March laughed teasingly. “Oh, I don’t say he was an impostor. Perhaps he really was hungry; but, if he wasn’t, what do you think of a civilization that makes the opportunity of such a fraud? that gives us all such a bad conscience for the need which is that we weaken to the need that isn’t? Suppose that poor fellow wasn’t personally founded on fact: nevertheless, he represented the truth; he was the ideal of the suffering which would be less effective if realistically treated. That man is a great comfort to me. He probably rioted for days on that quarter I gave him; made a dinner very likely, or a champagne supper; and if ‘Every Other Week’ wants to get rid of me, I intend to work that racket. You can hang round the corner with Bella, and Tom can come up to me in tears, at stated intervals, and ask me if I’ve found anything yet. To be sure, we might be arrested and sent up somewhere. But even in that extreme case we should be provided for. Oh no, I’m not afraid of losing my place! I’ve merely a sort of psychological curiosity to know how men like Dryfoos and Fulkerson will work out the problem before them.”
IX.
It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared, at least concerning Dryfoos. “I don’t know what the old man’s going to do,” he said to March the day after the Marches had talked their future over. “Said anything to you yet?”
“No, not a word.”
“You’re anxious, I suppose, same as I am. Fact is,” said Fulkerson, blushing a little, “I can’t ask to have a day named till I know where I am in connection with the old man. I can’t tell whether I’ve got to look out for something else or somebody else. Of course, it’s full soon yet.”
“Yes,” March said, “much sooner than it seems to us. We’re so anxious about the future that we don’t remember how very recent the past is.”
“That’s something so. The old man’s hardly had time yet to pull himself together. Well, I’m glad you feel that way about it, March. I guess it’s more of a blow to him than we realize. He was a good deal bound up in Coonrod, though he didn’t always use him very well. Well, I reckon it’s apt to happen so oftentimes; curious how cruel love can be. Heigh? We’re an awful mixture, March!”
“Yes, that’s the marvel and the curse, as Browning says.”
“Why, that poor boy himself,” pursued Fulkerson, “had streaks of the mule in him that could give odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the old man by the way he would give in to his will and hold out against his judgment. I don’t believe he ever budged a hairs-breadth from his original position about wanting to be a preacher and not wanting to be a business man. Well, of course! I don’t think business is all in all; but it must have made the old man mad to find that without saying anything, or doing anything to show it, and after seeming to come over to his ground, and really coming, practically, Coonrod was just exactly where he first planted himself, every time.”
“Yes, people that have convictions are difficult. Fortunately, they’re rare.”
“Do you think so? It seems to me that everybody’s got convictions. Beaton himself, who hasn’t a principle to throw at a dog, has got convictions the size of a barn. They ain’t always the same ones, I know, but they’re always to the same effect, as far as Beaton’s being Number One is concerned. The old man’s got convictions or did have, unless this thing lately has shaken him all up — and he believes that money will do everything. Colonel Woodburn’s got convictions that he wouldn’t part with for untold millions. Why, March, you got convictions yourself!”
“Have I?” said March. “I don’t know what they are.”
“Well, neither do I; but I know you were ready to kick the trough over for them when the old man wanted us to bounce Lindau that time.”
“Oh yes,” said March; he remembered the fact; but he was still uncertain just what the convictions were that he had been so stanch for.
“I suppose we could have got along without you,” Fulkerson mused aloud. “It’s astonishing how you always can get along in this world without the man that is simply indispensable. Makes a fellow realize that he could take a day off now and then without deranging the solar system a great deal. Now here’s Coonrod — or, rather, he isn’t. But that boy managed his part of the schooner so well that I used to tremble when I thought of his getting the better of the old man and going into a convent or something of that kind; and now here he is, snuffed out in half a second, and I don’t believe but what we shall be sailing along just as chipper as usual inside of thirty days. I reckon it will bring the old man to the point when I come to talk with him about who’s to be put in Coonrod’s place. I don’t like very well to start the subject with him; but it’s got to be done some time.”
“Yes,” March admitted. “It’s terrible to think how unnecessary even the best and wisest of us is to the purposes of Providence. When I looked at that poor young fellow’s face sometimes — so gentle and true and pure — I used to think the world was appreciably richer for his being in it. But are we appreciably poorer for his being out of it now?”
“No, I don’t reckon we are,” said Fulkerson. “And what a lot of the raw material of all kinds the Almighty must have, to waste us the way He seems to do. Think of throwing away a precious creature like Coonrod Dryfoos on one chance in a thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindau out of the way of being clubbed! For I suppose that was what Coonrod was up to. Say! Have you been round to see Lindau to-day?”
Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson startled March. “No! I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Fulkerson. “I guess I saw him a little while after you did, and that young doctor there seemed to feel kind of worried about him.
“Or not worried, exactly; they can’t afford to let such things worry them, I suppose; but—”
“He’s worse?” asked March.
“Oh, he didn’t say so. But I just wondered if you’d seen him to-day.”
“I think I’ll go now,” said March, with a pang at heart. He had gone every day to see Lindau, but this day he had thought he would not go, and that was why his heart smote him. He knew that if he were in Lindau’s place Lindau would never have left his side if he could have helped it. March tried to believe that the case was the same, as it stood now; it seemed to him that he was always going to or from the hospital; he said to himself that it must do Lindau harm to be visited so much. But he knew that this was not true when he was met at the door of the ward where Lindau lay by the young doctor, who had come to feel a personal interest in March’s interest in Lindau.
He smiled without gayety, and said, “He’s just going.”
“What! Discharged?”
“Oh no. He has been failing very fast since you saw him yesterday, and now—” They had been walking softly and talking softly down the aisle between the long rows of beds. “Would you care to see him?”
The doctor made a slight gesture toward the white canvas screen which in such places forms the death-chamber of the poor and friendless. “Come round this way — he won’t know you! I’ve got rather fond of the poor old fellow. He wouldn’t have a clergyman — sort of agnostic, isn’t he? A good many of these Germans are — but the young lady who’s been coming to see him—”
They both stopped. Lindau’s grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths. Beside his bed Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face was lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying man; she moved her lips inaudibly.
X.
In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of life, which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this is an instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but we have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it relates to some one remote or indifferent to us. March tried to project Lindau to the necessary dist
ance from himself in order to realize the fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered the region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree. The changed conditions forbade that. He had a soreness of heart concerning him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was grief for his death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about Dryfoos, or a foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which he knew his wife would now exact of him down to the last minutest particular of their joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since they had met him in New York.
He felt something knock against his shoulder, and he looked up to have his hat struck from his head by a horse’s nose. He saw the horse put his foot on the hat, and he reflected, “Now it will always look like an accordion,” and he heard the horse’s driver address him some sarcasms before he could fully awaken to the situation. He was standing bareheaded in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blocking the tide of carriages flowing in either direction. Among the faces put out of the carriage windows he saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe. The old man knew him, and said, “Jump in here, Mr. March”; and March, who had mechanically picked up his hat, and was thinking, “Now I shall have to tell Isabel about this at once, and she will never trust me on the street again without her,” mechanically obeyed. Her confidence in him had been undermined by his being so near Conrad when he was shot; and it went through his mind that he would get Dryfoos to drive him to a hatter’s, where he could buy a new hat, and not be obliged to confess his narrow escape to his wife till the incident was some days old and she could bear it better. It quite drove Lindau’s death out of his mind for the moment; and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he would drive up to the first cross-street and turn back with him, March said he would be glad if he would take him to a hat-store. The old man put his head out again and told the driver to take them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “There’s a hat-store around there somewhere, seems to me,” he said; and they talked of March’s accident as well as they could in the rattle and clatter of the street till they reached the place. March got his hat, passing a joke with the hatter about the impossibility of pressing his old hat over again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.
“If you ain’t in any great hurry,” the old man said, “I wish you’d get in here a minute. I’d like to have a little talk with you.”
“Oh, certainly,” said March, and he thought: “It’s coming now about what he intends to do with ‘Every Other Week.’ Well, I might as well have all the misery at once and have it over.”
Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to listen: “Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep drivin’ up and down till I stop you. I can’t hear myself think on these pavements,” he said to March. But after they got upon the asphalt, and began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin. At last he said, “I wanted to talk with you about that — that Dutchman that was at my dinner — Lindau,” and March’s heart gave a jump with wonder whether he could already have heard of Lindau’s death; but in an instant he perceived that this was impossible. “I been talkin’ with Fulkerson about him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off.”
March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak. He could not make out from the close face of the old man anything of his motive. It was set, but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power to relax itself. There was no other history in it of what the man had passed through in his son’s death.
