Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “How perfectly charming!” said one of the ladies. “I don’t wonder you fell in love with the name. It’s fit for a shepherdess of high degree.”

  “If I were a man,” said the girl across the table who was not less sweetly a girl because she would never see thirty-nine again, “I should simply drop everything and follow that piano to Phyllis Desmond’s door.”

  “It’s quite what I should like to do,” Gaites responded, with a well-affected air of passionate regret. “But I’m promised at Kent Harbor—”

  She did not wait for him to say more, but submitted, “Oh, well, if you’re going to Kent Harbor, of course!” as if that would excuse and explain any sort of dereliction; and then the talk went on about Kent Harbor till Mrs. Birkwall asked, generally, as if it were part of the Kent Harbor inquiry, “Didn’t I hear that the Ashwoods were going to their place at Upper Merritt, this year?”

  Then there arose a dispute, which divided the company into nearly equal parties; as to whether the Ashwoods had got home from Europe yet. But it all ended in bringing the talk back to Phyllis Desmond’s piano again, and in urging its pursuit upon Gaites, as something he owed to romance; at least he ought to do it for their sake, for now they should all be upon pins and needles till they knew who she was, and what she could be doing at Lower Merritt, N. H.

  At one time he had it on his tongue to say that there seemed to be something like infection in his interest in that piano, and he was going to speak of the young girl who seemed to share it, simply because she saw him staring at it, and who faltered so long with him before the freight-depot that she came near getting no seat in the train for Burymouth. But just at that moment the dispute about the Ashwoods renewed itself upon some fresh evidence which one of the ladies recollected and offered; and Gaites’s chance passed. When it came again he had no longer the wish to seize it. A lingering soreness from his experience with that young girl made itself felt in his nether consciousness. He forbore the more easily because, mixed with this pain, was a certain insecurity as to her quality which he was afraid might impart itself to those patrician presences at the table. They would be nice, and they would be appreciative, — but would they feel that she was a lady, exactly, when he owned to the somewhat poverty-stricken simplicity of her dress in some details, more especially her thread gloves, which he could not consistently make kid? He was all the more bound to keep her from slight because he felt a little, a very little ashamed of her.

  He woke next morning in a wide, low, square chamber to the singing of robins in the garden, from which at breakfast he had luscious strawberries, and heaped bowls of June roses. When he started for his train, he parted with Mrs. Birkwall as old friends as he was with her husband; and he completed her conquest by running back to her from the gate, and asking, with a great air of secrecy, but loud enough for Birkwall to hear, whether she thought she could find him another girl in Burymouth, with just such a house and garden, and exactly like herself in every way.

  “Hundreds!” she shouted, and stood a graceful figure between the fluted pillars of the portal, waving her hand to them till they were out of sight behind the corner of the high board fence, over which the garden trees hung caressingly, and brushed Gaites’s shoulder in a shy, fond farewell.

  It had all been as nice as it could be, and he said so again and again to Birkwall, who would go to the train with him, and who would not let him carry his own hand-bag. The good fellow clung hospitably to it, after Gaites had rechecked his trunk for Kent Harbor, and insisted upon carrying it as they walked up and down the platform together at the station. It seemed that the train from Boston which the Kent Harbor train was to connect with was ten minutes late, and after some turns they prolonged their promenade northward as far as the freight-depot, Birkwall in the abstraction of a plot for a novel which he was seizing these last moments to outline to his friend, and Gaites with a secret shame for the hope which was springing in his breast.

  On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, “All out?” and a voice from far within responded, “Case here, yet; I can’t handle it alone.”

  The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy bumping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it, while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to Birkwall’s plot that the most besotted young author could not have failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an “Oh, hello!” and slapped him on the back.

  Gaites nodded in proud assent, and Birkwall went on: “I thought you were faking the name last night; but I didn’t want to give you away. It was the real thing, wasn’t it, after all.”

  “The real thing,” said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he laughed for pleasure in his friend’s astonishment.

  “Well,” Birkwall resumed, “she seems to be following you up, old fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted you to follow her up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why, Gaites, you’ll be the tea-table talk for a week; you’ll be married to that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of Providence? Come! There’s time enough to get a ticket, and have your check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country express will be along here at nine o’clock. You can’t let that poor thing start off on her travels alone again!”

  Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer — flung over the man’s shoulder — which seemed willing enough, but was wholly unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a passenger-train which came pulling in from the southward.

  “Here’s the Hill Country express now!” said Birkwall. “You won’t change your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out. Don’t worry about the piano. I’ll find out what’s happened to the car it was in, and I’ll see that it’s put into a good strong one, next time.”

  “Do! That’s a good fellow!” said Gaites, and in repeated promises, demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.

  III.

  Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed; at half past one o’clock he dined at somebody’s cottage, and afterwards sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time to go to afternoon tea at somebody else’s cottage, where he chatted about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for seven or eight o’clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.

  There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out
canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go “just as he was,” and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type than Gaites himself had on.

  The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well that he told people he was never going away.

  He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs. Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond’s piano; and she had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning, however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared already with them.

  He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of anxiety at its retarded progress.

  “And, by-the-way,” she added, with the logic of her sex, “I’m just going to the station to see what’s become of a trunk myself that I ordered expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you’re not doing anything this morning — the tide isn’t in till noon, and there’ll be little or no bathing to look at before that — you’d better drive down with me. Or perhaps you’re canoeing up the river with somebody?”

  Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, tangentially, “I can get June Alber to go too, and you can take her canoeing afterwards.”

  But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as combining all the searching effects of a Röntgen-ray examination and the earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.

  He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis Desmond’s piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.

  “Why, look here!” he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its cover, “what’s that piano doing here?”

  The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this demand, and responded mildly, “Well, that’s just what I was thinking myself.”

  “That piano,” Gaites went on with unabated violence, “started from Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it’s been lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent Harbor Saturday morning!”

  The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites’s figure warily, as if it might be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of dreamy suggestion: “Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth.”

  Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.

  “Just look at this, Mrs. Maze,” said Gaites when she drew near enough to read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked at Gaites’s face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and then she looked back at the piano-case.

  “No!” she exclaimed and questioned in one.

  Gaites nodded confirmation.

  “Then it won’t be there in time for the poor thing’s birthday?”

  He nodded again.

  Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.

  “Well, it’s an abominable outrage!” she began. She added: “It’s a burning shame! They’ll never get over it in the world; and when it comes lagging along after everything’s over, she won’t care a pin for it! How did it happen?”

  Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap, and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter!” she said, with a bitterness that was a great comfort to Gaites. “What are you going to do about it?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know what can be done about it,” he answered, referring himself to the man in the silk cap.

  The man said, “No freight out, now, till Monday.”

  Mrs. Maze burst forth again: “If I had the least confidence in the world in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the expressage myself.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t let you do that, Mrs. Maze,” Gaites protested. “Besides, I don’t suppose they’d allow us to take it out of the freight, here, unless we had the bill of lading.”

  “Well,” cried Mrs. Maze, passionately, “I can’t bear to think of that child’s suspense. It’s perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn’t they telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and relieve people’s minds. We’ll go and make the station-master telegraph!”

  But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. “I don’t think I’ve got any right to do that,” he said.

  “Of coarse I’ll pay for the telegram,” Mrs. Maze interpolated.

  “It ain’t that exactly,” said the station-master. “It might look as if I was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze.”

  She took fire. “Then I’ll meddle myself!” she blazed. “There’s nothing to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!”

  “I can’t hinder you,” the station-master admitted.

  “Well, then!” She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her, and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:

  Miss Phyllis Desmond,

  Lower Merritt, N. H.

  Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth, where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday.

  “There! How will that do?” she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to him.

  “That seems to cover the ground,” he said, not so wholly hiding the mis
giving he began to feel but that she demanded,

  “It explains everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes—”

  “Very well; sign it, then!”

  “I?”

  “Certainly. She doesn’t know me.”

  “She doesn’t know me, either,” said Gaites. He added: “And a man’s name—”

  “To be sure! Why didn’t I think of that?” and she affixed a signature in which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive generation — Elaine W. Maze “Now,” she triumphed, as Gaites helped her into her trap— “now I shall have a little peace of my life!”

  IV.

  Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The argument she used was, “No freight out till Monday, you know.” The inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.

  That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue with the river and the girl’s eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o’clock dinner, with a few other friends.