Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In fact, I am seeing a good deal of the Ralsons, these days; or they are seeing a good deal of me. I seem to represent home and mother to Mrs. Ralson, and she claims part of every call I make at the Walhondia for a terribly long talk about Wottoma; though, as for calling, I am mostly there by invitation to all the meals of the day, including supper after the theatre or opera.

  America has set up a secretary for herself and a companion for her mother in the single person of a girl from western New York, somewhere, who does duty as a dragon when Ralson is away, or cannot be pressed into the service. She doesn’t look like a dragon exactly; in fact, with her shyness and brownness of hair and dress, she makes me think of a quail and its dead-leaf plumage; and she has a way of slipping under cover which I think would not be finally inconsistent with an ability to peck. To tell the truth, as nearly as I can make out on such short notice, the secretary-companion and I were born doubtful of each other; though I should be puzzled to say why. She seems, for reasons of her own, to look with a censorious eye upon America’s frank friendliness for me as something very mistakenly bestowed. This naturally puts me on my most cynical behavior; I say nothing but heartless things in the secretary’s presence; and if it goes on I shall turn out a hardened worldling, and be marrying America for her money before I know it. In view of this novel character, I do not understand how it is that the Mayor has not put me on the committee for the reception of Prince Henry. I think I could be guilty of a base servility that would satisfy the secretary’s worst expectation.

  You must not, by the way, imagine that New York is as hysterical about the prince’s visit as the newspapers make her appear. Journalism, my dear Lincoln, I do not mind confiding to you, now I have left it, is feminine; it likes to talk, and to hear itself talk, and it does not mind what the topic is: it can be as shrill and voluble about one thing as another. But I assure you that between the morning and the evening editions, there are long moments when we forget the prince altogether and “Shouldn’t hardly notice it at all,” in the words of Dockstader’s latest song, if he forgot to come.

  Yours ever,

  W. A.

  XI.

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

  NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 1902.

  My dear Margaret:

  If it surprises you to find this post-marked New York, instead of London, I confess that it rather puzzles me to explain why I have no more taken the steamer for Liverpool than the train for Boston. I can merely say that New York has given me pause, which is the last thing one would expect New York to do. Three weeks ago I might have thought that I knew the place, but now I am not sure that I can more than conjecture it a little bit, or throw out a vague suggestion or two at it. I might analyze accurately enough, but the fancy of synthetizing has grown upon me, and to synthetize New York is impossible.

  At least it is impossible for a Bostonian, of the Boston which, if it was as we believed it, is now certainly no more. We were (forgive the aoristic preterite; it is crueler for me than it is for you!) immensely, intensely, personal, and the note of New York is impersonality. If you wish to lose yourself, this is the shop; if you wish to find yourself, better go somewhere else. Our quality, and the defect of our quality, in that obsolete Boston, was from the wish to find ourselves, always. Here I feel resolved into my elements at times, in a measure which I do not believe would happen to me even in London or Paris. I am mere humanity; worse, I am mere mortality, as some one said of the people in Maeterlinck’s little mysteries, and I meet my fellow mortals in a sort of reciprocal dispersal; and yet, when I freely accept the conditions, the experience is rather pleasing. You will not believe it, or at least you will not believe it of me, and you could not acquire faith without coming here and staying rather longer than you are ever likely to do.

  It is not that people do not talk of people in New York, but they do not talk of them in our way, as acquaintance from the cradle up, by their nicknames or pet names, with a constant sense of their lurking cousinship. There is of course, this sort of intimacy here, but it does not quite turn the sojourner out of doors. I have been to your Van der Doeses, and they have been hospitable, but they did not make me feel that I mattered. I did not wish to matter, and yet an expectation of that sort ought to be imagined. They were very light, as people of the old Dutch blood are apt to be (the Dutch Calvinism was so very different from our Puritanism!) and though they had the evidences of refinement about them, I had somehow a fear that they might any moment begin asking conundrums. I do not know how else to put it, and I am afraid my meaning will not be perfectly clear to you. Is it possible that there was something in the air of our elder Boston, breathed from the interstellar spaces where our lights of literature and learning, of poetry and philosophy shone so long, which penetrated our psychical substance as nothing of the kind has the New Yorkers’?

