“Thank you, father,” said Dan.
They had come up to the paddock behind the barn, and they laid their arms on the fence while they looked over at the horses, which were still there. The beasts, in their rough winter coats, some bedaubed with frozen clots of the mud in which they had been rolling earlier in the afternoon, stood motionless in the thin, keen breeze that crept over the hillside from the March sunset, and blew their manes and tails out toward Dan and his father. Dan’s pony sent him a gleam of recognition from under his frowsy bangs, but did not stir.
“Bunch looks like a caterpillar,” he said, recalling the time when his father had given him the pony; he was a boy then, and the pony was as much to him, it went through his mind, as Alice had ever been. Was it all a jest, an irony? he asked himself.
“He’s getting pretty old,” said his father. “Let’s see: you were only twelve.”
“Ten,” said Dan. “We’ve had him thirteen years.”
Some of the horses pricked up their ears at the sound of their voices. One of them bit another’s neck; the victim threw up his heels and squealed.
Pat called from the stable, “Heigh, you divils!”
“I think he’d better take them in,” said Dan’s father; and he continued, as if it were all the same subject, “I hope you’ll have seen something more of the world before you fall in love the next time.”
“Thank you; there won’t be any next time. But do you consider the world such a school of morals; then? I supposed it was a very bad place.”
“We seem to have been all born into it,” said the father. He lifted his arms from the fence, and Dan mechanically followed him into the stable. A warm, homely smell of hay and of horses filled the place; a lantern glimmered, a faint blot, in the loft where Pat was pitching some hay forward to the edge of the boards; the naphtha gas weakly flared from the jets beside the harness-room, whence a smell of leather issued and mingled with the other smell. The simple, earthy wholesomeness of the place appealed to Dan and comforted him. The hay began to tumble from the loft with a pleasant rustling sound.
His father called up to Pat, “I think you’d better take the horses in now.”
“Yes, sir: I’ve got the box-stalls ready for ‘em.”
Dan remembered how he and Eunice used to get into the box-stall with his pony, and play at circus with it; he stood up on the pony, and his sister was the ring-master. The picture of his careless childhood reflected a deeper pathos upon his troubled present, and he sighed again.
His father said, as they moved on through the barn: “Some of the best people I’ve ever known were what were called worldly people. They are apt to be sincere, and they have none of the spiritual pride, the conceit of self-righteousness, which often comes to people who are shut up by conscience or circumstance to the study of their own motives and actions.”
“I don’t think she was one of that kind,” said Dan.
“Oh, I don’t know that she was. But the chances of happiness, of goodness, would be greater with a less self-centred person — for you.”
“Ah, Yes! For me!” said Dan bitterly. “Because I hadn’t it in me to be frank with her. With a man like me, a woman had better be a little scampish, too! Father, I could get over the loss; she might have died, and I could have got over that; but I can’t get over being to blame.”
“I don’t think I’d indulge in any remorse,” said his father. “There’s nothing so useless, so depraving, as that. If you see you’re wrong, it’s for your warning, not for your destruction.”
Dan was not really feeling very remorseful; he had never felt that he was much to blame; but he had an intellectual perception of the case, and he thought that he ought to feel remorseful; it was this persuasion that he took for an emotion. He continued to look very disconsolate.
“Come,” said his father, touching his arm, “I don’t want you to brood upon these things. It can do no manner of good. I want you to go to New York next week and look after that Lafflin process. If it’s what he thinks — if he can really cast his brass patterns without air-holes — it will revolutionise our business. I want to get hold of him.”
The Portuguese cook was standing in the basement door which they passed at the back of the house. He saluted father and son with a glittering smile.
“Hello, Joe!” said Dan.
“Ah, Joe!” said his father; he touched his hat to the cook, who snatched his cap off.
