Miss Grief and Other Stories (35 page)

“But we can't. Our cabins on the
Etruria
have been engaged for weeks,” replied her husband.

“They can be changed. At this season there's no crowd.”

“But why?”

“I want to see the other line for myself, with my own eyes, so that the next time we cross we can make an intelligent choice.”

“The next time? We needn't hurry about that. And it's too late to change now,” said Moore, returning to his paper.

“It isn't in the least too late, if you cared to please me. And it's a very little thing, I'm sure. Don't you see that if we are to live in Washington, we must go away early every summer?
We ought not to stay there a day after April, on account of the children. So, as I like going abroad better than any of the summer resorts, we shall be over here often. I don't see why we should not cross every year. So far, the three times we have crossed already, you have kept me tied to the Cunards. But I think that's narrow—to know only one line. It's like the New Edinburgh narrowness. They always quote Boston, and go to Boston, as though New York didn't exist. If you see about it immediately—to-morrow morning—I dare say you can arrange it. Promise me you will?”

“No; it's too late; they wouldn't do it. It's unreasonable to ask it.”

A flush of anger rose in Amy's thin little face. “I suppose you mean that I'm unreasonable? But if there's anything I'm not, it's that. I always have a motive for everything I do. You have not a single reason for holding to the Cunard, except the trouble it will be to change, while I have an excellent one for wishing to try the White Star. Unreasonable!”

Here there was a knock at the door, and Banks appeared with a scared look in his eyes. “Please, sir, will you step out for a moment?” he murmured, but preserving his correct attitude in spite of his alarm.

Moore threw down his paper, and hurried into the hall, closing the door behind him. Amy, however, had instantly followed him.

A policeman standing at the street door delivered his message: “There is a child injured at the underground station. Don't know how bad it is. The nurse said it lived here at this number.”

“Good God!” said Moore. And pushing by the man, he ran down the street towards the station.

Amy, who had overheard where she stood at the end of the hall, gave a gasp, and leaned for an instant against the wall. Then she too, bareheaded, darted out, and rushed down the lighted street. Miss Remington now appeared at the sitting-room door; seeing the policeman, and catching from Banks the words “child” and “station,” she ran back, seized a shawl of her own which was lying on a chair, and then followed the others, Banks accompanying her, but hardly able to keep up with her swiftness.

The Sloane Square Station was near. The stairway leading to the tracks at this station is one of the longest possessed by the underground railway; it does not turn, but goes straight down, down, as if descending to the bowels of the earth. The wicket at the bottom was open, and Gertrude ran through it and out on the lighted platform. There was a group at a distance; something told her that it surrounded the injured child. But before she could reach it, her eyes caught sight of Philip Moore leading, or trying to lead, Amy in the opposite direction, away from this group. Gertrude joined them, speechless.

“It's some other child,” said Philip, as she came up. “From our house, apparently. Belongs to that family above us, I suppose. Amy, do come this way; come into the shadow. Think of those poor people who will be here in a moment, and don't let them see you crying.”

But Amy seemed incapable of listening. He put his arm round her, and half carried her down the platform towards the deep shadow at the end.

“There is nothing the matter with any of
us
, Amy. Polly and Fritz are safe, and will be here soon. Don't cry so.”

But the shock had been too great. Amy could not stop. She clung to her husband in a helpless tremor, sobbing: “Don't leave me, Philip. Stay with me! Stay with me!”

“Leave you?” He kissed her forehead in the darkness. “I'm not dreaming of leaving you. Aren't you more to me than all the world?” He soothed her tenderly, stroking her hair as her head lay on his breast—the thin golden hair, artificially waved to hide its thinness.

Gertrude stood beside them in silence. After a minute she held out the shawl.

“Yes,” said Philip, “I am afraid she has already taken cold, with her head bare, she is so delicate.” There was deep love in his eyes as he drew the soft folds closely round his little wife, and lifted a corner to cover her bowed head. Then, still keeping his arm about her, he turned her so that she stood with her back toward the distant group, and also toward the stairway by which the other parents must descend.

They came a moment afterwards, poor things! But the noise of an arriving train on the other side covered the sounds that followed—if there were any. Philip, glancing over his shoulder, saw the child borne into one of the waiting-rooms, whose door was immediately shut upon the gazing crowd.

Now came a train on their side—the one from Notting Hill. It stopped, and Christine, composed and cool, emerged, holding Fritz's arm firmly with one hand, and Polly's with the other.

“Don't stop to kiss them now,” said Moore; “let us get away from here. Christine, take the children home as fast as possible.”
He followed the surprised nurse (surprised, but instantly obedient), supporting Amy up the long stairway directly behind Polly's little legs and the knickerbockers of Fritz.

Gertrude ascended behind them. She too was bareheaded; but no one had noticed that. At the door of the station stood Banks. Composedly he presented Philip Moore's hat.

The injured child recovered, though not for many long months. The Moores, however, left the house the next day, for the accident had made the place unpleasant to Amy. They went to the Bristol, Burlington Gardens.

On the passenger list of the White Star steamer Teutonic, January 6, 1892, were the following names: “Philip Moore and wife; two children and nurse. Miss Remington.”

Gertrude Remington does not keep a diary. But in a small almanac she jots down occasional brief notes. This is one of them: “New Edinburgh, February 20, 1892. Philip and A. gone to Washington. House here closed.”

NOTES

FOREWORD

1
.      Constance Fenimore Woolson [hereinafter CFW] to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1887],
The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson
, ed. Sharon L. Dean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 349–50.

