Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  But I must stop, merely adding that the Raisons took me to and from the theatre in their electric coupé, and America has just sent me home in it! She wished her best regards to you, Linc, and she seems to have a soft place in her spacious heart for all Wottoma.

  Yours ever,

  W. ARDITH.

  VIII.

  From Wallace Ardith to A. L. Wibbert, Wottoma.

  NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 1901.

  My dear Linc:

  I have a misgiving that my letter of last night implied a sort of a slight for America Ralson which I certainly do not feel. She has lots of sense, and is as fine as she is frank in the things that become a girl. That is, she is not changed from what you knew, and if anything I wrote gave merely the impression of her physical beauty, it was unfair to her and disgraceful to me. I had no right to speculate about her society prospects even; they may be all she could wish, and still leave her time and place for kindness to me, unworthy. I never liked the Ralson money, but I must say that it seems to crowd my imagination less in New York than it did in Wottoma, and that in old Ralson’s civility to me last night I thought there was more personal friendliness than I had realized in him before. He is coarse, but he is not hard, and where there is any little question of his being good to his wife or daughter, he is not so coarse as at other times. These are the hasty conclusions of a man who has eaten his canvas-back and drunken his claret, and ridden in his electric. They might not stand the test of greater experience, but though I own that he is the sort of man born to make money, I do not believe he is altogether selfish, or at least that he is incapable of self-sacrifice where his loving, or even his liking lies. If he did not love you or like you no doubt he would be capable of another sort of sacrifice in which he would not figure as the offering.

  As yet I do not know how many opportunities I shall have for studying him (he would be great material) for I do not know when I shall be living at the Wolhondia. The humiliating fact is, I have done the very thing I should not have done if I had not been more of an ass than I am willing to allow.

  You remember old man Baysley, who used to come from Timber Creek up to Wottoma, in the infant days of Ralson’s Trust? Well, he is living now — he would say “residing,” and it’s hardly living — in New York where he has some employment from the Cheese and Churn Trust, and is as lonesome as a cat in a strange garret. As luck would have it, he was about the first human being out of two or three millions that I struck against when I got out of my train when I arrived, and he made me promise to come and see “the folks.” At the same time I promised myself that I would not do it, but in about a week I ran across him again and then I was in for it. He took me home with him “to supper” — they dine at twelve o’clock, just as they did in Timber Creek, — and Mrs. Baysley was so pitifully glad to see me, and the girls so proudly glad, that I was rather glad myself. I never really saw much of them at home, though I went to school with the girls when we were children; but country makes kind, and before I knew it, I was sitting before their radiator with them, swapping reminiscences, and making the old people laugh; such simple old souls, and so willing to laugh! The father and mother each confided to me how homesick the other was, and the girls said they did not think New York was half as nice as Timber Creek, to live in, though it would be a great place to come to, for a few weeks in the winter.

  When I got up to go, Mrs. Baysley said, now father must show me the flat. But they all followed through it with me — six little boxes of rooms, counting the parlor and the girls’ bed-room portiered off it as two. The whole place was furnished with, their poor old Timber Creek things citified up, and their home carpets cut into rugs. They took me last into the “spare-room” at the back of the flat, and when the old lady let out that they really had more room than they wanted, for all the place seemed so small, and the old man looked anxious, and the girls hung their heads, the time had come for me to make an ass of myself, and I asked what was the matter with my taking that room. They made some decent demur, but not much, and we agreed on three dollars a week; and here I am, pretty far up on the west side of Central Park, about a block and a half from one of the gates, so that I can get in and meditate the thankless muse, as easily as I could from my hotel, where I was paying seven dollars a week for my room, without the sun, or the view of the neighborhood wash which I have here for less than half the money. The wash hangs from lines supported upon lofty flag staffs, behind the house, and it is very gay; if we are five flights up, still the halls and stairs are carpeted in a kind of blood-red tapestey brussels the whole way: Mrs. Baysley is very proud of that carpeting, though it is not hers. When I want to get in I touch a bell-button in the vestibule, and they free the latch by a sort of electric arrangement in their flat; but the old man promises me a latch-key when he can get round to it. When I’m late, he sits up and lets me in, and the girls keep breakfast for me long after he has gone down town next morning. I breakfast here, and browse about for lunch and dinner, and accumulate material. Now and then I take a turn at that Central Park incident of the lovers. I have tried it as an idyl, in hexameters, and as a Thackeray ballad, and I have tried it in prose; and it is getting as tough as a piece of bear’s meat which the more you chew it the more you can’t swallow it. But I don’t despair, and won’t, as long as you let me sign myself Your friend,

