Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Naughty little girl!” she cried. “Come into the car with me, this minute.”

  Halleck did not see Marcia again till the train had run far out of the city, and was again sweeping through the thick woods, and flashing out upon the levels of the fields where the farmers were riding their sulky-plows up and down the long furrows in the pleasant afternoon sun. There was something in this transformation of man’s old-time laborious dependence into a lordly domination over the earth which strikes the westward journeyer as finally expressive of human destiny in the whole mighty region, and which penetrated even to Halleck’s sore and jaded thoughts. A different type of men began to show itself in the car, as the Western people gradually took the places of his fellow-travellers from the East. The men were often slovenly and sometimes uncouth in their dress; but they made themselves at home in the exaggerated splendor and opulence of the car, as if born to the best in every way; their faces suggested the security of people who trusted the future from the past, and had no fears of the life that had always used them well; they had not that eager and intense look which the Eastern faces wore; there was energy enough and to spare in them, but it was not an anxious energy. The sharp accent of the seaboard yielded to the rounded, soft, and slurring tones, and the prompt address was replaced by a careless and confident neighborliness of manner.

  Flavia fretted at her return to captivity in the car, and demanded to be released with a teasing persistence from which nothing she was shown out of the window could divert her. A large man leaned forward at last from a seat near by, and held out an orange. “Come here to me, little Trouble,” he said; and Flavia made an eager start toward this unlooked-for friend.

  Marcia wished to check her; but Halleck pleaded to have her go. “It will be a relief to you,” he said.

  “Well, let her go,” Marcia consented. “But she was no trouble, and she is no relief.” She sat looking dully at the little girl after the Westerner had gathered her up into his lap. “Should I have liked to tell her,” she said, as if thinking aloud, “how we were really going to meet her father, and that you were coming with me to be my witness against him in a court, — to put him down and disgrace him, — to fight him, as father says?”

  “You mustn’t think of it in that way,” said Halleck, gently, but, as he felt, feebly and inadequately.

  “Oh, I shall not think of it in that way long,” she answered. “My head is in a whirl, and I can’t hold what we’re doing before my mind in any one shape for a minute at a time. I don’t know what will become of me, — I don’t know what will become of me!”

  But in another breath she rose from this desolation, and was talking with impersonal cheerfulness of the sights that the car-window showed. As long as the light held, they passed through the same opulent and monotonous landscape; through little towns full of signs of material prosperity, and then farms, and farms again; the brick houses set in the midst of evergreens, and compassed by vast acreages of corn land, where herds of black pigs wandered, and the farmers were riding their ploughs, or heaping into vast windrows for burning the winter-worn stalks of the last year’s crop. Where they came to a stream the landscape was roughened into low hills, from which it sank again luxuriously to a plain. If there was any difference between Ohio and Indiana, it was that in Indiana the spring night, whose breath softly buffeted their cheeks through the open window, had gathered over those eternal cornfields, where the long crooked windrows, burning on either hand, seemed a trail of fiery serpents writhing away from the train as it roared and clamored over the track.

  They were to leave their car at Indianapolis, and take another road which would bring them to Tecumseh by daylight the next morning. Olive went away with the little girl, and put her to bed on the sofa in their state-room, and Marcia suffered them to go alone; it was only by fits that she had cared for the child, or even noticed it. “Now tell me again,” she said to Halleck, “why we are going.”

  “Surely you know.”

  “Yes, yes, I know; but I can’t think, — I don’t seem to remember. Didn’t I give it up once? Didn’t I say that I would rather go home, and let Bartley get the divorce, if he wanted?”

  “Yes, you said that, Marcia.”

