Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  We had of course joined the crowd in pushing forward; people always do, though they promise themselves to wait till the last one is out. I got caught in a dark eddy on the first stair-landing; but I could see them farther down, and I knew they would wait for me outside the door.

  When I reached it at last they were nowhere to be seen; I looked up this street and down that, but they were not in sight.

  XII

  I did not afflict myself very much, nor pretend to do so. They knew the way home, and after I had blundered about in search of them through the lampshot darkness, I settled myself to walk back at my leisure, comfortably sure that I should find them on the verandah waiting for me when I reached the hotel. It was quite a thick night, and I almost ran into a couple at a corner of our quieter street when I had got to it out of Broadway. They seemed to be standing and looking about, and when the man said, “He must have thought we took the first turn,” and the woman, “Yes, that must have been the way,” I recognised my estrays.

  I thought I would not discover myself to them, but follow on, and surprise them by arriving at our steps at the same moment they did, and I prepared myself to hurry after them. But they seemed in no hurry, and I had even some difficulty in accommodating my pace to the slowness of theirs.

  “Won’t you take my arm, Miss Gage?” he asked as they moved on.

  “It’s so very dark,” she answered, and I knew she had taken it. “I can hardly see a step, and poor Mr. March with his glasses — I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “Oh, he only uses them to read with; he can see as well as we can in the dark.”

  “He’s very young in his feelings,” said the girl; “he puts me in mind of my own father.”

  “He’s very young in his thoughts,” said Kendricks; “and that’s much more to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men of his age who keep in touch with the times as he does.”

  “Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don’t you think? I wonder how soon they begin to feel old?”

  “Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It’s a good deal in temperament. I don’t suppose that either of them realises yet that they’re old, and they must be nearly fifty.”

  “How strange it must be,” said the girl, “fifty years old! Twenty seems old enough, goodness knows.”

  “How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?” Kendricks asked, and she laughed at his joke.

  “I don’t suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man.”

  I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I would drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously intimate for me to be put apart in the minds of these young people on account of my years as not of the same race or fate as themselves, there was nothing in what they said that I might not innocently overhear, as far as they were concerned, and I listened on.

  But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment, and then he said soberly, “There’s something fine in this isolation the dark gives you, isn’t there? You’re as remote in it from our own time and place as if you were wandering in interplanetary space.”

  “I suppose we are doing that all the time — on the earth,” she suggested.

  “Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now. Sometimes I have a sense of it, though, when the moon breaks from one flying cloud to another. Then it seems as if I were a passenger on some vast, shapeless ship sailing through the air. What,” he asked, with no relevancy that I could perceive, “was the strangest feeling you ever had?” I remembered asking girls such questions when I was young, and their not apparently thinking it at all odd.

  “I don’t know,” she returned thoughtfully. “There was one time when I was little, and it had sleeted, and the sun came out just before it set, and seemed to set all the woods on fire. I thought the world was burning up.”

  “It must have been very weird,” said Kendricks; and I thought, “Oh, good heavens! Has he got to talking of weird things?”

  “It’s strange,” he added, “how we all have that belief when we are children that the world is going to burn up! I don’t suppose any child escapes it. Do you remember that poem of Thompson’s — the City of Dreadful Night man — where he describes the end of the world?”

  “No, I never read it.”

  “Well, merely, he says when the conflagration began the little flames looked like crocuses breaking through the sod. If it ever happened I fancy it would be quite as simple as that. But perhaps you don’t like gloomy poetry?”

  “Yes, yes, I do. It’s the only kind that I care about.”

  “Then you hate funny poetry?”

  “I think it’s disgusting. Papa is always cutting it out of the papers and wanting to send it to me, and we have the greatest times!”

  “I suppose,” said Kendricks, “it expresses some moods, though.”

  “Oh yes; it expresses some moods; and sometimes it makes me laugh in spite of myself, and ashamed of anything serious.”

  “That’s always the effect of a farce with me.”

  “But then I’m ashamed of being ashamed afterward,” said the girl. “I suppose you go to the theatre a great deal in New York.”

  “It’s a school of life,” said Kendricks. “I mean the audience.”

  “I would like to go to the opera once. I am going to make papa take me in the winter.” She laughed with a gay sense of power, and he said —

  “You seem to be great friends with your father.”

  “Yes, we’re always together. I always went everywhere with him; this is the first time I’ve been away without him. But I thought I’d come with Mrs. Deering and see what Saratoga was like; I had never been here.”

  “And is it like what you thought?”

  “No. The first week we didn’t do anything. Then we got acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. March, and I began to really see something. But I supposed it was all balls and gaiety.”

  “We must get up a few if you’re so fond of them,” Kendricks playfully suggested.

  “Oh, I don’t know as I am. I never went much at home. Papa didn’t care to have me.”