  One curious experience as a Bostonian has come to me from these New Yorkers through their remote verification of the fact that we Bostonians are no longer so literary or philosophic as we once were. In that former time they imagined us lettered pedants or transcendantal cranks, and they laughed at their notion of us. Now they have somehow (their unintelligence is baffling) caught on to a change in us, and they no longer smile at our queerness; they no longer think of us at all; we suggest nothing to them. This is putting it rather crudely, and it is saying it in excess, of course, but a sad truth lies at the bottom of the well in which I hope this may not make you wish to drown yourself.

  At the Van der Doeses’ I could naturally meet none but their own kind; but they have been retrospectively more attentive than they actually were, and they have taken me with them to several functions, and had cards sent me for others, where I have seen a greater variety of my fellow mortals. You know I never scorned those simple at-homes and teas which most men disdain, and now when dinners rather take it out of me, I have been going to afternoon receptions with more than my earlier ardor. I have had my reward, for I have met there some agreeable women (rather too shrieky; but the noise is great) and such men of aesthetic employment as business does not hold in its grip quite till dinner. At the house of an editor who has made so much money with his paper (The Signal; its name would say nothing to you; but it has been rather dreadful) that he is now in case to clean up, and who has begun by housing himself, on the East side, rather too magnificently, I found some Perennial men, the other day; and there was an author or two, as authors go in New York, and some painters who, as things go anywhere, are always more interesting than authors. We were not without actors, for it was not a matinée afternoon, and I saw in the flesh the prevailing actress, though in rather less of it than I had seen her on the stage. It was pleasant, or at least piquant; if I were to distinguish so closely I should say that New York always piques rather than pleases, and Boston — well Boston at least does not pique; and it was the more amusing because it was of that provisional character in which what one may roughly call celebrity rather than society played the chief part. The Van der Doeses felt obliged to account for their presence to some of their friends whom they met, and their friends were likewise exculpatory; you know what I mean. The celebrity was nothing to them, or rather worse; I do not care for it much myself, because it is tiresome; it does not know what to do with itself; and you do not know what to do with it; but there were people there who were all eyes and ears for it. There was a pretty boy (the boys are so pretty now, with their shaven faces, which make us eighteen-sixty fellows look so barbaric with our beards, even when they go no farther than an “educated whisker” or two) who told me afterwards that he was from Iowa, of all places, and teased me with the sense of having seen him before, somewhere. I can’t make out yet where it was, if it was really anywhere, but probably it was nowhere. He interested me past the vain quest by asking me when the prevalent actress had turned from me, whether it were she, and then rushed off to a large, flowery young woman — sun-flowery is not too much — and seemed to excite her with the fact as much as hims
elf. Their emotion was so interesting that I did a thing I should not have done when I was under fifty. I followed him up and asked him if he would like to be presented, and the young woman to whom his eager eyes referred me, said, “She would give the world to,” and I led them up, and sacrificed them on the shrine of the amiable deity, who had instantly forgotten me, but received us as if we were her oldest friends. After her dispersing welcome, we rather had ourselves on each others’ hands, and following an interval in which we treated one another as veteran New Yorkers, we arrived at a sense of our common strangeness, and exchanged our geographical derivations. As the young woman said she had always wanted to see Boston, I could not do less than own that the disappointment of my life was never having seen Iowa. By and by, she asked the young man, who had naturally dropped out of the conversation, if he would not go and hunt up her father, and he presently came back with an old fellow so exactly of my years and of her looks that I had a difficulty in disentangling my consciousness from a tie of kindred. But my contemporary viewed me with an instant of suspicion which I had not experienced from his posterity. He asked, pretty stiffly, if she wanted to go, and she took a fonder leave of me than he. The Van der Doeses turned up in time to break my fall, and they had not quite finished asking me how in the world I had got hold of the Cheese and Churn Trust, when the father returned, with the air of having had it taken out of him by the sunflowery young woman, and said his daughter had been telling him how very kind I had been, and he wanted to thank me. He gave me his card, and when he went the Van der Doeses explained that this was the magnate whose financiering skill is going to embitter our bread to all of us who like butter and cheese with it, and sketched his social career in New York. It could be done briefly, because it had gone no farther than buying a lot worth its width in gold, to build on, and coasting along the shores of society. They added harrowing stories of Western millionaires who had failed to get in, and had gone to Europe to hide their sorrows in the bosom of the aristocracies there; but these Ralsons were inexhaustibly good natured, and the daughter seemed to know how to place the father’s money where it would do the most good. She had an instinct or an inspiration concerning the right sort of charities, and if she could find a foothold in Newport, the thing was done. They were very good-natured about it; New York is good-natured about everything; and they were not sorry not to despair of the Ralsons. They did not know who the pretty boy was; perhaps a reminiscence of pre-existence in Iowa (the terms are mine;) or a relation whom Papa Ralson was bringing up to inherit him in the Trust.