  “I used to make him very unhappy; I was very strict with him, when I knew he couldn’t bear any kind of strictness. And he was always so patient with me; though he never really cared for me. Oh, yes, I knew that from the first! He used to try; but he must have been glad to get away. Poor Bartley! It was cruel, cruel, to put that in about my abandoning him when he knew I would come back; but perhaps the lawyers told him he must; he had to put in something! Why shouldn’t I let him go? Father said he only wanted to get rid of me, so that he could marry some one else — Yes, yes; it was that that made me start! Father knew it would! Oh,” she grieved, with a wild self-pity that tore Halleck’s heart, “he knew it would!” She fell wearily back against the seat, and did not speak for some minutes. Then she said, in a slow, broken utterance: “But now I don’t seem to mind even that, any more. Why shouldn’t he marry some one else that he really likes, if he doesn’t care for me?”

  Halleck laughed in bitterness of soul as his thought recurred to Atherton’s reasons. “Because,” he said, “you have a public duty in the matter. You must keep him bound to you, for fear some other woman, whose husband doesn’t care for her, should let him go, too, and society be broken up, and civilization destroyed. In a matter like this, which seems to concern yourself alone, you are only to regard others.”

  His reckless irony did not reach her through her manifold sorrow. “Well,” she said, simply, “it must be that. But, oh! how can I bear it! how can I bear it!”

  The time passed; Olive did not return for an hour; then she merely said that the little girl had just fallen asleep, and that she should go back and lie down with her; that she was sleepy too.

  Marcia did not answer, but Halleck said he would call her in good time before they reached Indianapolis.

  The porter made up the berths of such as were going through to St. Louis, and Marcia was left sitting alone with Halleck. “I will go and get your father to come here,” he said.

  “I don’t want him to come! I want to talk to you — to say something — What was it? I can’t think!” She stopped, like one trying to recover a faded thought; he waited, but she did not speak again. She had laid a nervous clutch upon his arm, to detain him from going for her father, and she kept her hand there mechanically; but after a while he felt it relax; she drooped against him, and fell away into a sleep in which she started now and then like a frightened child. He could not release himself without waking her; but it did not matter; her sorrow had unsexed her; only the tenderness of his love for this hapless soul remained in his heart, which ached and evermore heavily sank within him.

  He woke her at last when he must go to tell Olive that they were running into Indianapolis. Marcia struggled to her feet: “Oh, oh! Are we there? Are we there?”

  “We are at Indianapolis,” said Halleck.

  “I thought it was Tecumseh!” She shuddered. “We can go back; oh, yes, we can still go back!”

  They alighted from the train in the chilly midnight air, and found their way through the crowd to the eating-room of the station. The little girl cried with broken sleep and the strangeness, and Olive tried to quiet her. Marcia clung to Halleck’s arm, and shivered convulsively. Squire Gaylord stalked beside them with a demoniac vigor. “A few more hours, a few more hours, sir!” he said. He made a hearty supper, while the rest scalded their mouths with hot tea, which they forced with loathing to their lips.

  Some women who were washing the floor of the ladies’ waiting-room told them they must go into the men’s room, and wait there for their train, which was due at one o’clock. They obeyed, and found the room full of emigrants, and the air thick with their tobacco smoke. There was no choice; Olive went in first and took the child on her lap, where it straightway fell asleep; the Squire found a seat beside them, and sat ere
ct, looking round on the emigrants with the air of being amused at their outlandish speech, into which they burst clamorously from their silence at intervals. Marcia stopped Halleck at the threshold. “Stay out here with me,” she whispered. “I want to tell you something,” she added, as he turned mechanically and walked away with her up the vast lamp-shot darkness of the depot. “I am not going on! I am going back. We will take the train that goes to the East; father will never know till it is too late. We needn’t speak to him about it—”

  Halleck set himself against this delirious folly: he consented to her return; she could do what she would; but he would not consent to cheat her father. “We must go and tell him,” he said, for all answer to all her entreaties. He dragged her back to the waiting-room; but at the door she started at the figure of a man who was bending over a group of emigrant children asleep in the nearest corner, — poor, uncouth, stubbed little creatures, in old-mannish clothes, looking like children roughly blocked out of wood, and stiffly stretched on the floor, or resting woodenly against their mother.

