I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, but instinctively and confidently westward. I felt, I don't know why, miraculously sure of some favoring chance and as if I were floating in the current of success. I was on the way to our reward, I was positively on the way to Paris, and New York itself, vast and glittering and roaring, much noisier even than the Works at their noisiest, but with its old rich thrill of the Art League days again in the air, was already almost Paris for me—so that when I at last fidgeted into the Park, where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next thing to Europe, and in fact HAD to be, since it's the very antithesis of Eastridge. I regularly revelled in that sense that Eliza couldn't have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains of sense she would have put in an appearance at the Chataways' with the lark, or at least with the manicure, who seems there almost as early stirring. Or rather, really, she would have reported herself as soon as their train, that of the “guilty couple,” got in; no matter how late in the evening. It was at any rate actually uplifting to realize that I had got thus, in three minutes, the pull of her in regard to her great New York friends. My eye, as Lorraine says, how she HAS, on all this ground of those people, been piling it on! If Maria, who has so bowed her head, gets any such glimpse of what her aunt has been making her bow it to—well, I think I shall then entertain something of the human pity for Eliza, that I found myself, while I walked about, fairly entertaining for my sister.
What were they, what ARE they, the Chataways, anyhow? I don't even yet know, I confess; but now I don't want to—I don't care a hang, having no further use for them whatever. But on one of the Park benches, in the golden morning, the wonderment added, I remember, to my joy, for we hadn't, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them: Lorraine only pretending a little, with her charming elfish art, that she occasionally was, in order to see how far Eliza would go. Well, that brilliant woman HAD gone pretty far for us, truly, if, after all, they were only in the manicure line. She was a-doing of it, as Lorraine says, my massive lady was, in the “parlor” where I don't suppose it's usually done; and aren't there such places, precisely, AS Manicure Parlors, where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to? Oh, I do hope, for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from us! Otherwise, by all the gods, it's just a boarding-house: there was exactly the smell in the hall, THE boarding-house smell, that pervaded my old greasy haunt of the League days: that boiled atmosphere that seems to belong at once, confusedly, to a domestic “wash” and to inferior food—as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the saucepan and the latter in the tubs.
There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chataway's queer look at me on my saying I was Eliza's nephew—the droll effect of her making on her side a discovery about ME. Yes, she made it, and as against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me; so that if Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged in New York about Eastridge. I didn't clearly, for Mrs. Chataway, come up to the brag—or perhaps rather didn't come down to it: since I dare say the poor lady's consternation meant simply that my aunt has confessed to me but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at the most; or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not as—well, as what I am. Whatever I am, in any case, and however awkward a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty minutes of the Park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle justified.
I could of course scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet alley, pulling up to gape, I recognized in a young man brooding on a bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward! There he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard. There is certainly but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep—or even, for that matter, the hart ungalled play; the wonder of my coincidence shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young despair wishes to commune with immensity it can ONLY do so either in a hall bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on my prey. To sit down, in short, you've GOT to sit there; there isn't another square inch of the whole place over which you haven't got, as everything shrieks at you, to step lively. Poor Goward, I could see at a glance, wanted very much to sit down—looked indeed very much as if he wanted never, NEVER again to get up.
I hovered there—I couldn't help it, a bit gloatingly—before I pounced; and yet even when he became aware of me, as he did in a minute, he didn't shift his position by an inch, but only took me and my dreadful meaning, with his wan stare, as a part of the strange burden of his fate. He didn't seem even surprised to speak of; he had waked up—premising his brief, bewildered delirium—to the sense that something NATURAL must happen, and even to the fond hope that something natural WOULD; and I was simply the form in which it was happening. I came nearer, I stood before him; and he kept up at me the oddest stare—which was plainly but the dumb yearning that I would explain, explain! He wanted everything told him—but every single thing; as if, after a tremendous fall, or some wild parabola through the air, the effect of a violent explosion under his feet, he had landed at a vast distance from his starting-point and required to know where he was. Well, the charming thing was that this affected me as giving the very sharpest point to the idea that, in asking myself how I should deal with him, I had already so vividly entertained.
VIII. THE MARRIED DAUGHTER, By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims—that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal, myself, because nobody—distinctly not one person—in our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves; nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether any one else in the world understood me or not.
I suppose—in fact, I know—that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy's which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me.
Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of this family. But nobody knows as well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them, collectively and individually considered. An older sister, if she have any consciousness of responsibility at all, is, to my mind, not in an easy position. Her extra years give her an extra sense. One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety which the younger children cannot share. She has, in a way, the intelligence and forethought of a mother without a mother's authority or privilege.