If she will only appear, money will not stand in her way, for we are long on money whatever we are short on. Father is almost as much puzzled in New York as he was in Wottoma how to spend his income. I am doing my best to show him, and when we begin to build, in the spring, I guess the architect will give him some instructions. His plans do more than anything else to keep mother in good spirits, and he has made her believe she made them. He has made father believe he owns him, and I thought maybe I did till he let out one day that there was some one else. Well, you can’t have everything in this world, and I shall try to rub along.
How would you like to have me rub along with a cast-off shoe of yours? Not Mr. Ardith! Yes, Mr. Ardith! He turned up here, last night about dinner time, and we saw him wandering round with a waiter, looking for a vacant table, and trying to pretend that he was not afraid, when any one could see that the poor boy’s heart was in his mouth. The fright made him look more refined than ever with that cleanshaven face of his, and his pretty, pointed chin, and his nice little mouth. He was so scared that he did not know us, though he was staring straight at us, till father got up and sort of bulged down on him, and shouted out, “Well, Wottoma, every time!” And in about a second, Mr. Ardith was sitting opposite me, with a napkin across his knees, and talking his soup cold under the latest news from home. Well, Caro, it was like some of the old South High Street times, and it made me homesick to hear all the old names. And what do you think father did after dinner? He made Mr. Ardith come up to our rooms, and the first thing I knew he was asking him how he would like to go to the theatre with us, if he had nothing better to do. He made a failure of trying to think of something, and the next thing I knew, father was bending over us in the box after the first act, with a hand on a shoulder apiece of us, (have I got that straight?) and asking us if we minded his going, and letting us get home at our convenience. I looked up and tried to frown him still, but it was no use. He just said, “I’ll send the carriage back for you, Make,” and went.
I don’t believe Mr. Ardith knew there was anything unusual in it, and I never let on. I hurried up the talk, and we talked pure literature. I saw I was in for it, and I tried to make him believe that I had read all the latest publications, and was taking a course of George Meredith between times. After while he began to hint round after you, Caro: he did, honest! He said he supposed I heard from you, and I said, very rarely; you must be so much taken up with the Wottoma gayeties. He may have merely asked about you for a bluff, and to show that he was not going to ask. He went on and talked a little more about you, kind of with a ten-foot pole, and getting further and further off all the time, till he got clear to New York, and then he talked about nothing but New York. He is crazy about the place, and sees it as a poem, he says; goodness knows what he means! He got quite up into the clouds, and he did not come down again till we reached home.
I saw that he wanted to do the handsome thing, and I allowed him to order some expensive food at the table we usually take, for I knew that it would hurt his pride if I didn’t. He seemed to have a good appetite, but he went on more psychologically than ever, and I was never so glad as when he said goodnight to me at our door — except when father wanted him to come in, and he wouldn’t. Yes, Caro, Mr. Ardith is too many for me, but I respect him, and if I could scratch up a little more culture perhaps I could more than respect him. He certainly is a nice boy.
We shall probably be at the Walhondia, the whole winter. You see life here, and although it is not exactly the kind of New York life that I am after, it is New York life, because it’s all strangers. I would like you to see it once, and why couldn’t you come on and pay me that visit? I would like nothing better than to blow in a few thousand on a show for you, and ask the Four Hundred to meet you. Father would believe they all came, and he would like the blowing-in anyway. He is not going to die disgraced, as Mr. Carnegie says, and he can’t die poor if the Trust keeps soaring as it has for the last six months. Better come, Caro, for perhaps when we get into our new house on the East Side next winter, I may not want you, and now I do want you. Come! I’ll give a little theatre dinner for you, and I’ll ask Mr. Ardith. There!
As we used to say when we thought we knew French,
Toute à vous,
MAKE.
NEW YORK, December the Eighteenth, Nineteen Hundred and One.
V.
From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. ANSEL G.
DENNAM, Lake Ridge, New York.
NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 1901.
Dear Mother:
I have the greatest mind to be like a good girl in a book, and tell you that I have got my ideal place; I know you are so anxious; but I guess I had better not. I am not the least bit discouraged, for I am sure to find it, though it does seem a little too much on the shrinking violet order. When I think of the number of ideal places that I am adapted to, I wonder they can all escape me; and I know I shall run one of them down at last. There are places which I could have got before now if I had not set my mark so high. Only yesterday I was offered a situation as hello-girl at a telephone station, and I could be sitting this moment with the transmitter at my mouth, and the receivers strapped to both ears, and looking as if I were just going to be electrocuted, if I had chosen.