2
.      CFW to Samuel Livingston Mather, April 10, 1880,
Complete Letters
, 138.

3
.      CFW to Samuel Mather, April 11, [1891],
Complete Letters
, 449.

4
.      CFW to unidentified recipient, [1880],
Complete Letters
, 136.

5
.      CFW to Katharine Livingston Mather, July 2, 1893,
Complete Letters
, 517.

6
.      CFW to Katharine Livingston Mather, August 20, 1893,
Complete Letters
, 520.

7
.      Lyndall Gordon,
A Private Life of Henry James
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 217.

8
.      CFW to Samuel Mather, March 20, [1880],
Complete Letters
, 130.

9
.      CFW to Arabella Washburn, no date,
Complete Letters
, 25.

10
.    Gordon., 172–73.

11
.    Ibid., 250.

INTRODUCTION

1
.      I discuss the critical response to her works in
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), from which the material for this introduction as a whole is derived. “Novelist laureate” from
The Boston Globe
quoted in a Harper & Brothers advertisement that ran nationally after the publication of
For the Major
(1883) and in the back of most of her subsequent books, all published by Harper & Brothers. See also the reference to her as America's “foremost novelist” in “Recent Fiction,”
The Independent
38 (December 1886): 11; and the remark that she “easily takes the first place among American female novelists” in “Miss Woolson's Stories,”
Harper's Bazar
19 (November 20, 1886): 758. That article continues, “Among English women George Eliot alone takes a higher rank.” Henry James, “Miss Woolson,”
The American Essays of Henry James
, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 164. Helen Gray Cone, “Woman in American Literature,”
Century Illustrated Magazine
40 (October 1890): 927.

2
.      Henry Mills Alden, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,”
Harper's
Weekly
38 (February 3, 1894): 113; “Constance Fenimore Woolson,”
New York Tribune
, January 28, 1894, 14; and Charles Dudley Warner, “Editor's Study,”
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
88 (May 1894): 967.

3
.      M. H., Letter to the
New York Times
Saturday Review of Books,
The New York Times
, June 2, 1906, BR358; Shan F. Bullock, “Miss Woolson Had a Conscience,” unidentified newspaper clipping, August 1, 1920 (the clipping is taped into a copy of Woolson's
East Angels
in the Clare Benedict Collection, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland).

4
.      I discuss this phenomenon at length in Anne E. Boyd,
Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

5
.      See, for instance, Fred Lewis Pattee,
A History of American Literature Since 1870
(New York: Century, 1915); Fred Lewis Pattee, “Constance Fenimore Woolson and the South.”
The South Atlantic Quarterly
38 (April 1939): 130–41; John Hervey, “Sympathetic Art.”
Saturday Review of Literature
12 (October 1929): 268; John Dwight Kern,
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934); Arthur Hobson Quinn,
American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey
(New York: Appleton-Century, 1936); Lyon N. Richardson, “Constance Fenimore Woolson, ‘Novelist Laureate' of America,”
The South Atlantic Quarterly
39 (January 1940): 20–36; Jay B. Hubbell, “Some New Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson,”
New England Quarterly
14 (December 1941): 715–35; Van Wyck Brooks,
The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958); Rayburn S. Moore,
Constance F. Woolson
(New York: Twayne, 1963); and Leon Edel,
Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882
–1895
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962).

6
.      See, for instance, Sharon Dean, “Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James: The Literary Relationship,”
Massachusetts Studies in English
7 (1980): 1–9; Sharon Dean, “Constance Fenimore Woolson's Southern Sketches,”
Southern Studies
25 (Fall 1986): 274–83; Sharon Dean,
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Joan Myers Weimer, ed.,
Women Artists, Women Exiles: “
Miss Grief” and Other Stories
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Cheryl Torsney,
Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Cheryl Torsney, ed.,
Critical Essays on Constance
Fenimore Woolson
(New York: G. K. Hall, 1992); Victoria Brehm, “Island Fortresses: The Landscape of the Imagination in the Great Lakes Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson,”
American Literary Realism
22 (1990): 51–66; and Victoria Brehm, ed.,
Constance Fenimore Woolson
's Nineteenth Century: Essays
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001).

7
.      Charles Dudley Warner, “Editor's Study,”
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
88 (May 1894): 967.

8
.      Constance Fenimore Woolson [hereinafter CFW] to Samuel Mather, December 10, [1893], in
The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson
, ed. Sharon Dean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 535.

9
.      CFW to Arabella Carter Washburn, undated fragment, in ibid., 561.

10
.    Inscription in Stopford A. Brooke, ed.,
Poems from Shelley
(London: Macmillan, 1880), Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome.

11
.    CFW to Henry Mills Alden, January 17, 1890, in
Complete Letters
, 397.

12
.    CFW to Edmund Clarence Stedman, August 10, [1889], in ibid., 376.

13
.    CFW to Edmund Clarence Stedman, April 30, [1883], in ibid., 239.

14
.    James, “Miss Woolson,” 168.

15
.    CFW to Miss Farnian, April 17, 1875, in
Complete Letters
, 33; CFW to Arabella Carter Washburn, [1874?], in ibid., 26; and CFW to Samuel Mather, April 25, [1875], in ibid., 34.

16
.    CFW to Henry James, February 12, [1882], in ibid., 190.

17
.    CFW to James, February 12, [1882]; CFW,
East Angels
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), 356.

ST. CLAIR FLATS

3
      
Captain Kidd
: Captain William Kidd (1645–1701), a Scottish seaman who was captured in Boston and sent to England, where he was executed for murder and piracy.