An Imperative Duty

William Dean Howells

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783849657529
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Mr. Howells' latest novel deserves and will receive wide reading. It deals with a problem which had found its way into American social life of his time: "How will a cultivated and beautiful woman feel if she discovers that she has a tinge of negro blood in her veins? How will other people, particularly her lover, feel and act?" Mr. Howells works out the problem with skill, on what seem to us sound lines of reasoning. 'An Imperative Duty' is so mature a work, and so good an example of the author's method, that it invites the closest scrutiny. It is written with his usual acuteness and cleverness, but with even more than his ordinary amount of self-consciousness. He is continually trying to say clever things, and he seems here a kind of intellectual conventionalist; we feel that he would commit a minor crime rather than fail in the proper tone. As one reads he plants his feet as circumspectly as in threading his way in a crowded parlor where trains abound. One is exhausted in the effort to keep up to the author's intensely self-conscious key. It is too much like the brilliant persiflage of a dinner-party when everybody means more than he says and challenges his listeners to see the target at which he is really aiming. The glow and "fling" of high creative work are thus rendered impossible to the author, and the reader falls into a hyper-critical state of mind. Mr. Howells is at his best when describing distinctive American types. The cultivated Frenchman and the cultivated American are much more alike than are the Frenchman and the American on lower levels; and when a writer selects his characters from Beacon Street and the "Cours la Reine" he has less opportunity to be picturesque than when he deals with Hanover Street and the "Quartier Latin." Mr. Howells is an artist of the first order like Henry James. He works by rule, and the result is the product of high talent.

VII

Miss Aldgate came in late in the afternoon. She came in softly, and then, finding her aunt awake, she let herself fall into an easy-chair with the air of utter exhaustion that girls like to put on, after getting home from a social pleasure, and sighed out a long "0-o-o-h, dear!

Her aunt let her sit silent and stare awhile at the carpet just beyond the toe of her pretty boot before she suggested, "Well?"

"Oh, nothing! Only it got to be rather tiresome, toward the last."

"Why did you stay so long?"

"I couldn't get away; they wouldn't let me go. They kept proposing this and that, and then they wanted to arrange something for to-morrow. But I wouldn't."

"They are rather persistent," said Mrs. Meredith. "Yes, they are persistent. But they are very kind--they are very good-natured. I wish--I wish I liked them better!"

"Don't you like them?"

"Oh, I like them, yes, in a kind of way. They're a very familyish sort of a family; they're so muck bound up in one another. Of course they can do a great many nice things: Miss Bloomingdale is really wonderful with her music; and Josie sketches very nicely; and Roberta sings beautifully,--there's no denying it; but they don't talk very much, and they're all so tall and handsome and blond; and they sit round with their hands arranged in their laps, and keep waiting for me to say things, and then their mother starts, them up and makes them do something. The worst is she keeps dragging in Mr. Bloomingdale all the time. There isn't anything that doesn't suggest him--what he thinks, what he says, where he's been and what he did there; just how far he's got on his way home by this time; how he's never seasick, but he doesn't like rough weather. I began to dread the introduction of a new subject: it was so sure to bring round to him. Don't you think they're of rather an old-fashioned taste?"

"I never liked this family very much," said Mrs. Meredith. "They seemed very estimable people, but not--"

"Our kind? No, decidedly. Did Dr. Olney stay long?"

"No. Why do you ask? " Mrs. Meredith returned, with a startled look.

"Oh, nothing. You seemed to be quite chummy with him, and not to want me round a great deal when I came in." Miss Aldgate had discovered the toe of her boot just beyond her skirt, apparently with some surprise, and she leaned forward to touch it with the point of her parasol, as if to make sure of it. "Is he coming again this evening? " she asked, leaning back in her chair, and twisting her parasol by its handle.

"Not unless I send for him. I have his sleeping medicine."

"Yes. And I know how to drop it. Did he think it strange my being away from you so much when you needed a doctor?"

"He knew I didn't need any doctor. Why do you ask such a question as that?"

"I don't know. I thought it might have struck him. But I thought I had better try and see if I could get used to them or not. They're pretty formal people--conventional. I mean in the way of dress and that kind of thing. They're formal in their ideals, don't you know. They would want to do just what they thought other people were doing; they would be dreadfully troubled if there was anything about them that was not just like everybody else. Do you think Mr. Bloomingdale would be so?"

"I never--liked his family very much," Mrs. Meredith repeated. "What little I saw of them," she added, as if conscientiously.

"Oh, that doesn't count, Aunt Caroline!" said the girl, with a laugh. "You never liked the families of any of the Americans that you thought fancied me. But the question is not whether we like his family, but whether he's like them."

"You can't separate him from his family, Rhoda. You must remember that. Each of us is bound by a thousand mysterious ties to our kindred, our ancestors; we can't get away from them--"

"Oh, what stuff, aunty! " Miss Aldgate was still greatly amused. "I should like to know how I'm bound to my mother's family, that I never saw one of; or to her father or grandfather?"

"How?" Mrs. Meredith gasped.

"Yes. Or how much they were bound to me, if they never tried to find me out or make themselves known by any sort of sign? I'm bound to you because we've always been together, and I was bound to Uncle Meredith because he was good to me. But there isn't anything mysterious about it. And Mr. Bloomingdale is bound to his family in the same way. He's fond of them because he's been nice to them and they've been nice to him. I wonder," she mused, while Mrs. Meredith felt herself slowly recoil from the point which she had been suddenly caught up to, "whether I really care for him or not? There were very nice things about him; and no, he was not tiresome and formal-minded like them. I wish I had been a little in love with some one, and then I could tell. But I've never had anything but decided dislikings, though I didn't dislike him decidedly. No, I rather liked him. That is, I thought he was good. Yes, I respected his goodness. It's about the only thing in this world you can respect. But now, I remember, he seemed very young, and all the younger because he thought it was his duty as a minister to seem old. Did you care very much for his sermon?"

