Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I think I can trust you,” she answered, but she sank a little into the shelter of the curtains, not to be seen talking with him, perhaps, or not to be interrupted — she did not analyze her motive closely.

  He remained talking to her until she went away, and then he contrived to go with her. She did not try to escape him after that; each time they met she had the pleasure of realizing that there had never been any danger of what never happened. But beyond this she could perhaps have given no better reason for her willingness to meet him again and again than the bewildered witnesses of the fact. In her set people not only never married outside of it, but they never flirted outside of it. For one of themselves, even for a girl like Bessie, whom they had not quite known from childhood, to be apparently amusing herself with a man like that, so wholly alien in origin, in tradition, was something unheard of; and it began to look as if Bessie Lynde was more than amused. It seemed to Mary Enderby that wherever she went she saw that man talking to Bessie. She could have believed that it was by some evil art that he always contrived to reach Bessie’s side, if anything could have been less like any kind of art than the bold push he made for her as soon as he saw her in a room. But sometimes Miss Enderby feared that it was Bessie who used such finesse as there was, and always put herself where he could see her. She waited with trembling for her to give the affair sanction by making her aunt ask him to something at her house. On the other hand, she could not help feeling that Bessie’s flirtation was all the more deplorable for the want of some such legitimation.

  She did not even know certainly whether Jeff ever called upon Bessie at her aunt’s house, till one day the man let him out at the same time he let her in.

  “Oh, come up, Molly!” Bessie sang out from the floor above, and met her half-way down the stairs, where she kissed her and led her embraced into the library.

  “You don’t like my jay, do you, dear?” she asked, promptly.

  Mary Enderby turned her face, the mirror of conscience, upon her, and asked: “Is he your jay?”

  “Well, no; not just in that sense, Molly. But suppose he was?”

  “Then I should have nothing to say.”

  “And suppose he wasn’t?”

  Still Mary Enderby found herself with nothing of all she had a thousand times thought she should say to Bessie if she had ever the slightest chance. It always seemed so easy, till now, to take Bessie in her arms, and appeal to her good sense, her self-respect, her regard for her family and friends; and now it seemed so impossible.

  She heard herself answering, very stiffly: “Perhaps I’d better apologize for what I’ve said already. You must think I was very unjust the last time we mentioned him.”

  “Not at all!” cried Bessie, with a laugh that sounded very mocking and very unworthy to her friend. “He’s all that you said, and worse. But he’s more than you said, and better.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Mary, coldly.

  “He’s very interesting; he’s original; he’s different!”

  “Oh, every one says that.”

  “And he doesn’t flatter me, or pretend to think much of me. If he did, I couldn’t bear him. You know how I am, Molly. He keeps me interested, don’t you understand, and prowling about in the great unknown where he has his weird being.”

  Bessie put her hand to her mouth, and laughed at Mary Enderby with her slanted eyes; a sort of Parisian version of a Chinese motive in eyes.

  “I suppose,” her friend said, sadly, “you won’t tell me more than you wish.”

  “I won’t tell you more than I know — though I’d like to,” said Bessie. She gave Mary a sudden hug. “You dear! There isn’t anything of it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But isn’t there danger that there will be, Bessie?” her friend entreated.

  “Danger? I shouldn’t call it danger, exactly!”

  “But if you don’t respect him, Bessie—”

  “Why, how can I? He doesn’t respect me!”

  “I know you’re teasing, now,” said Mary Enderby, getting up, “and you’re quite right. I have no business to—”

  Bessie pulled her down upon the seat again. “Yes, you have! Don’t I tell you, over and over? He doesn’t respect me, because I don’t know how to make him, and he wouldn’t like it if I did. But now I’ll try to make you understand. I don’t believe I care for him the least; but mind, I’m not certain, for I’ve never cared for any one, and I don’t know what it’s like. You know I’m not sentimental; I think sentiment’s funny; and I’m not dignified—”

  “You’re divine,” murmured Mary Enderby, with reproachful adoration.