  “There!” said the man, pressing a mug of coffee on the woman. “You drink that! It’ll do you good, — every drop of it! I’ve seen the time,” he said, turning round with the mug, when she had drained it, in his hand, and addressing Marcia and Halleck as the most accessible portion of the English-speaking public, “when I used to be down on coffee; I thought it was bad for the nerves; but I tell you, when you’re travelling it’s a brain-food, if ever there was a brain—” He dropped the mug, and stumbled back into the heap of sleeping children, fixing a ghastly stare on Marcia.

  She ran toward him. “Mr. Kinney!”

  “No, you don’t! — no, you don’t!”

  “Why, don’t you know me? Mrs. Hubbard?”

  “He — he — told me you — was dead!” roared Kinney.

  “He told you I was dead?”

  “More’n a year ago! The last time I seen him! Before I went out to Leadville!”

  “He told you I was dead,” repeated Marcia huskily. “He must have wished it!” she whispered. “Oh, mercy, mercy, mercy!” She stopped, and then she broke into a wild laugh: “Well, you see he was wrong. I’m on my way to him now to show him that I’m alive!”

  XL.

  Halleck woke at daybreak from the drowse into which he had fallen. The train was creeping slowly over the track, feeling its way, and he heard fragments of talk among the passengers about a broken rail that the conductor had been warned of. He turned to ask some question, when the pull of rising speed came from the locomotive, and at the same moment the car stopped with a jolting pitch. It settled upon the track again; but the two cars in front were overturned, and the passengers were still climbing from their windows, when Halleck got his bewildered party to the ground. Children were crying, and a woman was led by with her face cut and bleeding from the broken glass; but it was reported that no one else was hurt, and the trainmen gave their helplessness to the inspection of the rotten cross-tie that had caused the accident. One of the passengers kicked the decayed wood with his boot. “Well,” he said, “I always like a little accident like this, early; it makes us safe the rest of the day.” The sentiment apparently commended itself to popular acceptance; Halleck went forward with part of the crowd to see what was the matter with the locomotive: it had kept the track, but seemed to be injured somehow; the engineer was working at it, hammer in hand; he exchanged some dry pleasantries with a passenger who asked him if there was any chance of hiring a real fast ox-team in that neighborhood, in case a man was in a hurry to get on to Tecumseh.

  They were in the midst of a level prairie that stretched all round to the horizon, where it was broken by patches of timber; the rising sun slanted across the green expanse, and turned its distance to gold; the grass at their feet was full of wild-flowers, upon which Flavia flung herself as soon as they got out of the car. By the time Halleck returned to them, she was running with cries of joy and wonder toward a windmill that rose beautiful above the roofs of a group of commonplace houses, at a little distance from the track; it stirred its mighty vans in the thin, sweet inland breeze, and took the sun gayly on the light gallery that encircled it.

  A vision of Belgian plains swept before Halleck’s eyes. “There ought to be storks on its roof,” he said, absently.

  “How strange that it should be here, away out in the West!” said Olive.

  “If it were less strange than we are, here, I couldn’t stand it,” he answered.

  A brakeman came up with a flag in his hand, and nodded toward Flavia. “She’s on the right track for breakfast,” he said. “There’s an old Dutchman at that mill, and his wife knows how to make coffee like a fellow’s mother. You’ll have plenty of time. This train has come here to stay — till somebody can walk back five miles and telegraph for help.”

  “How far are we from Tecumseh?” asked Halleck.

  “Fifty miles,” the brakeman called back over his shoulder.

  “Don’t you worry any, Marcia,” said her father, moving off in pursuit of Flavia. “This accident makes it all right for us, if we don’t get there for a week.”

  Marcia answered nothing. Halleck began to talk to her of that Belgian landscape in which he had first seen a windmill, and he laughed at the blank unintelligence with which she received his reminiscences of travel. For the moment, the torturing stress was lifted from his soul; he wished that the breakfast in the miller’s house might never come to an end; he explored the mill with Flavia; he bantered the Squire on his saturnine preference for steam power in the milling business; he made the others share his mood; he pushed far from him the series of tragic or squalid facts which had continually brought the end to him in reveries in which he found himself holding his breath, as if he might hold it till the end really came.

