Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Frescobaldi’s men were in possession everywhere they had turned the cook out of her kitchen and the waitress out of her pantry; the reluctant Irishman at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, who spoke French with the guests, and said, “Bien, Monsieur,” and “toute suite,” and “Merci!” to all, as he took their hats and coats, and effused a hospitality that needed no language but the gleam of his eyes and teeth and the play of his eloquent hands. From his professional dress-coat, lustrous with the grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties, they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the drawing-room, which assumed informality for the affair, but did not put their wearers wholly at their ease. The father’s coat was of black broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned; the skirts were long, and the sleeves came down to his knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, and the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked each to take a chair. Conrad’s coat was of modern texture and cut, and was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more capable of coping with the situation than his father. They both waited for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner. Beaton stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty sleeve dangling over his wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a new coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was less afraid of him than of the others. He heard Lindau saying, “Boat, the name is Choarman?” and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others. In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and comfort — with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.

  Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out. He took Kendricks away from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on Kendricks’s shoulder, and one on the colonel’s, and made some flattering joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them. March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely: “I do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you. They constitute a problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society,” and he knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby’s paces later.

  Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and said, “If we don’t get this thing going pretty soon, it ‘ll be the death of me,” and just then Frescobaldi’s butler came in and announced to Dryfoos that dinner was served. The old man looked toward Fulkerson with a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to touch Lindau’s elbow. Fulkerson called out, “Here’s Colonel Woodburn, Mr. Dryfoos,” as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example of what he was to do by taking Lindau’s arm himself. “Mr. Lindau is going to sit at my end of the table, alongside of March. Stand not upon the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once.” He contrived to get Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with Kendricks. Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair. At the table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos’s right, and March on his left. March sat on Fulkerson’s right, with Lindau next him; and the young men occupied the other seats.

  “Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau,” said Fulkerson, “so you can begin to put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his little weakness of old; sorry to say it’s grown on him.”

  March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson’s wish to start the gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder. “I know hiss veakness. If he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss enemy, as Shakespeare galled it.”

  “Ah, but Shakespeare couldn’t have been thinking of champagne,” said

  Kendricks.

  “I suppose, sir,” Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy, “champagne could hardly have been known in his day.”

  “I suppose not, colonel,” returned the younger man, deferentially. “He seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn’t mention champagne.”

  “Perhaps he felt there was no question about that,” suggested Beaton, who then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.

  “I wonder just when champagne did come in,” said March.

  “I know when it ought to come in,” said Fulkerson. “Before the soup!”

  They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out of tumblers every day, as men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare was, well enough; Conrad’s face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking on such a subject, but he said nothing.

  The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The young men tossed the ball back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going, and they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn’s tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.

  Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a master of style. “Style, you know,” he added, “is the man.”

  “Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir,” the colonel assented; he wondered who Flaubert was.

  Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.

  He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a

  disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis

  Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller.

  “Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?” he demanded of March.

  “Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there’s nobody like

  Heine!”

  Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth under his mustache. He put his hand on March’s back. “This poy — he was a poy den — wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort togeder.”

  “He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?” asked Fulkerson, burlesquing the old man’s accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau himself laugh. “But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?” Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos’s eye at the purely literary course the talk had taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to business, to ‘Every Other Week;’ but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he wished to get it on the personal ground, where everybody is at home.

  “Ledt me zee,” mused Lindau. “Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway.”

  “Those were exciting times,” said Dryfoos, making his first entry into the general talk. “I went down to Indianapolis with the first company from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere. They had a song,

  ”
Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,

  For we’re bound for the land of Canaan.”

  The fellows locked arms and went singin’ it up and down four or five abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody else off the sidewalk.”

  “I remember, I remember,” said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and down. “A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan, Mr. Dryfoos?”

  “You’re right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was worth it — the country we’ve got now. Here, young man!” He caught the arm of the waiter who was going round with the champagne bottle. “Fill up Mr. Lindau’s glass, there. I want to drink the health of those old times with him. Here’s to your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau. God bless it! No offence to you, Colonel Woodburn,” said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.

  “Not at all, sir, not at all,” said the colonel. “I will drink with you, if you will permit me.”

  “We’ll all drink — standing!” cried Fulkerson. “Help March to get up, somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod! Now, then, hurrah for Lindau!”

  They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their knife-handles. Lindau remained seated. The tears came into his eyes; he said, “I thank you, chendlemen,” and hiccoughed.

  “I’d ‘a’ went into the war myself,” said Dryfoos, “but I was raisin’ a family of young children, and I didn’t see how I could leave my farm. But I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the volunteering stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself; and we offered as good bounties as any in the State. My substitute was killed in one of the last skirmishes — in fact, after Lee’s surrender — and I’ve took care of his family, more or less, ever since.”

