An Open-Eyed Conspiracy. William Dean Howells
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the wish that the future might be brighter for them. I thought myself warranted by my wife’s imprudence in taking a step toward their further intimacy on my own account, and I said:
“Well, perhaps I ought to tell you that I haven’t been inside the Saratoga Club or bet on the races since I’ve been here. That’s my name in full,”—and I gave him my card,—“and I’m in the literary line; that is, I’m the editor of a magazine in New York—the Every Other Week.”
“Oh yes; I know who you are,” said my companion, with my card in his hand. “Fact is, I was round at your place this morning trying to get rooms, and the clerk told me all about you from my description. I felt as mean as pu’sley goin’; seemed to be takin’ kind of an advantage of you.”
“Not at all; it’s a public house,” I interrupted; but I thought I should be stronger with Mrs. March if I did not give the fact away to her, and I resolved to keep it.
“But they couldn’t rest easy till I tried, and I was more than half glad there wasn’t any rooms.”
“Oh, I’m very sorry,” I said; and I indulged a real regret from the vantage I had. “It would have been very pleasant to have you there. Perhaps later—we shall be giving up our rooms at the end of the month.”
“No,” he said, with a long breath. “If I’ve got to leave ’em, I guess it’ll be just as well to leave ’em where they’re acquainted with the house anyway.” His remark betrayed a point in his thinking which had not perhaps been reached in his talk with the ladies. “It’s a quiet place, and they’re used to it; and I guess they wouldn’t want to stay through the rest of the month, quite. I don’t believe my wife would, anyway.”
He did not say this very confidently, but hopefully rather, and I thought it afforded me an opening to find out something yet more definite about the ladies.
“Miss Gage is remarkably fine-looking,” I began.
“Think so?” he answered. “Well, so does my wife. I don’t know as I like her style exactly,” he said, with a kind of latent grudge.
“Her style is magnificent,” I insisted.
“Well, maybe so. I guess she’s good enough looking, if that’s what you mean. But I think it’s always a kind of a mistake for three persons to come off together, I don’t care who they are. Then there’s three opinions. She’s a nice girl, and a good girl, and she don’t put herself forward. But when you’ve got a young lady on your hands, you’ve got her, and you feel bound to keep doin’ something for her all the time; and if you don’t know what to do yourself, and your wife can’t tell—”
I added intelligently, “Yes.”
“Well, that’s just where it is. Sometimes I wish the whole dumb town would burn up.” I laughed and laughed; and my friend, having begun to unpack his heart, went on to ease it of the rest of its load. I had not waited for this before making some reflections concerning him, but I now formulated them to myself. He really had none of that reserve I had attributed to him the night before; it was merely caution and this is the case with most country people. They are cautious, but not reserved; if they think they can trust you, they keep back none of their affairs; and this is the American character, for we are nearly all country people. I understood him perfectly when he said, “I ruther break stone than go through what I have been through the last week! You understand how it is. ’Tain’t as if she said anything; I wish she would; but you feel all the while that it ain’t what she expected it to be, and you feel as if it was you that was to blame for the failure. By George! if any man was to come along and make an offer for my contract I would sell out cheap. It’s worse because my wife asked her to come, and thought she was doin’ her all kinds of a favour to let her. They’ve always been together, and when we talked of coming to Saratoga this summer, nothing would do my wife but Julia must come with us. Her and her father usually take a trip off somewhere in the hot weather, but this time he couldn’t leave; president of our National Bank, and president of the village, too.” He threw in the fact of these dignities explanatorily, but with a willingness, I could see, that it should affect me. He went on: “They’re kind of connections of my first wife’s. Well, she’s a nice girl; too nice, I guess, to get along very fast. I see girls all the way along down gettin’ acquainted on the cars and boats—we come east on the Ogdensburg road to Rouse’s Point, and then took the boat down Lake Champlain and Lake George—but she always seemed to hold back. I don’t know’s she’s proud either; I can’t make it out. It balls my wife all up, too. I tell her she’s fretted off all the good her trip’s goin’ to do her before she got it.”
He laughed ruefully, and just then the band began to play the “Washington Post.”
“What tune’s that?” he demanded.
“‘Washington Post,’” I said, proud of knowing it.
“By George! that tune goes right to a fellow’s legs, don’t it?”
“It’s the new march,” I said.
He listened with a simple joy in it, and his pleasure strengthened the mystic bond which had formed itself between us through the confidences he had made me, so flatteringly corroborative of all my guesses concerning him and his party.
I longed to have the chance of bragging to my wife; but this chance did not come till the concert was quite over, after I rejoined her with my companion, and she could take leave of them all without seeming to abandon them. Then I judged it best to let her have the word; for I knew by the way she ran her hand through my arm, and began pushing me along out of earshot, that she was full of it.
“Well, Basil, I think that is the sweetest and simplest and kindest creature in the world, and I’m perfectly in love with her.”
I did not believe somehow that she meant the girl, but I thought it best merely to suggest, “There are two.”
“You know very well which I mean, and I would do anything I could for her. She’s got a difficult problem before her, and I pity her. The girl’s very well, and she is a beauty; and I suppose she has been having a dull time, and of course you couldn’t please Mrs. Deering half so well as by doing something for her friend. I suppose you’re feeling very proud that they’re just what you divined.”
“Not at all; I’m so used to divining people. How did you know I knew it?”
“I saw you talking to him, and I knew you were pumping him.”
“Pumping? He asked nothing better than to flow. He would put to shame the provoked spontaneity of any spring in Saratoga.”
“Well, did he say that he was going to leave them here?”
“He would like to do it—yes. He was very sweet and simple and kind, too, Isabel. He complained bitterly of the goddess, and all but said she sulked.”
“Why, I don’t know,” said my wife. “I think, considering, that she is rather amiable. She brightened up more and more.”
“That was prosperity, or the hope of it, my dear. Nothing illumines us like the prospect of pleasant things. She took you for society smiling upon her, and of course she smiled back. But it’s only the first smile of prosperity that cheers. If it keeps on smiling it ends by making us dissatisfied again. When people are getting into society they are very glad; when they have got in they seem to be rather gloomy. We mustn’t let these things go too far. Now that you’ve got your friends in good humour, the right way is to drop them—to cut them dead when you meet them, to look the other way. That will send them home perfectly radiant.”
“Nonsense! I am going to do all I can for them. What do you think we can do? They haven’t the first idea how to amuse themselves here. It’s a miracle they ever got that dress the girl is wearing. They just made a bold dash because they saw it in a dressmaker’s window the first day, and she had to have something. It’s killingly becoming to her; but I don’t believe they know it, and they don’t