Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In the supper-room she devoured salad and ices with a childish joy in them. The place was jammed, and she laughed from her corner at Colville’s struggles in getting the things for her and bringing them to her. While she was still in the midst of an ice, the faint note of the piano sounded. “Oh, they’re beginning again. It’s the Lancers!” she said, giving him the plate back. She took his arm again; she almost pulled him along on their return.

  “Why don’t you dance?” she demanded mockingly.

  “I would if you’d let me dance with you.”

  “Oh, that’s impossible! I’m engaged ever so many deep.” She dropped his arm instantly at sight of a young Englishman who seemed to be looking for her. This young Englishman had a zeal for dancing that was unsparing; partners were nothing to him except as a means of dancing; his manner expressed a supreme contempt for people who made the slightest mistake, who danced with less science or less conscience than himself. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said, in a tone of cold rebuke, without looking at her. “We’ve been waiting.”

  Colville wished to beat him, but Imogene took his rebuke meekly, and murmured some apologies about not hearing the piano before. He hurried her off without recognising Colville’s existence in any way.

  The undancing husband of the dancing wife was boring himself in a corner; Colville decided that the chances with him were better than with the fond father, and joined him, just as a polite officer came up and entreated him to complete a set. “Oh, I never danced in my life,” he replied; and then he referred the officer to Colville. “Don’t you dance?”

  “I used to dance,” Colville began, while the officer stood looking patiently at him. This was true. He used to dance the Lancers, too, and very badly, seventeen years before. He had danced it with Lina Ridgely and the other one, Mrs. Milbury. His glance wandered to the vacant place on the floor; it was the same set which Miss Graham was in; she smiled and beckoned derisively. A vain and foolish ambition fired him. “Oh yes, I can dance a little,” he said.

  A little was quite enough for the eager officer. He had Colville a partner in an instant, and the next he was on the floor.

  “Oh, what fun!” cried Miss Graham; but the fun had not really begun yet.

  Colville had forgotten everything about the Lancers. He walked round like a bear in a pen: he capered to and fro with a futile absurdity; people poked him hither and thither; his progress was attended by rending noises from the trains over which he found his path. He smiled and cringed, and apologised to the hardening faces of the dancers: even Miss Graham’s face had become very grave.

  “This won’t do,” said the Englishman at last, with cold insolence. He did not address himself to any one; he merely stopped; they all stopped, and Colville was effectively expelled the set? another partner was found for his lady, and he wandered giddily away. He did not know where to turn; the whole room must have seen what an incredible ass he had made of himself, but Mrs. Bowen looked as if she had not seen.

  He went up to her, resolved to make fun of himself at the first sign she gave of being privy to his disgrace. But she only said, “Have you found your way to the supper-room yet?”

  “Oh yes; twice,” he answered, and kept on talking with her and Madame Uccelli. After five minutes or so something occurred to Colville. “Have you found the way to the supper-room yet, Mrs. Bowen?”

  “No!” she owned, with a small, pathetic laugh, which expressed a certain physical faintness, and reproached him with insupportable gentleness for his selfish obtuseness.

  “Let me show you the way,” he cried.

  “Why, I am rather hungry,” said Mrs. Bowen, taking his arm, with a patient arrangement first of her fan, her bouquet, and her train, and then moving along by his side with a delicate footed pace, which insinuated and deprecated her dependence upon him.

