Brander Matthews

“ II NEW YORK, Sept. 16, 1894.
DEAREST MIRIAM,—I would have written two or three days ago, but when I’ve had supper I’m too tired to think even. It isn’t the work at the store, either. I’m getting on all right there, and I see how I can make myself useful already. I haven’t been living in Auburnvale all these years with my eyes shut, and I’ve got an idea or two that I’m going to turn to account. No, it’s just the city itself that’s so tiring. It’s the tramp, tramp, tramp of the people all the time, day and night, never stopping. And they are all so busy always. ”

“ XV NEW YORK, March 3, 1895.
MY DEAR MIRIAM,—Your letter is simply absurd. You say you “don’t believe in that Miss Stanwood,” and you want me to promise never to speak to her again. Now you can’t mean that. It is too ridiculous. I confess you puzzle me more and more. I don’t pretend to understand women, but you go beyond anything I ever heard of. What you ask is unworthy of you; it’s unworthy of me. It’s more—it’s unchristian. ”

“ The production of a piece at an important New York theater was a venture as aleatory almost as cutting a pack of cards, and the odds were always against the dramatist. And as the young man quietly recalled the events of the evening it seemed to him that the excitement of those who engineer corners in Wall Street must be like his own anxiety while the future of his drama hung in the balance, only theirs could not but be less keen than his, less poignant, for he was playing his game with men and women, while what they touched were but inanimate stocks. ”

“ Twelve months ago in the New England mill-town where her parents lived she had no thought of ever coming to New York to stay or of marrying soon. Last Thanksgiving she had never seen John; and indeed, it was not till long after Decoration Day that she had first heard his name; and now there was a plain gold ring on her finger, and John and she were man and wife. If she had not accepted Mary Morton’s invitation she might never have met John! She shuddered at the fatal possibility; and she marveled how the long happiness of a woman’s life might hang on a mere chance. ”

“ As Curtis Van Dyne thrust himself through the throng on the Broadway sidewalk, leaving the frowning Post-office behind him, and passing before the blithe effigy of Nathan Hale, he almost laughed aloud as it suddenly struck him how incongruous it was that a statue of a man who had gladly died for his country should be stuck there between two buildings filled with men who were looking to their country, to the nation or to the city, to provide them with a living. ”

“ As she stood there at the window she gave a slight start and nodded pleasantly to Reggie, who had bowed as he passed the house on the way to the Union Club. And then the avenue, with all its passers-by, its carriages and automobiles, its shoveling laborers and its falling snow, its Christmas greens and its lighted windows, faded again from her vision, as she tried to imagine that unseen grave far away in Panama. ”

“ If you are very young perhaps you do not yet know that men are not like us women; they need to be taken care of just like children. It is a blessed privilege to be a mother, but a childless wife can at least be a mother to her husband. That is what I have been trying to do all these years. I have tried to watch over John as though he were my only son. Perhaps if our little girl had lived to grow up I might have seen a divided duty before me. ”

“ You will learn in time how good John is. Perhaps you may think you know now—but you can’t know that as well as I do.
“You see I am older than John—not so much older, either, only a little more than two years. He doesn’t like me to admit it, but it is true; and of late I have been afraid that everybody could see it, for I am past forty now and I feel very old sometimes, while John is as young as ever. He looks just as he did twenty years ago; he has not a gray hair in his head yet. He comes up-stairs to me, after he gets back from the office, with the same boyish step I know so well. ”

“ The man wanted her—and for the first time she began to suspect that all the woman in her wanted him to want her. She hated herself for having been so unresponsive, so discouraging, so cold. She knew that he was a man of character and of ability, a clean man, a man his wife might be proud of. And she had looked ahead sharply and realized how desolate the Cotillion of One Hundred and the Thursday Theater Club would be for her if Addison Wyngard should go to Texas, after all. She began to fear that, if he did decide to leave New York, he would never dare to ask her to marry him. ”

“ So the days had gone, one after another, and so they would continue to go in the future. She was young, and she came of a sturdy stock; she might live to be three-score and ten.
As she stood there at the window, staring straight before her, she saw herself slowly changing into an old maid like Aunt Cordelia, well meaning and a little fidgety, a little fussy, and quite useless. She recoiled as she surveyed the long vista of time, with no husband to take her into his arms, and with no children for her to hold up to him when he came back from his work. ”

