April Hopes

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APRIL HOPES

1887

by William Dean Howells




I.

From his place on the floor of the Hemenway Gymnasium Mr. Elbridge G.
Mavering looked on at the Class Day gaiety with the advantage which his
stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these were pretty
girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the eclecticism
of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious compromises between
walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that the young men on whose
arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the crowd of
stationary spectators, were very much younger than students used to be,
whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the cut-away of the
Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves did not look so
old as he remembered them in his day. There was a band playing somewhere,
and the galleries were well filled with spectators seated at their ease,
and intent on the party-coloured turmoil of the floor, where from time to
time the younger promenaders broke away from the ranks into a waltz, and
after some turns drifted back, smiling and controlling their quick
breath, and resumed their promenade. The place was intensely light, in
the candour of a summer day which had no reserves; and the brilliancy was
not broken by the simple decorations. Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the
pine posts of the aisles, and swung in festoons overhead; masses of
tropical plants in pots were set along between the posts on one side of
the room; and on the other were the lunch tables, where a great many
people were standing about, eating chicken and salmon salads, or
strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking claret-cup. From the whole rose
that blended odour of viands, of flowers, of stuff's, of toilet perfumes,
which is the characteristic expression of, all social festivities, and
which exhilarates or depresses--according as one is new or old to it.

Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he
expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon.
the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons, but
he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless charged
with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the wearisome
encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously put on the
severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance where others are
meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly trimmed reddish-grey
beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of him, and saluted him with
the "Hello, Mavering!" of a contemporary.

His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition.
"Why, John Munt! is that you?" he said, and he took into his large moist
palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out into
the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr. Mavering spoke
in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of tongue; which
gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr. Munt used the sort of
bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us as a chest tone. But they
were cut short in their intersecting questions and exclamations by the
presence of the lady who detached herself from Mr. Munt's arm as if to
leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.

"Oh!" he said, suddenly recurring to her; "let me introduce you to Mrs.
Pasmer, Mr. Mavering," and the latter made a bow that creased his
waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer's pretty little nose.

His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age;
and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve. His
coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a certain
habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large handsome
face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the
consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of
pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe.
Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of
some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three
things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of
these old friends. They declared that they had not seen each other for
twenty years, or, at any rate, not since '59. She listened while they
disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt,
as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she
saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which
had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment
before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have
appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not
a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she was
not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been
pre-arranged, "Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you'll let me leave you with
Mr. Mavering a moment, I'll go off and bring that unnatural child to you;
no use dragging you round through this crowd longer."

He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite
and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and Mr.
Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his jaws
together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble in
getting in the first remark. "Isn't all this charming, Mr. Mavering?" She
spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood looking up,
at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the other drooped, and a
tasteful composition of her fan and hands and handkerchief at her waist.

"Yes, ma'am, it is," said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma'am to her
with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer's mind
fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, "Congressman
from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president?
railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town?--no, Mr. Munt
said Mister," and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to centre
there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her neat
brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her very
appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the
battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer;
but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say,
with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity,
whatever it might be, "A number of the young fellows together can give a
much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than
we used to do in our rooms."

"Ah, then you're a Harvard man too!" said Mrs. Primer to herself, with
surprise, which she kept to herself, and she said to Mavering: "Oh yes,
indeed! It's altogether better. Aren't they nice looking fellows?" she
said, putting up her glass to look at the promenaders.

"Yes," Mr. Mavering assented. "I suppose," he added, out of the
consciousness of his own relation to the affair--"I suppose you've a son
somewhere here?"

"Oh dear, no!" cried Mrs. Primer, with a mingling, superhuman, but for
her of ironical deprecation and derision. "Only a daughter, Mr.
Mavering."

At this feat of Mrs. Pasmer's, Mr. Mavering looked at her with question
as to her precise intention, and ended by repeating, hopelessly, "Only a
daughter?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, "only a poor,
despised young girl, Mr. Mavering."

"You speak," said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, "as if it
were a misfortune," and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had its
queer fascination.

"Why, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Pasmer.

"Well, I shouldn't have thought so."

"Then you don't believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and devotion
have gone out? You don't think the young men are all spoiled nowadays,
and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?"

"No," said Mr. Mavering slowly, as if recovering from the shock of the
novel ideas. "Do you?"

"Oh, I'm such a stranger in Boston--I've lived abroad so long--that I
don't know. One hears all kinds of things. But I'm so glad you're not one
of those--pessimists!"

