Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes, perfectly,” I said. “It is very curious.” He said in a kind of muse, “I don’t know just where I was.” Then he began again, “Oh, yes! It was at the ceremony — down there in the library. Some of the country people came in; I suppose they thought they ought, and I suppose they wanted to; it didn’t matter to me. I had sent for Doctor Norrey, as soon as the relapse came, and he was there with me. Of course there was the minister, conducting the services. He made a prayer full of helpless repetitions, which I helplessly noticed, and some scrambling remarks, mostly misdirected at me, affirming and reaffirming that the sister they had lost was only gone before, and that she was now in a happier world.

  “The singing and the praying and the preaching came to an end, and then there was that soul-sickening hush, that exanimate silence, of which the noise of rustling clothes and scraping feet formed a part, as the people rose in the hall, where chairs had been put for them, leaving me and Norrey alone with Marion. Every fibre of my frame recognized the moment of parting, and protested. A tremendous wave of will swept through me and from me, a resistless demand for her presence, and it had power upon her. I heard her speak, and say, as distinctly as I repeat the words, ‘I will come for you!’ and the youth and the beauty that had been growing more and more wonderful in her face, ever since she died, shone like a kind of light from it. I answered her, ‘I am ready now!’ and then Norrey scuffled to his feet, with a conventional face of sympathy, and said, ‘No hurry, my dear Alderling,’ and I knew he had not heard or seen anything, as well as I did afterwards when I questioned him. He thought I was giving them notice that they could take her away. What do you think?”

  “How what do I think?” I asked.

  “Do you think that it happened?”

  There was something in Alderling’s tone and manner that made me, instead of answering directly that I did not, temporize and ask, “Why?”

  “Because — because,” and Alderling caught his breath, like a child that is trying to keep itself from crying, “because I don’t.” He broke into a sobbing that seemed to wrench and tear his poor little body, and if I had thought of anything to say, I could not have said it to his headlong grief with any hope of assuaging it. “I am satisfied now,” he said, at last, wiping his wet face, and striving for some composure of its trembling features, “that it was all a delusion, the effect of my exaltation, of my momentary aberration, perhaps. Don’t be afraid of saying what you really think,” he added scornfully, “with the notion of sparing me. You couldn’t doubt it, or deny it, more completely than I do.”

  I confess this unexpected turn struck me dumb. I did not try to say anything, and Alderling went on.

  “I don’t deny that she is living, but I can’t believe that I shall ever live to see her again, or if you prefer, die to see her. There is the play of the poor animal instinct, or the mechanical persistence of expectation in me, so that I can’t shut the doors without the sense of shutting her out, can’t put out the lights without feeling that I am leaving her in the dark. But I know it is all foolishness, as well as you do, all craziness. If she is alive it is because she believed she should live, and I shall perish because I didn’t believe. I should like to believe, now, if only to see her again, but it is too late. If you disuse any member of your body, or any faculty of your mind, it withers away and if you deny your soul your soul ceases to be.”

  I found myself saying, “That is very interesting,” from a certain force of habit, which you have noted in me, when confronted with a novel instance of any kind. “But,” I suggested, “why not act upon the reverse of that principle, and create the fact by affirmation which you think your denial destroys?”

  “Because,” he repeated wearily, “it is too late. You might as well ask the fakir who has held his arm upright for twenty years, till it has stiffened there, to restore the dry stock by exercise. It is too late, I tell you.”

  “But, look here, Alderling,” I pursued, beginning to taste the joy of argument. “You say that your will had such power upon her after you knew her to be dead that you made her speak to you?”

  “No, I don’t say that now,” he returned. “I know now that it was a delusion.”

  “But if you once had that power of summoning her to you, by strongly wishing for her presence, when you were both living here, why doesn’t it stand to reason that you could do it still, if she is living there and you are living here?”

  “I never had any such power,” he replied, with the calm of absolute tragedy. “That was a delusion too. I leave the doors open for her, night and day, because I must, but if she came I should know it was not she.”

  IX.

  Of course you know your own business, my dear Acton, but if you think of using the story of the Alderlings — and there is no reason why you should not, for they are both dead, without kith or kin surviving, so far as I know, unless he has some relatives in Germany, who would never penetrate the disguise you could give the case — it seems to me that here is your true climax. But I necessarily leave the matter to you, for I shall not touch it at any point where we could come into competition. In fact, I doubt if I ever touch it at all, for though all psychology is in a manner dealing with the occult, still I think I have done my duty by that side of it, as the occult is usually understood; and I am shy of its grosser instances, as things that are apt to bring one’s scientific poise into question. However, you shall be the judge of what is best for you to do, when you have the whole story, and I will give it you without more ado, merely premising that I have a sort of shame for the aptness of the catastrophe. I shall respect you more if I hear that you agree with me as to the true climax of the tragedy, and have the heroism to reject the final event.

