"I presume you are the only person in this country who feels as you do,"
she observed at last.
"Not the only person who feels so, but very possibly the only person who
thinks so. I have an idea that my convictions exist in a vague,
unformulated state in the minds of a great many of my fellow-citizens.
If I should succeed some day in giving them adequate expression I should
simply put into shape the slumbering instincts of an important
minority."
"I am glad you admit it's a minority!" Verena exclaimed. "That's
fortunate for us poor creatures. And what do you call adequate
expression? I presume you would like to be President of the United
States?"
"And breathe forth my views in glowing messages to a palpitating Senate?
That is exactly what I should like to be; you read my aspirations
wonderfully well."
"Well, do you consider that you have advanced far in that direction, as
yet?" Verena asked.
This question, with the tone in which it happened to be uttered, seemed
to the young man to project rather an ironical light upon his present
beggarly condition, so that for a moment he said nothing; a moment
during which if his neighbour had glanced round at his face she would
have seen it ornamented by an incipient blush. Her words had for him the
effect of a sudden, though, on the part of a young woman who had of
course every right to defend herself, a perfectly legitimate taunt. They
appeared only to repeat in another form (so at least his exaggerated
Southern pride, his hot sensibility, interpreted the matter) the idea
that a gentleman so dreadfully backward in the path of fortune had no
right to take up the time of a brilliant, successful girl, even for the
purpose of satisfying himself that he renounced her. But the reminder
only sharpened his wish to make her feel that if he had renounced, it
was simply on account of that same ugly, accidental, outside
backwardness; and if he had not, he went so far as to flatter himself,
he might triumph over the whole accumulation of her prejudices--over all
the bribes of her notoriety. The deepest feeling in Ransom's bosom in
relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had
said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage's. She was
profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and
artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she
should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her
feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor's sex (what sex was it,
great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to
the land of vapours, of dead phrases. The reader may imagine whether
such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have
to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would
have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that
sort yet. "Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing--my
ambition is another!" he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry.
"Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my
days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of
greatness I have stifled and buried."
"Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren't you getting on
quite well in this city?"
This question of Verena's left him no time, or at least no coolness, to
remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his
prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was
but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear
such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that
the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be
an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so
close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his
situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had
lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this
kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was
fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a
perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both
the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even
sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena,
looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went
on--
"It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of
course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once
your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better
look out. With your will!" she added, with a curious mocking candour.
"What do you know about my will?" he asked, laughing a little awkwardly,
as if he had really attempted to kiss her--in the course of the second
independent interview he had ever had with her--and been rebuffed.
"I know it's stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I
had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should
have started for home."
"Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day," Basil Ransom
murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression
of his voice, he added--"Come and dine with me, since you wouldn't
lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?"
"I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have
lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank
you; I think you're cool!" Verena cried, with a laugh which her
chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though
Basil Ransom did not.
"You must remember that I have, on two different occasions, listened to
you for an hour, in speechless, submissive attention, and that I shall
probably do it a great many times more."
"Why should you ever listen to me again, when you loathe my ideas?"
"I don't listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice."
"Ah, I told Olive!" said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed
an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly
to him.
Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her,
especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man--"I
wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?"
"I should think you had made it clear enough--you had rubbed it in!"
"What have you understood, then?"
"Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any
period."
"I have been joking; I have been piling it up," Ransom said, making that
concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of
relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.
She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked--"Why don't
you write out your ideas?"
This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how
she couldn't keep off it, hit it every time. "Do you mean for the
public? I have written many things, but I can't get them printed."
"Then it would seem that there are not so many people--so many as you
said just now--who agree with you."
"Well," said Basil Ransom, "editors are a mean, timorous lot, always
saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it
comes."
"Is it for papers, magazines?" As it sank into Verena's mind more deeply
that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been
rejected--contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear
was riddled with scorn--she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of
injustice. "I am very sorry you can't get published," she said, so
simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on
the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in
relation to such a fact, were not "put on." But it was evidently
genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very
difficult always; she remembered, though she didn't mention, how little
success her father had when he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep
on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling,
with more irony: "You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please
don't say anything about Olive Chancellor."
"How little you understand what I want to achieve!" Basil Ransom
exclaimed. "There you are--you women--all over; always meaning,
yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by
others!"