"Well," said Mr. Mavering, still thoughtfully, "I don't know that I can
speak by the card exactly. I can't say how it is now. I haven't been at a
Class Day spread since my own Class Day; I haven't even been at
Commencement more than once or twice. But in my time here we didn't
expect the young ladies to show us attentions; at any rate, we didn't
wait for them to do it. We were very glad, to be asked to meet them, and
we thought it an honour if the young ladies would let us talk or dance
with them, or take them to picnics. I don't think that any of them could
complain of want of attention."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pasmer, "that's what I preached, that's what I
prophesied, when I brought my daughter home from Europe. I told her that
a girl's life in America was one long triumph; but they say now that
girls have more attention in London even than in Cambridge. One hears
such dreadful things!"

"Like what?" asked Mr. Mavering, with the unserious interest which Mrs.
Primer made most people feel in her talk.

"Oh; it's too vast a subject. But they tell you about charming girls
moping the whole evening through at Boston parties, with no young men to
talk with, and sitting from the beginning to the end of an assembly and
not going on the floor once. They say that unless a girl fairly throws
herself at the young men's heads she isn't noticed. It's this terrible
disproportion of the sexes that's at the root of it, I suppose; it
reverses everything. There aren't enough young men to go half round, and
they know it, and take advantage of it. I suppose it began in the war."

He laughed, and, "I should think," he said, laying hold of a single idea
out of several which she had presented, "that there would always be
enough young men in Cambridge to go round."

Mrs. Pasmer gave a little cry. "In Cambridge!"

"Yes; when I was in college our superiority was entirely numerical."

"But that's all passed long ago, from what I hear," retorted Mrs. Pasmer.
"I know very well that it used to be thought a great advantage for a girl
to be brought up in Cambridge, because it gave her independence and ease
of manner to have so many young men attentive to her. But they say the
students all go into Boston now, and if the Cambridge girls want to meet
them, they have to go there too. Oh, I assure you that, from what I hear,
they've changed all that since our time, Mr. Mavering."

Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she would
have approved of in another. The result was apparent in the jocosity of
this heavy Mr. Mavering's reply.

"Well, then, I'm glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked
generation. But I presume that unnatural supremacy of the young men is
brought low, so to speak, after marriage?"

Mrs. Primer let herself go a little further. "Oh, give us an equal
chance," she laughed, "and we can always take care of ourselves, and
something more. They say," she added, "that the young married women now
have all the attention that girls could wish."

"H'm!" said Mr. Mavering, frowning. "I think I should be tempted to box
my boy's ears if I saw him paying another man's wife attention."

"What a Roman father!" cried Mrs. Pasmer, greatly amused, and letting
herself go a little further yet. She said to herself that she really must
find out who this remarkable Mr. Mavering was, and she cast her eye over
the hall for some glimpse of the absent Munt, whose arm she meant to
take, and whose ear she meant to fill with questions. But she did not see
him, and something else suggested itself. "He probably wouldn't let you
see him, or if he did, you wouldn't know it."

"How not know it?"

Mrs. Primer did not answer. "One hears such dreadful things. What do you
say--or you'll think I'm a terrible gossip--"

"Oh no;" said Mr. Mavering, impatient for the dreadful thing, whatever it
was.

Mrs. Primer resumed: "--to the young married women meeting last winter
just after a lot of pretty girls had came out, and magnanimously
resolving to give the Buds a chance in society?"

"The Buds?"

"Yes, the Rose-buds--the debutantes; it's an odious little word, but
everybody uses it. Don't you think that's a strange state of things for
America? But I can't believe all those things," said Mrs. Pasmer,
flinging off the shadow of this lurid social condition. "Isn't this a
pretty scene?"

"Yes, it is," Mr. Mavering admitted, withdrawing his mind gradually from
a consideration of Mrs. Pasmer's awful instances. "Yes!" he added, in
final self-possession. "The young fellows certainly do things in a great
deal better style nowadays than we used to."

"Oh yes, indeed! And all those pretty girls do seem to be having such a
good time!"

"Yes; they don't have the despised and rejected appearance that you'd
like to have one believe."

"Not in the least!" Mrs. Pasmer readily consented. "They look radiantly
happy. It shows that you can't trust anything that people say to you."
She abandoned the ground she had just been taking without apparent shame
for her inconsistency. "I fancy it's pretty much as it's always been: if
a girl is attractive, the young men find it out."

"Perhaps," said Mr. Mavering, unbending with dignity, "the young married
women have held another meeting, and resolved to give the Buds one more
chance."

"Oh, there are some pretty mature Roses here," said Mrs. Pasmer, laughing
evasively. "But I suppose Class Day can never be taken from the young
girls."

"I hope not," said Mr. Mavering. His wandering eye fell upon some young
men bringing refreshments across the nave toward them, and he was
reminded to ask Mrs. Pasmer, "Will you have something to eat?" He had
himself had a good deal to eat, before he took up his position at the
advantageous point where John Munt had found him.

