Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “O Alice! Alice! Alice! Nobody could ever be what you are to me!” He soothed and comforted her with endearing words and touches; but before he could have believed her half consoled she pulled away from him, and asked, with shining eyes, “Do you think Mr. Boardman is a good influence in your life?”

  “Boardman!” cried Mavering, in astonishment. “Why, I thought you liked Boardman?”

  “I do; and I respect him very much. But that isn’t the question. Don’t you think we ought to ask ourselves how others influence us?”

  “Well, I don’t see much of Boardy nowadays; but I like to drop down and touch earth in Boardy once in a while — I’m in the air so much. Board has more common-sense, more solid chunk-wisdom, than anybody I know. He’s kept me from making a fool of myself more times—”

  “Wasn’t he with you that day with — with those women in Portland?”

  Dan winced a little, and then laughed. “No, he wasn’t. That was the trouble. Boardman was off on the press boat. I thought I told you. But if you object to Boardman—”

  “I don’t. You mustn’t think I object to people when I ask you about them. All that I wished was that you should think yourself what sort of influence he was. I think he’s a very good influence.”

  “He’s a splendid fellow, Boardman is, Alice!” cried Dan. “You ought to have seen how he fought his way through college on such a little money, and never skulked or felt mean. He wasn’t appreciated for it; the men don’t notice these things much; but he didn’t want to have it noticed; always acted as if it was neither here nor there; and now I guess he sends out home whatever he has left after keeping soul and body together every week.”

  He spoke, perhaps, with too great an effect of relief. Alice listened, as it seemed, to his tone rather than his words, and said absently —

  “Yes, that’s grand. But I don’t want you to act as if you were afraid of me in such things.”

  “Afraid?” Dan echoed.

  “I don’t mean actually afraid, but as if you thought I couldn’t be reasonable; as if you supposed I didn’t expect you to make mistakes or to be imperfect.”

  “Yes, I know you’re very reasonable, and you’re more patient with me than I deserve; I know all that, and it’s only my wish to come up to your standard, I suppose, that gives me that apprehensive appearance.”

  “That was what vexed me with you there at Campobello, when you — asked me—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You ought to have understood me better. You ought to know now that I don’t wish you to do anything on my account, but because it’s something we owe to others.”

  “Oh, excuse me! I’d much rather do it for you,” cried Dan; but Alice looked so grave, so hurt, that he hastened on: “How in the world does it concern others whether we are devoted or not, whether we’re harmonious and two-souls-with-but-a-single-thought, and all that?” He could not help being light about it.

  “How?” Alice repeated. “Won’t it give them an idea of what — what — of how much — how truly — if we care for each other — how people ought to care? We don’t do it for ourselves. That would be selfish and disgusting. We do it because it’s something that we owe to the idea of being engaged — of having devoted our lives to each other, and would show — would teach—”

  “Oh yes! I know what you mean,” said Dan, and he gave way in a sputtering laugh. “But they wouldn’t understand. They’d only think we were spoons on each other; and if they noticed that I cooled off toward people I’d liked, and warmed up toward those you liked, they’d say you made me.”

  “Should you care?” asked Alice sublimely, withdrawing a little from his arm.

  “Oh no! only on your account,” he answered, checking his laugh.

  “You needn’t on my account,” she returned. “If we sacrifice some little preferences to each other, isn’t that right? I shall be glad to sacrifice all of mine to you. Isn’t our — marriage to be full of such sacrifices? I expect to give up everything to you.” She looked at him with a sad severity.

  He began to laugh again. “Oh no, Alice! Don’t do that! I couldn’t stand it. I want some little chance at the renunciations myself.”

  She withdrew still further from his side, and said, with a cold anger, “It’s that detestable Mrs. Brinkley.”

  “Mrs. Brinkley!” shouted Dan.

  “Yes; with her pessimism. I have heard her talk. She influences you. Nothing is sacred to her. It was she who took up with those army women that night.”

