Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

“That,” said the head waiter, with pride either in the fact or for the effect it must produce, “was Miss Phyllis Desmond.”

  Gaites started as satisfactorily as could be wished. “Indeed?”

  “Yes; she’s engaged to play here the whole summer.” The head waiter fumbled with the knife and fork at the place opposite, and blushed. “But you’ll hear her to-night yourself,” he ended incoherently, and hurried away, to show another guest to his, or rather her, place.

  Gaites wondered why he felt suddenly angry; why he resented the head waiter’s blush as an impertinence and a liberty. After all, the fellow was a student and probably a gentleman; and if he chose to help himself through college by taking that menial rôle during the summer, rather than come upon the charity of his friends or the hard-earned savings of a poor old father, what had any one to say against it? Gaites had nothing to say against it; and yet that blush, that embarrassment of a man who had pulled out his chair for him, in relation to such a girl as Miss Phyllis Desmond, incensed him so much that he could not enjoy his supper. He did not bow to the head waiter when he held the netting-door open for him to go out, and he felt the necessity of taking the evening air in another stroll to cool himself off.

  Of course, if the poor girl was reduced to playing in the hotel orchestra for the money it would give her, she had come down to the level of the head waiter, and they must meet as equals. But the thought was no less intolerable for that, and Gaites set out with the notion of walking away from it. At the station, however, which was in friendly proximity to the Inn, his steps were stayed by the sound of girlish voices, rising like sweetly varied pipes from beyond the freight-depot. Their youth invited his own to look them up, and he followed round to the back of the depot, where he came upon a sight which had, perhaps from the waning light, a heightened charm. Against the curtain of low pines which had been gradually creeping back upon the depot ever since the woods were cut away to make room for it, four girls were posed in attitudes instinctively dramatic and vividly eager, while as many men were employed in getting what Gaites at once saw to be Miss Phyllis Desmond’s piano into the wagon backed up to the platform of the depot. Their work was nearly accomplished, but at every moment of what still remained to be done the girls emitted little shrieks, laughs, and moans of intense interest, and fluttered in their light summer dresses against the background of the dark evergreens like anxious birds.

  At last the piano was got into the middle of the wagon, the inclined planks withdrawn and loaded into it, and the tail-board snapped to. Three of the men stepped aside, and one of them jumped into the front of the wagon and gathered up the reins from the horses’ backs. He called with mocking challenge to the group of girls, “Nobody goin’ to git up here and keep this piano from tippin’ out?”

  A wild clamor rose from the girls, settling at last into staccato cries.

  “You’ve got to do it, Phyl!”

  “Yes, Phyllis, you must get in!”

  “It’s your piano, Phyl. You’ve got to keep it from tipping out!”

  “No, no! I won’t! I can’t! I’m not going to!” one voice answered to all, but apparently without a single reference to the event; for in the end the speaker gave her hand to the man in the wagon, and with many small laughs and squeaks was pulled up over the hub and tire of a front wheel, and then stood staying herself against the piano-case, with a final lamentation of “Oh, it’s a shame! I’ll never speak to any of you again! How perfectly mean! Oh!” The last exclamation signalized the start of the horses at a brisk mountain trot, which the driver presently sobered to a walk. The three remaining girls followed, mocking and cheering, and after them lounged the three remaining men, at a respectful distance, marking the social interval between them, which was to be bridged only in some such moment of supreme excitement as the present.

  It was no question with Gaites whether he should bring up the end of the procession; he could not think of any consideration that would have stayed him. He scarcely troubled himself to keep at a fit remove from the rest; and as he followed in the deepening twilight he felt a sweet, unselfish gladness of heart that the poor girl whom he had seen so wan and sad in Boston should be the gay soul of this pretty triumph.

