April Hopes

W >> William Dean Howells >> April Hopes


"Nothing. Or I will tell you when we are alone, Mrs. Trevor," said Mrs.
Brinkley, with burlesque sympathy. "We oughtn't to have a scene on both
sides of the foot-lights."

A boyish face, all excitement, was thrust out between the curtains
forming the proscenium of the little theatre. "All ready, Mrs. Trevor?"

"Yes, all ready, Jim."

He dashed the curtains apart, and marred the effect of his own
disappearance from the scene by tripping over the long legs of Jove,
stretched out to the front, where he sat on Mrs. Trevor's richest rug,
propped with sofa cushions on either hand.

"So perish all the impious race of titans, enemies of the gods!" said
Mavering solemnly, as the boy fell sprawling. "Pick the earth-born giant
up, Vulcan, my son."

The boy was very small for his age; every one saw that the accident had
not been premeditated, and when Vulcan appeared, with an exaggerated
limp, and carried the boy off, a burst of laughter went up from the
company.

It did not matter what the play was to have been after that; it all
turned upon the accident. Juno came on, and began to reproach Jupiter for
his carelessness. "I've sent Mercury upstairs for the aynica; but he says
it's no use: that boy won't be able to pass ball for a week. How often
have I told you not to sit with your feet out that way! I knew you'd hurt
somebody."

"I didn't have my feet out," retorted Jupiter. "Besides," he added, with
dignity, and a burlesque of marital special pleading which every wife and
husband recognised, "I always sit with my feet out so, and I always will,
so long as I've the spirit of a god."

"Isn't he delicious?" buzzed Mrs. Pasmer, leaning backward to whisper to
Mrs. Brinkley; it was not that she thought what Dan had just said was so
very fanny, but people are immoderately applausive of amateur dramatics,
and she was feeling very fond of the young fellow.

The improvisation went wildly and adventurously on, and the curtains
dropped together amidst the facile acclaim of the audience:

"It's very well for Jupiter that he happened to think of the curtain,"
said Mrs. Brinkley. "They couldn't have kept it up at that level much
longer."

"Oh, do you think so?" softly murmured Mrs. Pasmer. "It seemed as if they
could have kept it up all night if they liked."

"I doubt it. Mr. Trevor," said Mrs. Brinkley to the host, who had come up
for her congratulations, "do you always have such brilliant
performances?"

"Well, we have so far," he answered modestly; and Mrs. Brinkley laughed
with him. This was the first entertainment at Trevor cottage.

"'Sh!" went up all round them, and Mrs. Trevor called across the room, in
a reproachful whisper loud enough for every one to hear, "My
dear!--enjoying yourself!" while Mavering stood between the parted
curtains waiting for the attention of the company.

"On account of an accident to the call-boy and the mental exhaustion of
some of the deities, the next piece will be omitted, and the performance
will begin with the one after. While the audience is waiting, Mercury
will go round and take up a collection for the victim of the recent
accident, who will probably be indisposed for life. The collector will be
accompanied by a policeman, and may be safely trusted."

He disappeared behind the curtain with a pas and r swirl of his draperies
like the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, and the audience again abandoned
itself to applause.

"How very witty he is!" said Miss Cotton, who sat near John Munt. "Don't
you think he's really witty?"

"Yes," Munt assented critically. "But you should have known his father."

"Oh, do you know his father?"

"I was in college with him."

"Oh, do tell me about him, and all Mr. Mavering's family. We're so
interested, you know, on account of--Isn't it pretty to have that little
love idyl going on here? I wonder--I've been wondering all the time--what
she thinks of all this. Do you suppose she quite likes it? His costume
is so very remarkable!" Miss Cotton, in the absence of any lady of her
intimate circle, was appealing confidentially to John Munt.

"Why, do you think there's anything serious between them?" he asked,
dropping his head forward as people do in church when they wish to
whisper to some one in the same pew.

"Why, yes, it seems so," murmured Miss Cotton. "His admiration is quite
undisguised, isn't it?"

"A man never can tell," said Munt. "We have to leave those things to you
ladies."

"Oh, every one's talking of it, I assure you. And you know his family?"

"I knew his father once rather better than anybody else."

"Indeed!"