  “Ah, do you think it was right for him to keep you all to himself?” The girl did not answer, and they had both halted so abruptly that I almost ran into them. “I don’t quite make out where we are.” Kendricks seemed to be peering about. I plunged across the street lest he should ask me. I heard him add, “Oh yes; I know now,” and then they pressed forward.

  We were quite near our hotel, but I thought it best to walk round the square and let them arrive first. On the way I amused myself thinking how different the girl had shown herself to him from what she had ever shown herself to my wife or me. She had really, this plain-minded goddess, a vein of poetic feeling, some inner beauty of soul answering to the outer beauty of body. She had a romantic attachment to her father, and this shed a sort of light on both of them, though I knew that it was not always a revelation of character.

  XIII

  When I reached the hotel I found Miss Gage at the door, and Kendricks coming out of the office toward her.

  “Oh, here he is!” she called to him at sight of me.

  “Where in the world have you been?” he demanded. “I had just found out from the clerk that you hadn’t come in yet, and I was going back for you with a searchlight.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t so badly lost as all that,” I returned. “I missed you in the crowd at the door, but I knew you’d get home somehow, and so I came on without you. But my aged steps are not so quick as yours.”

  The words, mechanically uttered, suggested something, and I thought that if they were in for weirdness I would give them as much weirdness as they could ask for. “When you get along toward fifty you’ll find that the foot you’ve still got out of the grave doesn’t work so lively as it used. Besides, I was interested in the night effect. It’s so gloriously dark; and I had a fine sense
of isolation as I came along, as if I were altogether out of my epoch and my environment. I felt as if the earth was a sort of Flying Dutchman, and I was the only passenger. It was about the weirdest sensation I ever had. It reminded me, I don’t know how, exactly of the feeling I had when I was young, and I saw the sunset one evening through the woods after a sleet-storm.”

  They stared at each other as I went on, and I could see Kendricks’s fine eyes kindle with an imaginative appreciation of the literary quality of the coincidence. But when I added, “Did you ever read a poem about the end of the world by that City of Dreadful Night man?” Miss Gage impulsively caught me by the coat lapel and shook me.

  “Ah, it was you all the time! I knew there was somebody following us, and I might have known who it was!”

  We all gave way in a gale of laughter, and sat down on the verandah and had our joke out in full recognition of the fact. When Kendricks rose to go at last, I said, “We won’t say anything about this little incident to Mrs. March, hey?” And then they laughed again as if it were the finest wit in the world, and Miss Gage bade me a joyful good-night at the head of the stairs as she went off to her room and I to mine.

  I found Mrs. March waiting up with a book; and as soon as I shut myself in with her she said, awfully, “What were you laughing so about?”

  “Laughing? Did you hear me laughing?”

  “The whole house heard you, I’m afraid. You certainly ought to have known better, Basil. It was very inconsiderate of you.” And as I saw she was going on with more of that sort of thing, to divert her thoughts from my crime I told her the whole story. It had quite the effect I intended up to a certain point. She even smiled a little, as much as a woman could be expected to smile who was not originally in the joke.

  “And they had got to comparing weird experiences?” she asked.

  “Yes; the staleness of the thing almost made me sick. Do you remember when we first compared our weird experiences? But I suppose they will go on doing it to the end of time, and it will have as great a charm for the last man and woman as it had for Adam and Eve when they compared their weird experiences.”

  “And was that what you were laughing at?”

  “We were laughing at the wonderful case of telepathy I put up on them.”

  Mrs. March faced her open book down on the table before her, and looked at me with profound solemnity. “Well, then, I can tell you, my dear, it is no laughing matter. If they have got to the weird it is very serious; and her talking to him about her family, and his wanting to know about her father, that’s serious too — far more serious than either of them can understand. I don’t like it, Basil; we have got a terrible affair on our hands.”

  “Terrible?”

  “Yes, terrible. As long as he was interested in her simply from a literary point of view, though I didn’t like that either, I could put up with it; but now that he’s got to telling her about himself, and exchanging weird experiences with her, it’s another thing altogether. Oh, I never wanted Kendricks brought into the affair at all.”

  “Come now, Isabel! Stick to the facts, please.”

  “No matter! It was you that discovered the girl, and then something had to be done. I was perfectly shocked when you told me that Mr. Kendricks was in town, because I saw at once that he would have to be got in for it; and now we have to think what we shall do.”

  “Couldn’t we think better in the morning?”

  “No; we must think at once. I shall not sleep to-night anyhow. My peace is gone. I shall have to watch them every instant.”

  “Beginning at this instant. Why not wait till you can see them?”

  “Oh, you can’t joke it away, my dear. If I find they are really interested in each other I shall have to speak. I am responsible.”

  “The young lady,” I said, more to gain time than anything else, “seems quite capable of taking care of herself.”

  “That makes it all the worse. Do you think I care for her only? It’s Kendricks too that I care for. I don’t know that I care for her at all.”