  “By-the-way, March,” said Fulkerson, “what sort of an idea would it be to have a good war story — might be a serial — in the magazine? The war has never fully panned out in fiction yet. It was used a good deal just after it was over, and then it was dropped. I think it’s time to take it up again. I believe it would be a card.”

  It was running in March’s mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with it. He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a dormant nobleness in the man.

  Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: “You might get a series of sketches by substitutes; the substitutes haven’t been much heard from in the war literature. How would ‘The Autobiography of a Substitute’ do? You might follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man’s place, and inquire whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero when he was only hired in the place of one. Might call it ‘The Career of a Deputy Hero.’”

  “I fancy,” said March, “that there was a great deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations.” He found himself saying this in Dryfoos’s behalf; the old man looked at him gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.

  Lindau turned his head toward him and said: “You are righdt, Passil; you are righdt. I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of human paseness — chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte. I haf zeen men in the face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as — as pusiness motifes.”

  “Well,” said Fulkerson, “it would be a grand thing for ‘Every Other Week’ if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series. It would make a lot of talk.”

  Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, “I think, Major Lindau—”

  “High brifate; prefet gorporal,” the old man interrupted, in rejection of the title.

  Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,

  “Brevet corporal is good.”

  Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke. “I think Mr. Lindau is right. Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less frequent on ours. We were fighting more immediately for existence. We were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that if each were not for all, then none was for any.”

  The colonel’s words made their impression. Dryfoos said, with authority,

  “That is so.”

  “Colonel Woodburn,” Fulkerson called out, “if you’ll work up those ideas into a short paper — say, three thousand words — I’ll engage to make March take it.”

  The colonel went on without replying: “But Mr. Lindau is right in characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon’s mouth as no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible that he could have used. I was very much struck by it.”

  The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that no effort sufficed to dislodge him. The dinner went on from course to course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to bring the talk back to ‘Every Other Week.’ But perhaps because that was only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to bring a number of men together under Dryfoos’s roof, and make them the witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth, Fulkerson’s attempts failed. The colonel showed how commercialism was the poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple, agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct, divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in the hands of monopolies — the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Rubber Trust, and what not. And now what was the next thing? Affairs could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next thing?

  The company listened for the main part silently. Dryfoos tried to grasp the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he knew he had never been in that. He did not like to hear competition called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.

  All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel made against the present condition of things he said more and more fiercely, “You are righdt, you are righdt.” His eyes glowed, his hand played with his knife-hilt. When the colonel demanded, “And what is the next thing?” he threw himself forward, and repeated: “Yes, sir! What is the next thing?”

  “Natural gas, by thunder!” shouted Fulkerson.

  One of the waiters had profited by Lindau’s posture to lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It expressed Frescobaldi’s conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi’s personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to Frescobaldi. In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer himself, where he s
tood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist’s anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.

  “Come in, come in, Frescobaldi! We want to congratulate you,” Fulkerson called to him. “Here, gentlemen! Here’s Frescobaldi’s health.”

  They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos: “You are please; no? You like?”

  “First-rate, first-rate!” said the old man; but when the Italian had bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said dryly to Fulkerson, “I reckon they didn’t have to torpedo that well, or the derrick wouldn’t look quite so nice and clean.”

  “Yes,” Fulkerson answered, “and that ain’t quite the style — that little wiggly-waggly blue flame — that the gas acts when you touch off a good vein of it. This might do for weak gas”; and he went on to explain:

  “They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down; and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light and heat his house. I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My, my, my! You fel — you gentlemen — ought to go out and see that country, all of you. Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let ’em see how it works! Mind that one you torpedoed for me? You know, when they sink a well,” he went on to the company, “they can’t always most generally sometimes tell whether they’re goin’ to get gas or oil or salt water. Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas now and then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-well a blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn’t ripe for gas yet. Now they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and don’t seem to strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it. They have a little bar of iron that they call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please! You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick’s painted — got a coat on that’ll wear in any climate. That’s what our honored host meant. Generally get some visiting lady, when there’s one round, to drop the Go-devil. But that day we had to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let me drop it, but I declined. I told ’em I hadn’t much practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn’t very well myself, anyway. Astonishing,” Fulkerson continued, with the air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, “how reckless they get using dynamite when they’re torpedoing wells. We stopped at one place where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of ’em in his hand, and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it was. I turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color, and kind of coaxed the fellow till he quit. You could see he was the fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he’d keep on hammering that cartridge, just to show that it wouldn’t explode, till he blew you into Kingdom Come. When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his foreman. ‘Pay Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,’ says he. ‘He’s too safe a man to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.’ I never saw anybody so cool.”