"Yes." Munt sketched rather a flattered portrait of the elder Mavering,
his ability, his goodness, his shyness, which he had always had to make
such a hard fight with. Munt was sensible of an access of popularity in
knowing Dan Mavering's people, and he did not spare his colours.

"Then it isn't from his father that he gets everything. He isn't in the
least shy," said Miss Cotton.

"That must be the mother."

"And the mother?"

"The mother I don't know."

Miss Cotton sighed. "Sometimes I wish that he did show a little more
trepidation. It would seem as if he were more alive to the great
difference that there is between Alice Pasmer and other girls."

Munt laughed a man's laugh. "I guess he's pretty well alive to that, if
he's in love with her."

"Oh, in a certain way, of course, but not in the highest way. Now, for
instance, if he felt all her fineness as--as we do, I don't believe he'd
be willing to appear before her just like that." The father of the gods
wore a damask tablecloth of a pale golden hue and a classic pattern; his
arms were bare, and rather absurdly white; on his feet a pair of
lawn-tennis shoes had a very striking effect of sandals.

"It seems to me," Miss Cotton pursued; "that if he really appreciated her
in the highest way, he would wish never to do an undignified or trivial
thing in her presence."

"Oh, perhaps it's that that pleases her in him. They say we're always
taken with opposites."

"Yes--do you think so?" asked Miss Cotton.

The curtains were flung apart, and the Judgment of Paris followed rather
tamely upon what had gone before, though the two young fellows who did
Juno and Minerva were very amusing, and the dialogue was full of hits.
Some of the audience, an appreciative minority, were of opinion that
Mavering and Miss Anderson surpassed themselves in it; she promised him
the most beautiful and cultured wife in Greece. "That settles it," he
answered. They came out arm in arm, and Paris, having put on a striped
tennis coat over his short-sleeved Greek tunic, moved round among the
company for their congratulations, Venus ostentatiously showing the apple
she had won.

"I can haydly keep from eating it," she explained to Alice; before whom
she dropped Mavering's arm. "I'm awfully hungry. It's hayd woyk."

Alice stood with her head drawn back, looking at the excited girl with a
smile, in which seemed to hover somewhere a latent bitterness.

Mavering, with a flushed face and a flying tongue, was exchanging sallies
with her mother, who smothered him in flatteries.

Mrs. Trevor came toward the group, and announced supper. "Mr. Paris, will
you take Miss Aphrodite out?"

Miss Anderson swept a low bow of renunciation, and tacitly relinquished
Mavering to Alice.

"Oh, no, no!" said Alice, shrinking back from him, with an
intensification of her uncertain smile. "A mere mortal?"

"Oh, how very good!" said Mrs. Trevor.

There began to be, without any one's intending it, that sort of tacit
misunderstanding which is all the worse because it can only follow upon a
tacit understanding like that which had established itself between Alice
and Mavering. They laughed and joked together gaily about all that went
on; they were perfectly good friends; he saw that she and her mother were
promptly served; he brought them salad and ice-cream and coffee himself,
only waiting officially upon Miss Anderson first, and Alice thanked him,
with the politest deprecation of his devotion; but if their eyes met, it
was defensively, and the security between them was gone. Mavering vaguely
felt the loss, without knowing how to retrieve it, and it made him go on
more desperately with Miss Anderson. He laughed and joked recklessly, and
Alice began to mark a more explicit displeasure with her. She made her
mother go rather early.

On her part, Miss Anderson seemed to find reason for resentment in
Alice's bearing toward her. As if she had said to herself that her frank
loyalty had been thrown away upon a cold and unresponsive nature, and
that her harmless follies in the play had been met with unjust
suspicions, she began to make reprisals, she began in dead earnest to
flirt with Mavering. Before the evening passed she had made him seem
taken with her; but how justly she had done this, and with how much fault
of his, no one could have said. There were some who did not notice it at
all, but these were not people who knew Mavering, or knew Alice very
well.




XX.

The next morning Alice was walking slowly along the road toward the
fishing village, when she heard rapid, plunging strides down the wooded
hillside on her right. She knew them for Mavering's, and she did not
affect surprise when he made a final leap into the road, and shortened
his pace beside her.

"May I join you, Miss Pasmer?"

"I am only going down to the herring-houses," she began.