  I may get very tired of all this. I may go to Europe or I may go to Boston, but if I stay, I shall certainly try to see the Ralsons again.

  The excuse of this inordinate letter is that I have not written for so long before; but I will not be so long again. (I seem to be making a play upon words.) At any rate it will last you a day, if it is a day when you cannot go out in your chair. You see

  I keep up with your convalescence; for Wally told me something about you, and made it easier for me to break my promise about writing you every week. But I won’t do it again — I mean, break my promise.

  Yours affectionately,

  OTIS.

  XII.

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

  NEW YORK, January 17, 1902.

  Dear Linc:

  I have not written for nearly a week, not because there was nothing to write, but because there was and always is only too much. I am one and New York is three or four millions, and she can beat me when it comes to a grapple. I want to tell you all about her, and how she gets me down and rolls me over, every time I go out of doors, but it is no use trying; her tricks are too many; she is Hildegunde, and I happen not to be Siegfried; or not so much Siegfried as I supposed when I first came here. If I were wrestling for some other fellow, I might do better, but I am in love with her myself, and more and more in love every day.

  I am now seeing my beloved from the social whirl, so far as the Ralsons can drag me into the vortex.

  Their hospitality continues beyond anything that merit, however modest, could have expected. It is so constant that I find myself getting critical of the cuisine at the Walhondia. In fact, Lamarque’s fifty cent table d’ hôte is better, in certain touches beyond the reach of art, in certain inspirations. Besides, at Lamarque’s the company is always more cultivated than it is at the Walhondia, and on very exceptional Fridays I have got bouillabaisse at Lamarque’s: the same bouillabaisse that Thackeray made his ballad about; at the Walhondia they never give you bouillabaisse, and I doubt if many of the guests ever heard of Thackeray. But there are worse things than ignorance of literature, and better things than bouilla-baissè and I manage to have a good time with the Ralsons at the hotel. I even think that I help them to have a good time, and I don’t find myself sorry or ashamed for it. You have to respect a man who has got to the top, and planted himself so squarely there as Ralson has, and America is the best fellow in the world. I take that back, if there is the shadow of slight in it: she is a good, whole-souled girl, and I hope she may get into all the society she wants.

  In the meantime she isn’t worrying about whether she has reached the real thing or not. The other day they took me to an afternoon reception — or rather she did; her father came in later — at the editor of The Signal’s; a kind of housewarming that he was giving himself in the palace he’s just built, and I met more than four hundred delightful people, whether they were the four hundred that America is after or not. The most delightful of all turned out to be the charming old fellow whom I talked with in the Park the day I saw those unmanageable lovers of mine. The light of recognition faded into perplexity from the first glance he gave me, and I thought I would not press upon him the acquaintance which had evidently passed from his lax, senile hold; he proved even more satisfactory as a nice old Bostonian in whom I could not feel any menace of rival authorship. He was as old-school in his afternoon dress, as he was that day in the Park: very correct, with not just a New York correctness; but something more, and something less; it was as if his correctness were qualified by his intellectuality, which may make the Boston difference.