Perhaps I may decide to go into Sunday journalism. How would you like that — if you knew what it was? My chum, Miss Hally, is a Sunday journalist, and perfect bundle of energy. I believe she could work me in easily. She is from the South, or Soath, as she calls it, and she is one of these Southern women you meet here in New York, who make you think Southern women got so much rest in the old slavery times, that they never want to rest any more. They beat us poor Northern things all hollow in getting places, and the fact is that the only place I’ve got yet is the place I live in. That boarding house got to be a little too much, and before my week was up, on Wednesday, I began prospecting. Miss Hally went round with me and it was very well she did, because it is easier to get out of a tight place if there are two of you, and to make up flattering excuses, than it is if there is only one. In New York you have to be so careful — you have no idea in Lake Ridge how careful. Whole neighborhoods are barred, and sometimes when the streets are nice you have to pass through others that are not; it’s horrid. Well, it all ended, much sooner than we could expect, in our finding these two rooms, five pair up, in an apartment with respectable people who are glad to let them, and let us get breakfast in their kitchen. We go out for our lunches and dinners to a French boarding-house in the neighborhood, where the food is wonderful and the men all smoke cigarettes at the table; but they do not mean anything by it. Our rooms look south over a beautiful landscape of chimneys, and it is astonishing how all chimneys seem to be out of order and have to have something done to them; there is not a perfectly well chimney as far as the eye can reach. One room we use as a parlor, and the other has two let-down beds in it, and both are full of sun. It is delightful, and I know things are going to turn out just as I wish, for if you wish hard enough they have got to.
You mustn’t fret, or else I shall come home and shake you. My hundred dollars will last three months, or I will know the reason why. I think I will advertise, and get Miss Hally to go over the answers with me, and tell me which ones I had better follow up. She knows New York through and through, and if any one can help me run down my ideal employer she can. I have not swerved from a single requirement: age, amiability, opulence, with an eye on Europe in the spring. She will not have much, for me to do: just notes to write, accounts to keep, friends to receive and excuse her to, reading aloud in the evenings, with a perfectly ridiculous consideration for my strength, because I am long and rather limp and slab-sided, and must be sick; I shall have to overcome her fears for my health before she will consent to take me even on trial, and nothing but something strangely fascinating in me will help me to win the day. The only condition she will make is that I shall pay you a good long visit in May, before we sail. Perhaps she will let me begin it before, if she sees I am homes
ick, which I shall not be, and you needn’t think it. But I suppose the sunset still has that burnished crimson through the orchard and over the lake, and the Ridge woods are all red in it, and the vineyards black — how purple they were with grapes when I left! The chickens have gone to roost in the peach trees, and the guinea-hens are trying to make up their minds to, and you are standing by the gate looking wistfully down to the desolate depot for your runaway girl, and wondering how she is. She is very, very well, mum, and she is coming home with a pocketful of money to pay off that mortgage. But if you stand there at the gate, looking that way, mother, you will break my heart! Go in, this minute, or you will take cold, and then what shall I do? Give my love to all inquiring friends — very nasal love, and not sweeter than you can conscientiously make it. Then the neighbors will know that it is honest. Love to Lizzie, and tell her to be very good to you.
Your affectionate daughter,
FRANCES.
VI.
From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to Mrs. A. G. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.
NEW YORK, December 26, 1901.
Dear Mother:
I was disappointed yesterday in not getting that ideal place to send you for a Christmas present. It would have been so nice, that I thought surely I should get it; but you must not lose faith in me, for I confidently expect it this week, and you shall have it on New Year’s at the latest. I may have to telegraph it; but you will not mind that. The truth is the day has been so exciting that I did not grieve much for the ideal place, and my disappointment was mostly for you, because I had promised you. I was almost entirely taken up with my chum, Miss Hally, who told me, when we were both in the melting mood of clawing the candies out of each other’s stockings, where we had put them the night before, all about herself, and now I will tell you: I forgot to before. She is Miss Custis Hally, and she says her father was always opposed to slavery, and would not go with the rest when Virginia seceded, but just stayed on his plantation and took no part in the war. Miss Hally came to New York, after he died, and has worked on a newspaper here, ever since. She has got one of the best places now, but I guess it has been a fight. She is only forty, but her hair is as white as snow. She is tall and straight, and beautiful, with a kind of fierceness in her looks, that all breaks up when she speaks of anything she pities, and she has been kinder to me than I could ever tell you, though some day I will try. She has taken my case in hand, and you can count upon getting that place from me on New Year’s without fail, for I have begun to have answers to my advertisement already. None of them are just what I wanted, but it is a good deal for some of them to be what I can get. I needn’t tell you about them till I have gone over them with Miss Hally. She is going to help me boil them down tonight, and I will start out with the residuum tomorrow, and see which I will take. This sounds rather majestic, but it is not as majestic as it sounds. I have only got two answers that seem honest; the rest are fates of one kind or another, to get money out of me; I can see that for myself; but I depend upon Miss Hally to advise me about these two. You will soon hear from me, if I have luck, and if I haven’t you won’t hear so soon.
