UTTERLY SPENDS A PLEASANT EVENING
Utterly sat for three hours with Eleanor Bent on her mother's porch,
talking. He did not arrive until eight o'clock, which was late in
Waltonville, and she had been nervously watching for him for an hour.
She was consumed with impatience to hear what he had to say. If her
story had not been accepted, she wished to know it at once; if,
perchance, he had come to advise her to write no more--that also she
wished to know at once. She did not wish the young man--if that
gorgeously clad young man were really the messenger of the gods--to stay
long; she needed, after the excitement of the day, to be alone, to be
quiet, to touch her piano in the darkness, the piano dedicated in such a
surprising and poetic way.
She was too restless to play it now. She sat for a while beside her
mother, who was sewing beneath the pleasant lamp; then she struck a few
chords; then she went out to the porch, calling to her mother not to
expect anything.
"They might merely be sending an agent to town to ask people to
subscribe to their old magazine, or even to ask me to be agent. John
Simms has been and he is going away. That is it, I am sure, mother."
When she saw approaching through the twilight the tall figure of the
stranger, she summoned Mrs. Bent and let that frightened little woman
greet him.
Utterly anticipated in the evening's call a pleasant experience. The
wide landscape lay soft and beautiful in the moonlight, a panorama
spread for his delectation. He called it, in the city-dweller's
metaphor, a beautiful stage-set. After she had greeted him, Mrs. Bent
went back to her work. Except for a few moments an hour later when she
came out to put on the porch table a tray with a plate of cake and
tinkling glasses, Utterly saw her no more.
He regarded the young woman before him with a critical eye. She was
beautiful, of that there was no question. She was talented also, and
though she was still immature and provincial, she was not awkward or
self-conscious. She accepted the announcement which he had come to make
as quietly as any of the older, more sophisticated women with whom he
associated would have accepted it.
"I hope you are pleased."
"Very much," answered Eleanor in a quiet voice which belied the tumult
within. It seemed to her that she could hardly breathe.
"And you will keep on writing?"
"Oh, _yes_!" said Eleanor.
"You keep notebooks, I suppose, and record all your impressions?"
"Yes."
"And you read a great deal?"
"Yes."
"How do you mean to get new impressions? Are you going to stay here?"
Utterly's voice now disparaged Waltonville.
"I had not thought of going away," said Eleanor. "I have just graduated
to-day and I haven't any particular plans."
"You and your mother are alone?"
"Yes."
"Couldn't you have a winter in New York?"
"I had thought that sometime I might go to Boston," said Eleanor.
Utterly sniffed the air. He had, he said, little opinion of Boston as an
experience. Boston was of the past. No one got experience of anything
but the past there, and the past one ought to try to get away from.
"A writer must have stimulation," he went on. "A woman's talent is, in
far greater degree than a man's, dependent upon outside influences; it
is far less self-nourished and self-originated; she must have life,
though not too much life, and she must hold herself in a measure
separate from it."
Utterly added to this sage prescription a "don't you know," and Eleanor
answered with a hesitating "yes." She was, in spite of her confusion, a
little amused. Utterly had come half a day too late; had he presented
himself last evening instead of this, he might have made a deeper
impression.
Presently he ceased to ask questions and began to orate. In this
audience he found none of the stupid dullness which he had observed in
Dr. Scott, none of the silent unresponsiveness of Dr. Lister. All that
he would have said yesterday to his fellow travelers if they had had
minds to understand, all that he would have said to-day to Dr. Lister
and Dr. Scott, if they had had ears to hear, all that he would have said
at any time to any one who would listen, he said now. He discussed
schools of writing, ancient and modern; he discussed the influence of
Shelley upon the young Browning, the place of Edgar Allan Poe in
American literature and in English literature as a whole, and finally,
the ethics of biographical writing. The heat with which he spoke upon
the last topic was the sudden bursting into flame of the embers which
had smoldered since the afternoon. Had the world a right to all it could
learn of the lives of geniuses, or had it not? It most assuredly had,
declared Utterly. An author's acts in the world, an artist's, a
musician's, were as much the property of the world as they were the
property of the recording angel--if modern theology had not banished
that person from modern life. He spoke of the invaluable revelations of
old letters, which proved so clearly that no matter how long the world
believed that writers evolved from their inner consciousness the
material of their work, in the end it was proved to have a foundation in
actual experience. Time and scholarly investigation were showing what
was long suspected and long denied, that Charlotte Brontë's own life had
furnished her with her "stuff."