"Why, yes, thank you," said Mrs. Pasmer. "I ought to say, 'An ice,
please,' but I'm really hungry, and--"

"I'll get you some of the salad," said Mr. Mavering, with the increased
liking a man feels for a woman when she owns to an appetite. "Sit down
here," he added, and he caught a vacant chair toward her. When he turned
about from doing so, he confronted a young gentleman coming up to Mrs.
Pasmer with a young lady on his arm, and making a very low bow of
relinquishment.




II.

The men looked smilingly at each other without saying anything; and the
younger took in due form the introduction which the young lady gave him.

"My mother, Mr. Mavering."

"Mr. Mavering!" cried Mrs. Pasmer, in a pure astonishment, before she had
time to colour it with a polite variety of more conventional emotions.
She glanced at the two men, and gave a little "Oh?" of inquiry and
resignation, and then said, demurely, "Let me introduce you to Mr.
Mavering, Alice," while the young fellow laughed nervously, and pulled
out his handkerchief, partly to hide the play of his laughter, and partly
to wipe away the perspiration which a great deal more laughing had
already gathered on his forehead. He had a vein that showed prominently
down its centre, and large, mobile, girlish blue eyes under good brows,
an arched nose, and rather a long face and narrow chin. He had beautiful
white teeth; as he laughed these were seen set in a jaw that contracted
very much toward the front. He was tall and slim, and he wore with
elegance the evening dress which Class Day custom prescribes for the
Seniors; in his button-hole he had a club button.

"I shall not have to ask an introduction to Mr. Mavering; and you've
robbed me of the pleasure of giving him one to you, Mrs. Pasmer," he
said.

She heard the young man in the course of a swift review of what she had
said to his father, and with a formless resentment of the father's not
having told her he had a son there; but she answered with the flattering
sympathy she had the use of, "Oh, but you won't miss one pleasure out of
so many to-day, Mr. Mavering; and think of the little dramatic surprise!"

"Oh, perfect," he said, with another laugh. "I told Miss Pasmer as we
came up."

"Oh, then you were in the surprise, Alice!" said Mrs. Pasmer, searching
her daughter's eyes for confession or denial of this little community of
interest. The girl smiled slightly upon the young man, but not
disapprovingly, and made no other answer to her mother, who went on:
"Where in the world have you been? Did Mr. Munt find you? Who told you
where I was? Did you see me? How did you know I was here? Was there ever
anything so droll?" She did not mean her questions to be answered, or at
least not then; for, while her daughter continued to smile rather more
absently, and young Mavering broke out continuously in his nervous laugh,
and his father stood regarding him with visible satisfaction, she hummed
on, turning to the young man: "But I'm quite appalled at Alice's having
monopolised even for a few minutes a whole Senior--and probably an
official Senior at that," she said, with a glance at the pink and white
club button in his coat lapel, "and I can't let you stay another instant,
Mr. Mavering. I know very well how many demands you have upon you and you
must go back directly to your sisters and your cousins and your aunts,
and all the rest of them; you must indeed."

"Oh no! Don't drive me away, Mrs. Pasmer," pleaded the young man,
laughing violently, and then wiping his face. "I assure you that I've no
encumbrances of any kind here except my father, and he seems to have been
taking very good care of himself." They all laughed at this, and the
young fellow hurried on: "Don't be alarmed at my button; it only means a
love of personal decoration, if that's where you got the notion of my
being an official Senior. This isn't my spread; I shall hope to welcome
you at Beck Hall after the Tree; and I wish you'd let me be of use to
you. Wouldn't you like to go round to some of the smaller spreads? I
think it would amuse you. And have you got tickets to the Tree, to see us
make fools of ourselves? It's worth seeing, Mrs. Pasmer, I assure you."

He rattled on very rapidly but with such a frankness in his urgency, such
amiable kindliness, that Mrs. Pasmer could not feel that it was pushing.
She looked at her daughter, but she stood as passive in the transaction
as the elder Mavering. She was taller than her mother, and as she waited,
her supple figure described that fine lateral curve which one sees in
some Louis Quinze portraits; this effect was enhanced by the fashion of
her dress of pale sage green, with a wide stripe or sash of white
dropping down the front, from her delicate waist. The same simple
combination of colours was carried up into her hat, which surmounted
darker hair than Mrs. Pasmer's, and a complexion of wholesome pallor; her
eyes were grey and grave, with black brows, and her face, which was
rather narrow, had a pleasing irregularity in the sharp jut of the nose;
in profile the parting of the red lips showed well back into the cheek.

"I don't know," said Mrs. Pasmer, in her own behalf; and she added in
his, "about letting you take so much trouble," so smoothly that it would
have been quite impossible to detect the point of union in the two
utterances.

"Well, don't call it names, anyway, Mrs. Pasmer," pleaded the young man.
"I thought it was nothing but a pleasure and a privilege--"

"The fact is," she explained, neither consenting nor refusing, "that we
were expecting to meet some friends who had tickets for us"--young
Mavering's face fell--"and I can't imagine what's happened."