"And you'll let me go with you?" said the young fellow. "The fact
is--you're always so frank that you make everything else seem silly--I've
been waiting up there in the woods for you to come by. Mrs. Pasmer told
me you had started this way, and I cut across lots to overtake you, and
then, when you came in sight, I had to let you pass before I could screw
my courage up to the point of running after you. How is that for
open-mindedness?"

"It's a very good beginning, I should think."

"Well, don't you think you ought to say now that you're sorry you were so
formidable?"

"Am I so formidable?" she asked, and then recognised that she had been
trapped into a leading question.

"You are to me. Because I would like always to be sure that I had pleased
you, and for the last twelve hours I've only been able to make sure that
I hadn't. That's the consolation I'm going away with. I thought I'd get
you to confirm my impression explicitly. That's why I wished to join
you."

"Are you--were you going away?"

"I'm going by the next boat. What's the use of staying? I should only
make bad worse. Yesterday I hoped But last night spoiled everything.
'Miss Pasmer,'" he broke out, with a rush of feeling, "you must know why
I came up here to Campobello."

His steps took him a little ahead of her, and he could look back into her
face as he spoke. But apparently he saw nothing in it to give him courage
to go on, for he stopped, and then continued, lightly: "And I'm going
away because I feel that I've made a failure of the expedition. I knew
that you were supremely disgusted with me last night; but it will be a
sort of comfort if you'll tell me so."

"Oh," said Alice, "everybody thought it was very brilliant, I'm sure."

"And you thought it was a piece of buffoonery. Well, it was. I wish you'd
say so, Miss Pasmer; though I didn't mean the playing entirely. It would
be something to start from, and I want to make a beginning--turn over a
new leaf. Can't you help me to inscribe a good resolution of the most
iron-clad description on the stainless page? I've lain awake all night
composing one. Wouldn't you like to hear it?"

"I can't see what good that would do," she said, with some relenting
toward a smile, in which he instantly prepared himself to bask.

"But you will when I've done it. Now listen!"

"Please don't go on." She cut him short with a return to her severity,
which he would not recognise.

"Well, perhaps I'd better not," he consented. "It's rather a long
resolution, and I don't know that I've committed it perfectly yet. But I
do assure you that if you were disgusted last night, you were not the
only one. I was immensely disgusted myself; and why I wanted you to tell
me so, was because when I have a strong pressure brought to bear I can
brace up, and do almost anything," he said, dropping into earnest. Then
he rose lightly again, and added, "You have no idea how unpleasant it is
to lie awake all night throwing dust in the eyes of an accusing
conscience."

"It must have been, if you didn't succeed," said Alice drily.

"Yes, that's it--that's just the point. If I'd succeeded, I should be all
right, don't you see. But it was a difficult case." She turned her face
away, but he saw the smile on her cheek, and he laughed as if this were
what he had been trying to make her do. "I got beaten. I had to give up,
and own it. I had to say that I had thrown my chance away, and I had
better take myself off." He looked at her with a real anxiety in his gay
eyes.

"The boat goes just after lunch, I believe," she said indifferently.

"Oh yes, I shall have time to get lunch before I go," he said, with
bitterness. "But lunch isn't the only thing; it isn't even the main
thing, Miss Pasmer."

"No?" She hardened her heart.

He waited for her to say something more, and then he went on. "The
question is whether there's time to undo last night, abolish it, erase it
from the calendar of recorded time--sponge it out, in short--and get back
to yesterday afternoon." She made no reply to this. "Don't you think it
was a very pleasant picnic, Miss Pasmer?" he asked, with pensive
respectfulness.

"Very," she answered drily.

He cast a glance at the woods that bordered the road on either side.
"That weird forest--I shall never forget it."

"No; it was something to remember," she said.

"And the blueberry patch? We mustn't forget the blueberry patch."

"There were a great many blueberries."

She walked on, and he said, "And that bridge--you don't have that feeling
of having been here before?"

"No."

"Am I walking too fast for you, Miss Pasmer?"

"No; I like to walk fast."

"But wouldn't you like to sit down? On this wayside log, for example?" He
pointed it out with his stick. "It seems to invite repose, and I know you
must be tired."

"I'm not tired."

