Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Imogene sat silent, passing her hand across the front of her dress. The clock ticked audibly from the mantel.

  “I will not have it left to me!” cried Mrs. Bowen. “It is hard enough, at any rate. Do you think I like to speak to you?”

  “No.”

  “Of course it makes me seem inhospitable, and distrustful, and detestable.”

  “I never thought of accusing you,” said the girl, slowly lifting her eyes.

  “I will never, never speak to you of it again,” said Mrs. Bowen, “and from this time forth I insist upon your feeling just as free as if I hadn’t spoken.” She trembled upon the verge of a sob, from which she repelled herself.

  Imogene sat still, with a sort of serious, bewildered look.

  “You shall have every proper opportunity of meeting any one you like.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And I shall be only too gl-glad to take back everything!”

  Imogene sat motionless and silent. Mrs. Bowen broke out again with a sort of violence; the years teach us something of self-control, perhaps, but they weaken and unstring the nerves. In this opposition of silence to silence, the woman of the world was no match for the inexperienced girl.

  “Have you nothing to say, Imogene?”

  “I never thought of him in that way at all. I don’t know what to say yet. It — confuses me. I — I can’t imagine it. But if you think that he is trying to amuse himself — —”

  “I never said that!”

  “No, I know it.”

  “He likes to make you talk, and to talk with you. But he is perfectly idle here, and — there is too much difference, every way. The very good in him makes it the worse. I suppose that after talking with him every one else seems insipid.”

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Bowen rose and ran suddenly from the room.

  Imogene remained sitting cold and still.

  No one had been named since they spoke of Mr. Morton.

  XI

  Colville had not done what he meant in going to Mrs. Bowen’s; in fact, he had done just what he had not meant to do, as he distinctly perceived in coming away. It was then that in a luminous retrospect he discovered his motive to have been a wish to atone to her for behaviour that must have distressed her, or at least to explain it to her. She had not let him do this at once; an instant willingness to hear and to condone was not in a woman’s nature; she had to make him feel, by the infliction of a degree of punishment, that she had suffered. But before she ended she had made it clear that she was ready to grant him a tacit pardon, and he had answered with a silly sarcasm the question that was to have led to peace. He could not help seeing that throughout the whole Carnival adventure she had yielded her cherished reluctances to please him, to show him that she was not stiff or prudish, to convince him that she would not be a killjoy through her devotion to conventionalities which she thought he despised. He could not help seeing that he had abused her delicate generosity, insulted her subtle concessions. He strolled along down the Arno, feeling flat and mean, as a man always does after a contest with a woman in which he has got the victory; our sex can preserve its self-respect only through defeat in such a case. It gave him no pleasure to remember that the glamour of the night before seemed still to rest on Imogene unbroken; that, indeed, was rather an added pain. He surprised himself in the midst of his poignant reflections by a yawn. Clearly the time was past when these ideal troubles could keep him awake, and there was, after all, a sort of brutal consolation in the fact. He was forty-one years old, and he was sleepy, whatever capacity for suffering remained to him. He went to his hotel to catch a little nap before lunch. When he woke it was dinner-time. The mists of slumber still hung about him, and the events of the last forty-eight hours showed vast and shapelessly threatening through them.

  When the drama of the table d’hôte reached its climax of roast chestnuts and butter, he determined to walk over to San Marco and pay a visit to Mr. Waters. He found the old minister from Haddam East Village, Massachusetts, Italianate outwardly in almost ludicrous degree. He wore a fur-lined overcoat indoors; his feet, cased in thick woollen shoes, rested on a strip of carpet laid before his table; a man who had lived for forty years in the pungent atmosphere of an air-tight stove, succeeding a quarter of a century of roaring hearth fires, contented himself with the spare heat of a scaldino, which he held his clasped hands over in the very Italian manner; the lamp that cast its light on the book open before him was the classic lucerna, with three beaks, fed with olive oil. He looked up at his visitor over his spectacles, without recognising him, till Colville spoke. Then, after their greeting, “Is it snowing heavily?” he asked.