Experience in life, however, must, so said Utterly, go only so far, must
stop short before a man or woman was bound to obligations which would
rob him of his freedom. Only a few great men had been men of family,
or, being men of family, had got on with their families. There was
Byron, for instance, and there was Shelley, and there were dozens of
others on the tip of his tongue.
To the most of this fluent outpouring his dazzled audience made only
polite general responses. She knew, thank fortune! a good deal about
each of the authors whom he mentioned. Shelley she had read from cover
to cover and Byron also, and Charlotte Brontë, of course. But she did
not know much about them as human beings, Dr. Scott having an
old-fashioned way of requiring a reading of the works of great authors,
rather than a knowledge of their lives.
Finally Utterly spoke of the works of Basil Everman. One could almost
make up Basil Everman's life from his works, so clearly did they
indicate the storm and stress of spirit in which he must constantly have
lived.
"I believe I don't know who Basil Everman was," confessed Eleanor,
mortified by her own ignorance. "Was he related to Dr. Lister?"
"Of course you don't know!" Utterly leaned back in his chair, his voice
sharp with sarcasm. "It is apparently the deliberate intention of this
community not only to quench all sparks of divine fire, but to hide
their ashes. Basil Everman was the brother of the wife of your college
president; he grew up in this town, a person of extraordinary mind; he
died. But nobody remembers him or seems to want to remember him. It is
an attitude not peculiar to Waltonville; it is characteristic of
Keokuk, Ishpeming, and many other communities, bourgeois, intolerable,
insane."
When Utterly went at eleven o'clock, Eleanor flew to her mother. She was
excited and elated, her wonderful day had sloped to no anticlimax.
"They have taken my story, mother, and I am to have seventy-five
dollars!"
"Seventy-five dollars! Land of love!" repeated Mrs. Bent. "Why,
Eleanor!" Mrs. Bent's cheeks grew red, then pale.
"Mr. Utterly thinks that I really can amount to something. He thinks we
should go to New York, mother, and sometime to Europe. He says one must
have many different things to write about, and of course that is true.
Are you pleased, mother?"
"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bent gasped, as though events were happening too fast
for her to follow.
"And, mother, did you ever know any one by the name of Basil Everman
when you lived here long ago?"
Mrs. Bent rose and gathered her work together. Her face reddened again
with the flush which came and went so easily. She looked not only
startled, but frightened. For some reason Eleanor remembered the
long-past encounter with drunken Bates on the shady street. As Mrs. Bent
answered, she walked out into the darkened kitchen, her voice coming
back with a muffled sound.
"He didn't talk about Basil Everman!"
"Yes, he did. He said that Basil Everman wrote wonderfully, and that
nobody in Waltonville appreciated him or was willing to tell anything
about him. Did you know him, mother?"
"Yes," answered Mrs. Bent. "I knew him." She came back into the
lamplight. "Ain't you sleepy, Eleanor?" But Eleanor was not to be thus
easily turned away. Basil Everman was Richard Lister's uncle and that
was enough to make him interesting.
"Did you know him well, mother?"
Mrs. Bent put out her hand toward the lamp.
"Start upstairs, then I'll outen the light."
"Did you say you knew him well, mother?"
"Not so very well."
"Did you know about his writing?"
"No."
"Is Richard anything like him?"
"No."
"Was he anything like Mrs. Lister?"
"No." Mrs. Bent turned out the lamp and followed Eleanor up the stairs.