  “Well, Alice, I must say you can give things as ugly names as the next one. I haven’t seen Mrs. Brinkley the whole winter, except in your company. But she has more sense than all the other women I know.”

  “Oh, thank you!”

  “You know I don’t mean you,” he pushed on. “And she isn’t a pessimist. She’s very kindhearted, and that night she was very polite and good to those army women, as you call them, when you had refused to say a word or do anything for them.”

  “I knew it had been rankling in your mind all along,” said the girl “I expected it to coma out sooner or later. And you talk about renunciation! You never forget nor forgive the slightest thing. But I don’t ask your forgiveness.”

  “Alice!”

  “No. You are as hard as iron. You have that pleasant outside manner that makes people think you’re very gentle and yielding, but all the time you’re like adamant. I would rather die than ask your forgiveness for anything, and you’d rather let me than give it.”

  “Well, then, I ask your forgiveness, Alice, and I’m sure you won’t let me die without it.”

  They regarded each other a moment. Then the tenderness gushed up in their hearts, a passionate tide, and swept them into each other’s arms.

  “O Dan,” she cried, “how sweet you are! how good! how lovely! Oh, how wonderful it is! I wanted to hate you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but love you. Yes, now I understand what love is, and how it can do everything, and last for ever.”

  XLI.

  Mavering came to lunch the next day, and had a word with Mrs. Pasmer before Alice came in. Mr. Pasmer usually lunched at the club.

  “We don’t see much of Mrs. Saintsbury nowadays,” he suggested.

  “No; it’s a great way to Cambridge,” said Mrs. Pasmer, stifling, in a little sigh of apparent regret for the separation, the curiosity she felt as to Dan’s motive in mentioning Mrs. Saintsbury. She was very patient with him when he went on.

  “Yes, it is a great way. And a strange thing about it is that when you’re living here it’s a good deal further from Boston to Cambridge than it is from Cambridge to Boston.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “every one notices that.”

  Dan sat absently silent for a time before he said, “Yes, I guess I must go out and see Mrs. Saintsbury.”

  “Yes, you ought. She’s very fond of you. You and Alice ought both to go.”

  “Does Mrs. Saintsbury like me?” asked Dan. “Well, she’s awfully nice. Don’t you think she’s awfully fond of formulating people?”

  “Oh, everybody in Cambridge does that. They don’t gossip; they merely accumulate materials for the formulation of character.”

  “And they get there just the same!” cried Dan. “Mrs. Saintsbury used to think she had got me down pretty fine,” he suggested.

  “Yes!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an indifference which they both knew she did not feel.

  “Yes. She used to accuse me of preferring to tack, even in a fair wind.”

  He looked inquiringly at Mrs. Pasmer; and she said, “How ridiculous!”

  “Yes, it was. Well, I suppose I am rather circuitous about some things.”

  “Oh, not at all!”

  “And I suppose I’m rather a trial to Alice in that way.”

  He looked at Mrs. Pasmer again, and she said: “I don’t believe you are, in the least. You can’t tell what is trying to a girl.”

  “No,” said Dan pensively, “I can’t.” Mrs. P
asmer tried to render the interest in her face less vivid. “I can’t tell where she’s going to bring up. Talk about tacking!”

  “Do you mean the abstract girl; or Alice?”

  “Oh, the abstract girl,” said Dan, and they laughed together. “You think Alice is very straightforward, don’t you?”

  “Very,” said Mrs. Pasmer, looking down with a smile— “for a girl.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. And don’t you think the most circuitous kind of fellow would be pretty direct compared with the straight-forwardest kind of girl?”

  There was a rueful defeat and bewilderment in Dan’s face that made Mrs. Pasmer laugh. “What has she been doing now?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Pasmer,” said Dan, “you and I are the only frank and open people I know. Well, she began to talk last night about influence — the influence of other people on us; and she killed off nearly all the people I like before I knew what she was up to, and she finished with Mrs. Brinkley. I’m glad she didn’t happen to think of you, Mrs. Pasmer, or I shouldn’t be associating with you at the present moment.” This idea seemed to give Mrs. Pasmer inexpressible pleasure. Dan went on: “Do you quite see the connection between our being entirely devoted to each other and my dropping Mrs. Brinkley?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Alice doesn’t like satirical people.”