  “Yes, but you see how my divinity could be improved,” said Bessie, with a wild laugh. “I’m not sentimental, but I’m emotional, and he gives me emotions. He’s a riddle, and I’m all the time guessing at him. You get the answer to the kind of men we know easily; and it’s very nice, but it doesn’t amuse you so much as trying. Now, Mr. Durgin — what a name! I can see it makes you creep — is no more like one of us than a — bear is — and his attitude toward us is that of a bear who’s gone so much with human beings that he thinks he’s a human being. He’s delightful, that way. And, do you know, he’s intellectual! He actually brings me books, and wants to read passages to me out of them! He has brought me the plans of the new hotel he’s going to build. It’s to be very aesthetic, and it’s going to be called The Lion’s Head Inn. There’s to be a little theatre, for amateur dramatics, which I could conduct, and for all sorts of professional amusements. If you should ever come, Molly, I’m sure we shall do our best to make you comfortable.”

  Mary Enderby would not let Bessie laugh upon her shoulder after she said this. “Bessie Lynde,” she said, severely, “if you have no regard for yourself, you ought to have some regard for him. You may say you are not encouraging him, and you may believe it—”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it,” Bessie broke in, with a mock air of seriousness.

  “I must be going,” said Mary, stiffly, and this time she succeeded in getting to her feet.

  Bessie laid hold of her again. “You think you’ve been trifled with, don’t you, dear?”

  “No—”

  “Yes, you do! Don’t you try to be slippery, Molly. The plain pikestaff is your style, morally speaking — if any one knows what a pikestaff is. Well, now, listen! You’re anxious about me.”

  “You know how I feel, Bessie,” said Mary Enderby, looking her in the eyes.

  “Yes, I do,” said Bessie. “The trouble is, I don’t know how I feel. But if I ever do, Molly, I’ll tell you! Is that fair?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll give you ample warning. At the least little consciousness in the region of the pericardium, off will go a note by a district messenger, and when you come I’ll do whatever you say. There!”

  “Oh, Bessie!” cried her friend, and she threw her arms round her, “you always were the most fascinating creature in the world!”

  “Yes,” said Bessie, “that’s what I try to have him think.”

  XLII.

  Toward the end of April most people who had places at the Shore were mostly in them, but they came up to town on frequent errands, and had one effect of evanescence with people who still remained in their Boston houses provisionally, and seemed more than half absent. The Enderbys had been at the Shore for a fortnight, and the Lyndes were going to be a fortnight longer in Boston, yet, as Bessie made her friend observe, when Mary, ran in for lunch, or stopped for a moment on her way to the train, every few days, they were both of the same transitory quality.

  “It might as well be I as you,” Bessie said one day, “if we only think so. It’s all very weird, dear, and I’m not sure but it is you who sit day after day at my lonely casement and watch the sparrows examining the fuzzy buds of the Jap ivy to see just how soon they can hope to build in the vines. Do you object to the ivy buds looking so very much like snipped woollen rags? If you do, I’m sure it’s you, here in
my place, for when I come up to town in your personality it sets my teeth on edge. In fact, that’s the worst thing about Boston now — the fuzzy ivy buds; there’s so much ivy! When you can forget the buds, there are a great many things to make you happy. I feel quite as if we were spending the summer in town and I feel very adventurous and very virtuous, like some sort of self-righteous bohemian. You don’t know how I look down on people who have gone out of town. I consider them very selfish and heartless; I don’t know why, exactly. But when we have a good marrow-freezing northeasterly storm, and the newspapers come out with their ironical congratulations to the tax-dodgers at the Shore, I feel that Providence is on my side, and I’m getting my reward, even in this world.” Bessie suddenly laughed. “I see by your expression of fixed inattention, Molly, that you’re thinking of Mr. Durgin!”