  There were only a few people in the supper-room, and they had it practically to themselves. She took a cup of tea and a slice of buttered bread, with a little salad, which she excused herself from eating because it was the day after her headache. “I shouldn’t have thought you were hungry, Mrs. Bowen,” he said, “if you hadn’t told me so,” and he recalled that, as a young girl, her friend used to laugh at her for having such a butterfly appetite; she was in fact one of those women who go through life the marvels of such of our brutal sex as observe the ethereal nature of their diet. But in an illogical revulsion of feeling. Colville, who was again cramming himself with all the solids and fluids in reach, and storing up a vain regret against the morrow, preferred her delicacy to the magnificent rapacity of Miss Graham: Imogene had passed from salad to ice, and at his suggestion had frankly reverted to salad again and then taken a second ice, with the robust appetite of perfect health and perfect youth. He felt a desire to speak against her to Mrs. Bowen, he did not know why and he did not know how; he veiled his feeling in an open attack. “Miss Graham has just been the cause of my playing the fool, with her dancing. She dances so superbly that she makes you want to dance too — she made me feel as if I could dance.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen; “it was very kind of you to complete the set. I saw you dancing,” she added, without a glimmer of guilty consciousness in her eyes.

  It was very sweet, but Colville had to protest. “Oh no; you didn’t see me dancing; you saw me not dancing. I am a ruined man, and I leave Florence to-morrow; but I have the sad satisfaction of reflecting that I don’t leave an unbroken train among the ladies of that set. And I have made one young Englishman so mad that there is a reasonable hope of his not recovering.”

  “Oh no; you don’t think of going away for that!” said Mrs. Bowen, not heeding the rest of his joking.

  “Well, the time has been when I have left Florence for loss,” said Colville, with the air of preparing himself to listen to reason.

  “You mustn’t,” said Mrs. Bowen briefly.

  “Oh, very well, then, I won’t,” said Colville whimsically, as if that settled it.

  Mrs. Bowen would not talk of the matter any more; he could see that with her kindness, which was always more than her tact, she was striving to get away from the subject. As he really cared for it no longer, this made him persist in clinging to it; he liked this pretty woman’s being kind to him. “Well,” he said finally, “I consent to stay in Florence on condition that you suggest some means of atonement for me which I can also make a punishment to Miss Graham.”

  Mrs. Bowen did not respond to the question of placating and punishing her protégée with sustained interest. They went back to Madame Uccelli, and to the other elderly ladies in the room that opened by archways upon the dancing-room.

  Imogene was on the floor, dancing not merely with unabated joy, but with a zest that seemed only to freshen from dance to dance. If she left the dance, it was to go out on her partner’s arm to the supper-room. Colville could not decently keep on talking to Mrs. Bowen the whole evening; it would be too conspicuous; he devolved from frump to frump; he bored himself; he yawned in his passage from one of these mothers or fathers to another. The hours passed; it was two o’clock; Imogene was going out to the supper-room again. He was taking out his watch. She saw him, and “Oh, don’t!” she cried, laughing, as she passed.

  The dancing went on; she was waltzing now in the interminable german. Some one had let down, a window in the dancing-room, and he was feeling it in his shoulder. Mrs. Bowen, across the room, looked heroically patient, but weary. He glanced, down at the frump on the sofa near, and realised that she had been making a long speech to him, which, he could see from her look, had ended in some sort of question.

  Three o’clock came, and they had to wait till the german was over. He felt that Miss Graham was behaving badly, ungratefully, selfishly; on the way home in the carriage he was silent from utter boredom and fatigue, but Mrs. Bowen was sweetly sympathetic with the girl’s rapture. Imogene did not seem to feel his moodiness; she laughed, she joked, she told a number of things that happened, she hummed the air of the last waltz.
“Isn’t it divine?” she asked. “Oh! I feel as if I could dance for a week.” She was still dancing; she gave Colville’s foot an accidental tap in keeping time on the floor of the carriage to the tune she was humming. No one said anything about a next meeting when they parted at the gate of Palazzo Pinti, and Mrs. Bowen bade her coachman drive Colville to his hotel. But both the ladies’ voices called good-night to him as he drove away. He fancied a shade of mocking in Miss Graham’s voice.

  The great outer door of the hotel was locked, of course, and the poor little porter kept Colville thumping at it some time before he unlocked it, full of sleepy smiles and apologies. “I’m sorry to wake you up,” said Colville kindly.