  The wagon drove into the grounds of the Desmond cottage, and backed up to the edge of the veranda. Lights appeared, and voices came from within. One of the men, despatched to the barn for a hatchet, came flickering back with a lantern also; lamps brought out of the house were extinguished by the evening breeze (in spite of luminous hands held near the chimney to shelter them), amidst the joyful applause of all the girls and the laughter of the men. A sound of hammering rose, and then a sound of boards rending from the clutch of nails, and then a sound of pieces thrown loosely into a pile. There was a continual flutter of women’s dresses and emotions, and this did not end even when the piano, disclosed from its casing and all its wraps, was pushed indoors, and placed against the parlor wall, where a flash of lamp-light revealed it to Gaites in final position.

  He lingered still, in the shelter of some barberry-bushes at the cottage gate, and not till the last cry of gratitude had been answered by the unanimous disclaimer of the men rattling away in the wagon did he feel that his pursuit of the piano had ended.

  VII.

  “Can you tell me, madam,” asked Gaites of an obviously approachable tabby next the chimney-corner, “which of the musicians is Miss Desmond?”

  He had hurried back to the Inn, and got himself early into a dress suit that proved wholly inessential, and was down among the first at the hop. This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness in the evening’s pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to say a dark misgiving.

  “Oh,” the approachable tabby answered, “it’s the one at the piano. The violinist is Miss Axewright, of South Newton. They were at the Conservatory together in Boston, and they are such friends! Miss Desmond would never have played here — intends to take pupils in Portland in the winter — if Miss Axewright hadn’t come,” and the pleasant old tabby purred on, with a velvety pat here, and a delicate scratch there. But Gaites heard with one ear only; the other was more devotedly given to the orchestra, which also claimed both his eyes. While he learned, as with the mind of some one else, that the Desmonds had been very much opposed to Phyllis’s playing at the Inn, but had consented partly with their poverty, because they needed everything they could rake and scrape together, and partly with their will, because Miss Axewright was such a nice girl, he was painfully adjusting his consciousness to the fact that the girl at the piano was not the girl whom he had seen at Boston and whom he had so rashly and romantically decided to be Miss Phyllis Desmond. The pianist was indeed Miss Desmond, but to no purpose, if the violinist was some one else; it availed as little that the violinist was the illusion that had lured him to Lower Merritt in pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano, if she were really Miss Axewright of South Newton.

  What remained for him to do was to arrange for his departure by the first train in the morning; and he was subjectively accounting to the landlord for his abrupt change of mind after he had engaged his room for a week, while he was intent with all his upper faculties upon the graceful poses and movements of Miss Axewright. There was something so appealing in the pressure of her soft chin as it held the violin in place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his own larger than his Adam’s-apple would account for to the spectator; the delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a friendly young
fellow who had chosen himself master of ceremonies, and took part in the dancing; and at the end of the first half of the programme, while the other dancers streamed out on the verandas and thronged the stairways, he was aware of dangling his chains as he lounged toward the ladies of the orchestra. The volunteer master of ceremonies had half shut himself across the piano in his eager talk with Miss Desmond, and he readily relinquished Miss Axewright to Gaites, who willingly devoted himself to her, after Miss Desmond had risen in acknowledgment of his bow. He had then perceived that she was not nearly so tall as she had seemed when seated; and a woman who sat tall and stood low was as much his aversion as if his own abnormally long legs did not render him guilty of the opposite offence.

  Miss Desmond must have had other qualities and characteristics, but in his absorption with Miss Axewright’s he did not notice them. He saw again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever erring impressions, ever since.

  “I think we have met before, Miss Axewright,” he said boldly, and he had the pleasure of seeing her pensive little visage light up with a responsive humor.

  “I think we have,” she replied; and Miss Desmond, whose habitual state seemed to be intense inattention to whatever directly addressed itself to her, cut in with the cry:

  “You have met before!”

  “Yes. Two weeks ago, in Boston,” said Gaites. “Miss Axewright and I stopped at the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot to see that your piano started off all right.”

