Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Remember, he’s a mere little frisking prize ass; stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything: it’s all you now know and all you need to know, and you’ll be as firm on it as on a rock!” This is what I said to poor Peg, on the subject of Harry Goward, before I started, in the glorious impulse of the moment, five nights ago, for New York; and, with no moment now to spare, yet wishing not to lose my small silver clue, I just put it here for one of the white pebbles, or whatever they were, that Hop o’ my Thumb, carried off to the forest, dropped, as he went, to know his way back. I was carried off the other evening in a whirlwind, which has not even yet quite gone down, though I am now at home and recovering my breath; and it will interest me vividly, when I have more freedom of mind, to live over again these strange, these wild successions. But a few rude notes, and only of the first few hours of my adventure, must for the present suffice. The mot, of the whole thing, as Lorraine calls it, was that at last, in a flash, we recognized what we had so long been wondering about — what supreme advantage we’ve been, all this latter time in particular, “holding out” for.

  Lorraine had put it once again in her happy way only a few weeks previous; we were “saving up,” she said — and not meaning at all our poor scant dollars and cents, though we’ve also kept hold of some of THEM — for an exercise of strength and a show of character that would make us of a sudden some unmistakable sign. We should just meet it rounding a corner as with the rush of an automobile — a chariot of fire that would stop but long enough to take us in, when we should know it immediately for the vehicle of our fate. That conviction had somehow been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike on Peg’s coming back to us from her co-educative adventure so preposterously “engaged.” I didn’t believe in it, in such a manner of becoming so, one little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same; though that indeed seemed the last thing to trouble any one else. Her turning up in such a fashion with the whole thing settled before Father or Mother or Maria or any of us had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the tip of his nose, had too much in common, for my taste, with the rude betrothals of the people, with some maid-servant’s announcement to her employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy.

  I was indignant, quite artlessly indignant I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. “Oh, I suppose they don’t pretend not to take their students at the young people’s own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their affections!” she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute either to Father or to herself any disposition to control Peggy’s. It was one of the few occasions of my life on which I’ve suffered irritation from poor Mother; and yet I’m now not sure, after all, that she wasn’t again but at her old game (even then, for she has certainly been so since) of protecting poor Father, by feigning a like flaccidity, from the full appearance, not to say the full dishonor, of his failure ever to meet a domestic responsibility. It came over me that there would be absolutely nobody to meet this one, and my own peculiar chance glimmered upon me therefore on the spot. I can’t retrace steps and stages; suffice it that my opportunity developed and broadened, to my watching eyes, with each precipitated consequence of the wretched youth’s arrival.

  He proved, without delay, an infant in arms; an infant, either, according to circumstances, crowing and kicking and clamoring for sustenance, or wailing and choking and refusing even the bottle, to the point even, as I’ve just seen in New York, of imminent convulsions. The “arms” most appropriate to his case suddenly announced themselves, in fine, to our general consternation, as Eliza’s: but it was at this unnatural vision that my heart indeed leaped up. I was beforehand even with Lorraine; she was still gaping while, in three bold strokes, I sketched to her our campaign. “I take command — the others are flat on their backs.” I save little pathetic Peg, even in spite of herself; though her just resentment is really much greater than she dares, poor mite, recognize (amazing scruple!). By which I mean I guard her against a possible relapse. I save poor Mother — that is I rid her of the deadly Eliza — forever and a day! Despised, rejected, misunderstood, I nevertheless intervene, in its hour of dire need, as the good genius of the family; and you, dear little quaint thing, I take advantage of the precious psychological moment to whisk YOU off to Europe. We’ll take Peg with us for a year’s true culture; she wants a year’s true culture pretty badly, but she doesn’t, as it turns out, want Mr. Goward a ‘speck.’ And I’ll do it all in my own way, before they can recover breath; they’ll recover it — if we but give them time — to bless our name; but by that moment we shall have struck for freedom!”