Rhoda came to the end of her thinking aloud with a question that she had to repeat before her aunt asked, drearily in answer, "What sermon?"

"Why, we only heard him once! The one he preached in Florence. I didn't have a full sense of his youth till I heard that. Isn't it strange that there are ever young ministers? I suppose people think they can make up in inspiration what they lack in experience. But that day when I looked round at those men and women, some of them gray-haired, and most of them middle-aged, and all of them knowing so much more about life, and its trials and temptations, and troubles and sorrows, than poor Mr. Bloomingdale--I oughtn't to call him poor--and heard him going on about the birds and the flowers, I wondered how they could bear it. Of course it was all right; I know that. But if the preacher shouldn't happen to be inspired, wouldn't it be awful? How old do you suppose Dr. Olney is?"

"I don't know."

"He seems rather bald. Do you think he is forty?"

"Dear me, no, child! He isn't thirty yet, I dare say. Some men are bald much earlier than others. It's a matter of--heredity."

"Heredity! Everything's heredity with you, Aunt Caroline!" the girl laughed. "I'll bet he's worn it off by thinking too much in one particular spot. "You know that they say now they can tell just what place in the brain a person thinks this or that; and just where the will-power comes from when you wink your eye, or wiggle your little finger. I wonder if Dr. Olney knows all those things? Have you tried him on your favorite heredity yet?"

"What do you mean, Rhoda?"

"I know you have!" the girl exulted. "Well, he is the kind of man I should always want to have for my doctor if I had to have one; though I don't think he's done you a great deal of good yet, Aunt Caroline: you look wretched, and I shall feel like scolding Dr. Olney when he comes again. But what I mean is, he has such noble ideas: don't you think he has?"

"Yes--yes. About what?"

"Why, about the negroes, you know." Mrs. Meredith winced at the word. "I never happened to see it in that light before. I thought when we had set them free, we had done everything. But I can see now we haven't. We do perfectly banish them, as far as we can; and we don't associate with them half as much as we do with the animals. I got to talking with the Bloomingdales this afternoon, and I had to take the negroes' part. Don't you think that was funny for a Southern girl?" Mrs. Meredith looked at her with a ghastly face, and moved her lips in answer, without making any sound. "They said that the negroes were an inferior race, and they never could associate with the whites because they never could be intellectually equal with them. I told them about that black English lawyer from Sierra Leone that talked so well at the table d'hôte in Venice--better than anybody else--but they wouldn't give way. They were very narrow-minded; or the mother was; the rest didn't say anything; only made exclamations. Mrs. Bloomingdale said Dr. Olney must be a very strange physician, to have those ideas. I hope Mr. Bloomingdale isn't like her. You would say he was a good deal younger than Dr. Olney, wouldn't you?"

"Yes--not so very. But why--"

Rhoda broke out into a laugh of humorous perplexity. "Why, if he were only a little older, or a good deal older, he could advise me whether to marry him or not?" The laughter faded suddenly from her eyes, and she fell back dejectedly against her chair, and remained looking at her aunt, as if trying to read in her face the silent working of her thought. "Well?" she demanded, finally.

Mrs. Meredith dropped her eyes. "Why need you marry any one?"

"What a funny question! " the girl answered, with the sparkle of a returning smile. "So as to have somebody to take care of me in my old age!" The young like to speak of age so, with a mocking incredulity; they feel that, however it may have fared with all the race hitherto, they never can be old, and they like to make a joke of the mere notion. "You'll be getting old yourself some day, Aunt Caroline, and then what shall I do? Don't you think that a woman ought to got married?

"Yes--yes. Not always--not necessarily. Certainly not to have some one to take care of her."

"Of course not! That would be a very base motive. I suppose I really meant, have somebody for me to take care of. I think that is what keeps one from being lonesome more than anything else. I do feel so alone sometimes. It seems to me there are very few girls so perfectly isolated. Why, just think! With the exception of you, I don't believe I've got a single relation in the world." Rhoda seemed interested rather than distressed by the fact. "Now there are the Bloomingdales," she went on; "it seems as if they had connections everywhere. That is something like a family. If I married Mr. Bloomingdale, I could always have somebody to take care of as long as I lived. To be sure, they would be Bloomingdales," she added, dreamily.

"Rhoda!" said her aunt, "I cannot let you speak so. If you are in earnest about Mr. Bloomingdale--"

"I am. But not about his family--or not so much so."

"You cannot take him without taking his family; that is always the first thing to be thought of in marriage, and young people think of it the last. The family on each side counts almost as much as the couple themselves in a marriage."

"Mine wouldn't," the girl interpolated. "There's so very little of it!"

If Mrs. Meredith was trying to bring the talk to this point, she now seemed to find herself too suddenly confronted with it, and she shrank back a little. "I don't mean that family is the first thing."

"You just said it was, aunty!"

"The first thing," Mrs. Meredith continued, ignoring the teasing little speech, "is to make sure of yourself, to be satisfied that you love him."

"It's so much easier," the girl sighed in mock-seriousness, "to be satisfied that I don't love them."

"But that won't do, Rhoda," said Mrs. Meredith, and I can't let you treat the matter in this trivial spirit. It is a most important matter--far more important than you can realize."

"I can't realize anything about it--that's the trouble."

"You can realize whether you wish to accept him or not."

"No; that's just what I can't do."

"You've had time enough."

"I've had nearly a week. But I want all the time there is; it wouldn't be any too much. I must see him again--after seeing so much of his family."

"Rhoda!" her aunt ca...

Table of contents

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