  I stayed with Alderling nearly a week, and I will own that I bored myself. In fact, I am not sure but we bored each other. At any rate, when I told him, the night before I intended going, that I meant to leave him in the morning, he seemed resigned, or indifferent, or perhaps merely inattentive. From time to time we had recurred to the matter of his experience, or his delusion, but with apparently increasing impatience on his part, and certainly decreasing interest on mine; so that at last I think he was willing to have me go. But in the morning he seemed reluctant, and pleaded with me to stay a few days longer with him. I alleged engagements, more or less unreal, for I was never on such terms with Alderling that I felt I need make any special sacrifice to him. He gave way, suspiciously, rather, and when I came down from my room after having put the last touches to my packing, I found him on the veranda looking out to seaward, where a heavy fog-bank hung.

  You will sense here the sort of patness which I feel cheapens the catastrophe; and yet, as I consider it, again, the fact is not without its curious importance, and its bearing upon what went before. I do not know but it gives the whole affair a relief which it would not otherwise have.

  He was to have driven me to the station, some miles away, before noon, and I supposed we should sit down together, and try to have some sort of talk before I went. But Alderling appeared to have forgotten about my going, and after a while, took himself off to his studio, and left me alone to watch the inroads of the fog. It came on over the harbor rapidly, as on that morning when Mrs. Alderling had been so nearly lost in it, and presently the masts and shrouds of the shipping at anchor were sticking up out of it as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the sea under them.

  I amused myself watching it blot out one detail of the prospect after another, while the fog-horn lowed through it, and the bell-buoy, far out beyond the light-house ledge, tolled mournfully. The milk-white mass moved landward, and soon the air was blind with the mist which hid the grass twenty yards away. There was an awfulness in the silence, which nothing broke but the lowing of the horn, and the tolling of the bell, except when now and then the voice of a sailor came through it, like that of some drowned man sending up his hail from the bottom of the bay.

  Suddenly I heard a joyful shout from the attic overhead:

 
“I am coming! I am coming!”

  It was Alderling calling out through his window, and then a cry came from over the water, which seemed to answer him, but which there is no reason in the world to believe was not a girlish shout from one of the yachts, swallowed up in the fog.

  His lunging descent of the successive stairways followed, and he burst through the doorway beside me, and without heeding me, ran bareheaded down the sloping lawn.

  I followed, with what notion of help or hinderance I should not find it easy to say, but before I reached the water’s edge — in fact I never did reach it, and had some difficulty making my way back to the house, — I heard the rapid throb of the oars in the row-locks as he pulled through the white opacity.

  You know the rest, for it was the common property of our enterprising press at the time, when the incident was fully reported, with my ineffectual efforts to be satisfactorily interviewed as to the nothing I knew.

  The oarless boat was found floating far out to sea after the fog lifted. It was useless to look for Alderling’s body, and I do not know that any search was made for it.

  LETTERS HOME

  In this novel, first published in 1903, Howells experimented with the epistolary form, enabling him to present the same event from various different character’s first-hand perspectives, across a range of social backgrounds, while adding a new dimension to his realist style. The novel was not well received in America, but was greeted with praise in Britain.

  Title page of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  XXV.

  XXVI.

  XXVII.

  XXVIII.

  XXIX.

  XXX.

  XXXI.

  XXXII.

  XXXIII.

  XXXIV.

  XXXV.

  XXXVI.

  XXXVII.

  XXXVIII.

  XXXIX.

  XL.

  XLI.

  XLII.

  XLIII.

  XLIV.

  XLV.

  XLVI.

  XLVII.

  XLVIII.

  XLIX.

  I.

  From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING,. Boston.

  NEW YORK, Dec. 12, 1901.

  My Dear Margaret:

  I am afraid it will not do, and that you will have your brother-in-law back on your hands again, for the winter, or lose him indefinitely. I do not mean, lose him to New York; far from that; as far as Europe, in fact; for if I were to take stock (the local commercialism instantly penetrates one’s vocabulary) of my emotions, I suspect I should find myself evenly balanced between the impulse to board the next train for Boston and the impulse to board the next steamer for Liverpool. The things are about equally simple: the facilities for getting away from New York compensate for the facilities for getting to New York; and I could keep my promise of amusing your invalid leisure by letter as well from one place as from another. Wherever I am to be, I am not to be pitied as one taxed beyond his strength in keeping a rash promise. Your rest-cure may be good for you, or it may not; but for me I am sure it will be good if it gives me back that boon period of life, when I wrote letters willingly and wrote them long. I have already a pleasing prescience of an earlier time; in the mere purpose of writing you, I feel the glow of that charming adolescence of the world, in the eighteenth century, when everybody, no matter of what age, willingly wrote such long letters as to give the epistolary novel a happy air of verisimilitude.