"Yes, that's the charge they make," said Verena gaily.
"I don't want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or
Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and
celebrated being on earth--or in heaven."
"Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!" Verena
exclaimed, with the same brightness.
"No, I don't want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you.
There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you
alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look
after itself. That's what I want to save."
Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he
was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle
wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. "To
save it from what?" she asked.
"From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you
set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general
life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great
deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is
passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,
chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't
soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest
and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine
character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is--a
very queer and partly very base mixture--that is what I want to
preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that
I don't in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the
attempt!"
The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection
of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise)
with low, soft earnestness, bending towards her so as to give out his
whole idea, yet apparently forgetting for the moment how offensive it
must be to her now that it was articulated in that calm, severe way, in
which no allowance was to be made for hyperbole. Verena did not remind
herself of this; she was too much impressed by his manner and by the
novelty of a man taking that sort of religious tone about such a cause.
It told her on the spot, from one minute to the other and once for all,
that the man who could give her that impression would never come round.
She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up
his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more
comfortable--one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at
variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her
life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her
shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more
crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder
that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could think of to
disguise her emotion was to remark in a tone which, although not assumed
for that purpose, was really the most effective revenge, inasmuch as it
always produced on Ransom's part (it was not peculiar, among women, to
Verena) an angry helplessness--"Mr. Ransom, I assure you this is an age
of conscience."
"That's a part of your cant. It's an age of unspeakable shams, as
Carlyle says."
"Well," returned Verena, "it's all very comfortable for you to say that
you wish to leave us alone. But you can't leave us alone. We are here,
and we have got to be disposed of. You have got to put us somewhere.
It's a remarkable social system that has no place for _us_!" the girl
went on, with her most charming laugh.
"No place in public. My plan is to keep you at home and have a better
time with you there than ever."
"I'm glad it's to be better; there's room for it. Woe to American
womanhood when you start a movement for being more--what you like to
be--at home!"
"Lord, how you're perverted; you, the very genius!" Basil Ransom
murmured, looking at her with the kindest eyes.
She paid no attention to this, she went on, "And those who have got no
home (there are millions, you know), what are you going to do with
_them_? You must remember that women marry--are given in marriage--less
and less; that isn't their career, as a matter of course, any more. You
can't tell them to go and mind their husband and children, when they
have no husband and children to mind."
"Oh," said Ransom, "that's a detail! And for myself, I confess, I have
such a boundless appreciation of your sex in private life that I am
perfectly ready to advocate a man's having a half-a-dozen wives."
"The civilisation of the Turks, then, strikes you as the highest?"
"The Turks have a second-rate religion; they are fatalists, and that
keeps them down. Besides, their women are not nearly so charming as
ours--or as ours would be if this modern pestilence were eradicated.
Think what a confession you make when you say that women are less and
less sought in marriage; what a testimony that is to the pernicious
effect on their manners, their person, their nature, of this fatuous
agitation."
"That's very complimentary to me!" Verena broke in, lightly.
But Ransom was carried over her interruption by the current of his
argument. "There are a thousand ways in which any woman, all women,
married or single, may find occupation. They may find it in making
society agreeable."
"Agreeable to men, of course."
"To whom else, pray? Dear Miss Tarrant, what is most agreeable to women
is to be agreeable to men! That is a truth as old as the human race, and
don't let Olive Chancellor persuade you that she and Mrs. Farrinder have
invented any that can take its place, or that is more profound, more
durable."
Verena waived this point of the discussion; she only said: "Well, I am
glad to hear you are prepared to see the place all choked up with old
maids!"
"I don't object to the _old_ old maids; they were delightful; they had
always plenty to do, and didn't wander about the world crying out for a
vocation. It is the new old maid that you have invented from whom I pray
to be delivered." He didn't say he meant Olive Chancellor, but Verena
looked at him as if she suspected him of doing so; and to put her off
that scent he went on, taking up what she had said a moment before: "As
for its not being complimentary to you, my remark about the effect on
the women themselves of this pernicious craze, my dear Miss Tarrant, you
may be quite at your ease. You stand apart, you are unique,
extraordinary; you constitute a category by yourself. In you the
elements have been mixed in a manner so felicitous that I regard you as
quite incorruptible. I don't know where you come from nor how you come
to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising
influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young man proceeded, in the
same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a
mathematical solution, "you ought to know that your connexion with all
these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory
thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all.
