Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “With what you know to be my natural tendencies? Your prophetic eye prefigures my pantaloons in the tops of my boots. Well, there is time yet to turn back from the brutality of a patriarchal life. You must allow that I’ve taken the longest way round in going West. In Italy there are many chances; and besides, you know, I like to talk.”

  It seemed to be an old subject between them, and they discussed it languidly, like some abstract topic rather than a reality.

  “If you only had some tie to bind you to the East, I should feel pretty safe about you,” said Dunham, presently.

  “I have you,” answered his friend, demurely.

  “Oh, I’m nothing,” said Dunham, with sincerity.

  “Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me, there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up a studio instead of a ranch, — choose between sculpture and painting, instead of cattle and sheep? After all, it does grind me to have lost that money! If I had only been swindled out of it, I shouldn’t have cared; but when you go and make a bad thing of it yourself, with your eyes open, there’s a reluctance to place the responsibility where it belongs that doesn’t occur in the other case. Dunham, do you think it altogether ridiculous that I should feel there was something sacred in the money? When I remember how hard my poor old father worked to get it together, it seems wicked that I should have stupidly wasted it on the venture I did. I want to get it back; I want to make money. And so I’m going out to Italy with you, to waste more. I don’t respect myself as I should if I were on a Pullman palace car, speeding westward. I’ll own I like this better.”

  “Oh, it’s all right, Staniford,” said his friend. “The voyage will do you good, and you’ll have time to think everything over, and start fairer when you get back.”

  “That girl,” observed Staniford, with characteristic abruptness, “is a type that is commoner than we imagine in New England. We fair people fancy we are the only genuine Yankees. I guess that’s a mistake. There must have been a good many dark Puritans. In fact, we always think of Puritans as dark, don’t we?”

  “I believe we do,” assented Dunham. “Perhaps on account of their black clothes.”

  “Perhaps,” said Staniford. “At any rate, I’m so tired of the blonde type in fiction that I rather like the other thing in life. Every novelist runs a blonde heroine; I wonder why. This girl has the clear Southern pallor; she’s of the olive hue; and her eyes are black as sloes, — not that I know what sloes are. Did she remind you of anything in particular?”

  “Yes; a little of Faed’s Evangeline, as she sat in the door-way of the warehouse yesterday.”

  “Exactly. I wish the picture were more of a picture; but I don’t know that it matters. She’s more of a picture.”

  “‘Pretty as a bird,’ the captain said.”

  “Bird isn’t bad. But the bird is in her manner. There’s something tranquilly alert in her manner that’s like a bird; like a bird that lingers on its perch, looking at you over its shoulder, if you come up behind. That trick of the heavily lifted, half lifted eyelids, — I wonder if it’s a trick. The long lashes can’t be; she can’t make them curl up at the edges. Blood, — Lurella Blood. And she wants to know.” Staniford’s voice fell thoughtful.

  “She’s more slender than Faed’s Evangeline. Faed painted rather too fat a sufferer on that tombstone. Lurella Blood has a very pretty figure. Lurella. Why Lurella?”

  “Oh, come, Staniford!” cried Dunham. “It isn’t fair to call the girl by that jingle without some ground for it.”

  “I’m sure her name’s Lurella, for she wanted to know. Besides, there’s as much sense in it as there is in any name. It sounds very well. Lurella. It is mere prejudice that condemns the novel collocation of syllables.”

  “I wonder what she’s thinking of now, — what’s passing in her mind,” mused Dunham aloud.

  “You want to know, too, do you?” mocked his friend. “I’ll tell you what: processions of young men so long that they are an hour getting by a given point. That’s what’s passing in every girl’s mind — when she’s thinking. It’s perfectly right. Processsions of young girls are similarly passing in our stately and spacious intellects. It’s the chief business of the youth of one sex to think of the youth of the other sex.”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” assented Dunham; “and I believe in it, too—”

  “Of course you do, you wicked wretch, you abandoned Lovelace, you bruiser of ladies’ hearts! You hope the procession is composed entirely of yourself. What would the divine Hibbard say to your goings-on?”