At the head she bade her good-night. At the window of her room, which
looked toward the garden and the houses of the town, she sat a long
time. There was on her face the same expression of alarm that had rested
there when she sat in the parlor listening to Richard and Eleanor play.
It was the expression of one who felt herself to be entangled in a net
from which there was no escape.
Eleanor was certain that she should not close her eyes. She had been
waiting hours for this moment, when she might sit down by her window and
think of Richard Lister, of the crisp waves of his hair, of his strong
young hands which moved so swiftly. It seemed to her that he had played
not only upon the piano, but upon her, making her fingers fly faster and
more lightly than they had ever moved. Her heart expanded, her soul
seemed to burgeon and to bloom.
She wanted to think not only of this day's experience, but of the past.
She had seen Richard daily at college for four years, she had sat with
him in the same classes, but she had never known that he was like this!
She had met him, also, coming and going from Thomasina's. He must have
made, though she was unconscious of it at the time, a deep impression
upon her, because she could recall every motion of his light-stepping
figure as he moved from the flag walk to let her pass. She remembered
the straight line in which his coat fell from his shoulders as he sat at
Thomasina's piano, she could see his flashing smile. She tried to
remember the details of the appearance of others, and decided with
satisfaction that she had forgotten them. She heard the clock strike
twelve, then one, and still she sat by the window, every faculty alert,
the heavenly consciousness of expansion and growth growing keener. She
remembered hours of discouragement when time moved so slowly and nothing
seemed to get done. Now everything moved toward a happy conclusion. The
moonlight had never shone so soft, the night air had never been so
sweet.
After she had gone to bed, a tiny misgiving crept into her pleasant
meditations, the forerunner of a score of anxious questions which had
long been shaping themselves without her knowledge. For a moment she
could not quite grasp the cause, and lay still, her heart beating faster
and faster. She had done--she realized it now in a flash--a dreadful
thing. In "Professor Ellenborough's Last Class" she had made humorous
use of some of the small mannerisms of the college professors. Little
habits of Dr. Lister's were described; his constant swinging of his
foot, the tendency of his shoelaces to dangle, and his drawing-in of his
breath with a click against his cheek. Dr. Scott's den was there, though
in reality Eleanor's material was drawn from Dr. Green's office. But she
had come since morning to look at Dr. Lister and Dr. Scott from a
different angle, and it seemed to her that in using them even to so
small an extent she had done a monstrous thing.
The isolation of her mother and herself, their complete separation from
Waltonville and its citizens, became for the first time a source of
anxiety. Hitherto she had been indifferent to the fact that she was
almost unacquainted with Mrs. Lister. Now it became a serious matter.
She remembered that her volume of Mozart Sonatas had appeared
mysteriously--that was why Richard had come to the house and not to see
her! The duets had been an afterthought, suggested by the new piano. He
had merely happened to have the book with him, being on his way
doubtless to Thomasina's. He would come to-morrow to fetch it--it was
evidently his dear, careless way to leave things about--and then he
would come no more.
If he did not come again--Eleanor looked out over the moonlit fields
and faced another problem, more serious than the recollection of Dr.
Lister's dangling shoelaces--or if he came to-morrow and took his book
away and made her feel that they were strangers, then she would suspect
that for Richard and the Listers, and therefore for Waltonville, she and
her mother were unknown because they were unknowable. If Waltonville
were merely careless or thoughtless or indifferent--that was nothing.
But if Waltonville were deliberate, that was another matter.
She could not sleep, though she longed now intensely to sleep. Another
disturbing thought roused her to greater wakefulness. Her mother seemed
always to have ample supplies of money for their needs. But the price of
the beautiful piano must have been enormous--had her mother been
unwisely extravagant? She should be told about their affairs.
When, at last, she fell asleep, it was to disturbing dreams. Bates
appeared to threaten her and she fled from him. She called upon Richard
Lister to rescue her, and Richard proved to be not himself, but Dr.
Green, who would have none of her. This imaginary behavior of Dr. Green
was not unjust, since all day Eleanor had not thought of him who was
next to her mother her best friend.