They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by unfortunate
associations, and you accepted them as you would have accepted any other
burden, on account of the sweetness of your nature. You always want to
please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying
to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as
you did it before to please your father and mother. It isn't _you_, the
least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in
its way too) whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling
strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal
and efface yourself there. Ah, Miss Tarrant, if it's a question of
pleasing, how much you might please some one else by tipping your
preposterous puppet over and standing forth in your freedom as well as
in your loveliness!"
While Basil Ransom spoke--and he had not spoken just that way
yet--Verena sat there deeply attentive, with her eyes on the ground; but
as soon as he ceased she sprang to her feet--something made her feel
that their association had already lasted quite too long. She turned
away from him as if she wished to leave him, and indeed were about to
attempt to do so. She didn't desire to look at him now, or even to have
much more conversation with him. "Something," I say, made her feel so,
but it was partly his curious manner--so serene and explicit, as if he
knew the whole thing to an absolute certainty--which partly scared her
and partly made her feel angry. She began to move along the path to one
of the gates, as if it were settled that they should immediately leave
the place. He laid it all out so clearly; if he had had a revelation he
couldn't speak otherwise. That description of herself as something
different from what she was trying to be, the charge of want of reality,
made her heart beat with pain; she was sure, at any rate, it was her
real self that was there with him now, where she oughtn't to be. In a
moment he was at her side again, going with her; and as they walked it
came over her that some of the things he had said to her were far beyond
what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible. What would be
her state now, poor forsaken friend, if some of them had been borne to
her in the voices of the air? Verena had been affected by her
companion's speech (his manner had changed so; it seemed to express
something quite different) in a way that pushed her to throw up the
discussion and determine that as soon as they should get out of the park
she would go off by herself; but she still had her wits about her
sufficiently to think it important she should give no sign of
discomposure, of confessing that she was driven from the field. She
appeared to herself to notice and reply to his extraordinary
observations enough, without taking them up too much, when she said,
tossing the words over her shoulder at Ransom, while she moved quickly:
"I presume, from what you say, that you don't think I have much
ability."
He hesitated before answering, while his long legs easily kept pace with
her rapid step--her charming, touching, hurrying step, which expressed
all the trepidation she was anxious to conceal. "Immense ability, but
not in the line in which you most try to have it. In a very different
line, Miss Tarrant! Ability is no word for it; it's genius!"
She felt his eyes on her face--ever so close and fixed there--after he
had chosen to reply to her question that way. She was beginning to
blush; if he had kept them longer, and on the part of any one else, she
would have called such a stare impertinent. Verena had been commended of
old by Olive for her serenity "while exposed to the gaze of hundreds";
but a change had taken place, and she was now unable to endure the
contemplation of an individual. She wished to detach him, to lead him
off again into the general; and for this purpose, at the end of a
moment, she made another inquiry: "I am to understand, then, as your
last word that you regard us as quite inferior?"
"For public, civic uses, absolutely--perfectly weak and second-rate. I
know nothing more indicative of the muddled sentiment of the time than
that any number of men should be found to pretend that they regard you
in any other light. But privately, personally, it's another affair. In
the realm of family life and the domestic affections----"
At this Verena broke in, with a nervous laugh, "Don't say that; it's
only a phrase!"
"Well, it's a better one than any of yours," said Basil Ransom, turning
with her out of one of the smaller gates--the first they had come to.
They emerged into the species of _plaza_ formed by the numbered street
which constitutes the southern extremity of the park and the termination
of the Sixth Avenue. The glow of the splendid afternoon was over
everything, and the day seemed to Ransom still in its youth. The bowers
and boskages stretched behind them, the artificial lakes and cockneyfied
landscapes, making all the region bright with the sense of air and
space, and raw natural tints, and vegetation too diminutive to
overshadow. The chocolate-coloured houses, in tall, new rows, surveyed
the expanse; the street cars rattled in the foreground, changing horses
while the horses steamed, and absorbing and emitting passengers; and the
beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a
good deal towards representing the picturesque, the "bit" appreciated by
painters, announced themselves in signs of large lettering to the sky.