  Well, then, my own way — it was “given me,” as Lorraine says — was, taking the night express, without a word to any one but Peg, whom it was charming, at the supreme hour, to feel glimmeringly, all-wonderingly, with us: my own way, I say, was to go, the next morning, as soon as I had breakfasted, to the address Lorraine had been able, by an immense piece of luck, to suggest to me as a possible clue to Eliza’s whereabouts. “She’ll either be with her friends the Chataways, in East Seventy-third Street — she’s always swaggering about the Chataways, who by her account are tremendous ‘smarts,’ as she has told Lorraine the right term is in London, leading a life that is a burden to them without her; or else they’ll know where she is. That’s at least what I HOPE!” said my wife with infinite feminine subtlety. The Chataways as a subject of swagger presented themselves, even to my rustic vision, oddly; I may be mistaken about New York “values,” but the grandeur of this connection was brought home to me neither by the high lopsided stoop of its very, very East Side setting, nor by the appearance of a terrible massive lady who came to the door while I was in quite unproductive parley with an unmistakably, a hopelessly mystified menial, an outlandish young woman with a face of dark despair and an intelligence closed to any mere indigenous appeal. I was to learn later in the day that she’s a Macedonian Christian whom the Chataways harbor against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service; a romantic item that Eliza named to me in rueful correction of the absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough.

  The powder on the massive lady’s face indeed transcended, I rather thought, the bounds of prose, did much to refer her to the realm of fantasy, some fairy-land forlorn; an effect the more marked as the wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow both voluminous and tense (flowing like a cataract in some places, yet in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream) reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be made. She apologized when I said I had come to inquire for Miss Talbert — mentioned (with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand) that she herself was “just being manicured in the parlor”; but was evidently surprised at my asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the question — it suffused her extravagant blondness with a troubled light, struggling there like a sunrise over snow — of whether she had better, confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity or, pretending to knowledge, baffle mine. But mine of course carried the day, for mine showed it could wait, while hers couldn’t; the final superiority of women to men being in fact, I think, that we are more PATIENTLY curious.

  “Why, is she in the city?”

  “If she isn’t, dear madam,” I replied, “she ought to be. She left Eastridge last evening for parts unknown, and should have got here by midnight.” Oh, how glad I was to let them both in as far as I possibly could! And clearly now I had let Mrs. Chataway, if such she was, in very far indeed.

  She stared, but then airily considered. “Oh, well — I guess she’s somewheres.”

  “I guess she is!” I replied.

  “She hasn’t got here yet — she has so many friends in the city. But she always wants US, and when she does come — !” With which my friend, now so f
ar relieved and agreeably smiling, rubbed together conspicuously the pair of plump subjects of her “cure.”

  “You feel then,” I inquired, “that she will come?”

  “Oh, I guess she’ll be round this afternoon. We wouldn’t forgive her — !”

  “Ah, I’m afraid we MUST forgive her!” I was careful to declare. “But I’ll come back on the chance.”

  “Any message then?”

  “Yes, please say her nephew from Eastridge — !”

  “Oh, her nephew — !”

  “Her nephew. She’ll understand. I’ll come back,” I repeated. “But I’ve got to find her!”

  And, as in the fever of my need, I turned and sped away.

  I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, but instinctively and confidently westward. I felt, I don’t know why, miraculously sure of some favoring chance and as if I were floating in the current of success. I was on the way to our reward, I was positively on the way to Paris, and New York itself, vast and glittering and roaring, much noisier even than the Works at their noisiest, but with its old rich thrill of the Art League days again in the air, was already almost Paris for me — so that when I at last fidgeted into the Park, where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next thing to Europe, and in fact HAD to be, since it’s the very antithesis of Eastridge. I regularly revelled in that sense that Eliza couldn’t have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains of sense she would have put in an appearance at the Chataways’ with the lark, or at least with the manicure, who seems there almost as early stirring. Or rather, really, she would have reported herself as soon as their train, that of the “guilty couple,” got in; no matter how late in the evening. It was at any rate actually uplifting to realize that I had got thus, in three minutes, the pull of her in regard to her great New York friends. My eye, as Lorraine says, how she HAS, on all this ground of those people, been piling it on! If Maria, who has so bowed her head, gets any such glimpse of what her aunt has been making her bow it to — well, I think I shall then entertain something of the human pity for Eliza, that I found myself, while I walked about, fairly entertaining for my sister.

  What were they, what ARE they, the Chataways, anyhow? I don’t even yet know, I confess; but now I don’t want to — I don’t care a hang, having no further use for them whatever. But on one of the Park benches, in the golden morning, the wonderment added, I remember, to my joy, for we hadn’t, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them: Lorraine only pretending a little, with her charming elfish art, that she occasionally was, in order to see how far Eliza would go. Well, that brilliant woman HAD gone pretty far for us, truly, if, after all, they were only in the manicure line. She was a-doing of it, as Lorraine says, my massive lady was, in the “parlor” where I don’t suppose it’s usually done; and aren’t there such places, precisely, AS Manicure Parlors, where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to? Oh, I do hope, for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from us! Otherwise, by all the gods, it’s just a boarding-house: there was exactly the smell in the hall, THE boarding-house smell, that pervaded my old greasy haunt of the League days: that boiled atmosphere that seems to belong at once, confusedly, to a domestic “wash” and to inferior food — as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the saucepan and the latter in the tubs.