"Ah, that shows that you didn't lie awake grieving over your follies all
night. I hope you rested well, Miss Pasmer." She said nothing. "If I
thought--if I could hope that you hadn't, it would be a bond of sympathy,
and I would give almost anything for a bond of sympathy just now, Miss
Pasmer. Alice!" he said, with sudden seriousness. "I know that I'm not
worthy even to think of you, and that you're whole worlds above me in
every way. It's that that takes all heart out of me, and leaves me
without a word to say when I'd like to say so much. I would like to
speak--tell you--"

She interrupted him. "I wish to speak to you, Mr. Mavering, and tell you
that--I'm very tired, and I'm going back to the hotel. I must ask you to
let me go back alone."

"Alice, I love you."

"I'm sorry you said it--sorry, sorry."

"Why?" he asked, with hopeless futility.

"Because there can be no love between us--not friendship even--not
acquaintance."

"I shouldn't have asked for your acquaintance, your friendship, if--" His
words conveyed a delicate reproach, and they stung her, because they put
her in the wrong.

"No matter," she began wildly. "I didn't mean to wound you. But we must
part, and we must never see each other again:"

He stood confused, as if he could not make it out or believe it. "But
yesterday--"

"It's to-day now."

"Ah, no! It's last night. And I can explain."

"No!" she cried. "You shall not make me out so mean and vindictive. I
don't care for last night, nor for anything that happened." This was not
true, but it seemed so to her at the moment; she thought that she really
no longer resented his association with Miss Anderson and his separation
from herself in all that had taken place.

"Then what is it?"

"I can't tell you. But everything is over between us--that's all."

"But yesterday--and all these days past--you seemed--"

"It's unfair of you to insist--it's ungenerous, ungentlemanly."

That word, which from a woman's tongue always strikes a man like a blow
in the face, silenced Mavering. He set his lips and bowed, and they
parted. She turned upon her way, and he kept the path which she had been
going.

It was not the hour when the piazzas were very full, and she slipped into
the dim hotel corridor undetected, or at least undetained. She flung into
her room, and confronted her mother.

Mrs. Pasmer was there looking into a trunk that had overflowed from her
own chamber. "What is the matter?" she said to her daughter's excited
face.

"Mr. Mavering--"

"Well?"

"And I refused him."

Mrs. Pasmer was one of those ladies who in any finality have a keen
retrovision of all the advantages of a different conclusion. She had been
thinking, since she told Dan Mavering which way Alice had gone to walk,
that if he were to speak to her now, and she were to accept him, it would
involve a great many embarrassing consequences; but she had consoled
herself with the probability that he would not speak so soon after the
effects of last night, but would only try at the furthest to make his
peace with Alice. Since he had spoken, though, and she had refused him,
Mrs. Pasmer instantly saw all the pleasant things that would have
followed in another event. "Refused him?" she repeated provisionally,
while she gathered herself for a full exploration of all the facts.

"Yes, mamma; and I can't talk about it. I wish never to hear his name
again, or to see him, or to speak to him."

"Why, of course not," said Mrs. Pasmer, with a fine smile, from the
vantage-ground of her superior years, "if you've refused him." She left
the trunk which she had been standing over, and sat down, while Alice
swept to and fro before her excitedly. "But why did you refuse him, my
dear?"

"Why? Because he's detestable--perfectly ignoble."

Her mother probably knew how to translate these exalted expressions into
the more accurate language of maturer life. "Do you mean last night?"

"Last night?" cried Alice tragically. "No. Why should I care for last
night?"

"Then I don't understand what you mean," retorted Mrs. Pasmer. "What did
he say?" she demanded, with authority.

"Mamma, I can't talk about it--I won't."

"But you must, Alice. It's your duty. Of course I must know about it.
What did he say?"

Alice walked up and down the room with her lips firmly closed--like
Mavering's lips, it occurred to her; and then she opened them, but
without speaking.

"What did he say?" persisted her mother, and her persistence had its
effect.

"Say?" exclaimed the girl indignantly. "He tried to make me say."

"I see," said Mrs. Pasmer. "Well?"

"But I forced him to speak, and then--I rejected him. That's all."

"Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Pasmer. "He was afraid of you."

"And that's what made it the more odious. Do you think I wished him to be
afraid of me? Would that be any pleasure? I should hate myself if I had
to quell anybody into being unlike themselves." She sat down for a
moment, and then jumped up again, and went to the window, for no reason,
and came back.

