Читать книгу Letters Home - William Dean Howells - Страница 11

From, Wallace Ardith to A. L. Wibbert, Wottoma.

New York, Dec. 19, 1901.

My dear Line:

I have a misgiving that my letter of last night implied a sort of a slight for America Ralson which I certainly do not feel. She has lots of sense, and is as fine as she is frank in the things that become a girl. That is, she is not changed from what you knew, and if anything I wrote gave merely the impression of her physical beauty, it was unfair to her and disgraceful to me. I had no right to speculate about her society prospects even; they may be all she could wish, and still leave her time and place for kindness to me, unworthy. I never liked the Ralson money, but I must say that it seems to crowd my imagination less in New York than it did in Wottoma, and that in old Ralson's civility to me last night I thought there was more personal friendliness than I had realized in him before. He is coarse, but he is not hard, and where there is any little question of his being good to his wife or daughter, he is not so coarse as at other times. These are the hasty conclusions of a man who has eaten his canvas-back and drunken his claret, and ridden in his electric. They might not stand the test of greater experience, but though I own that he is the sort of man born to make money, I do not believe he is altogether selfish, or at least that he is incapable of self-sacrifice where his loving, or even his liking lies. If he did not love you or like you no doubt he would be capable of another sort of sacrifice in which he would not figure as the offering.

As yet I do not know how many opportunities, I shall have for studying him (he would be great material) for I do not know when I shall be living at the Walhondia. The humiliating fact is, I have done the very thing I should not have done if I had not been more of an ass than I am willing to allow.

You remember old man Baysley, who used to come from Timber Creek up to Wottoma, in the infant days of Ralson's Trust? Well, he is living now — he would say " residing, " and it's hardly living — in New York where he has some employment from the Cheese and Churn Trust, and is as lonesome as a cat in a strange garret. As luck would have it, he was about the first human being out of two or three millions that I struck against when I got out of my train when I arrived, and he made me promise to come and see " the folks. " At the same time I promised myself that I would not do it, but in about a week I ran across him again and then I was in for it. He took me home with him " to supper " — they dine at twelve o'clock, just as they did in Timber Creek, — and Mrs. Baysley was so pitifully glad to see me, and the girls so proudly glad, that I was rather glad myself. I never really saw much of them at home, though I went to school with the girls when we were children; but country makes kind, and before I knew it, I was sitting before their radiator with them, swapping reminiscences, and making the old people laugh; such simple old souls, and so willing to laugh! The father and mother each confided to me how homesick the other was, and the girls said they did not think New York was half as nice as Timber Creek, to live in, though it would be a great place to come to, for a few weeks in the winter.

When I got up to go, Mrs. Baysley said, now father must show me the flat. But they all followed through it with me — six little boxes of rooms, counting the parlor and the girls' bedroom portiered off it as two. The whole place was furnished with, their poor old Timber Creek things citified up, and their home carpets cut into rugs. They took me last into the " spare-room " at the back of the flat, and when the old lady let out that they really had more room than they wanted, for all the place seemed so small, and the old man looked anxious, and the girls hung their heads, the time had come for me to make an ass of myself, and I asked what was the matter with my taking that room. They made some decent demur, but not much, and we agreed on three dollars a week; and here I am, pretty far up on the west side of Central Park, about a block and a half from one of the gates, so that I can get in and meditate the thankless muse, as easily as I could from my hotel, where I was paying seven dollars a week for my room, without the sun, or the view of the neighborhood wash which I have here for less than half the money. The wash hangs from lines supported upon lofty flag staffs, behind the house, and it is very gay; if we are five flights up, still the halls and stairs are carpeted in a kind of blood-red tapestry brussels the whole way: Mrs. Baysley is very proud of that carpeting, though it is not hers. When I want to get in, I touch a bell-button in the vestibule, and they free the latch by a sort of electric arrangement in their flat; but the old man promises me a latch-key when he can get round to it. When I'm late, he sits up and lets me in, and the girls keep breakfast for me long after he has gone downtown next morning. I breakfast here, and browse about for lunch and dinner, and accumulate material. Now and then I take a turn at that Central Park incident of the lovers. I have tried it as an idyll, in hexameters, and as a Thackeray ballad, and I have tried it in prose; and it is getting as tough as a piece of bear's meat which the more you chew it the more you can't swallow it. But I don't despair, and won't, as long as you let me sign myself

Your friend,

W. A.