“I don’t know,” Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth window-strap, which he kept fingering, “as you quite understood what made me the maddest. I didn’t tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can’t keep it up with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I could understand what he was saying to you about me. I know I had no business to understood it, after I let him think I couldn’t but I did, and I didn’t like very well to have a man callin’ me a traitor and a tyrant at my own table. Well, I look at it differently now, and I reckon I had better have tried to put up with it; and I would, if I could have known—” He stopped with a quivering lip, and then went on: “Then, again, I didn’t like his talkin’ that paternalism of his. I always heard it was the worst kind of thing for the country; I was brought up to think the best government was the one that governs the least; and I didn’t want to hear that kind of talk from a man that was livin’ on my money. I couldn’t bear it from him. Or I thought I couldn’t before — before—” He stopped again, and gulped. “I reckon now there ain’t anything I couldn’t bear.” March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stare forward with which they ended. “Mr. Dryfoos, I didn’t know that you understood Lindau’s German, or I shouldn’t have allowed him he wouldn’t have allowed himself — to go on. He wouldn’t have knowingly abused his position of guest to censure you, no matter how much he condemned you.” “I don’t care for it now,” said Dryfoos. “It’s all past and gone, as far as I’m concerned; but I wanted you to see that I wasn’t tryin’ to punish him for his opinions, as you said.”
“No; I see now,” March assented, though he thought his position still justified. “I wish—”
“I don’t know as I understand much about his opinions, anyway; but I ain’t ready to say I want the men dependent on me to manage my business for me. I always tried to do the square thing by my hands; and in that particular case out there I took on all the old hands just as fast as they left their Union. As for the game I came on them, it was dog eat dog, anyway.”
March could have laughed to think how far this old man was from even conceiving of Lindau’s point of view, and how he was saying the worst of himself that Lindau could have said of him. No one could have characterized the kind of thing he had done more severely than he when he called it dog eat dog.
“There’s a great deal to be said on both sides,” March began, hoping to lead up through this generality to the fact of Lindau’s death; but the old man went on:
“Well, all I wanted him to know is that I wasn’t trying to punish him for what he said about things in general. You naturally got that idea, I reckon; but I always went in for lettin’ people say what they please and think what they please; it’s the only way in a free country.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it would make little difference to Lindau now—”
“I don’t suppose he bears malice for it,” said Dryfoos, “but what I want to do is to have him told so. He could understand just why I didn’t want to be called hard names, and yet I didn’t object to his thinkin’ whatever he pleased. I’d like him to know—”
“No one can speak to him, no one can tell him,” March began again, but again Dryfoos prevented him from going on.
“I understand it’s a delicate thing; and I’m not askin’ you to do it. What I would really like to do — if you think he could be prepared for it, some way, and could stand it — would be to go to him myself, and tell him just what the trouble was. I’m in hopes, if I done that, he could see how I felt about it.”
A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau with his vain regrets presented itself to March, and he tried once more to make the old man understand. “Mr. Dryfoos,” he said, “Lindau is past all that forever,” and he felt the ghastly comedy of it when Dryfoos continued, without heeding him.
“I got a particular reason why I want him to believe it wasn’t his ideas I objected to — them ideas of his about the government carryin’ everything on and givin’ work. I don’t understand ’em exactly, but I found a writin’ — among — my son’s — things” (he seemed to force the words through his teeth), “and I reckon he — thought — that way. Kind of a diary — where he — put down — his thoughts. My son and me — we differed about a good — many things.” His chin shook, and from time to time he stopped. “I wasn’t very good to him, I reckon; I crossed him where I guess I got no business to cross him; but I t
hought everything of — Coonrod. He was the best boy, from a baby, that ever was; just so patient and mild, and done whatever he was told. I ought to ‘a’ let him been a preacher! Oh, my son! my son!” The sobs could not be kept back any longer; they shook the old man with a violence that made March afraid for him; but he controlled himself at last with a series of hoarse sounds like barks. “Well, it’s all past and gone! But as I understand you from what you saw, when Coonrod was — killed, he was tryin’ to save that old man from trouble?”
“Yes, yes! It seemed so to me.”
“That’ll do, then! I want you to have him come back and write for the book when he gets well. I want you to find out and let me know if there’s anything I can do for him. I’ll feel as if I done it — for my — son. I’ll take him into my own house, and do for him there, if you say so, when he gets so he can be moved. I’ll wait on him myself. It’s what Coonrod ‘d do, if he was here. I don’t feel any hardness to him because it was him that got Coonrod killed, as you might say, in one sense of the term; but I’ve tried to think it out, and I feel like I was all the more beholden to him because my son died tryin’ to save him. Whatever I do, I’ll be doin’ it for Coonrod, and that’s enough for me.” He seemed to have finished, and he turned to March as if to hear what he had to say.
March hesitated. “I’m afraid, Mr. Dryfoos — Didn’t Fulkerson tell you that
Lindau was very sick?”
“Yes, of course. But he’s all right, he said.”
Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterly playing fast and loose with March’s consciousness. Something almost made him smile; the willingness he had once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoled himself by thinking that at least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos’s wish to make atonement with the fact that Lindau had renounced him, and would on no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from him. In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, and March had the momentary force to say —
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 426