Your gift and Lizzie’s came this morning, a day after the fair, which reopened on account of them. I was afraid you were going to forget me, and when you hadn’t, I wished you had. When I think of your using up your poor old eyes on that collar for me, I feel like giving you a good scolding for making me cry. Lizzie’s book-mark is beautiful, and when I get to reading aloud to the Unknown Lady that I am going to be companion to, I won’t use any other. I shall have the collar on, and she will try to beg them both of me, but of course I will be quite up and down with her. Good-by, you dear ones!
Your loving daughter and sister,
FRANCES.
VII.
From, WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.
NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 1901.
My dear Lincoln:
I do not want to crowd you with personal intelligence, but I shall not sleep to-night unless I tell someone that I have spent the evening with our old friends, the Ralsons, or rather our young friend, the Ralson.
The people at Lamarque’s would no more think of dressing for dinner than the most exclusive club men of Wottoma (if there were any,) but to-night I had the ambition to see how much a poor young man could dine for at the Walhondia and that was why I was all right as to clothes when I wandered into the glittering banquet hall, and found the Ralsons there. I knew they lived at the Walhondia, and I thought I might stumble on them, but when I did, I was able to give a good imitation of never being so much surprised in my life. The old gentleman had me down at their table in less time than I can tell it; and after dinner, before I knew it, he had me at the theatre with himself and America; and then as suddenly, as things happen in dreams, I was there alone with her. She seemed to think it tremendously exciting, being left with me in their box; and she treated her father’s abandoning us, on pretence of seeing a man somewhere after the first act, with a severity that slipped from her in one of those fine, large yawps of hers. She said, “O well, we’re all Wottoma innocents together, and nobody knows us, anyway,” and I could pass for her cousin, if not her mother or aunt, or some other elderly relative; and I realized that she was referring to the chaperonage that we are always reading about. After that we proceeded to have a good time, though we put up an icy front, that struck a chill to the beholder, whenever we found people looking at us.
They looked at us a good deal, and I didn’t wonder, for America is certainly beautiful to look at. Of course that hair of hers excites suspicion, but a woman has only got to behave as if she believed a thing was real herself, and she carries conviction. I could see doubt fade from the opera glasses of the observers at the theatre, and from their eyes at supper afterwards (I blew in about five dollars for a few gilded morsels, when we got back to the hotel), as they settled down to perfect faith in her particular rich mahogany shade of hair and gave themselves up to the joy of her sumptuous bloom and bulk, as something that there could never have been any question about. She was the handsomest girl in the theatre and the handsomest in the supper room, and she did not go half way down her spine to prove it, as some of the women did. I always did think her red, white and blue gorgeousness the richest type of beauty, even when my taste was more for something dark and fine. We got to talking about my taste at the theatre, after we had gone over the novel and the drama (she is more at home in the drama) and I thought it best to make a few careless inquiries about a Certain Person. The beauteous America corresponds with a Certain Person, but she pretended for my comfort that she had not heard from her for some time. She said she had asked a C. P. to visit her, and she put on ignorance enough to enable me to promise that I would be one of a theatre party if the C. P. came.
She said, when we parted at the door of her apartment, that I need not wait to hear that the C. P. was here before calling, and from this and other things that I have put with it, I infer that the divine America’s social progress in New York has not been quite equal to her social ambition. I don’t mean that she isn’t kind hearted enough to wish to make it pleasant for me here, but if she had a great many engagements, I doubt if she would have so much time for a country acquaintance. So far, I should think she had seen New York from her hotel, and that is not the best social basis, I imagine. Her hotel is New York, in a certain way, in the way of being a cluster of infinitely repellant particles, as Emerson says, of strangers. But there must be another New York, and I do not believe she has broken into that yet, but this may be because I am so entirely on the outside of it myself. Still I am within guessing distance, and what I guess is that in an old place like this there must be a society so sufficient to itself that it need not be at the pains to be exclusive, and so richly indifferent to what others can bring it that no amount of money can affect its imagination. I have an idea that it might be years before the people of such a society would ever hear of people like the Raisons. What could people with great-grandfathers in all the old grave-yards
here, and with family trees to burn, want with the Raisons? That is what has begun to steal darkly in upon me from the Raison situation, and I guess that the divine America, who is as sharp as she is beautiful, knows the facts, and it is to her credit that she has not soured on them. She is as jolly as ever she was, and she is just as determined to make her way as if it were open before her. Perhaps it is, and perhaps I am mistaken.
Perhaps if I lived at the Walhondia I should see things in a different light. I wish on some accounts, if not others, that I did live there, for it is a great world. Simply to sit in the office, and watch the smooth working of the huge machine is to store up impressions for a life-time. The way the clerks, call-boys, and porters operate the arriving and departing guest is so wonderful in itself, that the glimpses of the dining rooms and drawing rooms, and the overdressed women guests trailing through the corridors, with their underdressed men after them, and the he and she New York swells of all sorts and conditions who come in for supper, (like myself!) are naughtinesses of superfluity, embarrassments of riches.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 756