  But this respite could not last. A puff of white steam showed on the horizon, and after an interval the sound of the locomotive whistle reached them, as it came backing down a train of empty cars towards them. They were quickly on their journey again, and a scanty hour before noon they arrived at Tecumseh.

  The pretty town, which in prospect had worn to Olive Halleck’s imagination the blended hideousness of Sodom and Gomorrah, was certainly very much more like a New England village in fact. After the brick farmsteads and coal-smoked towns of Central Ohio, its wooden houses, set back from the street with an ample depth of door-yard, were appealingly familiar, and she exchanged some homesick whispers with Marcia about them, as they drove along under the full-leaved maples which shadowed the way. The grass was denser and darker than in New England, and, pretty as the town was, it wore a more careless and unscrupulous air than the true New England village; the South had touched it, and here and there it showed a wavering line of fence and a faltering conscientiousness in its paint. Presently all aspects of village quiet and seclusion ceased, and a section of conventional American city, with flab-roofed brick blocks, showy hotel, stores, paved street, and stone sidewalks expressed the readiness of Tecumseh to fulfil the destiny of every Western town, and become a metropolis at a day’s notice, if need be. The second-hand omnibus, which reflected the actuality of Tecumseh, set them down at the broad steps of the court-house, fronting on an avenue which for a city street was not very crowded or busy. Such passers as there were had leisure and inclination, as they loitered by, to turn and stare at the strangers; and the voice of the sheriff, as he called from an upper window of the court-house the names of absentee litigants or witnesses required to come into court, easily made itself heard above all the other noises.

  It seemed to Halleck as if the sheriff were calling them; he lifted his head and looked at Olive, but she would not meet his eye; she led by the hand the little girl, who kept asking, “Is this the house where papa lives?” with the merciless iteration of a child. Halleck dragged lamely after the Squire, who had mounted the steps with unnatural vigor; he promptly found his way to the clerk’s office, where he examined the docket, and then returned to his party triumphant. “We
are in time,” he said, and he led them on up into the court-room.

  A few spectators, scattered about on the rows of benching, turned to look at them as they walked up the aisle, where the cocoa matting, soaked and dried, and soaked again, with perpetual libations of tobacco-juice, mercifully silenced their footsteps; most of the faces turned upon them showed a slow and thoughtful movement of the jaws, and, as they were dropped or averted, a general discharge of tobacco-juice seemed to express the general adoption of the new-comers, whoever they were, as a necessary element of the scene, which it was useless to oppose, and about which it was idle to speculate. Before the Squire had found his party seats on one of the benches next the bar, the spectators had again given their languid attention to the administration of justice, which is everywhere informal with us, and is only a little more informal in the West than in the East. An effect of serene disoccupation pervaded the place, such as comes at the termination of an interesting affair; and no one seemed to care for what the clerk was reading aloud in a set, mechanical tone. The judge was busy with his docket; the lawyers, at their several little tables within the bar, lounged in their chairs, or stalked about laughing and whispering to each other; the prosecuting attorney leaned upon the shoulder of a jolly-looking man, who lifted his face to joke up at him, as he tilted his chair back; a very stout, youngish person, who sat next him, kept his face dropped while the clerk proceeded: —

  “And now, on motion of plaintiff, it is ordered by the Court that said defendant be now here three times called, which is done in open court, and she comes not; but wholly makes default herein. And this cause is now submitted to the Court for trial, and the Court having heard the evidence, and being fully advised, find for the plaintiff, — that the allegations of his complaint are true, and that he is entitled to a divorce. It is therefore considered by the Court, that said plaintiff be and he is hereby divorced, and the bonds of matrimony heretofore existing between said parties are dissolved and held for naught.”