  “Oh, don’t, Staniford! It isn’t fair,” pleaded Dunham, with the flattered laugh which the best of men give when falsely attainted of gallantry. “I was wondering whether she was feeling homesick, or strange, or—”

  “I will go below and ask her,” said Staniford. “I know she will tell me the exact truth. They always do. Or if you will take a guess of mine instead of her word for it, I will hazard the surmise that she is not at all homesick. What has a pretty young girl to regret in such a life as she has left? It’s the most arid and joyless existence under the sun. She has never known anything like society. In the country with us, the social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed, but there are monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are quite extinct now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns: ball-rooms that have had no dancing in them for half a century, and where they give you a bed sometimes. There used to be academies, too, in the hill towns, where they furnished a rude but serviceable article of real learning, and where the local octogenarian remembers seeing something famous in the way of theatricals on examination-day; but neither his children nor his grandchildren have seen the like. There’s a decay of the religious sentiment, and the church is no longer a social centre, with merry meetings among the tombstones between the morning and the afternoon service. Superficial humanitarianism of one kind or another has killed the good old orthodoxy, as the railroads have killed the turnpikes and the country taverns; and the common schools have killed the academies. Why, I don’t suppose this girl ever saw anything livelier than a township cattle show, or a Sunday-school picnic, in her life. They don’t pay visits in the country except at rare intervals, and their evening parties, when they have any, are something to strike you dead with pity. They used to clear away the corn-husks and pumpkins on the barn floor, and dance by the light of tin lanterns. At least, that’s the traditional thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides of the room, giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums, and coaxing somebody to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in the form of apples and water. I have assisted at some rural festivals where the apples were omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our country people don’t all go mad. They do go mad, a great many of them, and manage to get a little glimpse of society in the insane asylums.” Staniford ended his tirade with a laugh, in which he vented his humorous sense and his fundamental pity of the conditions he had caricatured.

  “But how,” demanded Dunham, breaking rebelliously from the silence in which he had listened, “do you account for her good manner?”

  “She probably was born with a genius for it. Some people are born with a genius for one thing, and some with a genius for another. I, for example, am an artistic genius, forced to be an amateur by the delusive possession of early wealth, and now burning with a creative instinct in the direction of the sheep or cattle business; you have the gift of universal optimism; Lurella Blood has the genius of good society. Give that girl a winter among nice people in Boston, and you would never know that she was not born on Beacon Hill.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” said Dunham.

  “You doubt it? Pessimist!”

  “But you implied just now that she had no sensibility,” pursued Dunham.

  “So I did!” cried Staniford, cheerfully. “Social genius and sensibility are two very different things; the cynic might contend they were incompatible, but I won’t insist so far. I dare
say she may regret the natal spot; most of us have a dumb, brutish attachment to the cari luoghi; but if she knows anything, she hates its surroundings, and must be glad to get out into the world. I should like mightily to know how the world strikes her, as far as she’s gone. But I doubt if she’s one to betray her own counsel in any way. She looks deep, Lurella does.” Staniford laughed again at the pain which his insistence upon the name brought into Dunham’s face.

  VIII.

  After dinner, nature avenged herself in the young men for their vigils of the night before, when they had stayed up so late, parting with friends, that they had found themselves early risers without having been abed. They both slept so long that Dunham, leaving Staniford to a still unfinished nap, came on deck between five and six o’clock.