  “It isn’t snowing at all. What made you think that?”

  “Perhaps I was drowsing over my book and dreamed it. We become very strange and interesting studies to ourselves as we live along.”

  He took up the metaphysical consideration with the promptness of a man who has no small-talk, and who speaks of the mind and soul as if they were the gossip of the neighbourhood.

  “At times the forty winters that I passed in Haddam East Village seem like an alien experience, and I find myself pitying the life I lived there quite as if it were the life of some one else. It seems incredible that men should still inhabit such climates.”

  “Then you’re not homesick for Haddam East Village?”

  “Ah! for the good and striving souls there, yes; especially the souls of some women there. They used to think that it was I who gave them consolation and spiritual purpose, but it was they who really imparted it. Women souls — how beautiful they sometimes are! They seem truly like angelic essences. I trust that I shall meet them somewhere some time, but it will never be in Haddam East Village. Yes, I must have been dreaming when you came in. I thought that I was by my fire there, and all round over the hills and in the streets the snow was deep and falling still. How distinctly, he said, closing his eyes, as artists do in looking at a picture, I can see the black wavering lines of the walls in the fields sinking into the drifts! the snow billowed over the graves by the church where I preached! the banks of snow around the houses! the white desolation everywhere! I ask myself at times if the people are still there. Yes, I feel as blessedly remote from that terrible winter as if I had died away from it, and were in the weather of heaven.”

  “Then you have no reproach for feeble-spirited fellow-citizens who abandon their native climate and come to live in Italy?”

  The old man drew his fur coat closer about him and shrugged his shoulders in true Florentine fashion. “There may be something to say against those who do so in the heyday of life, but I shall not be the one to say it. The race must yet revert in its decrepitude, as I have in mine, to the climates of the South. Since I have been in Italy I have realised what used to occur to me dimly at home — the cruel disproportion between the end gained and the means expended in reclaiming the savage North. Half the human endeavour, half the human suffering, would have made the whole South Protestant and the whole East Christian, and our civilisation would now be there. No, I shall never go back to New England. New England? New Ireland —— New Canada! Half the farms in Haddam are in the hands of our Irish friends, and the labour on the rest is half done by French Canadians. That is all right and well. New England must come to me here, by way of the great middle West and the Pacific coast.”

  Colville smiled at the Emersonian touch, but he said gravely, “I can never quite reconcile myself to the thought of dying out of my own country.”

  “Why not? It is very unimportant where one dies. A moment after your breath is gone you are in exile for ever — or at home for ever.”

  Colville sat musing upon this phase of Americanism, as he had upon many others. At last he broke the silence they had both let fall, far away from the topic they had touched.

  “Well,” he asked, “how did you enjoy the veglione?”

  “Oh, I’m too old to go to such places for pleasure,” said the minister simply. “But it was very
interesting, and certainly very striking: especially when I went back, toward daylight, after seeing Mrs. Bowen home.”

  “Did you go back?” demanded Colville, in some amaze.

  “Oh yes. I felt that my experience was incomplete without some knowledge of how the Carnival ended at such a place.”

  “Oh! And do you still feel that Savonarola was mistaken?”

  “There seemed to be rather more boisterousness toward the close, and, if I might judge, the excitement grew a little unwholesome. But I really don’t feel myself very well qualified to decide. My own life has been passed in circumstances so widely different that I am at a certain disadvantage.”

  “Yes,” said Colville, with a smile; “I daresay the Carnival at Haddam East Village was quite another tiling.”

  The old man smiled responsively. “I suppose that some of my former parishioners might have been scandalised at my presence at a Carnival ball, had they known the fact merely in the abstract; but in my letters home I shall try to set it before them in an instructive light. I should say that the worst thing about such a scene of revelry would be that it took us too much out of our inner quiet. But I suppose the same remark might apply to almost any form of social entertainment.”

  “Yes.”