  Mary gave a start of protest, but she was too honest to deny the fact outright, and Bessie ran on:

  “No, we don’t sit on a bench in the Common, or even in the Garden, or on the walk in Commonwealth Avenue. If we come to it later, as the season advances, I shall make him stay quite at the other end of the bench, and not put his hand along the top. You needn’t be afraid, Molly; all the proprieties shall be religiously observed. Perhaps I shall ask Aunt Louisa to let us sit out on her front steps, when the evenings get warmer; but I assure you it’s much more comfortable in-doors yet, even in town, though you’ll hardly, believe it at the Shore. Shall you come up to Class Day?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mary began, with a sigh of the baffled hope and the inextinguishable expectation which the mention of Class Day stirs in the heart of every Boston girl past twenty.

  “Yes!” said Bessie, with a sigh burlesqued from Mary’s. “That is what we all say, and it is certainly the most maddening of human festivals. I suppose, if we were quite left to ourselves, we shouldn’t go; but we seem never to be, quite. After every Class Day I say to myself that nothing on earth could induce me to go to another; but when it comes round again, I find myself grasping at any straw of a pretext. I’m pretending now that I’ve a tender obligation to go because it’s his Class Day.”

  “Bessie!” cried Mary Enderby. “You don’t mean it!”

  “Not if I say it, Mary dear. What did I promise you about the pericardiac symptoms? But I feel — I feel that if he asks me I must go. Shouldn’t you like to go and see a jay Class Day — be part of it? Think of going once to the Pi Ute spread — or whatever it is! And dancing in their tent! And being left out of the Gym, and Beck! Yes, I ought to go, so that it can be brought home to me, and I can have a realizing sense of what I am doing, and be stayed in my mad career.”

  “Perhaps,” Mary Enderby suggested, colorlessly, “he will be devoted to his own people.” She had a cold fascination in the picture Bessie’s words had conjured up, and she was saying this less to Bessie than to herself.

  “And I should meet them — his mothers and sisters!” Bessie dramatized an excess of anguish. “Oh, Mary, that is the very thorn I have been trying not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folks! I think I am getting a realizing sense. Wait! Don’t speak don’t move, Molly!” Bessie dropped her chin into her hand, and stared straight forward, gripping Mary Enderby’s hand.

  Mary withdrew it. “I shall have to go, Bessie,” she said. “How is your aunt?”

  “Must you? Then I shall always say that it was your fault that I couldn’t get a realizing sense — that you prevented me, just when I was about to see myself as others see me — as you see me. She’s very well!” Bessie sighed in earnest, and her friend gave her hand a little pressure of true sympathy. “But of course it’s rather dull here, now.”

  “I hate to have you staying on. Couldn’t you come down to us for a week?”

  “No. We both think it’s best to be here when Alan gets back. We want him to go down with us.” Bessie had seldom spoken openly with Mary Enderby about her brother; but that was rather from Mary’s shrinking than her own; she knew that everybody understood his case. She went so far now as to say: “He’s ever so much better than he has been. We have such hopes of him, if he can keep well, when he gets back this time.”

  “Oh, I know he will,” said Mary, fervently. “I’m sure of it. Couldn’t we do something for you, Bessie?”

  “No, there isn’t anything. But — thank you. I know you always think of me, and that’s worlds. When are you coming up again?”

  “I don’t know. Next week, some time.”

  “Come in and see me — and Alan, if he should be at home. He likes you, and he will be so glad.”

  Mary kissed Bessie for consent. “You know how much I admire Alan. He could be anything.”

  “Yes, he could. If he could!”

  Bessie seldom put so much earnest in anything, and Mary loved (as she would have said) the sad sincerity, the honest hopelessness of her tone. “We must help him. I know we can.”

  “We must try. But people who could — if they could—” Bessie stopped.

  Her friend divined that she was no longer speaking wholly of her brother, but she said: “There isn’t any if about it; and there are no ifs about anything if we only think so. It’s a sin not to think so.”

