Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Lillias, in her preparation for the stage, must have come so well in sight of the theatre as to have learned that there were such things as quarrels and separations among actors; but unless she recurred to her experience with her own father and mother she must have believed that such casualties were incidents solely of the histrionic temperament and profession. In spite of her frank recognition to her aunt of the situation which Craybourne had noted at the hotel, and had apparently talked over with her, the Crombies felt sacredly bound not to let her suspect it.

  Crombie felt himself the more strictly enjoined to reticence from the girl by the enlargement of his own knowledge a few nights later. It came in the form of a confidence from Mevison as they sat smoking late on the veranda, watching the planets over the fiery points of their cigars and fighting the occasional mosquitoes which came just often enough to bear Crombie out in saying that they had no mosquitoes to speak of. It began with the voluntary confession that Mevison made of his not having slept very well the night before.

  “What was the matter?” Crombie granted comfortably through his smoke. “Bed bad?”

  “No, the fault was with the man in it. I’ve got the trick of not sleeping very well.”

  “I remember when you couldn’t be kept awake.”

  “Oh,” Mevison laughed, forlornly, “I didn’t have the right one to keep me awake, then.” He piteously burst out: “For God’s sake, Crombie, don’t pretend you don’t see how it is with my wife and me!”

  “No, I won’t, Mevison,” his friend returned, kindly. “Do you want me to ask you what the trouble is?”

  “Oh, the usual trouble: incompatibility. We’re fighting to a separation. I didn’t want it to go to the extreme — to a divorce; but I’m resigned to that now, because I see we are impossible to each other. I’ve seen it for years; I’ve seen it from the first.”

  “Yes,” Crombie said, feeling that Mevison wished to be prompted.

  “It isn’t that we don’t love each other, or that we haven’t. We’ve always loved each other too much. I won’t brag of my part, but I know that when she’s been the most impossible she’s been the most devoted to me. She cared for me so entirely that she could not bear that anybody — no! any thing — else should have the least part of me. You used to believe I could paint? Or could have painted if I had kept on?”

  “You could have been a great painter.”

  “Perhaps. But she broke it up. It wasn’t merely that the models drove her mad. I could excuse her for that; I think it’s pretty hard for an artist’s wife to bear, and I’ve come to think it’s an unhallowed thing for a man to keep looking at a woman’s nakedness and putting her beauty down in color. But when I left off working from models, and took to chicquing it — did the ideal business — it was just as bad. Then I found out that it was the painting itself which she felt between us. If there had been a necessity for my working, if there had been poverty, I might have gone on; I should have had to. But there was money, plenty of it — hers. So I left off, for peace’ sake, thinking I could begin again some time; and we began to drift. We’ve been round the world half a dozen times; we’ve lived in twenty countries; but we always had ourselves with us. She wasn’t jealous, or at least not of women more than of men. But she felt that I was all hers, and that she had a right to every atom, every instant of me. If I made a friend, she broke up the friendship. Not in any public way — I must say she always managed skilfully at first, though of late she’s been growing reckless. But it was slavery.”

  “I see,” Crombie assented, but very gingerly, so as not to interrupt Mevison.

  “Still,” he went on, “I was not the only sufferer. Slavery was always worse for the owner than the slave. I know it hurt her worse than it hurt me; that it was anguish for her to make me miserable, as she had to do, because she loved me, in her way so much. It caused her pain and shame and sorrow twice as much as it caused me. She knew that she spoiled my life, and that whether I was aware of it or not, at the bottom of my soul I longed to be rid of her; to break my chain, to pull my neck out of the halter at any cost. The conviction grew upon her, and goaded her, till she had to accuse me of it. I knew the truth first from her; and the time came when I couldn’t deny it; though I denied it at first a thousand times, I had to own it at last. That made things intolerable. What she could bear, so long as I denied it, she could not bear when I owned it, though she had divined it herself, and brought me to the sense of it. What is the use of making a short story long? She sees as well as I do that we must part; but it is her helpless fate to torment me more and more into what if we could we would both avoid.”

