Indian Summer

by William Dean Howells

  Produced by David Garcia, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, andthe Online Distributed Proofreaders Team

  INDIAN SUMMER

  BY

  WILLIAM D. HOWELLS

  AUTHOR OF "THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM," "A MODERN INSTANCE,""WOMAN'S REASON," ETC.

  INDIAN SUMMER

  * * * * *

  I

  Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break thelines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either hand, andopen an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner ofa shop and stared out upon the river. It was the late afternoon of a dayin January, which had begun bright and warm, but had suffered a changeof mood as its hours passed, and now, from a sky dimmed with flying greyclouds, was threatening rain. There must already have been rain in themountains, for the yellow torrent that seethed and swirled around thepiers of the bridge was swelling momently on the wall of the Lung' Arno,and rolling a threatening flood toward the Cascine, where it lost itselfunder the ranks of the poplars that seemed to file across its course,and let their delicate tops melt into the pallor of the low horizon.

  The city, with the sweep of the Lung' Arno on either hand, and its domesand towers hung in the dull air, and the country with its white villasand black cypresses breaking the grey stretches of the olive orchards onits hill-sides, had alike been growing more and more insufferable; andColville was finding a sort of vindictive satisfaction in the power toignore the surrounding frippery of landscape and architecture. Heisolated himself so perfectly from it, as he brooded upon the river,that, for any sensible difference, he might have been standing on theMain Street Bridge at Des Vaches, Indiana, looking down at the tawnysweep of the Wabash. He had no love for that stream, nor for theambitious town on its banks, but ever since he woke that morning he hadfelt a growing conviction that he had been a great ass to leave them. Hehad, in fact, taken the prodigious risk of breaking his life sharp offfrom the course in which it had been set for many years, and ofattempting to renew it in a direction from which it had long beendiverted. Such an act could be precipitated only by a strong impulse ofconscience or a profound disgust, and with Colville it sprang fromdisgust. He had experienced a bitter disappointment in the city to whoseprosperity he had given the energies of his best years, and in whosefavour he imagined that he had triumphantly established himself.

  He had certainly made the Des Vaches _Democrat-Republican_ a very goodpaper; its ability was recognised throughout the State, and in DesVaches people of all parties were proud of it. They liked every morningto see what Colville said; they believed that in his way he was thesmartest man in the State, and they were fond of claiming that there wasno such writer on any of the Indianapolis papers. They forgave somepolitical heresies to the talent they admired; they permitted him thewhim of free trade, they laughed tolerantly when he came out in favourof civil service reform, and no one had much fault to find when the_Democrat-Republican_ bolted the nomination of a certain politician ofits party for Congress. But when Colville permitted his own name to beused by the opposing party, the people arose in their might and defeatedhim by a tremendous majority. That was what the regular nominee said. Itwas a withering rebuke to treason, in the opinion of this gentleman; itwas a good joke, anyway, with the Democratic managers who had takenColville up, being all in the Republican family; whichever it was, itwas a mortification for Colville which his pride could not brook. Hestood disgraced before the community not only as a theorist andunpractical doctrinaire, but as a dangerous man; and what was worse, hecould not wholly acquit himself of a measure of bad faith; hisconscience troubled him even more than his pride. Money was found, and aprinter bought up with it to start a paper in opposition to the_Democrat-Republican_. Then Colville contemptuously offered to sell outto the Republican committee in charge of the new enterprise, and theyaccepted his terms.