  The mixture of severity and of optimism in the nature of her friend had often amused Bessie, and it did not escape her tacit notice in even so serious a moment as this. Her theory was that she was shocked to recognize it now, because of its relation to her brother, but her theories did not always agree with the facts.

  That evening, however, she was truly surprised when, after a rather belated ring at the door, the card of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Durgin came up to her from the reception-room. Her aunt had gone to bed, and she had a luxurious moment in which she reaped all the reward of self-denial by supposing herself to have foregone the pleasure of seeing him, and sending down word that she was not at home. She did not wish, indeed, to see him, but she wished to know how he felt warranted in calling in the evening, and it was this unworthy, curiosity which she stifled for that luxurious moment. The next, with undiminished dignity, she said, “Ask him to come up, Andrew,” and she waited in the library for him to offer a justification of the liberty he had taken.

  He offered none whatever, but behaved at once as if he had always had the habit of calling in the evening, or as if it was a general custom which he need not account for in his own case. He brought her a book which they had talked of at their last meeting, but he made no excuse or pretext of it.

  He said it was a beautiful night, and that he had found it rather warm walking in from Cambridge. The exercise had moistened his whole rich, red color, and fine drops of perspiration stood on his clean-shaven upper lip and in the hollow between his under lip and his bold chin; he pushed back the coarse, dark-yellow hair from his forehead with his handkerchief, and let his eyes mock her from under his thick, straw-colored eyebrows. She knew that he was enjoying his own impudence, and he was so handsome that she could not refuse to enjoy it with him. She asked him if he would not have a fan, and he allowed her to get it for him from the mantel. “Will you have some tea?”

  “No; but a glass of water, if you please,” he said, and Bessie rang and sent for some apollinaris, which Jeff drank a great goblet of when it came. Then he lay back in the deep chair he had taken, with the air of being ready for any little amusing thing she had to say.

  “Are you still a pessimist, Mr. Durgin?” she asked, tentatively, with the effect of innocence that he knew meant mischief.

  “No,” he said. “I’m a reformed optimist.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a man who can’t believe all the good he would like, but likes to believe all the good he can.”

  Bessie said it over, with burlesque thoughtfulness. “There was a girl here to-day,” she said, solemnly, “who must have been a reformed pessimist, then, for she said the same thing.”

  “Oh! Miss Enderby,” said Jeff.

&nb
sp; Bessie started. “You’re preternatural! But what a pity you should be mistaken. How came you to think of her?”

  “She doesn’t like me, and you always put me on trial after she’s been here.”

  “Am I putting you on trial now? It’s your guilty conscience! Why shouldn’t Mary Enderby like you?”

  “Because I’m not good enough.”

  “Oh! And what has that to do with people’s liking you? If that was a reason, how many friends do you think you would have?”

  “I’m not sure that I should have any.”

  “And doesn’t that make you feel badly?”

  “Very.” Jeff’s confession was a smiling one.

  “You don’t show it!”

  “I don’t want to grieve you.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure that would grieve me.”

  “Well, I thought I wouldn’t risk it.”

  “How considerate of you!”

  They had come to a little barrier, up that way, and could go no further. Jeff said: “I’ve just been interviewing another reformed pessimist.”

  “Mr. Westover?”

  “You’re preternatural, too. And you’re not mistaken, either. Do you ever go to his studio?”

  “No; I haven’t been there since he told me it would be of no use to come as a student. He can be terribly frank.”

  “Nobody knows that better than I do,” said Jeff, with a smile for the notion of Westover’s frankness as he had repeatedly experienced it. “But he means well.”

  “Oh, that’s what they always say. But all the frankness can’t be well meant. Why should uncandor be the only form of malevolence?”

  “That’s a good idea. I believe I’ll put that up on Westover the next time he’s frank.”

  “And will you tell me what he says?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Jeff lay back in his chair at large ease and chuckled. “I should like to tell you what he’s just been saying to me, but I don’t believe I can.”

  “Do!”

  “You know he was up at Lion’s Head in February, and got a winter impression of the mountain. Did you see it?”