  W. A.

  IX.

  From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

  NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 1902.

  Well, mother dear:

  I have got it! I’ve just sent you a telegram, (I knew they would make you pay fifteen cents for bringing it up from the station,) so as to take away the taste of my last two or three gloomy letters as soon as possible; and now I am going to tell you all about it. When I told you the failure of those two places, that I went to look at with Miss Hally, I was so down-hearted that I hardly knew what to do; I wanted to give up, and take the first train home, and try for a school again. But I used all the proverbs I could put my mind on, and I said my prayer when I went to bed, just like a little girl, and cried into my pillow like a big one, and woke the next morning as bold as brass. I went down town and put in a new advertisement setting forth my gifts and accomplishments, bought all the papers, and read their “wanteds” over my lunch at the Woman’s Exchange; and that night I got Miss Hally to go over them with me. We got a good deal of forlorn fun out of it, but not much encouragement, and then Miss Hally proposed a still hunt, as she called it. We put aside two or three selected wanteds that we decided to investigate and see if they were deserving; and Miss Hally said she would begin the still hunt at once, by writing letters to half a dozen different people who might or might not be looking for a prize of my description, and offer them a chance in the raffle. She said this sort of thing would take time, but the results, even if they were failures would be more satisfactory than the other failures we had made. She looked awfully tired, for she had been writing out a long story, as she called it — a biography-interview with a new English lecturess who has just come ashore — but she kindled up at the chance of killing herself for me, and when she put me out for the night she kind of held me off by both shoulders, and then pulled me up and kissed me, for luck, as she said. I was so overcome that I could not even shed a tear; I just gasped, and took it in frozen silence, like a true Lake Ridger.

  It seemed to do as well as anything, though, so far as the luck was concerned, I got to thinking afterwards that perhaps it was not the right kind of kiss. The still hunt turned out as badly as the kind of gunning in the newspaper did when I first began to advertise, and when I felt as if everybody could see and hear me. Days, weeks, went by just as they do in novels when the author wants to skip; and yesterday I got word from the public telephone at our corner drug store that there was some one on the wire for me. You can bet, (or you could, if you ever did,) that I didn’t let the grass grow under my feet, either on the stairs down to the door, or in the street outside. Somehow I just knew that this time I was it; and
sure enough I found it was Miss Hally on the wire. She was calling me from the Hotel Walhondia and she wanted to know if I could come right down, and I said I could come like lightning, and she told me to inquire for Miss Ralson and I would find her there too.

  Well, I don’t know how I got to the hotel or how I lived through sending my name from the office, and then followed it; but before I wanted to be I was inside the Ralson apartment. Of course by that time I was in my usual frosty calm with strangers; but I tried to limber up enough to answer Miss Ralson’s questions, and to realize that Miss Hally was going away and leaving us to each other as soon as the questions began. She gave me a squeeze of the hand that said it was all right, and I felt how nice it was of her not to stay and hear that I wouldn’t do if I happened not to. Miss Ralson was pretty tremendous at first, and from time to time she was tremendous as we went on, but every now and then she broke down, and was not half so awful as I was. I think she saw that if she was to get at me at all, she would have to thaw me out to begin with. She asked me whether I had been to luncheon, and when I made out to remember I hadn’t, she said she thought we could talk so much better over a little lunch, and she ordered her maid to order it served to us there; and all the time she kept on talking, and now and then breaking into the largest kind of laugh. She has a head of dark red hair, and the bluest blue eyes, and white cheeks with soft pink in them, and she is built on the sky-scraping plan of the new girl, with shoulders and a neck to beat the band. I have got a fresh supply of slang from Miss Ralson, for after we cosied down to the lunch, she talked so much of it that I had to talk it too or seem impolite, and I was not going to do that. But she is business, every-time, in spite of her ups and downs of manner, and I can tell you she put me through my paces pretty thoroughly.

