Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “It’s an interesting story,” said Corey, with a long breath, as they rose together, and Lapham put on his coat.

  “That’s what it is,” said the Colonel. “Well!” he added, “I don’t see but what we’ve got to have another talk about this thing. It’s a surprise to me, and I don’t see exactly how you’re going to make it pay.”

  “I’m willing to take the chances,” answered Corey. “As I said, I believe in it. I should try South America first. I should try Chili.”

  “Look here!” said Lapham, with his watch in his hand. “I like to get things over. We’ve just got time for the six o’clock boat. Why don’t you come down with me to Nantasket? I can give you a bed as well as not. And then we can finish up.”

  The impatience of youth in Corey responded to the impatience of temperament in his elder. “Why, I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” he allowed himself to say. “I confess I should like to have it finished up myself, if it could be finished up in the right way.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Dennis!” Lapham called to the remote porter, and the man came. “Want to send any word home?” he asked Corey.

  “No; my father and I go and come as we like, without keeping account of each other. If I don’t come home, he knows that I’m not there. That’s all.”

  “Well, that’s convenient. You’ll find you can’t do that when you’re married. Never mind, Dennis,” said the Colonel.

  He had time to buy two newspapers on the wharf before he jumped on board the steam-boat with Corey. “Just made it,” he said; “and that’s what I like to do. I can’t stand it to be aboard much more than a minute before she shoves out.” He gave one of the newspapers to Corey as he spoke, and set him the example of catching up a camp-stool on their way to that point on the boat which his experience had taught him was the best. He opened his paper at once and began to run over its news, while the young man watched the spectacular recession of the city, and was vaguely conscious of the people about him, and of the gay life of the water round the boat. The air freshened; the craft thinned in number; they met larger sail, lagging slowly inward in the afternoon light; the islands of the bay waxed and waned as the steamer approached and left them behind.

  “I hate to see them stirring up those Southern fellows again,” said the Colonel, speaking into the paper on his lap. “Seems to me it’s time to let those old issues go.”

  “Yes,” said the young man. “What are they doing now?”

  “Oh, stirring up the Confederate brigadiers in Congress. I don’t like it. Seems to me, if our party hain’t got any other stock-in-trade, we better shut up shop altogether.” Lapham went on, as he scanned his newspaper, to give his ideas of public questions, in a fragmentary way, while Corey listened patiently, and waited for him to come back to business. He folded up his paper at last, and stuffed it into his coat pocket. “There’s one thing I always make it a rule to do,” he said, “and that is to give my mind a complete rest from business while I’m going down on the boat. I like to get the fresh air all through me, soul and body. I believe a man can give his mind a rest, just the same as he can give his legs a rest, or his back. All he’s got to do is to use his will-power. Why, I suppose, if I hadn’t adopted some such rule, with the strain I’ve had on me for the last ten years, I should ‘a’ been a dead man long ago. That’s the reason I like a horse. You’ve got to give your mind to the horse; you can’t help it, unless you want to break your neck; but a boat’s different, and there you got to use your will-power. You got to take your mind right up and put it where you want it. I make it a rule to read the paper on the boat —— Hold on!” he interrupted himself to prevent Corey from paying his fare to the man who had come round for it. “I’ve got tickets. And when I get through the paper, I try to get somebody to talk to, or I watch the people. It’s an astonishing thing to me where they all come from. I’ve been riding up and down on these boats for six or seven years, and I don’t know but very few of the faces I see on board. Seems to be a perfectly fresh lot every time. Well, of course! Town’s full of strangers in the summer season, anyway, and folks keep coming down from the country. They think it’s a great thing to get down to the beach, and they’ve all heard of the electric light on the water, and they want to see it. But you take faces now! The astonishing thing to me is not what a face tells, but what it don’t tell. When you think of what a man is, or a woman is, and what most of ’em have been through before they get to be thirty, it seems as if their experience would burn right through. But it don’t. I like to watch the couples, and try to make out which are engaged, or going to be, and which are married, or better be. But half the time I can’t make any sort of guess. Of course, where they’re young and kittenish, you can tell; but where they’re anyways on, you can’t. Heigh?”

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” said Corey, not perfectly reconciled to philosophy in the place of business, but accepting it as he must.

  “Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands. As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out — even if he hasn’t been found out to be so very bad — it’s pretty much all up with him. No, sir. I don’t want to know people through and through.”

  The greater part of the crowd on board — and, of course, the boat was crowded — looked as if they might not only be easily but safely known. There was little style and no distinction among them; they were people who were going down to the beach for the fun or the relief of it, and were able to afford it. In face they were commonplace, with nothing but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they did not wholly lack fire. But they were nearly all shrewd and friendly-looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous intimacy native to us all. The women were dandified in dress, according to their means and taste, and the men differed from each other in degrees of indifference to it. To a straw-hatted population, such as ours is in summer, no sort of personal dignity is possible. We have not even the power over observers which comes from the fantasticality of an Englishman when he discards the conventional dress. In our straw hats and our serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd of boys.

