice which she tried to make steady, and only succeeded in making almost as low as a whisper.

  “O yes,” said Miss Root; “there’s the theatre.”

  Helen’s heart gave a throb of hope. She used to play a good deal in private theatricals; she had acted a French monologue once, and she had taken a part in a German vaudeville; everybody had praised her, and she had unquestionably borne the palm from all her dramatic competitors. A brief but brilliant future dazzled before her: an actress who was evidently a lady, and carried the air and tone of good society with her on the stage; triumphs and gains in cities distant from Boston in an incognito strictly preserved; and then a sudden but inexorable retirement after a given time: it was easy work for Helen’s lively fancy to contrive all this, with a shining amplification, as rapid and full as if she had dreamed it in sleep. “Yes?” she said with an interest which she could not at once forbid herself.

  “I had a friend,” pursued Miss Root, “a friend — well, she was a kind of connection, — and she came up to Boston the same time I did — crazy to go on the stage. She used to act in the school exhibitions, and I guess she got her head turned; anyway nothing else would do her. But she was real modest about it; they all are; she only wanted to play little parts like Juliet, and Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth.

  Well, she went to a manager, and he was very kind and pleasant, and I guess he saw what a simple goose she was, and he told her he would let her have a chance to show what she could do, and he gave her a place in the ballet.”

  “In the ballet?” palpitated Helen. The colours had already begun to fade from her vision of histrionic success, and the crazy structure now trembled to its fall.

  “She thought,” resumed Cornelia, “just as I. presume you do, that it was dancin’. She said she couldn’t dance any; her folks had always been strict orthodox, and wouldn’t let her learn; and he laughed and said most of the ballet never danced at all. She’d have to go on as a peasant, or something like that, with a lot of others, first off; and as soon as he could he’d give her a few words to say, and she could see how she got along. It wa’n’t playing Ophelia exactly, but she was dead set on going on to the stage, and so she took up with his offer, and glad enough, and she got six dollars a week from the start.”

  “And has she ever — ever got on?” asked Helen faintly.

  “Well, the only time I ever saw her was one night when she had the part of a page. I guess she must have been on the stage as much as a minute, and she said at least a dozen words. But I couldn’t seem to stand it, to see any friend of mine up before all those people in boy’s clothes; and she seemed pretty long for a page, and kind of bony, and I went away after the first act; I was afraid she might come on again.”

  Helen smiled and shuddered; the idea of boy’s clothes was final, even in a reverie, and she hung her head in innocent shame.

  “Now,” said Cornelia, with a keen glance at her abasement, and apparently convinced that she had brought her low enough, “if you really do want to do something, I can get you a chance to try.”

  Helen started. “In the theatre? Oh, I couldn’t.” Cornelia laughed. “No, not in the theatre. But there’s a friend of mine — well, he’s a kind of a connection too — used to have a photograph saloon down in our place; used to have it on wheels, and get it dragged round from one village to another; and he’s got Boston-bit too; and so he’s come up, and he’s opened a gallery down in Hanover Street; well, it’s pretty far down. Well, he hain’t got a very hig
h class of custom, that’s a fact; and if he had he wouldn’t have this work to do, I presume.”

  “What is it?” asked Helen, “It’s colourin’ photographs.”

  “O yes; I’ve seen them,” said Helen, remembering some examples of the art, hung aloft in oval frames, in country parlours, of which they were cherished ornaments.

  “It ain’t a very high kind of art,” said Miss Root, as if she found something to reprove in Helen’s tone, “but it ain’t every one that can do it, low as it is.”

  “I’m sure I don’t depreciate it,” returned Helen.

  “I should be only too glad if you thought I could do it.”

  “I guess I can get you the chance to try,” said Cornelia; and now, as if she wished to leave the subject and prevent the premature acknowledgments which she felt she had not yet earned, she unpinned her sewing from her knee, and stood up holding it at arm’s-length from her.

  “The trouble is,” she mused aloud, “that you can’t tell how it’s going to hang, after all your worry.”

  “Why don’t you let me drape it on you?” asked Helen.

  Cornelia dropped the lifted arm, and let the skirt trail on the floor. “Well, if you think, Miss Harkness, that I’ve been hintin’ round for anything of that kind!”

  “I don’t,” said Helen. “Honestly! But I like to fit dresses. I used to help Our cook with hers.” Cornelia Root had to discipline with uncommon severity the proud spirit that revolted at having the same hands drape its corporeal covering which had draped the person of an. Irish cook. She subdued it, but it was not in human nature that she should yield gracefully. “I guess I better go to a dressmaker with it,” she said. “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “It won’t be any trouble, indeed,” said Helen, taking the dress from her.

  After fifteen minutes of lively discussion, of pinning back and pulling forward, and holding up and letting drop, during which Cornelia twisted her neck half off, as she said, looking at her own back, she mounted a chair and surveyed herself in the glass. “Well, you have got a touch, Miss Harkness,” she said. “O yes,” returned Helen simply. “I know that.”