  He explained himself further, and, “Well, I don’t see what you did to it,” Miss Desmond pouted. “It just got here this afternoon.”

  “Probably they ‘throwed a spell’ on it, as the country people say,” suggested the master of ceremonies. “But all’s well that end’s well. The great thing is to have your piano, Miss Phyllis. I’m coming up to-morrow morning to see if it’s got here in good condition.”

  “That’s some compensation,” said the girl ironically; and she added, with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, “I don’t know whether it won’t need tuning first.”

  “Well, I’m a piano-tunist myself,” the young fellow retorted, and their banter took a course that left Miss Axewright and Gaites to themselves. The dancers began to stray in again from the stairways and verandas.

  “Dear me!” said Miss Desmond, “it’s time already;” and as she dropped upon the piano-stool she called to Miss Axewright with an authority of tone which Gaites thought augured well for her success as a teacher, “Millicent!”

  VIII.

  The next morning when Gaites came down to breakfast he had a question which solved itself contrary to his preference as he entered the dining-room. He was so early that the head waiter had to jump from his own unfinished meal, and run to pull out his chair; and Gaites saw that he left at his table the landlord’s family, the clerk, the housekeeper, and Miss Axewright. It appeared that she was not only staying in the hotel, but was there on terms which indeed held her above the servants, but separated her from the guests.

  He hardly knew how to dissemble the feeling of humiliation mixed with indignation which flashed up in him, and which, he was afterwards afraid, must have made him seem rather curt in his response to the head waiter’s civilities. Miss Axewright left the dining-room first, and he hurried out to look her up as soon as he had despatched the coffee and steak which formed his breakfast, with a wholly unreasoned impulse to offer her some sort of reparation for the slight the conditions put upon her. He found her sitting on the veranda beside the friendly tabby of his last night’s acquaintance, and far, apparently, from feeling the need of reparation through him. She was very nice, though, and after chatting a little while she rose, and excused herself to the tabby, with a politeness that included Gaites, upon the ground of a promise to Miss Desmond that she would come up, the first thing after breakfast, and see how the piano was getting along.

  When she reappeared, in her hat, at the front of the Inn, Gaites happened to be there, and he asked her if he might walk with her and make his inquiries too about the piano, in which, he urged, they were mutually interested. He had a notion to tell her all about his pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano, as something that would peculiarly interest Miss Desmond’s friend; but though she admitted the force of his reasoning as to their common concern in the fate of the piano, and had allowed him to go with her to rejoice over its installation, some subtle instinct kept him from the confidence he had intended, and they walked on in talk (very agreeable talk, Gaites found it) which left the subject of the piano altogether intact.

  This was fortunate for Miss Desmond, who wished to talk of nothing else. The piano had arrived in perfect condition. “But I don’t know where the poor thing hasn’t been, on the way,” said the girl. “It left Boston fully two weeks ago, and it seems to have been wandering round to the ends of the earth ever since. The first of last week, I heard from it at Kent Harbor, of all places! I got a long despatch from there, from some unknown female, telling me it had broken down on the way to Burymouth, and been sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Have you ever been at Kent Harbor, Mr. Gaites?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Gaites. This was the moment to come out with the history of his relation to the piano; but he waited.

  “And can you tell me whether they happen to have a female freight agent there?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” said Gaites, with a mystical smile.

  “Then do you know anybody there by the name of Elaine W. Maze?”

  “Mrs. Maze? Yes, I know Mrs. Maze. She has a cottage, there.”

  “And can you tell me why Mrs. Maze should be telegraphing me about my piano?”

  There was a note of resentment in Miss Desmond’s voice, and it silenced the laughing explanation which Gaites had almost upon his tongue. He fell very grave in answering, “I can’t, indeed, Miss Desmond.”

  “Perhaps she found out that it had been a long time on the way, and did it out of pure good-nature, to relieve your anxiety.”

  This was what Miss Axewright conjectured, but it seemed to confirm Miss Desmond’s worst suspicions.