  “Oh, then I think we may fairly leave Kendricks to his own devices; and I’m not alarmed for Miss Gage either, though I do care for her a great deal.”

  “I don’t understand how you can be so heartless about it, Basil,” said Mrs. March, plaintively. “She is a young girl, and she has never seen anything of the world, and of course if he keeps on paying her attention in this way she can’t help thinking that he is interested in her. Men never can see such things as women do. They think that, until a man has actually asked a girl to marry him, he hasn’t done anything to warrant her in supposing that he is in love with her, or that she has any right to be in love with him.”

  “That is true; we can’t imagine that she would be so indelicate.”

  “I see that you’re determined to tease, my dear,” said Mrs. March, and she took up her book with an air of offence and dismissal. “If you won’t talk seriously, I hope you will think seriously, and try to realise what we’ve got in for. Such a girl couldn’t imagine that we had simply got Mr. Kendricks to go about with her from a romantic wish to make her have a good time, and that he was doing it to oblige us, and wasn’t at all interested in her.”

  “It does look a little preposterous, even to the outsider,” I admitted.

  “I am glad you are beginning to see it in that light, my dear, and if you can think of anything to do by morning I shall be humbly thankful. I don’t expect to.”

  “Perhaps I shall dream of something,” I said more lightly than I felt. “How would it do for you to have a little talk with her — a little motherly talk — and hint round, and warn her not to let her feelings run away with her in Kendricks’s direction?” Mrs. March faced her book down in her lap, and listened as if there might be some reason in the nonsense I was talking. “You might say that he was a society man, and was in great request, and then intimate that there was a prior attachment, or that he was the kind of man who would never marry, but was really cold-hearted with all his sweetness, and merely had a passion for studying character.”

  “Do you think that would do, Basil?” she asked.

  “Well, I thought perhaps you might think so.”

  “I’m afraid it wouldn’t,” she sighed.

  “All that we can do now is to watch them, and act promptly, if we see that they are really in love, either of them.”

  “I don’t believe,” I said, “that I should know that they were in love even if I saw it. I have forgotten the outward signs, if I ever knew them. Should he give her flowers? He’s done it from the start; he’s brought her boxes of Huyler candy, and lent her books; but I dare say he’s been merely complying with our wishes in doing it. I doubt if lovers sigh nowadays. I didn’t sigh myself, even in my time; and I don’t believe any passion could make Kendricks neglect his dress. He keeps his eyes on her all the time, but that may be merely an effort to divine her character. I don’t believe I should know, indeed I don’t.”

  “I shall,” said Mrs. March.

  XIV

  We were to go the next day to the races, and I woke with more anxiety about the weather than about the lovers, or potential lovers. But after realising that the day was beautiful, on that large scale of loveliness which seems characteristic of the summer days at Saratoga, where they have them almost the size of the summer days I knew when I was a boy, I was sensible of a secondary worry in my mind, which presently related itself to Kendricks and Miss Gage. It was a haze of trouble merely, however, such as burns off, like a morning fog, when the sun gets higher, and it was chiefly on my wife’s account.

  I suppose that the great difference between her conscience and one originating outside of New England (if any conscience can originate outside of New England) is that it cannot leave the moral government of the universe in the hands of divine Providence. I was willing to leave so many things which I could not control to the Deity, who probably could that she accused me of fatalism, and I was held to be little better than one of the wick
ed because I would not forecast the effects of what I did in the lives of others. I insisted that others were also probably in the hands of the somma sapienza e il primo amore, and that I was so little aware of the influence of other lives upon my own, even where there had been a direct and strenuous effort to affect me, that I could not readily believe others had swerved from the line of their destiny because of me. Especially I protested that I could not hold myself guilty of misfortunes I had not intended, even though my faulty conduct had caused them. As to this business of Kendricks and Miss Gage, I denied in the dispute I now began tacitly to hold with Mrs. March’s conscience that my conduct had been faulty. I said that there was no earthly harm in my having been interested by the girl’s forlornness when I first saw her; that I did not do wrong to interest Mrs. March in her; that she did not sin in going shopping with Miss Gage and Mrs. Deering; that we had not sinned, either of us, in rejoicing that Kendricks had come to Saratoga, or in letting Mrs. Deering go home to her sick husband and leave Miss Gage on our hands; that we were not wicked in permitting the young fellow to help us make her have a good time. In this colloquy I did all the reasoning, and Mrs. March’s conscience was completely silenced; but it rose triumphant in my miserable soul when I met Miss Gage at breakfast, looking radiantly happy, and disposed to fellowship me in an unusual confidence because, as I clearly perceived, of our last night’s adventure. I said to myself bitterly that happiness did not become her style, and I hoped that she would get away with her confounded rapture before Mrs. March came down. I resolved not to tell Mrs. March if it fell out so, but at the same time, as a sort of atonement, I decided to begin keeping the sharpest kind of watch upon Miss Gage for the outward signs and tokens of love.