“What a brick you are, father!” thought Dan. His heart leaped at the notion of getting away from Ponkwasset; he perceived how it had been irking him to stay. “If you think I could manage it with Lafflin—”
“Oh, I think you could. He’s another slippery chap.”
Dan laughed for pleasure and pain at his father’s joke.
XLIX.
In New York Dan found that Lafflin had gone to Washington to look up something in connection with his patent. In his eagerness to get away from home, Dan had supposed that his father meant to make a holiday for him, and he learned with a little surprise that he was quite in earnest about getting hold of the invention he wrote home of Lafflin’s absence; and he got a telegram in reply ordering him to follow on to Washington.
The sun was shining warm on the asphalt when he stepped out of the Pennsylvania Depot with his bag in his hand, and put it into the hansom that drove up for him. The sky overhead was of an intense blue that made him remember the Boston sky as pale and grey; when the hansom tilted out into the Avenue he had a joyous glimpse of the White House; of the Capitol swimming like a balloon in the cloudless air. A keen March breeze swept the dust before him, and through its veil the classic Treasury Building showed like one edifice standing perfect amid ruin represented by the jag-tooth irregularities of the business architecture along the wide street.
He had never been in Washington before, and he had a confused sense of having got back to Rome, which he remembered from his boyish visit. Throughout his stay he seemed to be coming up against the facade of the Temple of Neptune; but it was the Patent Office, or the Treasury Building, or the White House, and under the gay Southern sky this reversion to the sensations of a happier time began at once, and made itself a lasting relief. He felt a lift in his spirits from the first. They gave him a room at Wormley’s, where the chairs comported themselves as self-respectfully upon two or three legs as they would have done at Boston upon four; the cooking was excellent, and a mercenary welcome glittered from all the kind black faces around him. After the quiet of Ponkwasset and the rush of New York, the lazy ease of the hotel pleased him; the clack of boots over its pavements, the clouds of tobacco smoke, the Southern and Western accents, the spectacle of people unexpectedly encountering and recognising each other in the office and the dining-room, all helped to restore him to a hopefuller mood. Without asking his heart too curiously why, he found it lighter; he felt that he was still young.
In the weather he had struck a cold wave, and the wind was bitter in the streets, but they were full of sun; he found the grass green in sheltered places, and in one of the Circles he plucked a blossomed spray from an adventurous forceythia. This happened when he was walking from Wormley’s to the Arlington by a roundabout way of his own involuntary invention, and he had the flowers in his button-hole when Lafflin was pointed out to him in the reading room there, and he introduced himself. Lafflin had put his hat far back on his head, and was intensely chewing a toothpick, with an air of rapture from everything about him. He seemed a very simple soul to Dan’s inexperience of men, and the young fellow had no difficulty in committing him to a fair conditional arrangement. He was going to stay some days in Washington, and he promised other interviews, so that Dan thought it best to stay too. He used a sheet of the Arlington letter-paper in writing his father of what he had done; and then, as Lafflin had left him, he posted his letter at the clerk’s desk, and wandered out through a corridor different from that which he had come in by. It led by the door of the ladies parlour, and at the sound of women’s voices Dan halte
d. For no other reason than that such voices always irresistibly allured him, he went in, putting on an air of having come to look for some one. There were two or three groups of ladies receiving friends in different parts of the room. At the window a girl’s figure silhouetted itself against the keen light, and as he advanced into the room, peering about, it turned with a certain vividness that seemed familiar. This young lady, whoever she was, had the advantage of Dan in seeing him with the light on his face, and he was still in the dark about her, when she advanced swiftly upon him, holding out her hand.
“You don’t seem to know your old friends, Mr. Mavering,” and the manly tones left him no doubt.