"Yes," said her mother impartially, "he's light, and he's roundabout. He
couldn't come straight at anything."

"And would you have me accept such a--being?"

Mrs. Pasmer smiled a little at the literary word, and continued: "But
he's very sweet, and he's as good as the day's long, and he's very fond
of you, and--I thought you liked him."

The girl threw up her arms across her eyes. "Oh, how can you say such a
thing, mamma?"

She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her
hands, and cried.

Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, "But if
you feel so about it--"

"Mamma!" Alice sprang to her feet.

"It needn't come from you. I could make some excuse to see him--write him
a little note--"

"Never!" exclaimed Alice grandly. "What I've done I've done from my
reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it."

"Oh, very well," said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly
disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her
daughter's tragics. "But if you think that the feelings have nothing to
do with such a matter, you're very much mistaken." If she believed that
her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or
had not been able to give them, she did not say so.

The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the
causes of Mavering's going before the top of his hat disappeared below
the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds. One
faction held that he was going because Alice had refused him, and that
his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair. The
other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually engaged,
they understood each other, and he was going away because he wanted to
tell his family, or something of that kind. Between the two opinions Miss
Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to either. "What do you
really think?" she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch at the corner
of the piazza where the group was seated.

"Oh, what does it matter, at their age?" she demanded.

"But they're just of the age when it does happen to matter," suggested
Mrs. Stamwell.

"Yes," said Mrs. Brinkley, "and that's what makes the whole thing so
perfectly ridiculous. Just think of two children, one of twenty and the
other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in such
a vital matter! Should we trust their judgment in regard to the smallest
business affair? Of course not. They're babes in arms, morally and
mentally speaking. People haven't the data for being wisely in love till
they've reached the age when they haven't the least wish to be so. Oh, I
suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty; I can
look back and see that I did; and, what's more preposterous still, I
thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four. But we were no more fit to
accept or reject each other at that infantile period--"

"Do you really think so?" asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of
Mrs. Brinkley's irony.

"Yes, it does seem out of all reason," admitted Mrs. Stamwell.

"Of course it is," said Mrs. Brinkley. "If she has rejected him, she's
done a very safe thing. Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty.
Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved
each other."

Miss Cotton reflected a moment. "It is strange that such an important
question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far
from mature. I never happened to look at it in that light before."

"Yes," said Mrs. Brinkley--and she made herself comfortable in an arm
chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must
pass--"but it's only part and parcel of the whole affair. I'm sure that
no grown person can see the ridiculous young things--inexperienced,
ignorant, featherbrained--that nature intrusts with children, their
immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies,
without rebelling at the whole system. When you see what most young
mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the whole
race doesn't teeth and die. Yes, there's one thing I feel pretty sure
of--that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn't to be mothers at
all, there ought to be only grandmothers."

The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first to become
grave. At the bottom of her heart there was a doubt whether so light a
way of treating serious things was not a little wicked.

"Perhaps," she said, "we shall have to go back to the idea that
engagements and marriages are not intended to be regulated by the
judgment, but by the affections."

"I don't know what's intended," said Mrs. Brinkley, "but I know what is.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the affections have it their own
way, and I must say I don't think the judgment could make a greater mess
of it. In fact," she continued, perhaps provoked to the excess by the
deprecation she saw in Miss Cotton's eye, "I consider every broken
engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise."

Miss Cotton said nothing. The other ladies said, "Why, Mrs. Brinkley!"

"Yes. The thing has gone altogether too far. The pendulum has swung in
that direction out of all measure. We are married too much. And as a
natural consequence we are divorced too much. The whole case is in a
nutshell: if there were no marriages, there would be no divorces, and
that great abuse would be corrected, at any rate."

All the ladies laughed, Miss Cotton more and more sorrowfully. She liked
to have people talk as they do in genteel novels. Mrs. Brinkley's bold
expressions were a series of violent shocks to her nature, and imparted a
terrible vibration to the fabric of her whole little rose-coloured ideal
world; if they had not been the expressions of a person whom a great many
unquestionable persons accepted, who had such an undoubted standing, she
would have thought them very coarse. As it was, they had a great
fascination for her. "But in a case like that of"--she looked round and
lowered her voice--"our young friends, I'm sure you couldn't rejoice if
the engagement were broken off."