Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Mrs. March had never before had occasion in our happy life to deal with such an event, and now her instinct of usefulness surprised me; or rather it afterward surprised me, when I thought of it. From moment to moment she knew what to do, and she knew what to make me do. The doctor, whose office was with life, went away; and the priest, whose calling concerned after-life, was so stunned by what had happened, that he remained helpless in the presence of death. If it had not been for my wife and myself I hardly know who would have grappled with all those details which present themselves in such a situation with the same imperative claim upon us as eating, drinking and sleeping, and the other commonplace needs of existence. I was struck by their equality with these; in their order, they came like anything else.

  Just before dark my wife sent me back to our children at Lynn. “Poor little things! They will be frightened to death at our staying so long; and you must explain to them as well as you can why I didn’t come with you. Mrs. Wakely will get them to bed for you; and be sure that you see they have a light burning in the hall, if they’re nervous without it. You won’t be needed here. Of course I can’t leave her now. You must do the best you can without me.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “But how strange, Isabel, that we should be mixed up with these unhappy people in this way! Do you remember the critical mood in which we came here to-day?”

  “Yes; perhaps we’ve always been too critical, and held ourselves too much aloof — tried to escape ties.”

  “Death won’t let us escape them, even if life will,” I answered, and for the first time I had a perception of the necessary solidarity of human affairs from the beginning to the end, in which no one can do or be anything to himself alone. “It makes very little difference now what that poor man’s taste in literature and art was It seems a great while ago since we smiled at him for it. Was it only this morning?”

  “This morning? It seems a thousand years — in some pre-existence.”

  “Why, it was in a pre-existence for him!”

  “Yes; how strange that is!”

  II

  I DID NOT SEE Wingate again till I met him at our first dinner in the fall. Then, as we sat at our corner together, with our comfortable little cups of black coffee before us, at a sufficient distance from the others, who had broken up the order of the table, and grouped themselves in twos and threes for the good talk that comes last at such a time, we began to speak of the Faulkners. They had probably been in both our minds, vaguely and vividly, the whole evening. He asked me if I had heard anything from Mrs. Faulkner lately; and I said, Oh, yes; my wife heard from her pretty often, though irregularly; and I told him how, with every intention and prepossession to the contrary, my wife had grown into what I might call an intimate friendship with her. The widow had gone back to the city where Faulkner and I had lived together, and had taken up her life again in the old place, with the old surroundings and the old associations.

  “Then you were not especially intimate with him when you lived there?”

  “No,” I said; “it was a friendly acquaintance for a while, and then it was an unfriendly non-acquaintance;” and I explained how. “To tell you the truth, I never cared a great deal for him; and I was surprised to find that he seemed to care a good deal for me; though perhaps what seemed affection for me was only the appeal for sympathy that a dying man addresses to the whole earth.”

  “Perhaps,” said the doctor.

  “I hope I don’t appear very cold-hearted. I liked his friend the parson a great deal better, and for no more reason than I liked Faulkner less. Faulkner was a sentimental idealist; he tried to live the rather high-strung literature that he might have written, if his lot had been cast in a literary community. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have known several such men in the West; they’re rather characteristic of a new country.”

  “Yes; I can understand how. I didn’t know but you had been intimate,” said Wingate, in a half tone of disappointment.

  I recognized it with a laugh. “Well, Faulkner was intimate, doctor, if I wasn’t. Will that serve the purpose?”

  “I’m not sure.” The doctor broke off the ash of his cigar on the edge of his saucer. “I should like to ask one thing!” he said.

  “Ask away!”

  He hitched his chair nearer me, setting it sidewise of the table, on which he rested his left arm, and then dropped his face on his lifted hand. “That day, just before I came, had he been telling you his dream?”

  The doctor now used a whole tone of disappointment. “Well, I’m sorry. I should have liked to talk it over with you.”

  “You can’t be half so sorry as I am. I should like immensely to talk it over. I always had a fancy that his dream killed him.”

  “Oh, no! oh, no!” said the doctor, with a smile at my unscientific leap to the conclusion.

  “Hastened it, then.”

  “We can’t say, very decidedly, whether a death is hastened or not — that kind. The man was destined to die soon, and to die what is called suddenly. He might have died at that very moment and in that precise way if he had never had any such dream. Undoubtedly it wore upon him. But I should say it was an effect rather than a cause of his condition. There’s where you outsiders are apt to make your mistakes in these recondite cases. You want something dramatic — like what you’ve read of — and you’re fond of supposing that a man’s trouble of mind caused his disease, when it was his disease caused his trouble of mind: the physical affected the moral, and not the moral the physical.”

  “You mean that his mind was clouded?”

  The doctor laughed. “No, I didn’t mean that. But it’s true, all the same. His mind was clouded, by the pain he had suffered, perhaps, and his dream came out of the cloud in his mind. If he had lived, it would have resulted in mania, as I told him substantially that day. But it was very curious, its recurrence and its unvarying circumstantiality. I don’t know that I ever knew anything just like it; though there’s a kind of similarity in all these cases.”