He felt a rush of gladness, and he clasped her hand and clung to it as if he were not going to let it go again, bubbling out incoherencies of pleasure at meeting her. “Why, Miss Anderson! You here? What a piece of luck! Of course I couldn’t see you against the window — make you out! But something looked familiar — and the way you turned! And when you started toward me! I’m awfully glad! When — where are you — that is—”
Miss Anderson kept laughing with him, and bubbled back that she was very glad too, and she was staying with her aunt in that hotel, and they had been there a month, and didn’t he think Washington was charming? But it was too bad he had just got there with that blizzard. The weather had been perfectly divine till the day before yesterday.
He took the spray of forceythia out of his buttonhole. “I can believe it. I found this in one, of the squares, and I think it belongs to you.” He offered it with a bow and a laugh, and she took it in the same humour.
“What is the language of forceythia?” she asked.
“It has none — only expressive silence, you know.”
A middle-aged lady came in, and Miss Anderson said, “My aunt, Mr. Mavering.”
“Mr. Mavering will hardly remember me,” said the lady, giving him her hand. He protested that he should indeed, but she had really made but a vague impression upon him at Campobello. He knew that she was there with Miss Anderson; he had been polite to her as he was to all women; but he had not noticed her much, and in his heart he had a slight for her, as compared with the Boston people he was more naturally thrown with; he certainly had not remembered that she was a little hard of hearing.
Miss Van Hook was in a steel-grey effect of dress, and, she had carried this up into her hair, of which she worn two short vertical curls on each temple.
She did not sit down, and Dan perceived that the ladies were going out. In her tailor-made suit of close-fitting serge and her Paris bonnet, carried like a crest on her pretty little head, Miss Anderson was charming. She had a short veil that came across the base of her lively nose, and left her mouth and chin to make the most of themselves, unprejudiced by its irregularity.
Dan felt it a hardship to part with them, but he prepared to take himself off. Miss Anderson asked him how long he was to be in Washington, and said he must come to see them; they meant to stay two weeks yet, and then they were going to Old Point Comfort; they had their rooms engaged.
He walked down to their carriage with the ladies and put them into it, and Miss Anderson still kept him talking there.
Her aunt said: “Why shouldn’t you come with us, Mr. Mavering? We’re going to Mrs. Secretary Miller’s reception.”
Dan gave himself a glance. “I don’t know — if you want me?”
“We want you,” said Miss Anderson. “Very well, then, I’ll go.”
He got in, and they began rolling over that smooth Washington asphalt which makes talk in a carriage as easy as in a drawing-room. Dan kept saying to himself, “Now she’s going to bring up Campobello;” but Miss Anderson never recurred to their former meeting, and except for the sense of old acquaintance which was manifest in her treatment of him he might have thought that they had never met before. She talked of Washington and its informal delights; and of those plans which her aunt had made, like every one who spends a month in Washington, to spend all the remaining winters of her life there.
It seemed to Dan that Miss Anderson was avoiding Campobello on his account; he knew from what Alice had told him that there had been much surmise about their affair after he had left the island, and he suspected that Miss Anderson thought the subject was painful to him. He wished to reassure her. He asked at the first break in the talk about Washington, “How are the Trevors?”
“Oh, quite well,” she said, promptly availing herself of the opening. “Have you seen any of our Campobello friends lately in Boston?”
“No; I’ve been at home for the last month — in the country.” He scanned her face to see if she knew anything of his engagement. But she seemed honestly ignorant of everything since Campobello; she was not just the kind of New York girl who would visit in Boston, or have friends living there; probably she had never heard of his engagement. Somehow this seemed to simplify matters for Dan. She did not ask specifically after the Pasmers; but that might have been because of the sort of break in her friendship with Alice after that night at the Trevors’; she did not ask specifically after Mrs. Brinkley or any of the others.
At Mrs. Secretary Miller’s door there was a rapid arrival and departure of carriages, of coupes, of hansoms, and of herdics, all managed by a man in plain livery, who opened and shut the doors, and sent the drivers off without the intervention of a policeman; it is the genius of Washington, which distinguishes it from every other capital, from every other city, to make no show of formality, of any manner of constraint anywhere. People were swarming in and out; coming and going on foot as well as by carriage. The blandest of coloured uncles received their cards in the hall and put them into a vast tray heaped up with pasteboard, smiling affectionately upon them as if they had done him a favour.