  “But human nature is so constituted that some means of expansion must be provided, or a violent explosion takes place. The only question is what means are most innocent. I have been looking about,” added the old man quietly, “at the theatres lately.”

  “Have you?” asked Colville, opening his eyes, in suppressed surprise.

  “Yes; with a view to determining the degree of harmless amusement that may be derived from them. It’s rather a difficult question. I should be inclined to say, however, that I don’t think the ballet can ever be instrumental for good.”

  Colville could not deny himself the pleasure of saying, “Well, not the highest, I suppose.”

  “No,” said Mr. Waters, in apparent unconsciousness of the irony. “But I think the Church has made a mistake in condemning the theatre in toto. It appears to me that it might always have countenanced a certain order of comedy, in which the motive and plot are unobjectionable. Though I don’t deny that there are moods when all laughter seems low and unworthy and incompatible with the most advanced state of being. And I confess,” he went on, with a dreamy thoughtfulness, “that I have very great misgivings in regard to tragedy. The glare that it throws upon the play of the passions — jealousy in its anguish, revenge glutting itself, envy eating its heart, hopeless love — their nakedness is terrible. The terror may be salutary; it may be very mischievous. I am afraid that I have left some of my inquiries till it is too late. I seem to have no longer the materials of judgment left in me. If I were still a young man like you — —”

  “Am I still a young man?” interrupted Colville sadly.

  “You are young enough to respond to the appeals that sometimes find me silent. If I were of your age I should certainly investigate some of these interesting problems.”

  “Ah, but if you become personally interested in the problems, it’s as bad as if you hadn’t the materials of judgment left; you’re prejudiced. Besides, I doubt my youthfulness very much.”

  “You are fifty, I presume?” suggested Mr. Waters, in a leading way.

  “Not very near — only too near,” laughed Colville. “I’m forty-one.”

  “You are younger than I supposed. But I remember now that at your age I had the same feeling which you intimate. It seemed to me then that I had really passed the bound which separates us from the further possibility of youth. But I’ve lived long enough since to know that I was mistaken. At forty, one has still a great part of youth before him — perhaps the richest and sweetest part. By that time the turmoil of ideas and sensations is over; we see clearly and feel consciously. We are in a sort of quiet in which we peacefully enjoy. We have enlarged our perspective sufficiently to perceive things in their true proportion and relation; we are no longer tormented with the lurking fear of death, which darkens and embitters our earlier years; we have got into the habit of life; we have often been ailing and we have not died. Then we have time enough behind us to supply us with the materials of reverie and reminiscence; the terrible solitude of inexperience is broken; we have learned to smile at many things besides the fear of death. We ought also to have learned pity and patience. Yes,” the old man concluded, in cheerful self-corroboration, “it is a beautiful age.”

  “But it doesn’t look so beautiful as it is,” Colville protested. “People in that rosy prime don’t produce the effect of garlanded striplings upon the world at large. The women laugh at us; they think we are fat old fellows; they don’t recognise the slender and elegant youth that resides in our unwieldy bulk.”

  “You take my meaning a little awry. Besides, I doubt if even the ground you assume is tenable. If a woman has lived long enough to be truly young herself, she won’t find a man at forty either decrepit or grotesque. He can even make himself youthful to a girl of thought and imagination.”

  “Yes,” Colville assented, with a certain discomfort.

  “But to be truly young at forty,” resumed Mr. Waters, “a man should be already married.”

  “Yes?”

  “I sometimes feel,” continued the old man, “that I made a mistake in yielding to a disappointment that I met with early in life, and in not permitting myself the chance of retrieval. I have missed a beautiful and consoling experience in my devotion to a barren regret.”

  Colville said nothing, but he experienced a mixed feeling of amusement, of repulsion, and of curiosity at this.

  “We are put into the world to be of it. I am more and more convinced of that. We have scarcely a right to separate ourselves from the common lot in any way. I justify myself for having lived alone only as a widower might. I — lost her. It was a great while ago.”