Groups of the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the
seas, propped themselves against the low, sunny wall of the park; and on
the other side the commercial vista of the Sixth Avenue stretched away
with a remarkable absence of aerial perspective.
"I must go home; good-bye," Verena said, abruptly, to her companion.
"Go home? You won't come and dine, then?"
Verena knew people who dined at midday and others who dined in the
evening, and others still who never dined at all; but she knew no one
who dined at half-past three. Ransom's attachment to this idea therefore
struck her as queer and infelicitous, and she supposed it betrayed the
habits of Mississippi. But that couldn't make it any more acceptable to
her, in spite of his looking so disappointed--with his dimly-glowing
eyes--that he was heedless for the moment that the main fact connected
with her return to Tenth Street was that she wished to go alone.
"I must leave you, right away," she said. "Please don't ask me to stay;
you wouldn't if you knew how little I want to!" Her manner was different
now, and her face as well, and though she smiled more than ever she had
never seemed to him more serious.
"Alone, do you mean? Really I can't let you do that," Ransom replied,
extremely shocked at this sacrifice being asked of him. "I have brought
you this immense distance, I am responsible for you, and I must place
you where I found you."
"Mr. Ransom, I must, I will!" she exclaimed, in a tone he had not yet
heard her use; so that, a good deal amazed, puzzled and pained, he saw
that he should make a mistake if he were to insist. He had known that
their expedition must end in a separation which could not be sweet, but
he had counted on making some of the terms of it himself. When he
expressed the hope that she would at least allow him to put her into a
car, she replied that she wished no car; she wanted to walk. This image
of her "streaking off" by herself, as he figured it, did not mend the
matter; but in the presence of her sudden nervous impatience he felt
that here was a feminine mystery which must be allowed to take its
course.
"It costs me more than you probably suspect, but I submit. Heaven guard
you and bless you, Miss Tarrant!"
She turned her face away from him as if she were straining at a leash;
then she rejoined, in the most unexpected manner: "I hope very much you
_will_ get printed."
"Get my articles published?" He stared, and broke out: "Oh, you
delightful being!"
"Good-bye," she repeated; and now she gave him her hand. As he held it a
moment, and asked her if she were really leaving the city so soon that
she mightn't see him again, she answered: "If I stay it will be at a
place to which you mustn't come. They wouldn't let you see me."
He had not intended to put that question to her; he had set himself a
limit. But the limit had suddenly moved on. "Do you mean at that house
where I heard you speak?"
"I may go there for a few days."
"If it's forbidden to me to go and see you there, why did you send me a
card?"
"Because I wanted to convert you then."
"And now you give me up?"
"No, no; I want you to remain as you are!"
She looked strange, with her more mechanical smile, as she said this,
and he didn't know what idea was in her head. She had already left him,
but he called after her, "If you do stay, I will come!" She neither
turned nor made an answer, and all that was left to him was to watch her
till she passed out of sight. Her back, with its charming young form,
seemed to repeat that last puzzle, which was almost a challenge.
For this, however, Verena Tarrant had not meant it. She wanted, in spite
of the greater delay and the way Olive would wonder, to walk home,
because it gave her time to think, and think again, how glad she was
(really, positively, _now_) that Mr. Ransom was on the wrong side. If he
had been on the right----! She did not finish this proposition. She
found Olive waiting for her in exactly the manner she had foreseen; she
turned to her, as she came in, a face sufficiently terrible. Verena
instantly explained herself, related exactly what she had been doing;
then went on, without giving her friend time for question or comment:
"And you--you paid your visit to Mrs. Burrage?"
"Yes, I went through that."
"And did she press the question of my coming there?"
"Very much indeed."
"And what did you say?"
"I said very little, but she gave me such assurances----"
"That you thought I ought to go?"
Olive was silent a moment; then she said: "She declares they are devoted
to the cause, and that New York will be at your feet."
Verena took Miss Chancellor's shoulders in each of her hands, and gave
her back, for an instant, her gaze, her silence. Then she broke out,
with a kind of passion: "I don't care for her assurances--I don't care
for New York! I won't go to them--I won't--do you understand?" Suddenly
her voice changed, she passed her arms round her friend and buried her
face in her neck. "Olive Chancellor, take me away, take me away!" she
went on. In a moment Olive felt that she was sobbing and that the
question was settled, the question she herself had debated in anguish a
couple of hours before.