  “Some day,” said Lapham, rising as the boat drew near the wharf of the final landing, “there’s going to be an awful accident on these boats. Just look at that jam.”

  He meant the people thickly packed on the pier, and under strong restraint of locks and gates, to prevent them from rushing on board the boat and possessing her for the return trip before she had landed her Nantasket passengers.

  “Overload ’em every time,” he continued, with a sort of dry, impersonal concern at the impending calamity, as if it could not possibly include him. “They take about twice as many as they ought to carry, and about ten times as many as they could save if anything happened. Yes, sir, it’s bound to come. Hello! There’s my girl!” He took out his folded newspaper and waved it toward a group of phaetons and barouches drawn up on the pier a little apart from the pack of people, and a lady in one of them answered with a flourish of her parasol.

  When he had made his way with his guest through the crowd, she began to speak to her father before she noticed Corey. “Well, Colonel, you’ve improved your last chance. We’ve been coming to every boat since four o’clock, — or Jerry has, — and I told mother that I would come myself once, and see if I couldn’t fetch you; and if I failed, you could walk next time. You’re getting perfectly spoiled.”

  The Colonel enjoyed letting her scold him to the end before he said, with a twinkle of pride in his guest and satisfaction in her probably being able to hold her own against any discomfiture, “I’ve brought Mr. Corey down for the night with me, and I was showing him things all the way, and it took time.”

  The young fellow was at the side of the open beach-wagon, making a quick bow, and Penelope Lapham was cozily drawling, “Oh, how do you do,
Mr. Corey?” before the Colonel had finished his explanation.

  “Get right in there, alongside of Miss Lapham, Mr. Corey,” he said, pulling himself up into the place beside the driver. “No, no,” he had added quickly, at some signs of polite protest in the young man, “I don’t give up the best place to anybody. Jerry, suppose you let me have hold of the leathers a minute.”

  This was his way of taking the reins from the driver; and in half the time he specified, he had skilfully turned the vehicle on the pier, among the crooked lines and groups of foot-passengers, and was spinning up the road toward the stretch of verandaed hotels and restaurants in the sand along the shore. “Pretty gay down here,” he said, indicating all this with a turn of his whip, as he left it behind him. “But I’ve got about sick of hotels; and this summer I made up my mind that I’d take a cottage. Well, Pen, how are the folks?” He looked half-way round for her answer, and with the eye thus brought to bear upon her he was able to give her a wink of supreme content. The Colonel, with no sort of ulterior design, and nothing but his triumph over Mrs. Lapham definitely in his mind, was feeling, as he would have said, about right.

  The girl smiled a daughter’s amusement at her father’s boyishness. “I don’t think there’s much change since morning. Did Irene have a headache when you left?”

  “No,” said the Colonel.

  “Well, then, there’s that to report.”

  “Pshaw!” said the Colonel with vexation in his tone.

  “I’m sorry Miss Irene isn’t well,” said Corey politely.

  “I think she must have got it from walking too long on the beach. The air is so cool here that you forget how hot the sun is.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” assented Corey.

  “A good night’s rest will make it all right,” suggested the Colonel, without looking round. “But you girls have got to look out.”

  “If you’re fond of walking,” said Corey, “I suppose you find the beach a temptation.”

  “Oh, it isn’t so much that,” returned the girl. “You keep walking on and on because it’s so smooth and straight before you. We’ve been here so often that we know it all by heart — just how it looks at high tide, and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after a storm. We’re as well acquainted with the crabs and stranded jelly-fish as we are with the children digging in the sand and the people sitting under umbrellas. I think they’re always the same, all of them.”

  The Colonel left the talk to the young people. When he spoke next it was to say, “Well, here we are!” and he turned from the highway and drove up in front of a brown cottage with a vermilion roof, and a group of geraniums clutching the rock that cropped up in the loop formed by the road. It was treeless and bare all round, and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little more than a stone’s-cast from the cottage. A hospitable smell of supper filled the air, and Mrs. Lapham was on the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her belated husband’s excuses, which she was obliged to check on her tongue at sight of Corey.

  VII.

  THE exultant Colonel swung himself lightly down from his seat. “I’ve brought Mr. Corey with me,” he nonchalantly explained.

  Mrs. Lapham made their guest welcome, and the Colonel showed him to his room, briefly assuring himself that there was nothing wanting there. Then he went to wash his own hands, carelessly ignoring the eagerness with which his wife pursued him to their chamber.

  “What gave Irene a headache?” he asked, making himself a fine lather for his hairy paws.

  “Never you mind Irene,” promptly retorted his wife. “How came he to come? Did you press him? If you DID, I’ll never forgive you, Silas!”

  The Colonel laughed, and his wife shook him by the shoulder to make him laugh lower. “‘Sh!” she whispered. “Do you want him to hear EVERY thing? DID you urge him?”

  The Colonel laughed the more. He was going to get all the good out of this. “No, I didn’t urge him. Seemed to want to come.”

  “I don’t believe it. Where did you meet him?”