"Oh, let's hope something dreadful," he cried.

"Perhaps you know them," she delayed further. "Professor Saintsbury!"

"Well, rather! Why, they were here about an hour ago--both of them. They
must have been looking for you."

"Yes; we were to meet them here. We waited to come out with other
friends, and I was afraid we were late." Mrs. Pasmer's face expressed a
tempered disappointment, and she looked at her daughter for indications
of her wishes in the circumstances; seeing in her eye a willingness to
accept young Mavering's invitation, she hesitated more decidedly than she
had yet done, for she was, other things being equal, quite willing to
accept it herself. But other things were not equal, and the whole
situation was very odd. All that she knew of Mr. Mavering the elder was
that he was the old friend of John Munt, and she knew far too little of
John Munt, except that he seemed to go everywhere, and to be welcome, not
to feel that his introduction was hardly a warrant for what looked like
an impending intimacy. She did not dislike Mr. Mavering; he was evidently
a country person of great self-respect, and no doubt of entire
respectability. He seemed very intelligent, too. He was a Harvard man; he
had rather a cultivated manner, or else naturally a clever way of saying
things. But all that was really nothing, if she knew no more about him,
and she certainly did not. If she could only have asked her daughter who
it was that presented young Mavering to her, that might have formed some
clew, but there was no earthly chance of asking this, and, besides, it
was probably one of those haphazard introductions that people give on
such occasions. Young Mavering's behaviour gave her still greater
question: his self-possession, his entire absence of anxiety; or any
expectation of rebuff or snub, might be the ease of unimpeachable social
acceptance, or it might be merely adventurous effrontery; only something
ingenuous and good in the young fellow's handsome face forbade this
conclusion. That his face was so handsome was another of the
complications. She recalled, in the dreamlike swiftness with which all
these things passed through her mind, what her friends had said to Alice
about her being sure to meet her fate on Class Day, and she looked at her
again to see if she had met it.

"Well, mamma?" said the girl, smiling at her mother's look.

Mrs. Pasmer thought she must have been keeping young Mavering waiting a
long time for his answer. "Why, of course, Alice. But I really don't know
what to do about the Saintsburys." This was not in the least true, but it
instantly seemed so to Mrs. Pasmer, as a plausible excuse will when we
make it.

"Why, I'll tell you what, Mrs. Pasmer," said young Mavering, with a
cordial unsuspicion that both won and reassured her, "we'll be sure to
find them at some of the spreads. Let me be of that much use, anyway; you
must."

"We really oughtn't to let you," said Mrs. Pasmer, making a last effort
to cling to her reluctance, but feeling it fail, with a sensation that
was not disagreeable. She could not help being pleased with the pleasure
that she saw in her daughter's face.

Young Mavering's was radiant. "I'll be back in just half a minute," he
said, and he took a gay leave of them in running to speak to another
student at the opposite end of the hall.




III.

"You must allow me to get you something to eat first, Mrs. Pasmer," said
the elder Mavering.

"Oh no, thank you," Mrs. Pasmer began. But she changed her mind and said,
"Or, yes; I will, Mr. Mavering: a very little salad, please." She had
really forgotten her hunger, as a woman will in the presence of any
social interest; but she suddenly thought his going would give her a
chance for two words with her daughter, and so she sent him. As he
creaked heavily across the smooth floor of the nave; "Alice," she
whispered, "I don't know exactly what I've done: Who introduced this
young Mr. Mavering to you?"

"Mr. Munt."

"Mr. Munt!"

"Yes; he came for me; he said you sent him. He introduced Mr. Mavering,
and he was very polite. Mr. Mavering said we ought to go up into the
gallery and see how it looked; and Mr. Munt said he'd been up, and Mr.
Mavering promised to bring me back to him, but he was not there when we
got back. Mr. Mavering got me some ice cream first, and then he found you
for me."

"Really," said Mrs. Pasmer to herself, "the combat thickens!" To her
daughter she said, "He's very handsome."

"He laughs too much," said the daughter. Her mother recognised her
uncandour with a glance. "But he waltzes well," added the girl.

"Waltzes?" echoed the mother. "Did you waltz with him, Alice?"

"Everybody else was dancing. He asked me for a turn or two, and of course
I did it. What difference?"

"Oh, none--none. Only--I didn't see you."

"Perhaps you weren't looking."

"Yes, I was looking all the time."

"What do you mean, mamma?"

"Well," said Mrs. Pasmer, in a final despair, "we don't know anything
about them."

"We're the only people here who don't, then," said her daughter. "The
ladies were bowing right left to him all the time, and he kept asking if
I knew this one and that one, and all I could say was that some of them
were distant cousins, but I wasn't acquainted with them. I would think
he'd wonder who we were."