“ She walked slowly to the ribbon-counter in a far corner of the store, unconscious of the persons upon whom her eyes rested. She was thinking of herself and of her own future. She wondered whether that future was then hanging in the balance.
She had early discovered that she was not very pretty, although her mother was always telling her that she had a good figure; and she had reached the age of twenty-two without having had any particular attention from any man. She had begun to ask herself whether any man ever would single her out and make her interested in him and implore her to be his wife. ”

“ Wilson Carpenter’s marriage had been happy, and his boy was all he could wish,—and yet—and yet—Is this all that life can give a man? A little joy for the few who are fortunate, a little pleasure, and then—and then—For the first time he understood how it was that a happy man sometimes commits suicide. And he smiled as he thought that if he wished to choose death at the instant of life when the outsider would suppose his future to be brightest, now was the moment. ”

“ Sometimes of a winter’s night, when I take my seat at the desk before the crackling and cheerful hickory fire, the frog that played the trombone catches my eye, and I go back in memory to the evening when it performed its first solo in my presence, and I see again the beautiful liquid eyes of the friend who brought it to me. We were very young then, both of us, that night before Christmas, and our hearts kept time with the lilt of the tune that the frog played silently on his trombone. Now I am young no longer, I am even getting old, and my friend has been dead this many a year. ”

“ The two couples were close to each other as they went around the reservoir, along the shaded road on the edge of the Park, with the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue down below. Everywhere the grass was fresh and fragrant; and everywhere the squirrels were frequent and impertinent, cutting across the road almost under the wheels, or sitting up on the narrow sward in impudent expectation of the nuts gently thrown to them from the carriages. ”

“ Y Dear Miriam,—For you are mine now, all mine, and yet not so much as you will be some day—soon, I hope. You can’t guess how much bolder I feel now that you are waiting for me. And it won’t be so long that you will have to wait, either, for I am going to make my way here. There’s lots of young fellows come to New York from the country with no better start than I’ve got, and they’ve died millionaires. I’m in no hurry to die yet, not before I’ve got the million, anyway ”

“ He knew that it did a man good to be a reporter for a little while, if he had the courage to cut himself loose before it was too late, before journalism had corroded its stigma. His reporting had taken him into strange places now and again; but it had also taken him into the homes of the plain people who make New York what it is. Society, as Society was described in the Sunday papers, he knew little about, and he cared less; he was not a snob, if he knew himself. But humanity was unfailingly interesting and unendingly instructive ”

“ It might be that she had guessed it, although she had made no sign; he knew that women were as keen as they were inscrutable.
The hansom was at last under the ugly framework of the Elevated almost at the South Ferry gate. The tide was coming in strongly, and there was a salt savor in the breeze that blew up from the lower bay. The prisoner relished it as he filled his lungs with the fresh air; and then he asked himself how long it would be before that saline taste would touch his nostrils again.
As the cab drew up, the elder of the two men in it laid his hand on the arm of the younger. ”

“ That’s just the way with you men always! You never think about the woman’s feelings!”
“I’ll do my duty to her,” he answered.
“Your duty!” sniffed the girl, indignantly.
“I’ll be so attentive to her that she will never guess my heart is given to another,” he went on.
“Don’t be too sure of that,” she returned. “Women have very sharp eyes—sharper than you men think—especially about a thing like that!”
“I am not going to borrow trouble,” the Doctor declared, suavely. “I shall always be as nice to her as I can, and if it is in my power to make her happy, then she will be happy. ”

“ New York is very interesting, and I’d dearly love to talk it over with you. It is a sort of a stock-pot; everything goes in—good meat, and bones, and scraps of all sorts—and you never know just what the flavor will be like, but it’s sure to be rich and stimulating and unexpected. I’ve been to very exclusive houses here sometimes, and I enjoyed that immensely; I think I could learn easily to live up to any income, no matter how big it was. ”

“ Her eyes filled with tears when she thought of the swiftness with which a woman is forgotten when once she is dead.
She went to the window of the sitting-room and looked down on Gramercy Park again. The November twilight was settling down, and the rays of the setting sun were obscured by a heavy bank of gray clouds. The wind had risen and was whirling the dead leaves in erratic circles. Rain was threatened and might come at any minute. The day that had begun in glorious sunshine was about to end in gloom. The young bride was conscious of a vague feeling of loneliness and homesickness ”