  He wanted to talk, or to make me talk, of New York, and was gayly amused at my enthusiasm; he confessed he did not share it, but professed to be able to understand it, though I doubt if he did. I doubt if he quite grasped me as a product of the rolling prairie, but he did his best, and America seemed almost to take his mind off New York for a moment. Miss Everwort, the English actress was there, and he introduced us. When she got through with us, which she did in about half a second, as if we were so many seats in a house, not to be discriminated, he stayed chatting with Make and me, till some friends of his came up; Make told me afterwards they were the Van der Doeses, which means something supernal here. Miss Hally, the chief intervieweress of The Signal bowed to us from a distance, and he asked very eagerly who she was. Perhaps you will like to know, too, and I can tell you what I could not tell him, that she was much a type as he was. She is of a high old Southern family whose passive Unionism did not keep their fortunes from going down with the confederates’ in the Civil War, and after struggling along at home, putting up lady-like pickles and preserves for a reluctant market, she came North and went into journalism. When Casman took over The Signal, and began to clean it up, he asked her to join the staff, and that is why she was at his house the other day. She goes everywhere in the way of business, and is welcome to everybody either seeking or shunning publicity; for she is an artist and knows when to stop, or when not to begin. The Ralsons know her from her coming to make a story about Mr. R., shortly after their advent here, and they all like her, and help her in the little good turns her left hand does while her right is taking notes for Sunday stories. She got that combination secretary and companion for America and Mrs. Ralson, who has cast already the spell of her personality over the old lady, and the spell of her dictionary over the young one, and though she doesn’t like me, promises, I am bound to
say, to be a great boon to both of them. I mustn’t let you get the notion that I am always on the society heights where you are now beholding me. If I spend my days there from one p m. to twelve a m. with the Ralsons, I dwell with the Baysley’s from one a m. till twelve m., in the valley of humiliation, and mostly curse the hour when I was fool enough to come here. They were poor enough before, but just now Baysley has the grippe and they all have their hearts in their mouths for fear he may lose his job if he is kept away from the office long. The old woman and the oldest girl are nursing him, and the youngest is looking after me. I found her waiting to let me in to-night, (or call it this morning,) for my door key hasn’t materialized yet; and when I said something decent about her father’s sickness she broke down and cried with her head on the table, so that I wanted to put my arms round her and comfort her. But I didn’t. She is pretty in a pale blonde way, and you must not put your arms round a girl to comfort her when she is pretty, and giveth her color in a pale, blonde way. I suppose she cried a little more confidentially with me because I got up and kindled the fire in the range for her this morning — or yesterday morning, it is now. She has been making my coffee, and broiling my bacon, since her sister detailed herself to help her mother look after the old man; and though she doesn’t do them so well as to make me anxious for either, I did kindle the fire for her, when I found she wasn’t awake at nine o’clock. You will say that was self-interest, but then you know I might have gone out and got a breakfast without smutting my hands. Which would you have done? I know you will say you would have made the fire, and I hope you would. It was rather amusing, and rather a touching experience, for it made me think how I used to kindle the fire for my mother at Timber Creek, before I went on to be a distinguished journalist in Wottoma. The poor, sleepy thing came in after I had got the range red-hot, and wailed out “Oh what did you do it for?” in a way that made the lump come in my throat. I am telling you of these squalid matters a 1:30 a m., with my dress coat still on, after getting home from the opera with the Ralsons, and gayly parting with Make and her father in their automobile at the door, which this wretched little Essie Baysley let me in at. Life is strange, my dear Linc, but as full of material as an egg is of meat.