The Greater Inclination

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"I must pretend I don't know," she went on murmuring. The words had lost
their significance, but she repeated them mechanically, as though they had
been a magic formula, until suddenly she heard herself saying: "I can't
remember, I can't remember!"

Her voice sounded very loud, and she looked about her in terror; but no
one seemed to notice that she had spoken.

As she glanced down the car her eye caught the curtains of her husband's
berth, and she began to examine the monotonous arabesques woven through
their heavy folds. The pattern was intricate and difficult to trace; she
gazed fixedly at the curtains and as she did so the thick stuff grew
transparent and through it she saw her husband's face--his dead face. She
struggled to avert her look, but her eyes refused to move and her head
seemed to be held in a vice. At last, with an effort that left her weak
and shaking, she turned away; but it was of no use; close in front of her,
small and smooth, was her husband's face. It seemed to be suspended in the
air between her and the false braids of the woman who sat in front of her.
With an uncontrollable gesture she stretched out her hand to push the face
away, and suddenly she felt the touch of his smooth skin. She repressed a
cry and half started from her seat. The woman with the false braids looked
around, and feeling that she must justify her movement in some way she
rose and lifted her travelling-bag from the opposite seat. She unlocked
the bag and looked into it; but the first object her hand met was a small
flask of her husband's, thrust there at the last moment, in the haste of
departure. She locked the bag and closed her eyes ... his face was there
again, hanging between her eye-balls and lids like a waxen mask against a
red curtain....

She roused herself with a shiver. Had she fainted or slept? Hours seemed
to have elapsed; but it was still broad day, and the people about her were
sitting in the same attitudes as before.

A sudden sense of hunger made her aware that she had eaten nothing since
morning. The thought of food filled her with disgust, but she dreaded a
return of faintness, and remembering that she had some biscuits in her bag
she took one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she hastily
swallowed a little brandy from her husband's flask. The burning sensation
in her throat acted as a counter-irritant, momentarily relieving the dull
ache of her nerves. Then she felt a gently-stealing warmth, as though a
soft air fanned her, and the swarming fears relaxed their clutch, receding
through the stillness that enclosed her, a stillness soothing as the
spacious quietude of a summer day. She slept.

Through her sleep she felt the impetuous rush of the train. It seemed to
be life itself that was sweeping her on with headlong inexorable force--
sweeping her into darkness and terror, and the awe of unknown days.--Now
all at once everything was still--not a sound, not a pulsation... She was
dead in her turn, and lay beside him with smooth upstaring face. How quiet
it was!--and yet she heard feet coming, the feet of the men who were to
carry them away... She could feel too--she felt a sudden prolonged
vibration, a series of hard shocks, and then another plunge into darkness:
the darkness of death this time--a black whirlwind on which they were both
spinning like leaves, in wild uncoiling spirals, with millions and
millions of the dead....

* * * * *

She sprang up in terror. Her sleep must have lasted a long time, for the
winter day had paled and the lights had been lit. The car was in
confusion, and as she regained her self-possession she saw that the
passengers were gathering up their wraps and bags. The woman with the
false braids had brought from the dressing-room a sickly ivy-plant in a
bottle, and the Christian Scientist was reversing his cuffs. The porter
passed down the aisle with his impartial brush. An impersonal figure with
a gold-banded cap asked for her husband's ticket. A voice shouted "Baig-
gage express!" and she heard the clicking of metal as the passengers
handed over their checks.

Presently her window was blocked by an expanse of sooty wall, and the
train passed into the Harlem tunnel. The journey was over; in a few
minutes she would see her family pushing their joyous way through the
throng at the station. Her heart dilated. The worst terror was past....

"We'd better get him up now, hadn't we?" asked the porter, touching her
arm.

He had her husband's hat in his hand and was meditatively revolving it
under his brush.

She looked at the hat and tried to speak; but suddenly the car grew dark.
She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell face
downward, striking her head against the dead man's berth.

THE PELICAN

She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose
and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple
that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the
outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear
lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real
thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic
problem.

I don't think nature had meant her to be "intellectual;" but what can a
poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly six
months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather's edition
of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the creditors?

Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in
blank verse on "The Fall of Man;" one of her aunts was dean of a girls'
college; another had translated Euripides--with such a family, the poor
child's fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband's
debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after some
hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was
unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.

They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her she
was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden china
and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccupied with their spring
bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies assembled to
hear her had given me to understand that she was "doing it for the baby,"
and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper lip and the
bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to listen leniently to
her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was still, if I may use
the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as walking down a museum-
gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later
complications--the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of
Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of
the erudite--still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific
critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the
Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without
danger of losing his way.

Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious but inaccurate memory, and an
extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not remember--
wrongly; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers of rhetoric
that their infirmities were imperceptible to her friendly critics.
Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had translated
Euripides; and the mere sound of the [Greek: ais] and [Greek: ois] that
she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course,
with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to
the hearts of ladies whose only "accomplishment" was French--if you didn't
speak too quickly.

I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months later I
came upon her again in the New England university town where the
celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of a local Parnassus,
with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped on the lower
ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her husband's
death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her father's
lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to
her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, was already esconced in a snug
hollow of the Parnassian slope.

After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs. Amyot.
From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who were
hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at
that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt whether any of my
discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was ever treated to so
ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham erudition and
real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the opening
of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as
possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course
the torch of Greek art might be handed on.

She began by telling me that she had never been so frightened in her life.
She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I was, and when, just as she
was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her that I was in the
room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then (with a flying
dimple) she had remembered Emerson's line--wasn't it Emerson's?--that
beauty is its own excuse for _seeing_, and that had made her feel a little
more confident, since she was sure that no one _saw_ beauty more vividly
than she--as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan vase
on the bookcase in the library, while her sisters played with their
dolls--and if _seeing_ beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking
about it, why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be _too_
critical and sarcastic, especially if, as she thought probable, I had
heard of her having lost her poor husband, and how she had to do it for
the baby.

Being abundantly assured of my sympathy on these points, she went on to
say that she had always wanted so much to consult me about her lectures.
Of course, one subject wasn't enough (this view of the limitations of
Greek art as a "subject" gave me a startling idea of the rate at which a
successful lecturer might exhaust the universe); she must find others; she
had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought of Tennyson--didn't I
_love_ Tennyson? She _worshipped_ him so that she was sure she could help
others to understand him; or what did I think of a "course" on Raphael or
Michelangelo--or on the heroines of Shakespeare? There were some fine
steel-engravings of Raphael's Madonnas and of the Sistine ceiling in her
mother's library, and she had seen Miss Cushman in several Shakespearian
_roles_, so that on these subjects also she felt qualified to speak with
authority.

When we reached her mother's door she begged me to come in and talk the
matter over; she wanted me to see the baby--she felt as though I should
understand her better if I saw the baby--and the dimple flashed through a
tear.

The fear of encountering the author of "The Fall of Man," combined with
the opportune recollection of a dinner engagement, made me evade this
appeal with the promise of returning on the morrow. On the morrow, I left
too early to redeem my promise; and for several years afterwards I saw no
more of Mrs. Amyot.

My calling at that time took me at irregular intervals from one to another
of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also peripatetic it was
inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other's path. It was
therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston, I learned
from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon as the meal
was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.

"On Greek art?" I suggested.

"Oh, you've heard her then? No, this is one of the series called 'Homes
and Haunts of the Poets.' Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake Poets,
to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful creature--all
the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course, that her mother
was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on 'The Fall of Man'; N.P.
Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of Mrs. Amyot's aunts
has translated Eurip--"

"And is she as pretty as ever?" I irrelevantly interposed.

My hostess looked shocked. "She is excessively modest and retiring. She
says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she only
does it for the baby."

Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall full
of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a favorite with
these austere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and as we entered a
pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was setting forth to several
dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them with seats.

Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the back
of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once able to
establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to the applause
of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my earlier
recollections.

Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious
discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the stateness of her
theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which she
had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the shots
were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that, for her
purpose, the bull's-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be
flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her
eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick analogous to that of
the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white paper out of his mouth.
From a large assortment of stock adjectives she chose, with unerring
deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and discrimination would most
surely have rejected, fitting out her subject with a whole wardrobe of
slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size. To the invaluable knack of
not disturbing the association of ideas in her audience, she added the
gift of what may be called a confidential manner--so that her fluent
generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the lecture was,
of course, manufactured out of Lewes's book) had the flavor of personal
experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on the
best way of knitting children's socks, or of putting up preserves for the
winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent--the moral equivalent
of her dimple--that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational
success. It was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand
emotions that so endeared her to her feminine listeners.

To any one not in search of "documents" Mrs. Amyot's success was hardly of
a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the
growing conviction that the "suffering" entailed on her by public speaking
was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had reached the
point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating
her public; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in
attaining results so considerable by means involving so little conscious
effort. Mrs. Amyot's art was simply an extension of coquetry: she flirted
with her audience.

In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded but languidly to my
hostess's suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs.
Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday
evenings, and one met "thoughtful" people there, my hostess explained: it
was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained distinctly
resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and intellectuality, and I
declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the street.

She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston; why had I not
come last night? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and it had
frightened her--yes, really, almost as much as years ago in Hillbridge.
She never _could_ get over that stupid shyness, and the whole business was
as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do? There was the baby--
he was a big boy now, and boys were _so_ expensive! But did I really think
she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn't I come home with
her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of the
lecture? She had plenty of flattery--people were _so_ kind, and every one
knew that she did it for the baby--but what she felt the need of was
criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine--oh, she knew that I
was dreadfully discriminating!

I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her Tennyson-
worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked it. Perhaps,
however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating length of his
yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been taught to recite
Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the itching of my palms in
his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason to think that he
would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with the other
boys in the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another outlet for
Mrs. Amyot's irrepressible coquetry.

But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother's love for him was. It
justified everything--the lectures _were_ for the baby, after all. I had
not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot
carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she
should--Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was no use,
of course, in being "discriminating." I preserved sufficient reason to
avoid that pitfall, but I suggested "subjects" and made lists of books for
her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated the
remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men might
have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage
and escaped by the afternoon train.

The next time I saw her was in New York, when she had become so
fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at
her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and hear
Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was
perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to
support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin)
was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the throng
of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped
their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the
study of each other's apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but
she evidently represented a social obligation like going to church, rather
than any more personal interest; in fact, I suspect that every one of the
ladies would have remained away, had they been sure that none of the
others were coming.

Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between
herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become a
task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less convincing warmth
than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but it was
like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed far away.
She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart
gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities of a settled
income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened
I reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in
saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did
it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the
price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal
education.

I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I
found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot's side. The dimple came out at my
greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the
same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty
demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs.
They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a
moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.

Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat,
with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of
expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful.
It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot's account. Lancelot had been
sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people
didn't tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard afterwards. During
the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and
radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then,
always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic: she
had become a lecturing-machine.

I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared.
I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had
been last heard of as lecturing--still lecturing--but no one seemed to
know when or where.

It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the
oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had
so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had
elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of my
hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to
have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set
it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown
that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the line of
prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.

It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the
first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I made
no excuse for following her.

She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with
her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the
guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last seen
me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well and that
for the present she was not lecturing--she was tired and her doctor had
ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she paused and held
out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I were in
Boston again--the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed the
door on the conclusion of the phrase.

Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from
her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been
unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and
could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which--. A few days
later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had
happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for
some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more
rivals than formerly--younger women, she admitted, with a smile that could
still afford to be generous--and then her audiences had grown more
critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing--as she understood it--
used to be simple enough. You chose your topic--Raphael, Shakespeare,
Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar "subject"--and read up
about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then
told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple
process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar "subjects";
it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn't always known
about--natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative
folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult
to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the
"influence" of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on
influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied
with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin,
of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on English literature; but such
investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated
audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced
should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection
between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of
ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two
people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each
other's works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance,
been lecturing with great success on the influence of the Rosicrucians
upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody else had given a "course" on the
influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.

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