  Lydia was there, wrapped against the freshening breeze in a red knit shawl, and seated on a stool in the waist of the ship, in the Evangeline attitude, and with the wistful, Evangeline look in her face, as she gazed out over the far-weltering sea-line, from which all trace of the shore had vanished. She seemed to the young man very interesting, and he approached her with that kindness for all other women in his heart which the lover feels in absence from his beloved, and with a formless sense that some retribution was due her from him for the roughness with which Staniford had surmised her natural history. Women had always been dear and sacred to him; he liked, beyond most young men, to be with them; he was forever calling upon them, getting introduced to them, waiting upon them, inventing little services for them, corresponding with them, and wearing himself out in their interest. It is said that women do not value men of this sort so much as men of some other sorts. It was long, at any rate, before Dunham — whom people always called Charley Dunham — found the woman who thought him more lovely than every other woman pronounced him; and naturally Miss Hibbard was the most exacting of her sex. She required all those offices which Dunham delighted to render, and many besides: being an invalid, she needed devotion. She had refused Dunham before going out to Europe with her mother, and she had written to take him back after she got there. He was now on his way to join her in Dresden, where he hoped that he might marry her, and be perfectly sacrificed to her ailments. She only lacked poverty in order to be thoroughly displeasing to most men; but Dunham had no misgiving save in regard to her money; he wished she had no money.

  “A good deal more motion, isn’t there?” he said to Lydia, smiling sunnily as he spoke, and holding his hat with one hand. “Do you find it unpleasant?”

  “No,” she answered, “not at all. I like it.”

  “Oh, there isn’t enough swell to make it uncomfortable, yet,” asserted Dunham, looking about to see if there were not something he could do for her. “And you may turn out a good sailor. Were you ever at sea before?”

  “No; this is the first time I was ever on a ship.”

  “Is it possible!” cried Dunham; he was now fairly at sea for the first time himself, though by virtue of his European associations he seemed to have made many voyages. It appeared to him that if there was nothing else he could do for Lydia, it was his duty to talk to her. He found another stool, and drew it up within easier conversational distance. “Then you’ve never been out of sight of land before?”

  “No,” said Lydia.

  “That’s very curious — I beg your pardon; I mean you must find it a great novelty.”

  “Yes, it’s very strange,” said the girl, seriously. “It looks like the Flood. It seems as if all the rest of the world was drowned.”

  Dunham glanced round the vast horizon. “It is like the Flood. And it has that quality, which I’ve often noticed in sublime things, of seeming to be for this occasion only.”

  “Yes?” said Lydia.

  “Why, don’t you know? It seems as if it must be like a fine sunset, and would pass in a few minutes. Perhaps we feel that we can’t endure sublimity long, and want it to pass.”

  “I could look at it forever,” replied Lydia.

  Dunham turned to see if this were young-ladyish rapture, but perceived that she was affecting nothing. He liked seriousness, for he was, with a great deal of affectation for social purposes, a very sincere person. His heart warmed more and more to the lonely girl; to be talking to her seemed, after all, to be doing very little for her, and he longed to be of service. “Have you explored our little wooden world, yet?” he asked, after a pause.

  Lydia paused too. “The ship?” she asked presently. “No; I’ve only been in the cabin, and here; and this morning,” she added, conscientiously, “Thomas showed me the cook’s galley, — the kitchen.”

  “You’ve seen more than I have,” said Dunham. “Wouldn’t you like to go forward, to the bow, and see how it looks there?”

  “Yes, thank you,” answered Lydia, “I would.”

  She tottered a little in gaining her feet, and the wind drifted her slightness a step or two aside. “Won’t you take my arm, perhaps?” suggested Dunham.

  “Thank you,” said Lydia, “I think I can get along.” But after a few paces, a lurch of the ship flung her against Dunham’s side; he caught her hand, and passed it through his arm without protest from her.

  “Isn’t it grand?” he asked triumphantly, as they stood at the prow, and rose and sank with the vessel’s careering plunges. It was no gale, but only a fair wind; the water foamed along the ship’s sides, and, as her bows descended, shot forward in hissing jets of spray; away on every hand flocked the white caps. “You had better keep my arm, here.” Lydia did so, resting her disengaged hand on the bulwarks, as she bent over a little on that side to watch the rush of the sea. “It really seems as if there were more of a view here.”

  “It does, somehow,” admitted Lydia.

  “Look back at the ship’s sails,” said Dunham. The swell and press of the white canvas seemed like the clouds of heaven swooping down upon them from all the airy heights. The sweet wind beat in their faces, and they laughed in sympathy, as they fronted it. “Perhaps the motion is a little too strong for you here?” he asked.