  “I think I can understand,” Crombie said, modestly enough, for subtleties like these were not his strong point. He had a notion of suggesting that something might be done, but upon the whole he felt that nothing had better be done, even if it could, and that the most that could be hoped or asked for these miserable people was a separation for time, if not for eternity.

  “I don’t mean to say,” Mevison continued, getting up and throwing the stump of his cigar over the veranda rail, “that I haven’t been to blame. But the accurate way of putting it would be to say that neither of us is to blame. We were simply born not to be mated, and we have been mated. That’s all.”

  Crombie had his own opinion as to the totality. In his heart he did not the least blame his friend, and he did blame Mrs. Mevison. He was in the presence of his friend’s quivering anguish, his humiliation and despair, and he did not believe the woman who caused it could share it in the measure that Mevison believed. He would have liked to say something of the sort, but besides being a little insecure of his phrasing, he was uncertain how Mevison might take it. The next thing was to sympathize with Mevison about his not sleeping. “Did you ever try Scotch whiskey for your insomnia? I find that sets me off about as quick as anything.”

  “I don’t know,” Mevison hesitated. “I think I can manage without, to-night, I’m so dead tired. The worst of it is that if the whiskey fails it leaves you twice as rotten as if you had simply lain awake without it. Still!”

  “Better try it,” Crombie urged. “It can’t fail if you take enough of it.” They went in-doors and Crombie got a bottle down from one of the book-shelves in his library, where it seemed to be doing duty as literature. He found a tumbler on the shelf, and he went out to the dining-room for some water and sugar. Mevison refused the sugar, and Crombie said, “You don’t want to put in too much water, either.” Mevison put in so little as to leave the whiskey he drank off almost neat. “There,” Crombie said, “I guess that will fetch you.” He poured some water into a tumbler, and handed it to Mevison with the bottle of whiskey. “Better take it up with you. If the first dose don’t do the business, the second will, sure.”

  Mevison obeyed him, and crept slowly up the stairs while Crombie stayed to put out the lights and follow him with a candle.

  “Give me something to read,” he whispered on the upper landing. “Something good and dull. I find that sets me off at times.”

  “Novel?” Crombie suggested.

  “No; the cheapest story interests me too much. Haven’t you got some sort of travels — old sort?”

  Crombie found on a hanging shelf in the hall a volume which Mevison said would do, and they bade each other good-night. Everybody else, plainly, was asleep, and Crombie, unused as he was to such psychological reflections, felt a fine conjecture penetrate him as to the dreams of the several people slumbering in their several rooms. He dismissed his wife’s briefly, because for one thing she would be sure to tell them to him when she woke; but he hung upon those of Lillias Bellard, whose chamber was on one side of Mevison’s room, with a doorless wall between, and those of Mrs. Mevison, whose room, on the other side, opened into her husband’s.

  It occurred to Crombie that the girl’s visions probably concerned a radiant future, and the woman’s a radiant past, and that this state was in both cases the same. He did not know whether the hope of it or the despair
of it was the worse, and, having no one there to help him guess, he gave it up, as if it were a conundrum, and opened his own door, across the hall from those of his three guests, and let himself in very softly, so as not to disturb his wife, who slept in the room next his.

  X

  MRS. MEVISON came down in the morning in a youthful freshness so alien to her years, though these were not very many, that every one noted it and was surprised: every one but poor Mr. Mevison, as she called him in reporting that he had had a bad night, and she had left him trying to catch a little beauty-nap. They must not wait breakfast for him; he would be all the better-looking for being allowed to take his chances later. She noted with explicit pleasure that they had not waited for her. She liked that English way of breakfasting catch-as-catch-can; perhaps that was not just the phrase. “I’m afraid your whiskey was a failure, Mr. Crombie,” she sweetly turned upon the host, “though Mr. Mevison gave it a fair trial, I should say, from the looks of the bottle!”