  I wish I could be more definite as to the reasons of my doubts whether I shall stay here or not., Certainly the meteorological conditions have nothing to do with the matter. Up to the present date these have been the greatest amiability. About Thanksgiving there were some days of rough cold, which with our native climate still in my nerves, I expected to last for a week at least; but with the volatility of the New York nature, it all blew away in forty-eight hours. The like has happened several times since; a sort of corrupt warmth has succeeded the cold, affecting one as if the tissues of the season had broken down through sympathy with the municipal immorality. I should like to stay, if for nothing else, to see what the reformers will do in the way of an honest climate after they get into power at the end of the year, but I do not know whether I shall be able to do it. In the meantime, I like the mildness, though I can never get over my surprise at it; I enjoy it, as I suppose I should enjoy standing in with Tammany, in some enormously wicked deal that turned over half the streets to me for, say, automobile speedways. I had really forgotten what a Florentine sky New York often has in mid-December, by night and by day, with a suffusion of warm color from the sunsets, which is as different from the shrill pink of our Back Bay sunsets as the New York relaxation is from our moral tension. You have been here much later and oftener than I, and I dare say you take for granted all the unseasonable gentleness which I am finding so incredible, and so acceptable. But as yet I am not accustomed to it, and I have a bad conscience in celebrating it.

  The whole place is filthier, witty the pulling down and building up, the delving for the Rapid Transit, and I do not know what else, than I have seen it since poor Waring first taught Father Knickerbocker (as their newspaper cartoonists like to figure the city), the novelty of purging and living cleanly like a gentleman, and I suppose it is the sense of the invasive, pervasive dirt that has much to do with my doubt whether I can stand it. Now and then a rain comes and washes it all away, and makes the old sloven look endimanché, but the filth begins again with the first week day, and you go about with your mouth and eyes full of malarious dust, as you did before. Of course, you will remind me that Boston is always pulling down and building up too; but her vices whiten into virtues beside New York’s in that way. Then the noise, the noise! All the money from all the stocks and bonds centering their wealth into the place, cannot buy exemption from it. Boston is noisy, too, but there are large spaces in Boston where you can get fairly well away from the noise, and I know of none here, though there is said to be one block up and down next the Riverside Drive which is tolerably free from it; but no one that is any one lives there, for New York is in nothing more anomalous than in having the east side for her fashionable quarter. Everywhere the noise buffets you, insults you; and the horrible means of transit, that add so much to the danger and the dirt, burst your ears with their din.

  I am no longer young, and I am not very well; you are quite right on both of these points; but I am not a dotard quite, or quite an invalid, and I do not exaggerate the facts which you beautiful creatures in your later forties make so light of. I fancy there is a dreadful solidarity in New York. I dare not trust myself to the climate, for instance, which I know is doing me good, for fear there is something behind it, something colossally uncertain and unreliable, and that later I shall pay with pneumonia for the relief from my nervous dyspepsia.

  Just now, indeed, we are in one of those psychological moments when there ought to be great safety for me. The better element, as it diffidently calls itself, has been given charge of the city, you know, by the recent election, and the experiment of self-government is to be tried once more by people who have apparently so little interest in it. As nearly as I can make out from chance encounters at the Perennial Club (where Malkin has had me elected a non-resident member; he left town as soon as he had done it), there seems to be what I should call an unexpectation in the genera] mind: a willingness to take things as they come, to wait on providence in a semi-cynical resignation, which in the last analysis might prove a ki
nd of piety. They have been reformed so frequently, these poor New Yorkers, and then unreformed, that they have rather fallen into the habit of taking the good with the bad as if it might turn out the bad. The newspapers keep shouting away, but that does not count; there are only two or three of them that are ever regarded seriously; and the people at the Perennial, who do not get their politics from London quite so entirely as some of our fellows, are very placid about the municipal situation. They seem to rely altogether on the men who have been put into office, and not the least on those who put them in; in fact the government of New York is almost as personal as that of Germany.

  You can read this to Walter; and tell him that the Perennial is certainly a club to be put up at if you must come to New York. There are interesting heads, inside and out, here; the house is wonderfully cosy and incredibly quiet, an oasis in a desert of noise; and the windows look out over two miles of woodland in the Park, where I have already begun to take my walks. You will say, Here are the elements of a pleasant sojourn; and I do not deny it; but they are only the elements. The chemistry of their combination is wanting; and what I fear is that at the end of the winter, I should look back over my experience, and find in it nothing but the elements of a pleasant sojourn.

  Yours affectionately,

  OTIS.

  II.

  From WALLACE ARDITH to A. LINCOLN WIBBERT, Office of THE DAY, Wottoma, Iowa.

  NEW YORK, Dec. 15, 1901.

  Dear Old Linc:

  It is simply glorious, there is no other word for it. I have to keep pinching myself, to make sure that it is not some other fellow; but if it be I as I hope it be, I’ve a little Linc at home, and he’ll know me — or words to that effect. So I will try to sober down and make the appeal to you. But I feel that it is an awful waste of time, for the subjects crowd upon you here, and what I give to friendship I take from literature. I want you to appreciate that.