  “Well, of course not. But Mrs. Brinkley is such an admirer of hers.”

  “I dare say she tells you so.”

  “Oh, but she is!”

  “I don’t deny it,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “But if Alice feels something inimical — antipatico — in her atmosphere, it’s no use talking.”

  “Oh no, it’s no use talking, and I don’t know that I want to talk.” After a pause, Mavering asked, “Mrs. Pasmer, don’t you think that where two people are going to be entirely devoted to each other, and self-sacrificing to each other, they ought to divide, and one do all the devotion, and the other all the self-sacrifice?”

  Mrs. Pasmer was amused by the droll look in Dan’s eyes. “I think they ought to be willing to share evenly,” she said.

  “Yes; that’s what I say — share and share alike. I’m not selfish about those little things.” He blew off a long sighing breath. “Mrs. Pasmer, don’t you think we ought to have an ideal of conduct?”

  Mrs. Pasmer abandoned herself to laughter. “O Dan! Dan! You will be the death of me.”

  “We will die together, then, Mrs. Pasmer. Alice will kill me.” He regarded her with a sad sympathy in his eye as she laughed and laughed with delicious intelligence of the case. The intelligence was perfect, from their point of view; but whether it fathomed the girl’s whole intention or aspiration is another matter. Perhaps this was not very clear to herself. At any rate, Mavering did not go any more to see Mrs. Brinkley, whose house he had liked to drop into. Alice went several times, to show, she said, that she had no feeling in the matter; and Mrs. Brinkley, when she met Dan, forbore to embarrass him with questions or reproaches; she only praised Alice to him.

  There were not many other influences that Alice cut him off from; she even exposed him to some influences that might have been thought deleterious. She made him go and call alone upon certain young ladies whom she specified, and she praised several others to him, though she did not praise them for the same things that he did. One of them was a girl to whom Alice had taken a great fancy, such as often buds into a romantic passion between women; she was very gentle and mild, and she had none of that strength of will which she admired in Alice. One night there was a sleighing party to a hotel in the suburbs, where they had dancing and then supper. After the supper they danced “Little Sally Waters” for a finale, instead of the Virginia Reel, and Alice would not go on the floor with Dan; she said she disliked that dance; but she told him to dance with Miss Langham. It became a gale of fun, and in the height of it Dan slipped and fell with his partner. They laughed it off, with the rest, but after a while the girl began to cry; she had received a painful bruise. All the way home, while the others laughed and sang and chattered, Dan was troubled about this poor girl; his anxiety became a joke with the whole sleighful of people.

  When he parted with Alice at her door, he said, “I’m afraid I hurt Miss Langham; I feel awfully about it.”

  “Yes; there’s no doubt of that. Good night!”

  She left him to go off to his lodging, hot and tingling with indignation at her injustice. But kindlier thoughts came to him before he slept, and he fell asleep with a smile of tenderness for her on his lips. He could see how he was wrong to go out with any one else when Alice said she disliked the dance; he ought not to have taken advantage of her generosity in appointing him a partner; it was trying for her to see him make that ludicrous tumble, of course; and perhaps he had overdone the attentive sympathy on the way home. It flattered him that she could not help showing her jealousy — that is flattering, at first; and Dan was able to go and confess all but this to Alice. She received his submission magnanimously, and said that she was glad it had happened, because his saying this showed that now they understood each other perfectly. Then she fixed her eyes on his, and said, “I’ve just been round to see Lilly, and she’s as well as ever; it was only a nervous shock.”

  Whether Mavering was really indifferent to Miss Langham’s condition, or whether the education of his perceptions had gone so far that he consciously ignored her, he answered, “That was splendid of you, Alice.”

  “No,” she said; “it’s you that are splendid; and you always are. Oh, I wonder if I can ever be worthy of you!”