  In private life he found much of the old kindness returning to him; andhis successful opponent took the first opportunity of heaping coals offire on his head in the public street, when he appeared to the outer eyeto be shaking hands with Colville. During the months that he remained toclose up his affairs after the sale of his paper, the_Post-Democrat-Republican_ (the newspaper had agglutinated the titles oftwo of its predecessors, after the fashion of American journals) wasfulsome in its complimentary allusions to him. It politely invented thefiction that he was going to Europe for his health, impaired by hisjournalistic labours, and adventurously promised its readers that theymight hope to hear from him from time to time in its columns. In someof its allusions to him Colville detected the point of a fine irony, ofwhich he had himself introduced the practice in the _Democrat-Republican_;and he experienced, with a sense of personal impoverishment, thecurious fact that a journalist of strong characteristics leavesthe tradition of himself in such degree with the journal he hascreated that he seems to bring very little away. He was obligedto confess in his own heart that the paper was as good as ever.The assistants, who had trained themselves to write like him, seemed tobe writing quite as well, and his honesty would not permit him toreceive the consolation offered him by the friends who told him thatthere was a great falling off in the _Post-Democrat-Republican_. Exceptthat it was rather more Stalwart in its Republicanism, and had turnedquite round on the question of the tariff, it was very much what it hadalways been. It kept the old decency of tone which he had given it, andit maintained the literary character which he was proud of. The newmanagement must have divined that its popularity, with the women atleast, was largely due to its careful selections of verse and fiction,its literary news, and its full and piquant criticisms, with their longextracts from new books. It was some time since he had personally lookedafter this department, and the young fellow in charge of it under himhad remained with the paper. Its continued excellence, which he couldnot have denied if he had wished, seemed to leave him drained andfeeble, and it was partly from the sense of this that he declined theovertures, well backed up with money, to establish an independent paperin Des Vaches. He felt that there was not fight enough in him for thework, even if he had not taken that strong disgust for public life whichincluded the place and its people. He wanted to get away, to get faraway, and with the abrupt and total change in his humour he reverted toa period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition ofCongress were things undreamed of.

  At that period he was a very young architect, with an inclination towardthe literary side of his profession, which made it seem profitable tolinger, with his Ruskin in his hand, among the masterpieces of ItalianGothic, when perhaps he might have been better employed in designingred-roofed many-verandaed, consciously mullioned seaside cottages on theNew England coast. He wrote a magazine paper on the zoology of theLombardic pillars in Verona, very Ruskinian, very scornful of modernmotive. He visited every part of the peninsula, but he gave the greaterpart of his time to North Italy, and in Venice he met the young girlwhom he followed to Florence. His love did not prosper; when she wentaway she left him in possession of that treasure to a man of histemperament, a broken heart. From that time his vague dreams began tolift, and to let him live in the clear light of common day; but he wasstill lingering at Florence, ignorant of the good which had befallenhim, and cowering within himself under the sting of wounded vanity, whenhe received a letter from his elder brother suggesting that he shouldcome and see how he liked the architecture of Des Vaches. His brotherhad been seven years at Des Vaches, where he had lands, and a lead-mine,and a scheme for a railroad, and had lately added a daily newspaper tohis other enterprises. He had, in fact, added two newspapers; for havingunexpectedly and almost involuntarily become the owner of the Des Vaches_Republican_, the fancy of building up a great local journal seized him,and he bought the _Wabash Valley Dem
ocrat_, uniting them under the nameof the _Democrat-Republican_. But he had trouble almost from the firstwith his editors, and he naturally thought of the brother with a turnfor writing who had been running to waste for the last year or two inEurope. His real purpose was to work Colville into the management of hispaper when he invited him to come out and look at the architecture ofDes Vaches.

  Colville went, because he was at that moment in the humour to goanywhere, and because his money was running low, and he must begin worksomehow. He was still romantic enough to like the notion of the place alittle, because it bore the name given to it by the old French_voyageurs_ from a herd of buffalo cows which they had seen grazing onthe site of their camp there; but when he came to the place itself hedid not like it. He hated it; but he stayed, and as an architect was thelast thing any one wanted in Des Vaches since the jail and court-househad been built, he became, half without his willing it, a newspaper man.He learned in time to relish the humorous intimacy of the life abouthim; and when it was decided that he was no fool--there were doubts,growing out of his Eastern accent and the work of his New York tailor,at first--he found himself the object of a pleasing popularity. In duetime he bought his brother out; he became very fond of newspaper life,its constant excitements and its endless variety; and six weeks beforehe sold his paper he would have scoffed at a prophecy of his return toEurope for the resumption of any artistic purpose whatever. But here hewas, lounging on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, whither he had come withthe intention of rubbing up his former studies, and of perhaps gettingback to put them in practice at New York ultimately. He had said tohimself before coming abroad that he was in no hurry; that he shouldtake it very easily--he had money enough for that; yet he would keeparchitecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in acommunity where every one was intensely occupied, and he unconsciouslypaid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an objectless life wasdisgraceful to a man.