  “That is what I should like to be sure of,” she said.

  Gaites thought of all his own anxieties and interferences in behalf of the piano of this ungrateful girl, and in her presence he resolved that his lips should be forever sealed concerning them. She never would take them in the right way. But he experimented with one suggestion. “Perhaps she was taken with the beautiful name on the piano-case, and couldn’t help telegraphing just for the pleasure of writing it.”

  “Beautiful?” cried Miss Desmond. “It was my grandmother’s name; and I wonder they didn’t call me for my great-grandmother, Daphne, and be done with it.”

  The young man who had chosen himself master of ceremonies at the hop the night before now proposed from the social background where he had hitherto kept himself, “I will call you Daphne.”

  “You will call me Miss Desmond, if you please, Mr. Ellett.” The owner of the name had been facing her visitors from the piano-stool with her back to the instrument. She now wheeled upon the stool, and struck some chords. “I wish you’d thought to bring your fiddle, Millicent. I should like to try this piece.” The piece lay on the music-rest before her.

  “I will go and get it for her,” said the ex-master of ceremonies.

  “Do,” said Miss Desmond.

  “No, no,” Gaites protested. “I brought Miss Axewright, and I have the first claim to bring her fiddle.”

  “I’m afraid you couldn’t either of you find it,” Miss Axewright began.

  “We’ll both try,” said the ex-master of ceremonies. “Where do you think it is?”

  “Well, it’s in the case on the piano.”

  “That doesn�
��t sound very intricate,” said Gaites, and they all laughed.

  As soon as the two men were out of the house, the ex-master of ceremonies confided: “That name is a very tender spot with Miss Desmond. She’s always hated it since I knew her, and I can’t remember when I didn’t know her.”

  “Yes, I could see that — too late,” said Gaites. “But what I can’t understand is, Miss Axewright seemed to hate it, too.”

  Mr. Ellett appeared greatly edified. “Did you notice that?”

  “I think I did.”

  “Well, now I’ll tell you just what I think. There aren’t any two girls in the world that like each other better than those two. But that shows just how it is. Girls are terribly jealous, the best of them. There isn’t a girl living that really likes to have another girl praised by a man, or anything about her, I don’t care who the man is. It’s a fact, whether you believe it or not, or whether you respect it. I don’t respect it myself. It’s narrow-minded. I don’t deny it: they are narrow-minded. All the same, we can’t help ourselves. At least, I can’t.”

  Mr. Ellett broke into a laugh of exhaustive intelligence and clapped Gaites on the back.

  IX.

  Gaites, if he did not wholly accept Ellett’s philosophy of the female nature, acted in the light it cast upon the present situation. From that time till the end of his stay at Lower Merritt, which proved to be coeval with the close of the Inn for the season, and with the retirement of the orchestra from duty, he said nothing more of Miss Phyllis Desmond’s beautiful name. He went further, and altogether silenced himself concerning his pursuit of her piano; he even sought occasions of being silent concerning her piano in every way, or so it seemed to him, in his anxious avoidance of the topic. In all this matter he was governed a good deal by the advice of Mr. Ellett, to whom he had confessed his pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano in all its particulars, and who showed a highly humorous appreciation of the facts. He was a sort of second (he preferred to say second-hand) cousin of Miss Desmond, and, so far as he could make out, had been born engaged to her; and he showed an intuition in the gingerly handling of her rather uncertain temper which augured well for his future happiness. His future happiness seemed to be otherwise taken care of, for though he was a young man of no particular prospects, and no profession whatever, he had a generous willingness to liberate his affianced to an artistic career; or, at least, there was no talk of her giving up her scheme of teaching the piano-forte because she was engaged to be married, he was exactly fitted to become the husband of a wage-earning wife, and was so far from being offensive in this quality that everybody (including Miss Desmond, rather fitfully) liked him; and he was universally known as Charley Ellett.