  I saw that Wingate would like to tell me what Faulkner’s dream was; but I knew that he would not do so unless he could fully justify the confidence to his professional conscience. I said to myself that I should not tempt him, but I tried to tempt him. “He told you how long he had been having his dream?”

  The doctor appeared not to have heard my question. “And you say she has gone back to their old place?”

  “Yes, and to every circumstance of their life as nearly as possible.” I did not like his running away with my bait in that fashion very well, but I thought it best to give him all the line he wanted, and then play him back as I could. “You know — but of course you don’t know — that his mother always lived with them when they were at home — or they lived with her: it was the old lady’s house, I believe: and the widow has even repeated that feature of their former ménage, and has her mother-in-law with her.”

  “And what’s become of the parson?”

  “The parson? Oh — Nevil! Nevil’s given up his parish there, and gone further west — to Kansas, where he has charge of a sort of mission church — I don’t understand the mechanism of those things very well — and is doing some good work. I believe he has ritualized somewhat. That seems to be the way with them when they take to practical Christianity. Curious; but it’s so.”

  “And she lives with her mother-in-law,” the doctor mused aloud. “Property tied up so she had to?”

  “No. I think not. It seems to be quite her own choice. I dare say they get on very well. The old lady is romantic, I believe, like Faulkner; and probably she’s in love with her daughter-in-law.”

  “Well,” said the doctor, “it isn’t a situation that every woman could reconcile herself to, under the best conditions. But if she thought she ought to do it, she would do it. She has pluck enough. I should like to tell you one thing,” and the doctor hitched his chair a little closer as he said this, and again he broke the ash of his cigar off on his saucer.
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  He did not go on at once, and lest it might be for want of prompting I said, “Well?”

  “I don’t know whether this is something your wife ever knew about or not?” he began, askingly.

  “Really, I can’t say,” I answered, impatiently, “till I know myself.”

  He did not mind my impatience, but pulled comfortably at his cigar for a moment before he went on. “She came to my office with her.”

  “When they went to see you just before she started West? I understood she called on business.”

  “To pay my bill? Yes; and then she asked to see me alone. I suppose your wife thought she wished to consult me; and so did I. But it wasn’t the usual kind of consultation; in fact she wasn’t the usual kind of woman! She didn’t lose an instant; she went right at me. ‘Doctor,’ said she, ‘do you know what was on my husband’s mind?’ I like to deal with any one I can be honest with, and I saw I could be honest with her. ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘he told me.’ She caught her breath a little, and then said she, ‘Can you tell me the form, the kind, of trouble it was?’ ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘it was a dream. A dream that kept coming, again and again, and finally had begun to color his waking thoughts and impressions.’ She gave another gasp — I can see her now, just how she looked with the black crape round her face, all pale and washed out with weeping — and then she asked, ‘Did it relate to — me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it related to you, Mrs. Faulkner.’ She came right back at me. ‘Doctor Wingate,’ said she, ‘is it something that he could ever have told me, if he had lived?’ I had to think awhile before I said, ‘No, as I understood his character, I don’t think he ever could.’ She came right back again — I could see that she had made up her mind to go through it all in a certain way, and that she was ready for anything — and said she, ‘I know that whatever it was, he was always struggling against it; and that when it forced itself upon him, he did not believe it at the bottom of his heart. I have seen that; and now I will ask you only one thing more. Is it something that for his sake — not for mine, remember! — you wouldn’t wish me to know?’ ‘I would rather you wouldn’t know it, for his sake,’ said I. ‘Then,’ said she, ‘that is all;’ and she got up, and put out her hand to me, and gave mine a grip as strong as a man’s, and went out.”

  “Splendid!” I said, overmastering my own disappointment, and wishing that in my interest Mrs. Faulkner had been a little less heroic.

  “Splendid?” said Wingate. “It was superhuman! Or super-woman. Just think of the burden she shouldered for life! I don’t know how much or how little she had divined, but all the worse if she had divined anything. She denied herself the satisfaction of her curiosity, and left me to make whatever I chose of her motives. She didn’t explain; she simply asked and acted. I might suspect this, or I might suppose that; she left me free. I never saw such nerve. It was superb.”

  “Perhaps a little topping,” I suggested.

  “Yes, perhaps a little topping,” the doctor consented. “But still, it was a toppingness that could have consisted only with the most perfect conscience, the most absolute freedom from self-reproach in every particular.”

  “C’&eactue;tait magnifique, mais ce n’était pas la guerre. I think I should have preferred a little more human nature in mine. I should have liked her better if she had gone down on her knees to you, and begged you to tell her what it was; and when you had told her, if it inculpated her at all, would never have left you till you had exculpated her. That would have been more like a woman.”

  “Yes, much more like most women,” said the doctor. “But the type is not the nation, or the race, or the sex. The type is cheap, dirt cheap. It’s the variation from the type that is the character, the individual, the valuable and venerable personality.”

  “Since when did you set up hero-worship, doctor? Really, you’re worse than my wife. But I expect her to be worse than you when I tell her this story of Mrs. Faulkner. You will let me tell her?”

  “Oh, yes. I suppose you would tell her whether I let you or not.”

  “There’s always a danger of that kind,” I admitted.