  She said that they wanted me to be a companion to her mother, and read to her and amuse her any way I could when she and her father could not be at home with her. But they did not want me for that alone; she needed a secretary to write her notes, and keep track of her engagements, and to go with her where a chaperon was not exactly needed, but two girls would do. She asked me if I would just write her a little note, then and there, and say whether I liked the notion, and what salary I should expect; she must have talked that point over with Miss Hally, for she said I could mention twelve hundred if I liked. She put me down at her desk with some note paper, and went away to the window, while I struggled with the note, and she kept coming back to see if I had finished. When I had, she looked pretty hard at it, and compared it with some notes she had received, and then she said, Yes, that would do first-rate. She asked me if I was sure about the spelling, because she always spelt salary with two lls, and she offered to bet me what I dared that hers was the right way. We referred it to the dictionary leaves in her portefolio, and I won, of course, but we had forgot to say what we had bet, and so I didn’t win anything but the bet. She seemed perfectly delighted, and she said that if there was anything she did envy another person it was spelling; and now she felt sure of me, if I thought I could get along with her mother.

  She took me to her mother in the next room, and introduced me, and I had a wicked pleasure in seeing that Mrs. Ralson was more scared than I was. She is a very small old lady, not the least like her daughter, and she began to question me about where I came from, and my family, and whether I was homesick, and didn’t I think New York was an awful place. I agreed to everything, and that seemed to cheer her up considerably, and she showed me the photograph of their house in Wottoma, Iowa, where they came from, and said it was considered the most beautiful “home” in the place. She pointed out the windows of her room, which Mr. Ralson had planned for her, and furnished himself, for a surprise, before she ever went into it, and she had never changed a thing. It was before they had formed the Cheese and Churn Trust, and always expected to live in Wottoma, but afterwards nothing would do America but to come to New York. That was better than Europe, anyway, where they had spent a year; and now Mr. Ralson had bought, up between Fifth Avenue and Madison, and they were going to build in the spring, and she supposed they should always live here, but she preferred Wottoma, herself, where you could have some ground around you, and everybody was neighborly.

  Well, mother, it made me a little homesick to hear her go on, and I showed that I felt for her, and before we got through, we were old friends, and she said she knew we could get on together first-rate, and she would not work me too hard, and I must not let Make. Make was a good girl, but she was thoughtless, and wanted to be on the go the whole while. She got to talking of Miss Ralson by her nickname, (her whole name is America) and of her husband by his first name, and she was so helplessly humble and simple, that I was glad her daughter had gone out of the room, for I am afraid she would have checked her, and I wouldn’t have liked that. Mrs. Ralson is New England born, and I told her you were too, and then she seemed to think I was. I explained how Lake Ridge was settled from New England, and she said that if we were the same kind of people, it came to the same thing.