“Don’t you like them?” asked Dan of Miss Anderson; he meant the Southern negroes.
“I adoye them,” she responded, with equal fervour. “You must study some new types here for next summer,” she added.
Dan laughed and winced too. “Yes!” Then he said solemnly, “I am not going to Campobello next summer.”
They felt into a stream of people tending toward an archway between the drawing-rooms, where Mrs. Secretary Miller stood with two lady friends who were helping her receive. They smiled wearily but kindly upon the crowd, for whom the Secretary’s wife had a look of impartial hospitality. She could not have known more than one in fifty; and she met them all with this look at first, breaking into incredulous recognition when she found a friend. “Don’t go away yet,” she said cordially, to Miss Van Hook and her niece, and she held their hands for a moment with a gentle look of relief and appeal which included Dan. “Let me introduce you to Mrs. Tolliver and to Miss Dixon.”
These ladies said that it was not necessary in regard to Miss Anderson and Miss Van Hook; and as the crowd pushed them on, Dan felt that they had been received with distinction.
The crowd expressed the national variety of rich and poor, plain and fashionable, urbane and rustic; they elbowed and shouldered each other upon a perfect equality in a place where all were as free to come as to the White House, and they jostled quaint groups of almond-eyed legations in the yellows and purples of the East, who looked dreamily on as if puzzled past all surmise by the scene. Certain young gentlemen with the unmistakable air of being European or South American attaches found their way about on their little feet, which the stalwart boots of the republican masses must have imperilled; and smiled with a faint diplomatic superiority, not visibly admitted, but all the same indisputable. Several of these seemed to know Miss Anderson, and took her presentation of Mavering with exaggerated effusion.
“I want to introduce you to my cousin over yonder,” she said, getting rid of a minute Brazilian under-secretary, and putting her hand on Dan’s arm to direct him: “Mrs. Justice Averill.”
Miss Van Hook, keeping her look of severe vigilance, really followed her energetic niece, who took the lead, as a young lady must whenever she and her chaperon meet on equal terms.
Mrs. Justice Averill, who was from the far West somewhere, received Dan with the ease of the far East, and was talking London and Paris to him before the end of the third minute. It gave Dan a sense of liberation, of expansion; he filled his lungs with the cosmopolitan air in a sort of intoxication; without formulating it, he felt, with the astonishment which must always attend the Bostonian’s perception of the fact, that there is a great social life in America outside of Boston. At Campobello he had thought Miss Anderson a very jolly girl, bright, and up to all sorts of things; but in the presence of the portable Boston there he could not help regarding her with a sort of tolerance which he now blushed for; he thought he had been a great ass. She seemed to know all sorts of nice people, and she strove with generous hospitality to make him have a good time. She said it was Cabinet Day, and that all the secretaries’ wives were receiving, and she told him he had better make the rounds with them. He assented very willingly, and at six o’clock he was already so much in the spirit of this free and simple society, so much opener and therefore so much wiser than any other, that he professed a profound disappointment with the two or three Cabinet ladies whose failure to receive brought his pleasure to a premature close.
“But I suppose you’re going to Mrs. Whittington’s to-night!” Miss Anderson said to him, as they drove up to Wormley’s, where she set him down. Miss Van Hook had long ceased to say anything; Dan thought her a perfect duenna. “You know you can go late there,” she added.
“No, I can’t go at all,” said Dan. “I don’t know them.”
“They’re New England people,” urged Miss Anderson; as if to make him try to think that he was asked to Mrs. Whittington’s.
“I don’t know more than half the population of New England,” said Dan, with apparent levity, but real forlornness.
“If you’d like to go — if you’re sure you’ve no other engagement—”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 378