  “I wonder,” said Wingate, “whether the eagerness of women to hear things isn’t a natural result from the eagerness of men to tell them?”

  “Possibly they may have spoiled us in that way. Do you think you were as eager not to tell, as Mrs. Faulkner was not to hear?”

  The doctor laughed tolerantly.

  III

  I WAS SURPISED at the way my wife took the doctor’s story when I repeated it to her the next morning at breakfast.

  “Well,” she said, “that is the first thing I’ve ever heard of Mrs. Faulkner that I don’t like.”

  “It was certainly a base treason to her sex to go back on its reputation for curiosity in that manner.”

  “Oh, it was enough like a woman to do that — a certain kind of woman.”

  “The poseuse?”

  “The worse than poseuse. The kind of woman that overtasks her strength, and breaks down with what she’s undertaken, and makes us all ridiculous, and discourages us from trying to bear what we really could bear.”

  “Doctor Wingate admires her immensely for her courage in trying it.”

  “And I suppose you admire her too.”

  “No. When it comes to that, I’m all woman — the kind of woman that wouldn’t attempt more than she could perform, unless she could get some man to carry out her enterprise for her. But perhaps she might do that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean what, at all. I mean whom. Nevil.”

  “Basil,” said my wife, “when you talk that way you make me lose all respect for you. No. She may be too exalted, but at least she isn’t degraded.”

  “She couldn’t very well be both,” I admitted.

  “And it shows what a really low idea you have of women, my dear. I’m sorry for you.”

  “Bless my soul! Why do you object to her being superwoman, as Wingate says, in one way, and not superwoman in another?”

  “We both agreed, from the very beginning, that that ridiculous friendship was entirely between him and Faulkner. I think it was as silly as it could be, and weak, and sentimental in all of them. She ought to have put a stop to it; but with him so sick as he was, of course she had to yield, and then be subjected to — to anything that people were mean enough to think.”

  “Why not say base enough, vile enough, grovelling enough, crawling-in-the-mire enough?”

  “Very well, then, I will say that. And I will say that any one who will insinuate such a thing is as bad — as bad as Faulkner himself.”

  “But not so much to blame, I hope. At least I didn’t bring Nevil into his family.”

  “You admired him!”

  “Yes, if I may say it without further offence, I liked him. I pitied him; it seemed to me that he was the chief victim of Faulkner’s fondness. He couldn’t get away without inhumanity; but I believe he was thoroughly bored by the situation. He felt it to be ndiculous.”

  “And she, what did she think of it ?”

  “I don’t believe she thought of it at all. She was preoccupied with her husband. He had to stay and simply look on, and see her suffer, because he couldn’t get away. It was an odious predicament.”

  “Yes. I think it was too,” said my wife. “And I felt sorry for him, though I didn’t admire him. And I must say that he escaped from his false position as quickly and as completely as possible.”

  “Ah, I don’t know that I’ve altogether liked his leaving the town. That looked, if anything, a little conscious. I should have preferred his staying and living it all down.”

  “There was nothing to live down!”

  “No; nothing.”

  “You are talking so detestably,” said my wife, “that I’ve got a great mind not to tell you something.”

  I folded my hands in supplication. “Oh, I will behave! I will behave! Don’t keep anything more from me, my dear. Think what I’ve endured already from the forti
tude of Mrs. Faulkner!”

  “The letter came last night, by the last distribution, after you’d gone to your dinner,” said Mrs. March, feeling in her pocket for it, which was always a work of time: a woman has to rediscover her pocket whenever she uses it. “He’s engaged.”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Mr. Nevil. Now, what do you have to say?”

  I threw myself forward in astonishment. “What! Already! Why it isn’t six months since—”

  “Basil!” cried my wife, in a voice of such terrible warning that I was silent. I had to humble myself very elaborately, after that. Even then it was with great hauteur and distance that she said, “He’s engaged to a young lady of his parish out there. The letter’s from Mrs. Faulkner.” She tossed it across the table to me with a disdain for my low condition that would have wounded a less fallen spirit. But I was glad of the letter on any terms, and I eagerly pulled it open and flattened it out.

  “Just read it aloud, please,” commanded my wife, from her remote height, and I meekly obeyed.

  ‘DEAR MRS. MARCH, — You will be surprised to get a letter from me so soon after the last I wrote; but I have a piece of news which has excited us all here a good deal, and which I think will interest you and Mr. March. Mr. Nevil has just written my mother, Mrs. Faulkner, of his engagement.’

  “What an astonishing woman!” I broke off. “Why in the world didn’t she keep it for the postscript, after she had palavered over forty or fifty pages about nothing?”

  “Because,” said my wife, “she isn’t an ordinary woman in any way. Go on.”

  I went on.

  “‘His letter is rather incoherent, of course. But he tells us she is very young, and he encloses a photograph to show us that she is pretty. She is more than that, however; she is a beautiful girl; but the photograph does not paint character, and so we have to take Mr. Nevil’s word for the fact that she is very good, and cultivated and affectionate.’

  “Affectionate, of course!” I broke off again; and my wife came down from her high horse long enough to laugh; and then instantly got back again.