  It is all as different from what I had planned, as could be, but I am not so sorry as I would have supposed. The Ralsons are not an old Knickerbocker family, with stately, highbred ways, and old mahogany sideboards and ancestral silver, but they will be, if they live here long enough; and I shall get on with them much better as they are at present. Perhaps an old Knickerbocker family would not have much use for me; and I shall have a better chance to grow up with the country here if I begin with an old Wottoma family. They may rot send me to Europe for my health, but I think they will let me go out to see you in May, about apple-blossom time, with a pocket full of money for the June interest. How thankful I ought to be, and how thankful I am! I am going to do everything I can to deserve my good fortune, and you need not be afraid to hear of my misbehaving! It is all settled that I am to begin earning my salary, with two lls, tomorrow. The arrangement is for me to keep on here with Miss Hally, and not to live with the Ralson’s, till they get into their house. When they keep me too late for me to get home alone, they will send me in their automobile or get me a room in the hotel. The way they don’t mind money, takes my breath away. After I got through with her mother to-day, Miss Ralson asked me how I would like to go shopping with her a little while, and in about two hours I saw her spend a thousand dollars. She bought anything she fancied, and some things that she didn’t fancy, as she found out later. But she said you could always exchange them, and if you couldn’t you could get rid of them somehow. It is a great thing to have a Cheese and Churn Trust for a father. I have not seen him, yet, but Mrs. Ralson says Miss Ralson is his “perfect image,” and they are just alike, every way.

  I feel as if I had not said anything, and were horrid and unthankful, and I don’t know what all. But you musn’t. Tell Lizzie that if she is very, very good, I will let her have some of my old things as soon as I have any new ones.

  With best love to you both,

  FRANCES.

  X.

  From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

  NEW YORK, Jan’y 10, 1902.

  You dear old fellow:

  You really mustn’t print things from my letters, unless you want to take the frankness out of me. I can’t write to all Wottoma as ingenuously as I write to you; I can understand your grief at having my good things wasted on you alone, but I really can’t let you share my bounty with the public. If the Day people were to ask me for New York letters, and were to offer me decent pay for them, that would be something to consider — and refuse; for I am going to devote myself to pure literature here, at least till I starve at it; and I can’t let the Day have my impressions for nothing, or next to it.

  I wish I had put them down, as I felt them, from moment to moment since I arrived, but perhaps they will be full enough in my letters; of course you will keep my letters, and let me recover them as material for my epic, later on. New York gains in epicality every day, and the wonder is that I don’t get familiar with it: I get more and more strange. The nov
elty of it is simply inexhaustible, and the drama of its tremendous being is past all saying. The other day, as I was walking up town after a cup of tea with the sumptuous America at her hotel, I struck into Broadway, and abandoned myself to the spectacle of the laborers digging the foundations for a sky-scraper at one of the corners. They had scooped forty or fifty feet into the earth, below the cellars of the old houses they had torn down, and were drilling into the everlasting rock with steam drills. A whole hive of men were let loose all over the excavation, pitching the earth and broken stones into carts, lifting the carts by derricks to the level of the street, and hitching the horses to them, and working the big steam shovels hanging from the derricks, and the engines were snorting and chuckling and the wheels grinding, and the big horses straining and the men silently shouting at them, — the whole thing muted by the streaming feet of the multitude, and the whine of the trolleys, and the clatter of the wagons, and the crash and roar of the elevated trains; and pretty soon, a mud-covered Italian ran out of the depths with a red flag, and the rest ran to cover, and puff! went a blast that tore up tons of rock, and made no more of a dint in the great mass of noise than if it had been the jet of white vapor that it looked like. Life here is on such a prodigious scale, and it is going on in so many ways at once that the human atom loses the sense of its own little aches and pains, and merges its weakness in the strenuousness of the human mass.

  I suppose that is the reason why literature, as a New York interest, affects me less in New York than it did in Wottoma. I know here, as I knew there, that this is a literary centre, and now and then I catch a glimpse of authorship in the flesh. But either because the other interests dwarf the literary interests, or because literature is essentially subjective, it is, so far, disappointingly invisible and intangible. Some of the young fellows dine at Lamarque’s, and have a table to themselves in one corner, where they talk and smoke; but I don’t know any of them yet, and I haven’t quite the gall to make up to them. I suppose there must be literary houses where authors meet; but I have not begun to frequent them, and in my dearth of poets I try to make out with the poem which I find more and more in the personality of the divine America.