  “Oh, not at all!” cried the girl.

  He had done something for her by bringing her here, and he hoped to do something more by taking her away. He was discomfited, for he was at a loss what other attention to offer. Just at that moment a sound made itself heard above the whistling of the cordage and the wash of the sea, which caused Lydia to start and look round.

  “Didn’t you think,” she asked, “that you heard hens?”

  “Why, yes,” said Dunham. “What could it have been? Let us investigate.”

  He led the way back past the forecastle and the cook’s galley, and there, in dangerous proximity to the pots and frying pans, they found a coop with some dozen querulous and meditative fowl in it.

  “I heard them this morning,” said Lydia. “They seemed to wake me with their crowing, and I thought — I was at home!”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Dunham, sympathetically. He wished Staniford were there to take shame to himself for denying sensibility to this girl.

  The cook, smoking a pipe at the door of his galley, said, “Dey won’t trouble you much, miss. Dey don’t gen’ly last us long, and I’ll kill de roosters first.”

  “Oh, come, now!” protested Dunham. “I wouldn’t say that!” The cook and Lydia stared at him in equal surprise.

  “Well,” answered the cook, “I’ll kill the hens first, den. It don’t make any difference to me which I kill. I dunno but de hens is tenderer.” He smoked in a bland indifference.

  “Oh, hold on!” exclaimed Dunham, in repetition of his helpless protest.

  Lydia stooped down to make closer acquaintance with the devoted birds. They huddled themselves away from her in one corner of their prison, and talked together in low tones of grave mistrust. “Poor things!” she said. As a country girl, used to the practical ends of poultry, she knew as well as the cook that it was the fit and simple destiny of chickens to be eaten, sooner or later; and it must have been less in commiseration of their fate tha
n in self-pity and regret for the scenes they recalled that she sighed. The hens that burrowed yesterday under the lilacs in the door-yard; the cock that her aunt so often drove, insulted and exclamatory, at the head of his harem, out of forbidden garden bounds; the social groups that scratched and descanted lazily about the wide, sunny barn doors; the anxious companies seeking their favorite perches, with alarming outcries, in the dusk of summer evenings; the sentinels answering each other from farm to farm before winter dawns, when all the hills were drowned in snow, were of kindred with these hapless prisoners.

  Dunham was touched at Lydia’s compassion. “Would you like — would you like to feed them?” he asked by a happy inspiration. He turned to the cook, with his gentle politeness: “There’s no objection to our feeding them, I suppose?”

  “Laws, no!” said the cook. “Fats ’em up.” He went inside, and reappeared with a pan full of scraps of meat and crusts of bread.

  “Oh, I say!” cried Dunham. “Haven’t you got some grain, you know, of some sort; some seeds, don’t you know?”

  “They will like this,” said Lydia, while the cook stared in perplexity. She took the pan, and opening the little door of the coop flung the provision inside. But the fowls were either too depressed in spirit to eat anything, or they were not hungry; they remained in their corner, and merely fell silent, as if a new suspicion had been roused in their unhappy breasts.

  “Dey’ll come, to it,” observed the cook.

  Dunham felt far from content, and regarded the poultry with silent disappointment. “Are you fond of pets?” he asked, after a while.

  “Yes, I used to have pet chickens when I was a little thing.”

  “You ought to adopt one of these,” suggested Dunham. “That white one is a pretty creature.”

  “Yes,” said Lydia. “He looks as if he were Leghorn. Leghorn breed,” she added, in reply to Dunham’s look of inquiry. “He’s a beauty.”

  “Let me get him out for you a moment!” cried the young man, in his amiable zeal. Before Lydia could protest, or the cook interfere, he had opened the coop-door and plunged his arm into the tumult which his manoeuvre created within. He secured the cockerel, and drawing it forth was about to offer it to Lydia, when in its struggles to escape it drove one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it; and then ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the ship, in which it had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang upon the rail; he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a desperate screech, and flew far out over the sea. They watched the suicide till it sank exhausted into a distant white-cap.