  “It is my duty,” said the porter, with amiable heroism. He discharged another duty by lighting a whole new candle, which would be set down to Colville’s account, and went before him to his room, up the wide stairs, cold in their white linen path, and on through the crooked corridors haunted by the ghosts of extinct tables d’hôte, and full of goblin shadows. He had recovered a noonday suavity by the time he reached Colville’s door, and bowed himself out, after lighting the candles within, with a sweet plenitude of politeness, which Colville, even in his gloomy mood, could not help admiring in a man in his shirt sleeves, with only one suspender up.

  If there had been a fire, Colville would have liked to sit down before it, and take an account of his feelings, but the atmosphere of a bed-chamber in a Florentine hotel at half-past three o’clock on a winter morning is not one that invites to meditation; and he made haste to get into bed, with nothing clearer in his mind than a shapeless sense of having been trifled with. He ought not to have gone to a dancing party, to begin with, and then he certainly ought not to have attempted to dance; so far he might have been master of the situation, and was responsible for it; but he was, over and above this, aware of not having wished to do either, of having been wrought upon against his convictions to do both. He regarded now with supreme loathing a fantastic purpose which he had formed while tramping round on those women’s dresses, of privately taking lessons in dancing, and astonishing Miss Graham at the next ball where they met. Miss Graham? What did he care for that child? Or Mrs. Bowen either, for the matter of that? Had he come four thousand miles to be used, to be played with, by them? At this point Colville was aware of the brutal injustice of his mood. They were ladies, both of them, charming and good, and he had been a fool; that was all. It was not the first time he had been a fool for women. An inexpressible bitterness for that old wrong, which, however he had been used to laugh at it and despise it, had made his life solitary and barren, poured upon his soul; it was as if it had happened to him yesterday.

  A band of young men burst from one of the narrow streets leading into the piazza and straggled across it, letting their voices flare out upon the silence, and then drop extinct one by one. A whole world of faded associations flushed again in Colville’s heart. This was Italy; this was Florence; and he execrated the hour in which he had dreamed of returning.

  VII

  The next morning’s sunshine dispersed the black mood of the night before; but enough of Colville’s self-disgust remained to determine him not to let his return to Florence be altogether vain, or his sojourn so idle as it had begun being. The vague purpose which he had cherished of studying the past life and character of the Florentines in their architecture shaped itself anew in the half-hour which he gave himself over his coffee; and he turned it over in his mind with that mounting joy in its capabilities which attends the contemplation of any sort of artistic endeavour. No people had ever more distinctly left the impress of their whole temper in their architecture, or more sharply distinguished their varying moods from period to period in their palaces and temples. He believed that he could not only supply that brief historical sketch of Florence which Mrs. Bowen had lamented the want of, but he could make her history speak an unintelligible, an unmistakeable tongue in every monument of the past, from the Etruscan wall at Fiesole to the cheap, plain, and tasteless shaft raised to commemorate Italian Unity in the next piazza. With sketches from his own pencil, illustrative of points which he could not otherwise enforce, he could make such a book on Florence as did not exist, such a book as no one had yet thought of making. With this object in his mind, making and keeping him young, he could laugh with any one who liked at the vanity of the middle-aged Hoosier who had spoiled a set in the Lancers at Madame Uccelli’s party; he laughed at him now alone, with a wholly impersonal sense of his absurdity.

  After breakfast he went without delay to Viesseux’s reading-room, to examine his catalogue, and see what there was in it to his purpose. While he was waiting his turn to pay his subscription, with the people who surrounded the proprietor, half a dozen of the acquaintances he had made at Mrs. Bowen’s passed in and out. Viesseux’s is a place where sooner or later you meet every one you know among the foreign residents at Florence; the natives in smaller proportion resort there too; and Colville heard a lady asking for a book in that perfect Italian which strikes envy to the heart of the stranger sufficiently versed in the language to know that he never shall master it. He rather rejoiced in his despair, however, as an earnest of his renewed intellectual life. Henceforth his life would be wholly intellectual. He did not regret his little excursion into society; it had shown him with dramatic sharpness how unfit for it he was.