  Crombie was driven to the mistake of excusing himself. “There wasn’t much in the bottle when he took it.”

  “There certainly wasn’t much when he left it!” she crowed back. “There’s a little remedy of mine that I give him, when I find out he’s not been sleeping, that never fails. But the difficulty is to find out. Men are so odd! I’m the last to know such a thing; I suppose he thinks it will worry me. I shall give you some, Mr. Crombie, and the next time he complains to you I want you to offer it instead of the whiskey — as if it were your own invention. Won’t that be good!”

  She bade them please not stay at table with her, and Crombie went into his library, while Mrs. Crombie went to interview the cook about luncheon and dinner. Lillias had already slipped away and found Craybourne mysteriously arrived on the veranda, where he must have been in telepathic communion with her for some minutes before she left the table. She sat down on the upper tread of the stairs leading to the lawn at the side of the house, and he on a tread lower, which brought his head on a level with hers. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, her hands pressed together, and her face slanted towards his in a pose favorable to the confidences they at once began exchanging.

  “I never knew,” he said, “that your eyes were so very blue.”

  “Nor I that yours were so very black. But mine are really bluish green. What are yours, really?”

  “Blackish green, I suppose.” He took one of her hands from the other and examined it carefully, without and within, and then restored it to her.

  “Will it do?” she asked. “Is it the rose-leaf pattern?”

  “It’s exquisite,” he sighed. “It’s the prime agent of your grace. I remember it in the air, at your lectures out there; no more like a ‘gesture’ than the movement of a bough in the wind or the sweep of a bird’s wing.”

  “Now, that is true poetry,” Lillias tenderly mocked. “What do you think of my looks generally, this morning?”

  “Generally?”

  “Yes; I flattered myself that I looked something like a faded flower.”

  “You look like the red, red rose that’s newly something in June.”

  “Tea, tea rose, you mean. But one gets credit for nothing!” she sighed. “I hardly slept last night.”

  “Poor girl! What happened?”

  “Dreadful things, grewsome things, things to take the heart out of one.” She looked round over her shoulder, and saw Mrs. Mevison advance from the doorway to the rail of the veranda, on which she leaned while examining the sky. She knew that Mrs. Mevison had seen her look round, but they both pretended unconsciousness; and Mrs. Mevison went in-doors. Then Lillias said, “I had bad dreams.”

  “My bad dreams come from something I’ve eaten; but I know that yours must be purely psychological. What were they about?” he asked.

  “I hate to tell you. About a lovers’ quarrel” — she looked again— “a married lovers’ quarrel.” She paused and then added, abruptly, “I dreamed that a woman came into her husband’s room, and woke him out of his sleep, and began accusing and upbraiding him. He groaned, and told her it was the first sleep he had had for nights, and implored her to go away. Then he began to threaten, and she to laugh — Oh, Edmund, it was terrible!”

  The tears came, and she stretched her hands to him as for help. When he offered to take them she pulled them back. “No, no! I may be just so, sometime; and you—”

  The soft plapping of a woman’s footfall made itself heard, and, with another glance over her shoulder, Lillias saw Mrs. Mevison prowling to and fro at the farther end of the veranda, and busying herself with putting in place some fallen trailers of honeysuckle. Lillias clutched her lover’s hand and pulled him away down over the lawn into the avenue leading to the river. There she bathed her eyes with water which he scooped up and held in his joined hands for her. Then, seated on a grassy bank, above a sunny ripple of the stream, they continued their study of the lamentable case that had fallen in their way, and tried to divine the lesson of it for themselves.

  “There can’t be any doubt,” she said, “about her loving him. A woman couldn’t do such things to a man she was indifferent to, or one that she simply hated. She loves him, I can see it in every look she gives him; and what do you suppose is the trouble?”