  “At the office.”

  “What office?”

  “Mine.”

  “Nonsense! What was he doing there?”

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  “What did he come for?”

  “Come for? Oh! he SAID he wanted to go into the mineral paint business.”

  Mrs. Lapham dropped into a chair, and watched his bulk shaken with smothered laughter. “Silas Lapham,” she gasped, “if you try to get off any more of those things on me — —”

  The Colonel applied himself to the towel. “Had a notion he could work it in South America. I don’t know what he’s up to.”

  “Never mind!” cried his wife. “I’ll get even with you YET.”

  “So I told him he had better come down and talk it over,” continued the Colonel, in well-affected simplicity. “I knew he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Go on!” threatened Mrs. Lapham.

  “Right thing to do, wa’n’t it?”

  A tap was heard at the door, and Mrs. Lapham answered it. A maid announced supper. “Very well,” she said, “come to tea now. But I’ll make you pay for this, Silas.”

  Penelope had gone to her sister’s room as soon as she entered the house.

  “Is your head any better, ‘Rene?” she asked.

  “Yes, a little,” came a voice from the pillows. “But I shall not come to tea. I don’t want anything. If I keep still, I shall be all right by morning.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said the elder sister. “He’s come down with father.”

  “He hasn’t! Who?” cried Irene, starting up in simultaneous denial and demand.

  “Oh, well, if you say he hasn’t, what’s the use of my telling you who?”

  “Oh, how can you treat me so!” moaned the sufferer. “What do you mean, Pen?”

  “I guess I’d better not tell you,” said Penelope, watching her like a cat playing with a mouse. “If you’re not coming to tea, it would just excite you for nothing.”

  The mouse moaned and writhed upon the bed.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t treat YOU so!”

  The cat seated herself across the room, and asked quietly —

  “Well, what could you do if it WAS Mr. Corey? You couldn’t come to tea, you say. But HE’LL excuse you. I’ve told him you had a headache. Why, of course you can’t come! It would be too barefaced. But you needn’t be troubled, Irene; I’ll do my best to make the time pass pleasantly for him.” Here the cat gave a low titter, and the mouse girded itself up with a momentary courage and self-respect.

  “I should think you would be ashamed to come here and tease me so.”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe me,” argued Penelope. “Why shouldn’t he come down with father, if father asked him? and he’d be sure to if he thought of it. I don’t see any p’ints about that frog that’s any better than any other frog.”

  The sense of her sister’s helplessness was too much for the tease; she broke down in a fit of smothered laughter, which convinced her victim that it was nothing but an ill-timed joke.

  “Well, Pen, I wouldn’t use you so,” she whimpered.

  Penelope threw herself on the bed beside her.

  “Oh, poor Irene! He IS here. It’s a solemn fact.” And she caressed and soothed her sister, while she choked with laughter. “You must get up and come out. I don’t know what brought him here, but here he is.”

  “It’s too late now,” said Irene desolately. Then she added, with a wilder despair: “What a fool I was to take that walk!”

  “Well,” coaxed her sister, “come out and get some tea. The tea will do you good.”

  “No, no; I can’t come. But send me a cup here.”

  “Yes, and then perhaps you can see him later in the evening.”

  “I shall not see him at all.”

  An hour after Penelope came back to her sister’s room and found her before her glass. “You might as well have kept still, and been
well by morning, ‘Rene,” she said. “As soon as we were done father said, ‘Well, Mr. Corey and I have got to talk over a little matter of business, and we’ll excuse you, ladies.’ He looked at mother in a way that I guess was pretty hard to bear. ‘Rene, you ought to have heard the Colonel swelling at supper. It would have made you feel that all he said the other day was nothing.”

  Mrs. Lapham suddenly opened the door.

  “Now, see here, Pen,” she said, as she closed it behind her, “I’ve had just as much as I can stand from your father, and if you don’t tell me this instant what it all means — —”

  She left the consequences to imagination, and Penelope replied with her mock soberness —

  “Well, the Colonel does seem to be on his high horse, ma’am. But you mustn’t ask me what his business with Mr. Corey is, for I don’t know. All that I know is that I met them at the landing, and that they conversed all the way down — on literary topics.”

  “Nonsense! What do you think it is?”

  “Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think this talk about business is nothing but a blind. It seems a pity Irene shouldn’t have been up to receive him,” she added.

  Irene cast a mute look of imploring at her mother, who was too much preoccupied to afford her the protection it asked.

  “Your father said he wanted to go into the business with him.”

  Irene’s look changed to a stare of astonishment and mystification, but Penelope preserved her imperturbability.

  “Well, it’s a lucrative business, I believe.”

  “Well, I don’t believe a word of it!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “And so I told your father.”

  “Did it seem to convince him?” inquired Penelope.

  Her mother did not reply. “I know one thing,” she said. “He’s got to tell me every word, or there’ll be no sleep for him THIS night.”

  “Well, ma’am,” said Penelope, breaking down in one of her queer laughs, “I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if you were right.”