  “Good morning!” said some one in a bland undertone full of a pleasant recognition of the claims to quiet of a place where some others were speaking in their ordinary tones.

  Colville looked round on the Rev. Mr. Waters, and took his friendly hand. “Good morning — glad to see you,” he answered.

  “Are you looking for that short Florentine history for Mrs. Bowen’s little girl?” asked Mr. Waters, inclining his head slightly for the reply. “She mentioned it to me.”

  By day Colville remarked more distinctly that the old gentleman was short and slight, with a youthful eagerness in his face surviving on good terms with the grey locks that fell down his temples from under the brim of his soft felt hat. With the boyish sweetness of his looks blended a sort of appreciative shrewdness, which pointed his smiling lips slightly aslant in what seemed the expectation rather than the intention of humour.

  “Not exactly,” said Colville, experiencing a difficulty in withholding the fact that in some sort he was just going to write a short Florentine history, and finding a certain pleasure in Mrs. Bowen’s having remembered that he had taken an interest in Effie’s reading. He had a sudden wish to tell Mr. Waters of his plan, but this was hardly the time or place.

  They now found themselves face to face with the librarian, and Mr. Waters made a gesture of waiving himself in Colville’s favour.

  “No, no!” said the latter; “you had better ask. I am going to put this gentleman through rather an extended course of sprouts.”

  The librarian smiled with the helplessness of a foreigner, who knows his interlocutor’s English, but not the meaning of it.

  “Oh, I merely wanted to ask,” said Mr. Waters, addressing the librarian, and explaining to Colville, “whether you had received that book on Savonarola yet. The German one.”

  “I shall see,” said the librarian, and he went upon a quest that kept him some minutes.

  “You’re not thinking of taking Savonarola’s life, I suppose?” suggested Colville.

  “Oh no. Villari’s book has covered the whole ground for ever, it seems to me. It’s a wonderful book. You’ve read it?”

  “Yes. It’s a thing that makes you feel that, after all, the Italians have only to make a real effort in any direction, and they go ahead of everybody else. What biography of the last twenty years can compare with it?”

  “You’re right, sir — you’re right,” cried the old man enthusiastically. “They’re a gifted race, a people of genius.”

  “I wish for their own sakes they’d give their minds a little to generalship,” said Colville, pressed by the facts to hedge somewhat. “They did get so ba
dly smashed in their last war, poor fellows.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I should like them any better if they were better soldiers. Perhaps the lesson of noble endurance that they’ve given our times is all that we have the right to demand of them in the way of heroism; no one can say they lack courage. And sometimes it seems to me that in simply outgrowing the different sorts of despotism that had fastened upon them, till their broken bonds fell away without positive effort on their part, they showed a greater sublimity than if they had violently conquered their freedom. Most nations sink lower and lower under tyranny; the Italians grew steadily more and more civilised, more noble, more gentle, more grand. It was a wonderful spectacle — like a human soul perfected through suffering and privation. Every period of their history is full of instruction. I find my ancestral puritanism particularly appealed to by the puritanism of Savonarola.”

  “Then Villari hasn’t satisfied you that Savonarola wasn’t a Protestant?”

  “Oh yes, he has. I said his puritanism. Just now I’m interested in justifying his failure to myself, for it’s one of the things in history that I’ve found it hardest to accept. But no doubt his puritanic state fell because it was dreary and ugly, as the puritanic state always has been. It makes its own virtues intolerable; puritanism won’t let you see how good and beautiful the Puritans often are. It was inevitable that Savonarola’s enemies should misunderstand and hate him.”

  “You are one of the last men I should have expected to find among the Arrabiati,” said Colville.

  “Oh, there’s a great deal to be said for the Florentine Arrabiati, as well as for the English Malignants, though the Puritans in neither case would have known how to say it. Savonarola perished because he was excessive. I am studying him in this aspect; it is fresh ground. It is very interesting to inquire just at what point a man’s virtues become mischievous and intolerable.”