  In the meantime he suffered keenly and at every moment the loss of theoccupation of which he had bereaved himself; in thinking of quite otherthings, in talk of totally different matters, from the dreams of night,he woke with a start to the realisation of the fact that he had nolonger a newspaper. He perceived now, as never before, that for fifteenyears almost every breath of his life had been drawn with reference tohis paper, and that without it he was in some sort lost, and, as itwere, extinct. A tide of ridiculous home-sickness, which was anexpression of this passionate regret for the life he had put behind him,rather than any longing for Des Vaches, swept over him, and the firstpassages of a letter to the _Post-Democrat-Republican_ began to shapethemselves in his mind. He had always, when he left home for New York orWashington, or for his few weeks of summer vacation on the Canadianrivers or the New England coast, written back to his readers, in whom heknew he could count upon quick sympathy in all he saw and felt, and henow found himself addressing them with that frank familiarity whichcomes to the journalist, in minor communities, from the habit of print.He began by confessing to them the defeat of certain expectations withwhich he had returned to Florence, and told them that they must not lookfor anything like the ordinary letters of travel from him. But he wasnot so singular in his attitude toward the place as he supposed; for anytourist who comes to Florence with the old-fashioned expectation ofimpressions will probably suffer a disappointment, unless he arrivesvery young and for the first time. It is a city superficially so wellknown that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself;they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examinedthem before, and is disposed to be critical of them. Certain emotions,certain sensations failed to repeat themselves to Colville at sight ofthe familiar monuments, which seemed to wear a hardy and indifferentair, as if being stared at so many years by so many thousands oftravellers had extinguished in them that sensibility which one likes tofancy in objects of interest everywhere.

  The life which was as vivid all about him as if caught by the latestinstantaneous process made the same comparatively ineffective appeal.The operatic spectacle was still there. The people, with their cloaksstatuesquely draped over their left shoulders, moved down the street, orposed in vehement dialogue on the sidewalks; the drama of bargaining,with the customer's scorn, the shopman's pathos, came through the openshop door; the handsome, heavy-eyed ladies, the bare-headed girls,thronged the ways; the caffes were full of the well-remembered figuresover their newspapers and little cups; the officers were as splendid asof old, with their long cigars in their mouths, their swords kickingagainst their beautiful legs, and their spurs jingling; the dandies,with their little dogs and their flower-like smiles, were still in frontof the confectioners' for the inspection of the ladies who passed; theold beggar still crouched over her scaldino at the church door, and theyoung man with one leg, whom he thought to escape by walking fast, hadtimed him to a second from the other side of the street. There was thewonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stenchin the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. Theartisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light onsome bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarmingthrough the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-cartsand cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled uponthe crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of thesouthern winter, gathering in the shade and dispersing in the sun, anddenied everywhere by the profusion of fruit and flowers, and by thegreenery of gardens showing through the grated portals and over the topsof high walls; the groups of idle poor, permanently or temporarilypropped against the bases of edifices with a southern exposure; thepriests and monks and nuns in their gliding passage; the impassionedsnapping of the cabmen's whips; the clangour of bells that at some hoursinundated the city, and then suddenly subsided and left it to thebanging of coppersmiths; the open-air frying of cakes, with itsprimitive smell of burning fat; the tramp of soldiery, and the fanfareof bugles blown to gay measures--these and a hundred othercharacteristic traits and facts still found a response in theconsciousness where they were once a rapture of novelty; but theresponse was faint and thin; he could not warm over the old mood inwhich he once treasured them all away as of equal preciousness.

  Of course there was a pleasure in recognising some details of formerexperience in Florence as they recurred. Colville had been met at onceby a _festa_, when nothing could be done, and he was more than consoledby the caressing sympathy with which he was assured that his brokentrunk could not be mended till the day after to-morrow; he had quiteforgotten about the festas and the sympathy. That night the piazza onwhich he lodged seemed full of snow to the casual glance he gave it;then he saw that it was the white Italian moonlight, which he had alsoforgotten....