  Their mutual forgiveness was very sweet to them, and they went on praising each other. Alice suddenly broke away from this weakening exchange of worship, and said, with that air of coming to business which he lad learned to recognise and dread a little, “Dan, don’t you think I ought to write to your mother?”

  “Write to my mother?”

  “Why, you have written to her. You wrote as soon as you got back, and she answered you.”

  “Yes; but write regularly? — Show that I think of her all the time? When I really think I’m going to take you from her, I seem so cruel and heartless!”

  “Oh, I don’t look at it in that light, Alice.”

  “Don’t joke! And when I think that we’re going away to leave her, for several years, perhaps, as soon as we’re married, I can’t make it seem right. I know how she depends upon your being near her, and seeing her every now and then; and to go off to Europe for years, perhaps — Of course you can be of use to your father there; but do you think it’s right toward your mother? I want you to think.”

  Dan thought, but his thinking was mainly to the effect that he did not know what she was driving at. Had she got any inkling of that plan of his mother’s for them to come and stay a year or two at the Falls after their marriage? He always expected to be able to reconcile that plan with the Pasmer plan of going at once; to his optimism the two were not really incompatible; but he did not wish them prematurely confronted in Alice’s mind. Was this her way of letting him know that she knew what his mother wished, and that she was willing to make the sacrifice? Or was it just some vague longing to please him by a show of affection toward his family, an unmeditated impulse of reparation? He had an impulse himself to be frank with Alice, to take her at her word, and to allow that he did not like the notion of going abroad. This was Dan’s notion of being frank; he could still reserve the fact that he had given his mother a tacit promise to bring Alice home to live, but he postponed even this. He said: “Oh, I guess that’ll be all right, Alice. At any rate, there’s no need to think about it yet awhile. That can be arranged.”

  “Yes,” said Alice; “but don’t you think I’d better get into the habit of writing regularly to your mother now, so that there needn’t be any break when we go abroad?” He could see now that she had no idea of giving that plan up, and he was glad that he had not said anything. “I think,” she continued, “that I shall write to her once a week, and give her a fu
ll account of our life from day to day; it’ll be more like a diary; and then, when we get over there, I can keep it up without any effort, and she won’t feel so much that you’ve gone.”

  She seemed to refer the plan to him, and he said it was capital. In fact, he did like the notion of a diary; that sort of historical view would involve less danger of precipitating a discussion of the two schemes of life for the future. “It’s awfully kind of you, Alice, to propose such a thing, and you mustn’t make it a burden. Any sort of little sketchy record will do; mother can read between the lines, you know.”

  “It won’t be a burden,” said the girl tenderly. “I shall seem to be doing it for your mother, but I know I shall be doing it for you. I do everything for you. Do you think it’s right?”

  “Oh; it must be,” said Dan, laughing. “It’s so pleasant.”

  “Oh,” said the girl gloomily; “that’s what makes me doubt it.”

  XLII.

  Eunice Mavering acknowledged Alice’s first letter. She said that her mother read it aloud to them all, and had been delighted with the good account she gave of Dan, and fascinated with all the story of their daily doings and sayings. She wished Eunice to tell Alice how fully she appreciated her thoughtfulness of a sick old woman, and that she was going to write herself and thank her. But Eunice added that Alice must not be surprised if her mother was not very prompt in this, and she sent messages from all the family, affectionate for Alice, and polite for her father and mother.

  Alice showed Dan the letter, and he seemed to find nothing noticeable in it. “She says your mother will write later,” Alice suggested.

  “Yes. You ought to feel very much complimented by that. Mother’s autographs are pretty uncommon,” he said, smiling.

  “Why, doesn’t she write? Can’t she? Does it tire her?” asked Alice.

  “Oh yes, she can write, but she hates to. She gets Eunice or Minnie to write usually.”

  “Dan,” cried Alice intensely, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why, I thought you knew it,” he explained easily. “She likes to read, and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don’t suppose I get more than two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. She makes the girls write. But you needn’t mind her not writing. You may be sure she’s glad of your letters.”