  There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chataway’s queer look at me on my saying I was Eliza’s nephew — the droll effect of her making on her side a discovery about ME. Yes, she made it, and as against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me; so that if Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged in New York about Eastridge. I didn’t clearly, for Mrs. Chataway, come up to the brag — or perhaps rather didn’t come down to it: since I dare say the poor lady’s consternation meant simply that my aunt has confessed to me but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at the most; or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not as — well, as what I am. Whatever I am, in any case, and however awkward a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty minutes of the Park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle justified.

  I could of course scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet alley, pulling up to gape, I recognized in a young man brooding on a bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward! There he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard. There is certainly but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep — or even, for that matter, the hart ungalled play; the wonder of my coincidence shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young despair wishes to commune with immensity it can ONLY do so either in a hall bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on my prey. To sit down, in short, you’ve GOT to sit there; there isn’t another square inch of the whole place over which you haven’t got, as everything shrieks at you, to step lively. Poor Goward, I could see at a glance, wanted very much to sit down — looked indeed very much as if he wanted never, NEVER again to get up.

  I hovered there — I couldn’t help it, a bit gloatingly — before I pounced; and yet even when he became aware of me, as he did in a minute, he didn’t shift his position by an inch, but only took me and my dreadful meaning, with his wan stare, as a part of the strange burden of his fate. He didn’t seem even surprised to speak of; he had waked up — premising his brief, bewildered delirium — to the sense that something NATURAL must happen, and even to the fond hope that something natural WOULD; and I was simply the form in which it was happening. I came nearer, I stood before him; and he kept up at me the oddest stare — which was plainly but the dumb yearning that I would explain, explain! He wanted everything told him — but every single thing; as if, after a tremendous fall, or some wild parabola through the air, the effect of a violent explosion under his feet, he had landed at a vast distance from his starting-point and required to know where he was. Well, the charming thing was that this affected me as giving the very sharpest point to the idea that, in asking myself how I should deal with him, I had already so vividly entertained.

  CHAPTER VIII THE MARRIED DAUGHTER by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

  We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims — that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal, myself, because nobody — distinctly not one person — in our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves; nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether any one else in the world understood me or not.

  I suppose — in fact, I know — that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy’s which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me.

  Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of this family. But nobody knows as well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them, collectively and individually considered. An older sister, if she have any consciousness of responsibility at all, is, to my mind, not in an easy position. Her extra years give her an extra sense. One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety which the younger children cannot share. She has, in a way, the intelligence and forethought of a mother without a mother’s authority or privilege.

  When father had that typhoid and could not sleep — dear father! in his normal condition he sleeps like a bag of corn-meal — who was there in all th
e house to keep those boys quiet? Nobody but me. When they organized a military company in our back yard directly under father’s windows — two drums, a fish-horn, a jews-harp, a fife, and three tin pans — was there anybody but me to put a stop to it? It was on this occasion that the pet name Moolymaria, afterward corrupted into Messymaria, and finally evolved into Meddlymaria, became attached to me. To this day I do not like to think how many cries I had over it. Then when Charles Edward got into debt and nobody dared to tell father; and when Billy had the measles and there wasn’t a throat in the house to read to him four hours a day except my unpopular throat; and when Charles Edward had that quarrel over a girl with a squash-colored dress and cerise hair-ribbons; or when Alice fell in love with an automobile, the chauffeur being incidentally thrown in, and took to riding around the country with him — who put a stop to it? Who was the only person in the family that COULD put a stop to it?

  Then again — but what’s the use? My very temperament I can see now (I didn’t see it when I lived at home) is in itself an unpopular one in a family like ours. I forecast, I foresee, I provide, I plan — it is my “natur’ to.” I can’t go sprawling through life. I must know where I am to set my foot. Dear mother has no more sense of anxiety than a rice pudding, and father is as cool as one of his own ice-pitchers. We all know what Charles Edward is, and I didn’t count grandmother and Aunt Elizabeth.