  “Yes,” said Colville, after the pause which ensued; “I agree with you that one has no right to isolate himself, to refuse his portion of the common lot; but the effects of even a rebuff may last so long that one has no heart to put out his hand a second time — for a second rap over the knuckles. Oh, I know how trivial it is in the retrospect, and how what is called a disappointment is something to be humbly grateful for in most cases; but for a while it certainly makes you doubtful whether you were ever really intended to share the common lot.” He was aware of an insincerity in his words; he hoped that it might not be perceptible, but he did not greatly care.

  Mr. Waters took no notice of what he had been saying. He resumed from another point. “But I should say that it would be unwise for a man of mature life to seek his happiness with one much younger than himself. I don’t deny that there are cases in which the disparity of years counts for little or nothing, but generally speaking, people ought to be as equally mated in age as possible. They ought to start with the same advantages of ignorance. A young girl can only live her life through a community of feeling, an equality of inexperience in the man she gives her heart to. If he is tired of things that still delight her, the chances of unhappiness are increased.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” answered Colville gravely. “It’s apt to be a mistake and a wrong.”

  “Oh, not always — not always,” said the old minister. “We mustn’t look at it in that way quite. Wrongs are of the will.” He seemed to lapse into a greater intimacy of feeling with Colville. “Have you seen Mrs. Bowen to-day? Or — ah! true! I think you told me.”

  “No,” said Colville. “Have we spoken of her? But I have seen her.”

  “And was the little one well?”

  “Very much better.”

  “Pretty creatures, both of them,” said the minister, with as fresh a pleasure in his recognition of the fact as if he had not said nearly the same thing once before, “You’ve noticed the very remarkable resemblance between mother and daughter?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “There is a gentleness in Mrs. Bowen which seems to me the la
st refinement of a gracious spirit,” suggested Mr. Waters. “I have never met any lady who reconciled more exquisitely what is charming in society with what is lovely in nature.”

  “Yes,” said Colville. “Mrs. Bowen always had that gentle manner. I used to know her here as a girl a great while ago.”

  “Did you? I wonder you allowed her to become Mrs. Bowen.”

  This sprightliness of Mr. Waters amused Colville greatly. “At that time I was preoccupied with my great mistake, and I had no eyes for Mrs. Bowen.”

  “It isn’t too late yet,” said Mr. Waters, with open insinuation.

  A bachelor of forty is always flattered by any suggestion of marriage; the suggestion that a beautiful and charming woman would marry him is too much for whatever reserves of modesty and wisdom he may have stored up Colville took leave of the old minister in better humour with himself than he had been for forty-eight hours, or than he had any very good reason for being now.

  Mr. Waters came with him to the head of the stairs and held up the lamp for him to see. The light fell upon the white locks thinly straggling from beneath his velvet skull-cap, and he looked like some mediaeval scholar of those who lived and died for learning in Florence when letters were a passion there almost as strong as love.

  The next day Colville would have liked to go at once and ask about Effie, but upon the whole he thought he would not go till after he had been at the reception where he was going in the afternoon. It was an artist who was giving the reception; he had a number of pictures to show, and there was to be tea. There are artists and artists. This painter was one who had a distinct social importance. It was felt to be rather a nice thing to be asked to his reception; one was sure at least to meet the nicest people.

  This reason prevailed with Colville so far as it related to Mrs. Bowen, whom he felt that he would like to tell he had been there. He would speak to her of this person and that — very respected and recognised social figures, — so that she might see he was not the outlaw, the Bohemian, he must sometimes have appeared to her. It would not be going too far to say that something like an obscure intention to show himself the next Sunday at the English chapel, where Mrs. Bowen went, was not forming itself in his mind. As he went along it began to seem not impossible that she would be at the reception. If Effie’s indisposition was no more serious than it appeared yesterday, very probably Mrs. Bowen would be there. He even believed that he recognised her carriage among those which were drawn up in front of the old palace, under the painter’s studio windows.