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “he doesn’t love her, and she knows it.”

  “No, that can’t be it. If he didn’t love her he would have left her long ago. He does love her; you mustn’t think he doesn’t.”

  “Dearest, I won’t if you say so.”

  “No, not because I say so, but because it isn’t true.”

  “Then because it isn’t true.”

  “That is something like.” She drooped a little nearer, so that their shoulders touched. “Where was I?”

  “They are cruel because they are kind.”

  “Something of that sort. But you see, now, that love in itself isn’t enough to keep people friends?”

  “Do you mean that it has to be mixed with a little reason?”

  “With a good deal of reason.”

  “Well, you shall supply the reason and I will supply the love. I’ll tell you what I think the trouble is: Mrs. Mevison is a fool. I thought so the first time I saw her.”

  “Then she’s a fool by her woman’s nature, as much as by her own.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame her for being a fool, any more than I praise you for being a sage. She wants to exact everything from her husband because she would like to give him everything — if she could.”

  “That doesn’t sound very logical.”

  “It’s as logical as it can be under the circumstances.”

  They both laughed at this, more and more fondly, and she said, “Well, then, what we have got to do is to love each other less and less.”

  “Something like that,” he consented, and they began throwing little sticks into the stream and watching them drift off together over the ripple.

  They named them after themselves, and she said, “Now Edmund is chasing Lillias!”

  “No, it’s Lillias that’s chasing Edmund!” he retorted.

  They sauntered back to the house buoyant from their nonsense, with renewed hope and faith in themselves, and Mrs. Mevison met them at the veranda steps. Mevison was sitting there, and she called gayly, as if for him to hear: “Ah, I saw you escaping me! I wanted to follow you and eavesdrop your billing and cooing. All the world loves a lover, they say, you know, and I’m hungry for a taste of your happiness. Yes, I would eavesdrop, if I could. Fair exchange is no robbery, is it, Miss Bellard? What do you call each other now? You won’t always call each other sweet names, but you’ll always mean sweetness by any name. You mustn’t be astonished at the change, Miss Bellard. Why, the first time Mr. Mevison said to me, ‘Stubborn little fool!’ I hardly knew where to look; but I soon found out that it meant the same as ducky or dovey. Didn’t it, ducky-dovey?”

  She went up to Mevison, sitting gloomily tilted back in his chair, and from behind him clapped her
hands on his cheeks and pressed her own cheek down on his head. When she released him, he flung his arms wildly about in the effort to recover his balance. Craybourne and Lillias ran too late to catch him from falling. Mrs. Mevison stopped herself in a shriek of laughter.

  “Oh, what a shame! Do forgive me, Arthur!”

  She lent her aid with the others; but Lillias saw him pushing his wife’s hands away, when he could, with looks of deadly rage.

  “I’m afraid,” he said to Lillias, when he had got back to his pose, “that I was rather ridiculous.”

  “Oh, no one thought of such a thing, Arthur,” his wife said, with indignant tenderness.

  “I’m so glad we were in time, Mr. Mevison,” the girl said.

  “You’re all right now?” Craybourne asked.

  With a little more polite parley the lovers got themselves away, Craybourne declaring that he must go back to the hotel. Mrs. Mevison remained superfluously putting her husband in shape, and brushing specks of imaginary dust from his clothes, and compassionately cooing over him.

  Lillias went down the avenue with Craybourne to the ferry, and then trailed slowly back over the stubble, with her head down. When she lifted it she saw Mrs. Mevison sweeping swiftly towards her.

  “Just one moment, Miss Bellard!” Mrs. Mevison called to her. The voice was gay, and even arch, but there was a note of battle in it, which no woman could have mistaken, though a man might have been deceived. When she came up to the girl, who was staring fearlessly at her, she broke out in tones thick with fury: “Don’t think I don’t know that you heard, last night. I don’t say you listened!”